I couldn't help thinking of the Lord of the Flies:
'This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grown-ups come to fetch us we'll have fun.'
There is a determined bunch of hackers who want to create an alternate reality online -- a virtuality they control and use to disrupt the real world and put themselves in power -- but they keep getting arrested.
Good!
So Ross William Ulbricht, was busted this week on charges of being the kingpin behind the Silk Road Bitcoin illegal narcotics empire.
And while they said it couldn't be done, the FBI is even described as seizing his "non-existent" virtual coins -- the Bitcoins in which he was said to keep his billion-dollar empire.
All of this was done through Tor, the same software that was used by the child pornographers' ring that was busted in Ireland some weeks ago and which shut down half the Tor nodes and spread panic among users as it seemed that essentially, the FBI poured purple dye on them to out them.
One also wonders if that one capture then facilitated this other one, and if any of the Torians are singing and helping the feds in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
And supposedly it's all because Ulbright slipped up on his social media footprint and didn't "practice good hygiene." According to some reports, he put his nickname "Dread Pirate Roberts" in one place where it could be linked via LinkedIn with another, and his other accounts had duplicates and clues that old-fashioned human intelligence could put together.
The arrogant geek is always the weakest link in any security chain.
TechCrunch cites court documents about supposed contract murders but doesn't do any journalism to check it.
Meanwhile, an old fashioned newspaper, the Toronto Star, found out that in fact, a package of fake IDs that got discovered at a routine inspection at Customs seems to be really what busted him, and there was no evidence that this hit target even existed or that any assassination took place.
It doesn't appear that there was any kind of NSA phone metadata scrape or DEA reconstruction here, but old-school police work.
Um, no, I'm not a sheeple and think that "routine inspection" is something that was necessarily so routine. No matter. Law-enforcement isn't required to tell *you* everything about their methods in catching criminals. Packages *are* subject to inspection, and that's a good thing.
Andy Greenberg had an interview with Ulbrecht just a month before his arrest, with elaborate "safety precautions" which obviously didn't work -- and he seems to indicate that there is someone even more secret and more sinister behind Ulbricht -- the real kingpin. There probably is. I'll bet he's Russian!
Say, I wish Andy would now interview some other bad actors and maybe they could be brought to justice, too!
Some thoughts:
o Second Life's virtual currency still works mainly because unlike Bitcoin, it isn't run by arrogant unaccountable and anonymous coders, but a visible real-life company with fiscal responsibility in a corporation. And of course it works because it's regulated like China. The exchange rate is kept stable by the company regularly printing or selling currency on the LindEx. SL's virtual banking and stock market collapse of some years ago was mainly caused by anonymous unaccountable geeks - tied to gambling empires. Once MasterCard and other companies told Linden Lab that they simply wouldn't process their credit charges unless they complied with new laws prohibiting online gambling -- that's what it took -- then they had to close all the virtual casinos and everything began to collapse.
o Ulbricht is described as being a devotee of Mises -- which means that Bitcoin is more about technolibertarianism than technocommunism. Somehow I always thought Bitcoin was more about collectivism of the socialist anarchist type that hates states and institutions and celebrates the self-selected community, but there are times when T-L and T-C meet each other at their similar extremes, and I suppose Bitcoin is one of them.
o Reason magazine predictably is taking an awful position on this, condemning it -- although Silk Road was a cess-pool not only of illegal dangerous drugs but other illegal activities like making fake IDs and assassination orders, as it turns out! Reason has become so ugly, aggressive, and crass in its extreme drug legalization position. It used to be Reason was reasonable and an interesting antidote to conservative politics and leftism. Now it's filled with aggressive assholes, especially in the comments, who can't seem to grasp that legalizing drugs legalizes the kind of drugged behaviour that harms people and take other people's rights away.
o I don't believe in Bitcoins obviously, because I don't believe in anonymous coders running our society in any way, shape or form. The people who endlessly argue on their behalf are like gold bugs and truthers -- wait, they are gold bugs and truthers. Virtual currency is interesting to me because it is a way for micropayments to take place and for people to transact business for virtual or real goods and services online and increase people's livelihoods -- I'm all for it. But I want it to be tethered to the real world. When the virtual currency is cashed out to real dollars, it is proper to make it taxable.
o Another interesting aspect of all this -- after the news of the Silk Road arrest, Jacob Appelbaum started complaining on Twitter that the GCHQ (British equivalent of the NSA) was ordering The Guardian to suppress a story. He seemed to be banging on Greenwald indirectly, and attracted enormous interest from lots of his many followers about this, but he remained cryptic (not surprisingly).
He said the story was Tor related, and that also opened up the possibility it could be Silk Road related. I mean, here some of Tor's biggest criminal customers are getting busted, and where does that leave them?
It's also interesting to see how some of his peers critique him over this.
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