Sociopath Community

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/02/end-of-the-silk-road-fbi-busts-the-webs-biggest-anonymous-drug-black-market/

This is pretty fascinating.  In case you didn't know about Silk Road: it was a giant, anonymous means to get drugs over the internet.  Except for the whole getting caught part, I feel a little envy.  What a sweet gig.

I thought Silk Road was shutdown some time ago. Apparently not, as the article does appear to be recent. Anyway, the BlackMarket Reloaded is still active. The FBI hasn't gotten to that one yet.

There's plenty of drugs on there, including guns and all kinds of illegal shit.

 According to sources, perhaps 50% of the TOR system has been compromised.

There is more to come to light yet though.

The feds will be holding tight to the unreleased details...as they are key to further arrests.

 In July 2013, the FBI located the Silk Road server and copied an image of it - all its contents, in other words. They discovered 957,000 registered accounts on the server, of which at least 30% were from the US.

Things came to a head in early August, when the FBI arrested a man who was allegedly trading child pornography via a Tor-hosted site called Freedom Hosting.

At that point, "dark web" sites began going offline as users figured out that as much as 50% of the Tor network had been compromised by the feds.

The fact that Ulbricht was still online, and operating Silk Road, through September, is therefore surprising. he had ample warning the feds were after him as far back as June.

In fact, as the indictment against him makes clear, the feds were on to Silk Road back in January 2011. Their investigation discovered him allegedly trying to hire a hitman to take care of an extortionist in March 2013.Now it's emerged that Ulbricht - known online as "Dread Pirate Roberts", a character from the film Princess Bride - used a site called Stack Overflow to ask for a hand.

According to the criminal complaint against him, Ulbrecht asked "How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?".

The FBI were watching, and the alarm bells sounded.

According to the criminal complaint, Ulbricht posted the question using his own real name. Less than one minute later, he changed his username to "frosty."

 http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

this is the indictment.

 http://nation.time.com/2013/10/03/alleged-black-market-operator-indicted-in-new-murder-for-hire-scheme/

What a fucking idiot.

Got lazy and stupid.

 Ya, it's been rather intriguing.  I wonder if Ulbricht should have been turning profits into further security and anonymity measures.  Could they have been made better?  You'd think he'd have the hub of information, like you said, and had ample warning enough to take measures further.

 He obviously had the warning, and also the resources to put into further security measures. 

Why he didnt?..

Laziness?...complacency?...

all of the above?

Shame really, as he could have continued to prove that watching small details will foil prying eyes.

Theres a valid lesson in all this I feel.

According to the Tor Group, the FBI didn't compromise Tor:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-and-silk-road-takedown