The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall (opens in new tab)

In the first part, it talks about how the agent loves breaking down doors at 6am in his Doc Martens. I.e. loves being a literal jackbooted thug.

My only consultation is that hopefully one day prohibition will be fixed, and these agents will reflect and see their careers contributed nothing of value to the world. That they just caused trouble, like a bully. That countless lives, marriages, children got screwed up due to their pointless actions. I know, probably they'll remain delusional, but one can hope.

There were a whole bunch of articles a while ago about the rise of using SWAT teams for all sorts of arrests. Think from the officers' perspectives - they watch all these movies, they go and become FBI officers, and then they barely get to do anything exciting. So they naturally jump at the chance to do an exciting arrest. I guess there should be some kind of check-and-balance in place on the type of arrest, maybe for some arrests they should need to get a special warrant or something.

I thought to come back to this thread and mention this as well because the more I think about it, the more it disturbs me. Why is the high-intensity SWAT raid so embedded in the FBI mindset that it's the first thing they go for, and even well-reasoned internal pressure isn't enough to stop it?

First, I haven't heard of any suspicions that Ross/DPR was in physical possession of any significant quantity of drugs or any weapons at all, or that he had any history of or inclination towards personally committing violence. So what's the point of the 5AM ninja raid? 4 agents in business clothes swinging by at noon would be perfectly adequate to take him into custody without hurting anybody, destroying anything, scaring the crap out of anybody, or scaring anybody into defending themselves with force against what looks an awful lot like criminal action.

Second, the cybercrime team, the guys who actually generated the evidence needed to find him in the first place, told the locals that they were very unlikely to get enough evidence to convict unless they literally snatched his work laptop out of his hands while he was working on Silk Road, without him even having a chance to press a single key. This was based on their experience in previous cybercrime investigations. They were completely ignored, and a SWAT raid was planned anyways, despite this and the first point above.

WTF FBI? Somebody needs to smack some sense into them over there, tell them that they exist to solve crimes and not play wannabe COD mall-ninjas.

Sounds more like the old adage about how when you're holding a hammer-

I just hope they make it more real documentary style like "The Internet's Own Boy as opposed to stupid and dumbed down like the Steve Jobs movie. No matter where you fall on the legal/ethical spectrum, you have to admit it's an awesome story.

You can be sure it is in early development stage.

I seriously cannot imagine a work environment where it's ok for you to be reading this article sans images, but it wouldn't be ok to be reading this article with the graphics.

> When did Wired become NSFW?

More like when did caseysoftware decide to work somewhere stupid.

I work at a generic corporate america job. I've got a generic corporate america boss, and you know what? He wouldn't get any more upset with me for reading an article with that image in it than he'd get upset with me for reading some article so completely unrelated to work on the clock.

Women have breasts. If you work somewhere where images of breasts are more of an issue than you know... not working at work, then maybe you should just not work there. It's not Wired that's at fault. It's your ridiculously backwards employer.

Calling him stupid seems to kinda miss the point to me. I think it's more that when you're up against the Feds, especially on something so deeply entrenched as being illegal worldwide as distributing drugs on a massive scale, you're going to get caught eventually, because it only takes one mistake. Sure, he was kinda dumb and made a lot more than one mistake, but how much better could anybody here do? Enough to keep the Feds away for how long, exactly? Another year or two maybe?

I kinda sympathize with his position in a way. He was clearly in over his head both on the technological front and on the administration front, despite making piles of money. When that happens in a normal business, you hire some help. But how do you find help to hire for such a massively illegal operation? Finding anyone who could be trusted is a tough problem, much less someone who can be trusted and also has strong technical skills.

Eh. I dunno. When you get in that deep it kinda feels like it's an inevitability, one way or the other. I hate doing it because it's almost cliche at this point, but Avon Barksdale has a pretty good point:

"Comin up the way we did, you know, you kind of expect that. Waitin on it. See, the thing is, you only got to fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once. And how you ain't gonna never be slow? Never be late? You can't plan through no shit like this, man. It's life."

It's pretty amazing how the use of Tor drives this kind of wishful ignorance. You see it all the time on /r/darknetmarkets

So yes, in retrospect he made some very basic errors. That said, it's pretty easy to call someone stupid after reading a long-form piece informed by a full indictment of their crimes produced by an intergovernmental criminal investigation and subsequent trial.

I have no experience in the matter, but I imagine that being the kingpin of such an organization tends to pull one's head in so many directions that it's easy for smart people to do dumb things unknowingly.

Deserves it because he was stupid??? Or do you mean because of what he did?

Cirrus?