That's their public version of the story.
Thanks to Snowden, we know today that they use "parallel construction", so we may have no clue at all to what lengths they went and how many illegal tactics they used:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
2. I doubt I'll be able to implement it entirely myself regardless.
3. even if I or someone else does, what is bad about it, exactly? It'll be just software. A set of Ruby/JS files. Everyone would be able to run a node so clearly punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option.
This is dangerously naive. This is exactly what "they" do, if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it.
Said example must include:
* open source implementation released to the public
* author did not directly do anything obviously illegal, or profit by anyone else doing it
* overwhelming force under colour of law
* He built some software to upload images to a web site.
* A porn site then used it without his knowledge.
* He was sentenced to death.
Miss a detail, change the story.
Purposely remained anonymous because he knew they would target him. Bitcoin foundation claims that as creator of Bitcoin, he is liable for every transaction under new FinCen laws being considered. https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=163
It would help if the author of this software doesn't call it 'Silk Rd 2.0' or reference online narcotics trade in any way. It should be called 'P2P open marketplace' which makes a huge difference during your trial when they claim you purposely set it up to violate US law instead of being able to argue you are an innocent software developer. Just look at weev's trial how they manipulated everything he said on IRC to make him look as criminal as possible.
Stephen Watt (the_uT) also merely wrote a piece of software he didn't use himself, nor did he profit from and he went to prison after Albert Gonzales used it to steal a ton of money with. It was sort of released to the public, dumped in an IRC room
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/...
It might not be true, but remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this is a case where risk really is unbounded, so you better be cautious.
Man, I really wish people would stop saying this. It's just completely false. It's a basic result of probability theory that if A is evidence of B, ¬A is evidence of ¬B.
The trick is that the strength of the evidence is not equivalent. It is not correct to say "Evidence of strong evidence is strong evidence of absence". More generally, A is strong evidence of B does not imply that ¬A is strong evidence of ¬B.
We have an absence of evidence for æther, but we are pretty certain that if it exists, we would have evidence of it. Our confidence of that is strong enough to state with some confidence that æther does not exist. For practical intents and purposes, we can say that the absence of evidence of æther is evidence that it does not exist.
Not all absences of evidence are made equal, some are more significant than others.
Otherwise all crypto projects are off limits, including Tor and Bitcoin
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/coder-charged-for-g...
The difference between offering BackTrack isos for download and running live, free Backtrack VMs.
A traditional, non-distributed service is often backed by centralized entity (corporation, nonprofit or private person), so many of the consequences are directed at them. Whereas with a diffused individuals running their own, it would be harder to as easily control.
Believe it or not, V for Vendetta is not actually a handbook on how to run a democracy.
“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”
The ones that have been harassed in my memory is the Cryptocat dev and Winny. Don't mark your software as having a political purpose and more of a general tool and I think you'll have less harassment in your future.
Again, it's apples to oranges, but you can see how the court's line of reasoning could go the same direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arista_Records_LLC_v._Lime_Grou...
The only thing that potentially could get the user in trouble would be the specific and illegal usage of it, i.e. the selling of illegal substances.
As a side note, of course, this is the very definition of the breakdown of law. But that is what the people want: a nation, not of laws, but of men.
One could imagine a Bitcoin-esque system where the creator includes rules in the client that require every transaction to send a small cut to a Bitcoin address he owns. [1]
If that system then "happens" to be used for illegal purposes like drug trafficking, is the developer of the system committing a crime? It's distributed so he can't shut it down and he's no longer actively participating. What if he destroys the private key of the Bitcoin address?
It's an interesting thought experiment...
[1] Of course you'd need a critical mass of users and the right incentives to prevent people from starting their own "alt-markets" much like Bitcoin has spawned dozens of "alt-coins".
>definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself
is not very convincing...
Plus, this new system would involve no central entity taking a cut.
(Even if they remember to destroy their inscribed copies of 'Leaves of Grass')
- it makes GitHub a target
- it makes contributors into targets
First, Git (although DVCS) needs to be located in a non-extradition country where a SEAL team cannot just break in and steal dev servers. This sounds like it would require tor also.
Second, all contributors need perfect anonymity hygiene. Anyone that commits publicly is a liability. Use a new pseudonym just for this project, keep issues and discussion to information and technical matters strictly.
It's going to get to the point where theres no where we're going to end up hosting Reddit, et al., on the Moon.
It seems to me, viewing history as an example, it used to be possible to legitimately petition the government by means of demonstrations, protests, contacting legislators, etc. Now that's been completely replaced with lawsuits. Only by one party with significant means and resourcing sueing the other and waiting a long time to reach the Supreme Court do things get accomplished.
As this has to do with the drug war, however, I think things are slowly changing. If the Prohibition of alcohol can be any guide it will take a large enough public outcry along with voting people into office that share your point of view. All that takes time, money, and at least some way to sway the public (generally meaning control in some kind of large media company that the public believes/trusts).
The only way to get started is for people to get together and say they want to do it and start doing it. Apathy and complaining about it goes nowhere.
https://twitter.com/pogue25 if anyone wants to get started :)
And winning the hearts and minds is not going to be easy. Consider the Tea Party (and importantly consider your own feelings toward the Tea Party) A bona-fide grass roots movement that the establishment has marginalized, ridiculed and baselessly accused of violence and racism and now stands charged with holding the nation hostage, by exercising legal and constitutional rights. I suspect you're movement would not fair any better.
I don't see the public outcry as muted at all, but I suppose it depends on where you look. Remember, we're in a transition of traditional/oldschool media to new media.
I also don't expect the body politic to simply throw out their beloved spy apparatus after some public outcry. This isn't just a decision of Congress, but of a state funded military industrial complex that exists out of bounds of any kind of oversight with their own secret budgets -- something almost unheard of any prior state and without historical precedent. Trying to tear down the walls of that is going to be an extremely complicated and time consuming process, and I think its going to be a piecemeal affair.
> I suspect you're movement would not fair any better.
Obviously its very hard to establish a movement in the 21st century that can effectively alter the status quo. I look at Occupy as a better example -- and without getting into arguments regards one vs the other the Tea Party has continued where Occupy faltered and disintegrated. You may not be able to control what people say about you and its hard to keep a movement from splintering, but if you go by the basic tenants of creating a popular mass movement with leadership, specific political objectives, and enough funds, I think it's very possible to get things accomplished.
non-extradition country to where? Non-extradiction country to the USA? That's very America-centric. Any place you can host it, will have local courts, local police and local judges. You can't find a country that, effectively, has no laws you have to obey.
If you aren't, you're still completely wrong. Russia, America or any nationstate that is made aware of something can seize whatever it wants whenever it wants and wherever it wants. That's why any controversial app must be distributed, fault resilient for both development AND production. Centralized will never work, even with perfect security hygiene. It's a good thing that Git has a full copy, because a single dev server seizure would be annoying but not fatal.
Do you have any other flaws to point out that pertain to my original comment?
That genius you replied to takes one point to make a political statement, not contribute anything to the conversation and then slips into to the gutter.
On the other hand, that would seriously piss off the rest of the international community, especially if the two satellites were high enough to clutter up existing satellite traffic.
Just hook up emagnets in the doorframes. Wipe the servers if they're removed from their environ.
The story then went full-on Breaking Bad nuts, with
Redandwhite demanding $150,000 for a "non-clean" kill and
$300,000 for a "clean" version. Roberts said that he knew
the value of such things; he claimed to have paid $80,000
for a previous "clean" hit, and he wanted a discount.
Did I say earlier that the story had already gone off the
rails into Crazytown? Reader—I was wrong. Because a
federal indictment unsealed separately today in a Maryland
court says that Roberts had in fact arranged such an
$80,000 hit just a few weeks earlier. Not crazy enough?
Turns out that the "hitman" in this first attempt was
actually a federal agent.
Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show
these employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week
—had stolen from Roberts and eventually managed to get
himself arrested by dealing with an undercover agent.
Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he would
return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about
hitmen, Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover
agent who had helped bust his employee.
There's nothing illegal in this repo, sure -- but definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself. Or even use it.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...