Posted on 01/19/2014 8:37:25 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Ross Ulbrichts last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the science fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That computer, according to the F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the worlds largest and most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD.
The site was like an eBay for the illicit, celebrated by drug enthusiasts, denounced by United States senators and stalked by four federal agencies. But because it was run on Tor, an encrypted Internet network, and because it merely connected buyers and sellers rather than warehousing any products it seemed to operate in a vaporous cloud. It was a business without infrastructure, other than a few servers and that laptop, which on 3:14 that October afternoon sat on a library desk, open.
Had Mr. Ulbricht seen the F.B.I. coming, and simply closed the laptop, password protections probably would have kicked in, turning the hard drive into what Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, called an encrypted lump that would have been tougher to break into than Fort Knox.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This isn’t just computer hacking. This young man tried to order murder for hire in several cases.
Who did he try to murder?
Read the article. Several people. The trouble is, he hired undercover FBI agents as his hit men.
Too bad the FBI won’t investigate Obama in such a thorough fashion.
“...he hired undercover FBI agents as his hit men.”
Lefty lawyer Ron Kuby is back on the radio and I heard him say the other day: unless you are in an organization that regularly hires hit men (like the Mafia or the CIA) do not attempt to hire one. He will ALWAYS been an undercover LEO.
Hey, lazy pants, you could read the story for yourself... :)
You should read the article. It’s a bit fluffy, but still a fascinating read that attaches a face to an idea.
I suspect it is already happening, but one has to believe organized crime will take over the basement of the internet at some point. Too much profit potential. The mistake this kid made was trying to run it from the United States.
The detachment of the internet meets murder like it’s all a video game. This will be an interesting movie.
Very good points. This was all being done by remote means, in a way which is normally fictional, which gave him the ability to detach himself from what he did.
Of course, he was a Ron Paul supporter and therefore used to living with contradictions, I guess.
Reality became indistinguishable from a game of Farmville on facebook for this kid. No surprise that he is a Ron Paul supporter. These were real people committing real crimes, but for this kid it was an alternate reality. Considering what his net worth was in comparison to his lifestyle proves it.
This will be a very interesting case and will likely create a good bit of case law moving into a new future for cybercrime.
Read the article?
hack, cough, spit
Heretic!
Some serious hackers that I know of use stolen credit cards to pay for amazon servers. They route to the stolen servers through several layers of hacked computers. The servers being used for the attacks are temporary and are pulled down after short periods. Makes them very hard to catch unless you get inventive.
I think you’re right - there will be a lot of new law coming out of this. It beings up a whole new range of cybercrime related issues. And since the economy of the future is definitely going to be electronically based, it’s time to lay some foundations.
:o)
Any bets that this road runs directly through NSA?
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