I'm not saying that drug discussion is the quintessential act that deserves to be protected, but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get this information. What happens when it's something far more political? What happens when they serve a gag order alongside their subpoena? What happens when the people talking aren't technically inclined, and don't use Tor? (By the way, I would bet these people were using Tor and this subpoena is useless.)
The issue of "abuse" which is harmful to people other than users of the forum should also be considered carefully.
>The issue of "abuse" which is harmful to people other than users of the forum should also be considered carefully.
If you think of always accessing the information through a "reader" rather than in raw form, than effectively the reader mods can delete and remove spam - users could subscribe to a reader, or several readers that can give different views of the same information - but also would have the choice not to do so.
While spam would still be a problem, requiring a negligible payment would greatly reduce the ability of spammers to flood forums with posts.
It's highly decentralized, censorship resistant, and can be very anonymous.
Based on how poor the opsec of previous darknet admins has been, I see no reason to assume theirs was any better.
Hosting AMAs is both stupid and provocative IMHO when you're a drug dealer.
This is a public forum. Hell, one of the users even VOLUNTEERED himself to be interviewed by the users of one of the most popular websites in the world under the topic of what amounts to "I run or help run a drug smuggling/selling marketplace".
What reasonable expectation should this user have to privacy? You can't do all these things in public and then say "well, the government shouldn't be able to look at me for it" - I'd think what he did met the very definition of probable cause.
subreddits are fantastic for that type of thing, and i like the ease of use and PRAW, however, handing over all of the community's data to conde nast isn't something i'm interested in.
what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities, which would consist of a message board with upvotes/downvotes, user profiles, and perhaps a small chat system, with good mobile integration. as you said, it should be decentralized. it should also be as secure as possible without requiring non-standard software like TOR.
http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html
vBulletin has support for all of this, as does WordPress, and probably a hundred other pieces of software.
The downside, as always, is that you become a sysadmin and moderator and hacker and on-call technician.
I was very active on usenet back in the early to mid 1990s and I would say that it was an enormously valuable experience. I interacted with a lot of smart people, I got to explore a lot of exciting areas of interest, and I spent a lot of time improving my writing abilities. It makes me sad to think that there are lots of people who well never benefit from that experience. At their best HN and parts of reddit can be excellent, but there's still a lot that they're missing.
This would make it so content that's purely spam wouldn't be pulled to all the USENET servers. If a moderation provider started vouching for a lot of spam, it would quickly be removed by providers.
This is pretty close to being what you describe, in that it will function as a transport layer - now all that is needed is a standardized protocol for how to put information onto it that can be easily found.
If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys?
It just always makes me chuckle when criminals won't face the fact that they are criminals. They'll deflect, ignore, and basically try anything to escape the reality - they broke the rules of society and now society wants to punish them.
And just to give you a little background - I've done some time in a few bids for violence and drugs. I know what it means to be a criminal because I grew up as one. I have no pity. None. You should've made better decisions. I made a choice to leave that behind a long time ago, and you should too.
I think most people, criminals or otherwise, understand this quite well. In fact, I'd guess that criminals understand it better than non-criminals.
What some people don't seem to understand (or even want to think about) is that the law is often a pitiful and nationally embarrasing reflection of ethics. Laws don't get passed because they are good, or helpful, or promote some positive thing. They get passed because enough politicians could be convinced (sometimes by bribery, sometimes by real or implied threats) to vote for them. Why anyone imagines that the resulting laws have a significant correlation with what's good for an individual's rights and freedom is totally beyond me.
Gandhi, MLK, and the U.S. Founding Fathers were all criminals of their times. Sometimes the world needs people to break the law to show how broken the law really is. If you or anyone else judges them solely because the label "criminal" applies to them, then I have no pity for you.
Except those individuals fought the laws and the people behind them. They did not simply try to circumvent the unjust laws. It is tougher to take the moral high-ground when you aren't striving for change. These people are not battling some great injustice, they are breaking [perhaps unjust] laws for their own personal gain (either monetarily or recreationally).
Equating drug dealers with Ghandi, MLK and the US Founding Fathers is a stretch at the least and outright offensive at worst. These people aren't making bold political statements. They're selling drugs.
If you think that drugs should be legal, convince your fellow citizens to vote to make them legal. MLK, Gandhi and the Founding Fathers did what was necessary to change laws that they felt were unjust. Criminal behavior isn't the same thing as civil disobedience, and there are no shortcuts.
"I know, right? Why don't all those damn sodomites just take their chemical castration and shut up and accept the fact they're criminals?"
>"I know, right? Why don't all those damn sodomites just take their chemical castration and shut up and accept the fact they're criminals?"
"I took mine, and I'm thankful for it every day. No pity."
"One day, this heinous crime I have committed might not be illegal. Knowing that, how can you possibly convict me!?"
For example, in my country, discussing LGBT or even marijuana would get you into serious trouble. Hence, as internet users, we should look beyond our time and space, ensuring freedom of speech.
Edit: This applies for the USA. Other countries I can't really speak about. Some are truly oppressive and I doubt just using the system would accomplish much. I understand that. I don't know how to solve that problem unfortunately.
So what is the correct action for the Fed? To ignore the law and not enforce it?
Wow. That's truly sad. I mean, if only talking about the subject already gets you into trouble, I don't want to know how LGBT people in your country actually live.
We always hear about these things in the newspapers and such and it always outrages me,, but to hear it from an actual citizen brings a different perspective, at least for me.
I truly hope this ends sooner rather than later OP.
What do you think drives the impulse to suppress free speech? And do you really think this is a free speech issue?
Law does not equal to the "rules of society", at best they asymptote the "rules of society", if there is even something like that.
In programming term, law is the formalized code (ie a program) of a society's moral stance. And as any computer program, it has bug, unintended behaviours, and changing one part of it will affect other parts due to unknown complexity. Imagine how hard it is to do random stupid CRUD app at scale, our moral code itself is complex and ambiguous, applying to a few hundred millions users and it's a big fat mess that's barely coherent.
I don't have an opinion on the whole "war on drugs" one way or another. But it's straight up dangerous to believe that the law is the be-all end-all in a society, especially when more basic ideals are put down to be less important.
> they broke the rules of society and now society wants to punish them
Contrary to popular belief, every single one of us here on HN are still human, not robots. And we are decidedly part of society.
They likely disagree that their "crimes" ought to be illegal, and do not accept the legitimacy of any punishment for such behavior.
Why should they have to "make a choice" and make "better decisions" when they don't believe what they've done is wrong?
The only reason you are making this comment is because you don't believe drugs (and drug dealing) should be illegal.
They should probably still accept the reality of the punishment, at least until the law is modified. Disobeying a law for moral reasons is only the first half of civil disobedience.
For example, Suppose you sell servers, and someone calls you up one day wanting 30 of them. You hit it off with this client, a friendship develops, and 6 months later that person, in an unguarded moment, says 'heh, I bet you never thought those 30 servers would end up as part of the 'Drugz, maaan' empire.' Now, unless you're a mandated reporter nothing criminal has occurred so far - you gained knowledge of criminal activity, but your friend hasn't ordered any more servers from you and so you're not taking part in any conspiracy, plus you were paid long before you learned this information (let's assume you can prove all this). However, if you bragged to someone else that you knew who the boss of 'Drugz, maan' is, then prosecutors would be able to subpoena your testimony whether you wanted to give it or not.
This is just a made-up example; I just want to point out that it's not necessarily a question of criminality or free speech. The government (ie the US government, following common law principles)has always been able to compel testimony except from a defendant or a small class of other people who have an intimate relationship with a defendant (doctor/attorney/clergy person). Even though a witness may object to being called and not want to help the prosecution at all (ie a hostile witness), there's still an obligation to testify truthfully. So, free-speech advocates, just because you're allowed to say something and you may not be putting your own freedom at risk, be aware that the subject of your speech could be impacted by your statements.
There are uncomfortable uses of state power in the drug war, like FISA warrants and civil asset forfeiture. This is not one of them.
Edit after reading replies to your comment: Well, I guess I predicted wrongly.
Anti-terroism laws are great, the problem is that everyone is a terroist.
Anti-criminal laws are great, the problem is that everyone is a criminal.
Anti-drug laws can also be great, the problem is that relatively safe drugs are incredibly illegal, and applied typically against minorities, and extremely unsafe designer drugs arn't and circulate amongst the public.
It's not so black and white as I see it, anyway.
If we assume a definition of great that allows the following sentence to be true: Racial discrimination can be great.
But the law is so widely varied that to group all these people under the same heading and to narrow it down to choice is in quite a few cases simply in error, depending on who you are, where you are and what your genetic make-up is.
Lots of things that are criminal in one place are considered health issues in another, mental health issues in a third and non-issues in a fourth.
The next two paragraphs you wrote a bullshit though. You said you "made a choice." I suppose that was after you did some time, yes? What did you do before that? Deflecting and ignoring perhaps? Give them a chance to learn.
If your local authorities recognize the right to freely speak (and freely receive speech) you cannot commit a crime online.
In the case of buying or selling contraband, the crime occurs when the contraband physically transfers possession. The network is neither necessary nor sufficient to commit the crime.
Wrong. Everything is a liberty issue.
"This is a you're probably a criminal issue"
This is why this is a liberty issue. Or did everyone just forget that it's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty? Even in the fucking article you have Branwen saying that most of the guys are probably just red herrings but that one guy might be a valid target.
Yet here you are making broad, sweeping statements and dismissing any criticism of the justice process through the lense of "people get what they deserve"... and then you continue to attempt to establish your authority as a criminal as a means to prop up your other claims.
"I have no pity. None."
Let me ask you seriously, who of the people being targeted do you have no pity for? Is it only for NSWGreat? What about Branwen? The other guys? Are they all immediately criminals in your mind? Based off what evidence?
Here's another reason your post is asinine: the way the current system is set up, almost everyone commits a crime everyday. This hasn't applied quite as much in the computer world but due to the fact that the powers that be woke up and recognized the internet as a threat, more and more computer fraud and abuse act style legislation is popping up and pretty soon it will be the same online (e.g everyone commits an online crime once a day)
You do realize, through your self proclaimed vast experience, that the justice system is corrupted as fuck right, and that simply putting bad guys in jail isn't how it always works out right?
Some people enjoy prison. I imagine they're not common.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out considering Gwern has a few essays on self-experimentation with drugs and discloses they were purchased from Darknet vendors. Despite the articles pertaining to illicit substances the experiments in question were exceedingly academic (like much of Gwern's writings).
I'm not a lawyer but I don't foresee much prison time in Gwern's future. There are bigger fish to fry.
It's possible they might've planned to use some of his drug purchases and position in the community as leverage to get him to talk, but I strongly doubt they're interested in prosecuting him.
> The Darknet is amazing, its changing the drug scene for the better. Its taking away the violence and the dangers that are inherit with buying drugs.
Never thought about it this way, but as everyone is talking and writing endlessly about how taxi rides will be revolutionized by billion-dollar Silicon Valley start-ups I found this insight about the drug-market fascinating. Online selling of drugs probably means less deaths of young (mostly black) people fighting for "street corners" and also less people killed by the Mexican cartels.
I'm trying to be better about reading too much into a single comment, but I think this means that you either have a long-held belief on the 'war on drugs' (one way or the other) or that you've simply never given it any thought as it may be a matter which you may feel does not concern you (it actually affects almost everybody).
In either case, here are a few materials that you might find interesting.
Milton Friedman on the 'War on Drugs' (1 of 3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyystXOfDqo
Noam Chomsky on the 'War on Drugs': http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm
To be honest, it's been a while since I've read/watched either of the above, and there might be a good amount of overlap between them.
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/redbook/
The Internet will always try to route around any roadblocks and form more efficient markets. Governments have to aggressive act to stop it from happening.
This, to me, is much more "Hey, look at this, Drugs 2.0, no harm!" with little to no evidence to back it up.
I'm surprised so few are being targeted, now that they actually do something about it.
If people turned out to truly be that foolish then I will have little, if any, sympathy for them.
One would be quite foolish to assume strong OpSec from drug seekers and their enablers. We've seen case after case resulting from these busts with absolutely trivial investigations necessary to locate the defendants.
I'm not 100% on this but I thought that because Reddit isn't hosted on the 'deep web' (ie no .onion address) you lose a layer of protection visiting it even over Tor, compared to sites that are hosted on Tor. It's still safer, but it's not the same, right?
Anyway, it's inevitable that some people are better at anonymising themselves than others, so even if they all try to do so, there's going to be at least some users who do it badly and wind up being arrested.
It's also inevitable that 100% of people who are confident enough to buy drugs online think that they have done everything correctly.
At least as far as I understand it. I admittedly don't have as much experience with Tor as I'd like, so I'd be happy to be told that I'm wrong.
you should probably assume the same of HN, or most things that don't live on I2P or Freenet.
This info is, of course, redundant or too late for the people talking about illegal activities on that particular subreddit, but it might come in handy for when they come searching for you.
HTTPS won't do anything to stop a subpoena for IP information(?)
