When people are introduced to Silk Road, one of their earliest instincts is to articulate a few obvious methods by which law enforcers could potentially subvert the community or stability of the site. The feasibility of the attacks usually falls apart given meticulous scrutiny. Most often the techniques rely on social engineering, but occasionally technical attacks are suggested. The technical approaches can be mitigated in the conventional ways and the fortification of web servers has been described in great volume elsewhere, so we will focus on the most commonly suggested social engineering attack.
The social engineering scenario most often contrived involves a government (in practice it is almost always the US government) making thousands of vendor and customer accounts, buying things from themselves, and leaving very positive reviews. When real customers buy from these apparently well established merchants government agents arrest them. The real impact here is not the arrests, but the destruction of confidence in merchants. How can you know who is or is not a government sockpuppet if the majority of the well established vendors may very well be honeypots? The elephant in the room for those familiar with Silk Road’s merchant system is that vendor accounts cost over 500 dollars each, and even that is subject to increase if administrators feel the barrier to entry is too low to stop fakes. Let’s take a quick look at the economics at play here.
Let V be the price of a single vendor account, let G be the number of vendor accounts the government will buy, and let P be the price. Basic arithmetic shows that V * G = P. This means that if the government wants to poison the well with 5000 accounts, and each account is $500, the price just to start out will be $2,500,000. Keep in mind that the price is liable to increase once the administrators feel threatened, and the attackers would need to continuously buy new accounts for each sockpuppet they use to make an arrest.
Another problem with this technique is the administrators would be able to see which accounts are interacting with each other, and it would be possible to figure out which accounts were not buying and selling outside of the government bubble. Thus, this would be an extremely expensive operation and even an organization that had the money could be easily stopped by diligent administrators.
My friend, you have little experience with federal narcotics agencies–and there’s lots of them. A federal task force targeting the Silk Road would have practically unlimited resources. I’ve seen the DEA come up with $1 million in cash in less than four hours for a buy-bust. Not to mention the expenses of running their own air wing. Plus, it would not be necessary to set up 5000 accounts; it would be enough to set up enough accounts (with a few arrests) so that buyers would lose confidence in the system. It is easy for them to arrest buyers; this is called a ‘controlled delivery.’
All drug deals are composed of three elements: price, quality and terms of delivery. Silk Road does fine with the first two, but the last remains a gaping hole.
The majority of sales on Silk Road are small scale personal purchases. Busting that type of purchase would be much easier accomplished by targeting dealers in local communities, which would also have the effect of reducing violence and crime. Don’t you think that would be more desirable than busting online customers that are out of sight and out of mind? Also, there are a lot of sellers on Silk Road, and a lot of scammers who are actively chased down by administrators. Making enough vendor accounts to effectively poison the well without being noticed by administrators would be a massive operation.
The resources required could be used much more effectively for more traditional busts, especially considering the violence on the border that has been occuring as a result of the conventional drug trade. The DEA would be foolish to drop millions on Silk Road and ignore public outrage about the drug cartels and gang violence.
If it were about economic efficiency there would be no “drug war” at all. All it takes is for someone to make a policy decision to pursue Silk Road buyers and that will be the end of it. It’s not about taking drugs off the street–that goal was abandoned long ago–but whatever the current interdiction strategy du jour is. One current fad is “interrupting drug networks.” The Silk Road is a network and so fits within current policy objectives. The question isn’t, “couldn’t enforcement funds be spent better elsewhere?” Maybe, but so what? The question you posited was whether the Silk Road could be made ineffective by targeting buyers. You reached the conclusion that it would be too expensive to do so. I have merely pointed out that you are wrong. Of course, the way this works is the same way that taking down a drug cartel works–it’s whack-a-mole. Take down the Silk Road and say hello to the Cotton Path. Or the Carretera Clandestina. Or whatever arises to take its place. Then, rinse and repeat–supply will always rise to meet demand, illegal or not.
>The question isn’t, “couldn’t enforcement funds be spent better elsewhere?” Maybe, but so what? The question you posited was whether the Silk Road could be made ineffective by targeting buyers. You reached the conclusion that it would be too expensive to do so.
Not exactly. The question is why are governments NOT doing this. The price and political environment makes it unlikely to happen. DEA policy is controlled by politicians who are voted into office. Using resources to fight drug cartels would be a much more popular decision than using resources to secretly sockpuppet Silk Road.
And by the way, busting small-time users or even dealers doesn’t necessarily result in a reduction in crime. Once upon a time, the Miami police set up a drug sting market in a local neighborhood. They let it run for weeks (remember, taking drugs off the street is not the main goal). The neighborhood filled up with criminals on their way to and coming back from acquiring their drug of choice. People from all over the city came, because the product quality was high–after all, it was being sold by the police. After a while, the police shut down the operation, but new dealers returned because the area now had a reputation for high quality product. In the end nothing was accomplished.
>And by the way, busting small-time users or even dealers doesn’t necessarily result in a reduction in crime.
I agree, but neither would shutting down Silk Road. Between the two, targeting real criminals would have a much more noticeable impact than targeting (what I believe to be) harmless Silk Road users.
This is such classic wishful thinking. Ignore for a second that the amounts of money involved are trivial and that they would expect to get much of it back after a seizure of the assets of all the involved parties. You make the assumption that a single bust will burn a seller account and make it unusable for further busts. Much more likely is the busted party will be turned via plea agreement into an agent of the government. (See the recent prosecutions of figures from Anonymous for an example.) If government influence spread virally in this manner they could compromise the entire network quite easily. Its worked with previous iterations of organized crime whom I’d argue have a much harder to penetrate credentialling system. (IE ‘make your bones’ by killing someone.)
>This is such classic wishful thinking.
No, this is what is currently happening in real life. Silk Road is running fine. I am trying to explain reality. As far as I can tell the obsessive creation of circumstances where Silk Road will be compromised is wishful thinking. Many people cannot accept the inability of the state to deal with a problem – the state must either be an oppressive, insurmountable evil, or a force of pure good and reason. Silk Road challenges both of these positions so those that hold them resort to wishful thinking about how the DEA will use it’s infinite political and economic might to overcome Silk Road.
Yep, Black Market Reloaded already has more publicly listed items than Silk Road.
Silk Road might just be finished or at least very hurting ATM.Someone is forsure screwing up the buisness and i doubt it is some kid/kids.
Why do you say that? I haven’t been keeping up with the news around there.