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I said I had my suspicions Tor had been compromised. I haven’t read the articles. Does it mention it?
@General Lighting 561315 wrote:
EN : BBC News – Five arrested in Utopia dark net marketplace crackdown
NL : Politie arresteert verdachten online wapenhandel – Binnenland – VK
Dutch and German police have arrested five people and shut down a “dark net” website as part of an investigation into online criminal marketplaces.
Utopia had been used to trade drugs, stolen credit cards and weapons among other illegal goods, the Dutch public prosecution service said.
The site’s pages had been hidden to the public unless they accessed Tor – an otherwise invisible layer of the net.
Police also seized 900 bitcoins, worth about £363,000 or $610,900.
The virtual currency is sometimes used to make it hard to track online transactions.
The announcement follows the FBI’s seizure of Silk Road – another dark net marketplace – in October.
The Dutch authorities said their operation – codenamed Commodore – sent out a message that no-one was “untouchable” on Tor.
However, one journalist who covers the sector said dozens of illicit marketplaces remained online.
Seized site
Utopia had only launched nine days ago. The DeepDotWeb news site posted screenshots at the time that showed guns, hacking kits, cocaine and counterfeit goods being offered for sale.
By the time Utopia went offline on Tuesday there were more than 13,000 listings on its pages, with many of the traders offering to ship their goods worldwide.
Prices were quoted in euros, but purchases could by made via the virtual currency Bitcoin to help keep the transactions anonymous.
Visitors to the site are now greeted by the Dutch police force’s logo and a message saying: “This hidden service has been seized.”
Two Dutch men, aged 30 and 31, alleged to have run the service had also been involved in another dark net site, Black Market Reloaded, which had closed towards the end of 2013, said prosecutors.
The other suspects arrested on Friday are:
a 29-year-old from Utrecht, who the prosecutors said they believed had been involved in several other unnamed black market marketplaces in addition to Utopia
a 46-year-old Dutch national accused of illegal trade over the internet and an attempt to incite murder
a 21-year-old German, arrested in Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt, accused of selling hard drugs and weapons
Assassination deposit
As part of Operation Commodore, prosecutors said, undercover agents had bought thousands of ecstasy pills, raw MDMA and dozens of grams of cocaine.
During their undercover work, it is alleged one of the suspects hired them to commit an assassination and paid a deposit for the job.
Searches of the men’s homes led to the confiscation of external hard drives and USB sticks, suggesting the potential for follow-up arrests.
@Dr Bunsen 561326 wrote:
I said I had my suspicions Tor had been compromised. I haven’t read the articles. Does it mention it?
The North European cops had worked out how to geolocate the traffic years ago (and this is widely mentioned in many papers about TOR). I don’t think they are decrypting the traffic – nor do they need to.
90% of TOR users seem to think they are in a computer game and know jack shit about real life underground operations (whether civilian or military) nor the basic principles of telecommunications, let alone crypto (I steer clear of it myself as its more trouble than its worth and I have no use for class A controlled drugs, nor guns). They are also mostly too young to remember the Cold War and its long lasting effects, or if older than us have got away with stuff in real life but have become complacent with age and/or dependent to some extent on illegal revenue to support a family.
TOR was developed by the military, and the first thing military signals officers are taught is that all electromagnetic communication can be located no matter how much crypto you put on it, so that communications should be kept as brief as possible and using many different methods (including reverting to flags and/or flashing lamps in particularly strongly monitored areas).
All communications on a shared resource (a radio frequency, or the Internet via copper or fibre optic cable) has an identifier which can be picked out from anything else or the system would not work – from radio call signs and telephone numbers to packet headers. Where crypto is used, the signal still must go from one place to another, and stands out from anything else on that network.
As the signal wiill always travel at a constant speed which will be near 299 792 458 m/s (less the attenuation factor of the fibre optic cable, which KPN and Telekom would know) all the cops (or anyone else wishing to track TOR traffic) need to do is send traffic (which could be anything, including cat pictures or 50x Weesgegroet (hail marys)) from one place to another using a similar TOR based system, and calculate the time it takes to get from one place to another (I think it is coded to take the shortest route and not usually cross borders, and even if it does when enough data is gathered the average routing time can still be worked out).
This of course needs some very brainy people who can do hard maths and very accurate clocks, but there are a lot of people in North Europe who do hard maths and/or make clocks (including computer based ones) for a hobby and share their findings online, and there has been a trend in the last few decades to recruit police officers who can actually use their brains as well as physical force or guns…
I’ve also just noticed that VK’s reporting (which is more detailed than the BBC report) emphasises the weapons traffic far more than the sale of drugs, and points out that the surveillance operation took a good part of a year and the 46 year old offender was already in prison! (A report linked from the BBC from the NL justice ministry seems to indicate the 46 year old had been caught in October 2013 taking drugs to DE, was released (possibly on license a relatively short sentence) and has ended up back inside..
usually these license confine the offender to certain address so this made him a “useful idiot” who would supply traffic from a known location on a connection that could be easily monitored without breaking any domestic nor EU human rights laws (it can be justified as a test of whether the prisoner genuinely has given up crime).
What I find harder to understand is why these European lads wanted to get caught up in illegal firearms dealing as well as drugs.
I’ve never in 25 years been asked if I wanted to obtain a firearm or ammunition by a young drugs dealer (even in times when they were less restricted).
I have been offered both (and politely declined) but by folk you would never suspect to do this. I have been asked at least once if I knew where to get one, especially by paranoid stoners who watch too many Hong Kong action films and Eastenders. But even the instruction manuals which come with firearms say not to use them if/when you have been drinking or taking drugs, for understandable reasons.
It is perfectly legal to export guns from DE and NL to the USA with appropriate licenses and vice versa. In both DE and NL its not impossible to get a firearms license for as many as 5 weapons provided they are used for correct and safe purposes like hunting or target shooting, and the owner is not a registered drug addict, criminal or with some mental health conditions. What you cannot do is go discharging them in cities for amusement, or shooting at people you simply don’t like the look of, its rare even for the cops to do that in those countries in spite of them all being armed (and in DE some private rentaguards too).
Not suprised the politie busted them hard, those cops have probably saved lives (MDMA comedowns and easy access to firearms is really asking for trouble). I’m sure that if they had stuck to small amounts of drugs the whole lot would be just thought of as kattekwaad (small mischief) and would not have got in this much trouble – now they will all have to surrender at least 5 years of their lives and a lot of their future prospects..
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