An Aussie classic

Growing up I was always being warned about malevolent people who would seek me out and trick me into trying drugs, providing them for free until I was hooked.  Then they would charge extravagant prices once they had me in their evil clutches.  We had police officers coming to school to scare the bejeezus out of us with descriptions of the tricks they would use, disguising them as lollies, or jabbing us unexpectedly, with one hit leading to a lifetime of addiction and certain early death.

This, I presume, is where the term drug ‘pusher’ came from.  It described people who ‘pushed’ their wares onto others who otherwise might not be interested in trying them.

Of course, I never came into contact with one of these mythical creatures, though like Deb in Puberty Blues I knew where to find people with access to all manner of drugs from an early age.  My work has also brought me into contact with numerous drug dealers over the years.  Never, in all that time, have I met a one who seeks out customers or tries to convince the reluctant to try their wares.

The trial I attended of small-time drug dealer Paul Howard is a case in point.  Several text messages to and by him were read out in court and they made it clear that customers sought out he and his products, not the other way around.  A first time offender who the judge described as having excellent rehabilitation prospects, he received a sentence of 3.5 years, with a non-parole period of 1 year, 9 months.  He was not a predator.  He did not lurk outside schoolyards trying to tempt kids into trying drugs.  He responded to demand by an informed, adult clientele.

Compare that to the sentence of someone who offended at a similar time in the same Australian state of Victoria, Ken Bayliss.   (Warning: graphic descriptions of extreme child sexual abuse contained in that link). This repeat offender received a total sentence of 3 years, 6 months’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of 2 years.  A very similar sentence, but I know which one I would prefer to have walking around free in my home town.

Sentencing for drug offences seems out of proportion to harm caused, especially when compared to sentences for violent offenders.  Both of the above crimes (selling drugs and distributing material depicting actual child rapes) cause harm to others.  The big difference is that the vast majority of harm caused by drug offences comes from the fact of drugs being illegal rather than from the drugs themselves.  Selling, say, heroin or cocaine contributes to brutalities and deaths in Afghanistan and Mexico due to warring cartels in the source countries. Selling MDMA or crystal meth probably props up organised crime groups who have a monopoly on the manufacturing process.  In both cases, the brutality would stop if drugs were no longer illegal and could be sourced ethically.  End-user deaths and other harms that are connected with drug use would also be mitigated by a consistent and regulated product.

The myth of the drug pusher as predator persists, despite worldwide surveys repeatedly reporting that the vast majority of drug users get introduced to drugs by family and friends, not dealers.  In fact, they will rarely meet a dealer until their drug use has become habitual – in other words, most users will never meet a dealer at all.  And nearly all users make an informed, adult (again, borne out by the surveys) choice to start – and in many cases finish soon after – taking drugs.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the online drug markets.  What with understanding Tor, sourcing bitcoins, sorting out the scammers from the real deal, working out drop addresses, and avoiding Customs or postal interception, people have to really, really want their drug of choice.  Nobody who visits these places is tricked or forced in any way to ingest illicit substances.

And in at least some cases, people on these sites are committing a completely victimless crime.  The most obvious examples are the vendors who grow their own cannabis or mushrooms and sell them directly to the person who will ingest them.

The time for a rethink on drug policy is far overdue.  The money being spent on this immoral ‘war’ could be poured into health, education and fighting the sort of crime that actually hurts people.  The first step is to stop the misinformation.

You know you want to.  Don’t forget to PGP sign your message.   Unsigned messages will be ignored. 

(Apologies to anyone who thought there might be a post here.  Coming soon)

Edit: the replies to this post are some of the most entertaining I’ve had on this site. Thanks to the contributors

As online drugs marketplace Silk Road sustains blows from an ongoing attack its owner says “appears to be DoS in nature,” the forums are awash with queries, rumours and speculation about newcomer, Atlantis Marketplace.  Is it responsible for the attacks on Silk Road? Is it a better, more stable alternative? Who runs it? Is it just one great big honeypot for law enforcement agencies to gather intelligence on drug dealers?

Newcomer Atlantis Marketplace aims to cannibalise Silk Road’s market share

There is something a little bizarre about chatting to directors (yes, they have a board) of an underground black market about their company model.  But that’s what I did last night when two of the founders of Atlantis, ‘Loera’ and ‘Vladimir’ answered my questions in real time (over encrypted chat, naturally).

Atlantis, a darkwebsite selling (mainly) drugs, is apparently a proper business venture, complete with business plan, profit forecasts and a long term strategy to claw the lion’s share of the online drug market away from incumbent leader, Silk Road.  But they are not, they claim, in any way responsible for the DDoS attack on their rival.

Atlantis is here, they say, “to offer the leading free market for buyers and vendors. To rapidly improve and evolve our feature set. To crush the competition.”

THE HONEYPOT THEORY

We get right to the elephant in the room – are they law enforcement, setting up a sting operation to trap and expose Silk Road’s largest vendors?  The hypothesis for this theory goes something like this:

(1) Create great incentives for Silk Road’s biggest vendors to join up.

(2) Tout easy-to-use automatic encryption as a security enhancement – harvest addresses and other information from those who do not manually encrypt communications.

(3) Work with postal services to triangulate exit points of that particular profile of mail – volume from major sellers is very high and packaging can be easily profiled by making controlled purchases.

(4) Use this profile with socially engineered telling details of vendors to bust the major sellers.

Atlantis makes no apology for offering incentives to Silk Road’s trusted vendors. “We began by offering 3 months commission free to vendors on the Road to jump start the community,” says Loera. “We’ve already seeing [sic] some of the top 1% and 2% vendors making a move to cover more ground.”

The one-way PGP (i.e. communications do not need to be manually encrypted – the user enters their address in plain text and the site encrypts it for them), “simply uses the users public key to encrypt the message when the auto-encryption service is enabled,” says Vladimir. “Without the corresponding private key, no one can decrypt the message (including us or law enforcement)”.

But the fact is, many users of black markets who simply want to buy drugs and don’t want to go to the hassle of learning encryption may be reassured by the claim the site will do it all for them and hand over a plaintext address or other details.

“We don’t force our users to use any of these ‘convenience’ features,” says Loera. “They’re simply there to add a bit of extra functionality to the website for those who wish to use them”.

If it is a sting, it will be human error, not Tor or the .onion platform, that will bring down any players.  But Loera thinks it would be counter-intuitive for law enforcement to use this method of entrapment.

“It’s only natural for people to be a bit sceptical at first,” he says. “However many people have made successful sales on Atlantis, and the scepticism is starting to fade”.   He states that Dread Pirate Roberts (Silk Road’s founder) had to begin under the same circumstances.

I point out that this is not entirely true – at the time Silk Road started, there was no knowledge of internet drug trade outside a few uber-geeks, and no incentive for the law to create such a honeypot.  Now, with global mainstream media coverage and drug dealers openly and blatantly advertising their wares online, mass arrests would be seen by the public as a win in the ongoing ‘War on Drugs’. Such sting operations in the face of public outrage are not unprecedented.

“There’s no good way to prove to the community that we’re not a honeypot, Loera concedes. “All we can do is continue to do what we’re doing, and the success stories of the community will speak for themselves”.

A NEW MARKETPLACE

Loera and Vladimir represent the board of a founding team of ‘about 5’ members, all ‘libertarians at heart’ with backgrounds in technology, business and drug dealing.  “I’ve personally never been involved in the drug trade up until now,” says Loera.

As it is obvious that much inspiration (or copyright infringement if you want to be unkind) was drawn from Silk Road – from the layout of the categories to the wording of the user manuals – a natural question is whether any of the founders are ex ‘employees’ of the original site.

“We are not affiliated with Silk Road,” says Loera, “however we do have some people with close ties to administration as well as a large and growing number of their top vendors”.

Atlantis was born in March 2013 because its founders saw an opportunity in the market when Silk Road started having reliability problems and outages which became more and more frequent. “We understand  that they are a huge target, but with the sums of money they turn over this should not be a problem”, says Loera. “The community has rallied behind them for long enough without any significant changes.”

The founders claim to have started their business with a philosophy of responsiveness to members’ suggestions and complaints, affordable vendor fees, scalable high-tech infrastructure, and a team with technical experience in corporate level environments. “Reliability and security are our top concerns,” says Loera. “We want sellers to be able to make sales at all hours of the day”.

Marketing started with an advertisement in the ‘Newbie’ section of Silk Road and many believe Atlantis has created multiple accounts to spruik the site across its rival’s forums. Atlantis denies this, saying it is the Silk Road outages that causes people to defect and the good customer service that makes them provide word-of-mouth recommendations.

Atlantis is unabashed in its desire to lure customers away from Silk Road.  Whilst showing some level of respect for Dread Pirate Roberts for evolving the online platform, implementing Bitcoin support and taking black cybermarkets to the next level, they think he has dropped the ball, perhaps complacent in his monopoly. “There is a lot of potential in this market, and if they aren’t willing to make the big moves we will do it for them,” says Loera.

“There’s always room for competitor markets especially in a market as large as the drug trade,”he continues. “However there will always a be a leader and we want this to be us. We will do this by offering incentives for users. Innovation and listening to user feedback is crucial and will be crucial to our success”.

Roberts had previously told me he was good-natured about competition, welcoming it ‘so long as it is friendly’.  I point out that some of Loera’s comments and Atlantis’ approach to marketing may be seen as less than affable.

“That’s okay, DPR doesn’t need to welcome us,” he says. “We’re more concerned with making a positive change in the community through our use of the technology. To allow the free trade market to evolve and prosper”.

In the six weeks since inception, Atlantis claims to have had 10,000 user sign-ups. Although they didn’t have figures to hand for how many of those accounts were cashed up, they were able to tell me there is currently $70,000 USD worth of cryptocurrency in circulation on the website.  With a sliding commission scale of 6% of transactions under $50 to 1% of transactions over $1000, the team is not drawing a salary yet.  But this is clearly not unusual in the initial growth phase of any start-up.

“It hasn’t been an issue for the team members involved,” says Loera.  “They want to see the success of Atlantis”.

A NEW CRYPTOCURRENCY

One of the biggest surprises with this new market was the initial decision to deal exclusively in Litecoin, rather than the well-established Bitcoin used by Silk Road, Black Market Reloaded and other online stores. The reason, Atlantis claimed, was the teething problems of Bitcoin had been eradicated or minimised with Litecoin. But the main differences are the speed of transaction confirmation and the fact that mining is available to the average user.

Potential customers were not convinced and in less than a month Atlantis implemented dual-currency recognition, accepting Bitcoins as well.  Their enthusiasm for the Litecoin, however, raises the question of whether the team has a vested interest in the fledgling cryptocurrency.

“We have the same level of interest in Litecoin as we do Bitcoin, which is why we decided to support both,” Loera says, not altogether convincingly.  Atlantis hedges the wildly fluctuating currencies against their weighted average USD value on MtGox and BTC-e exchanges and is proud of its robust security measures, stating that the way cryptocurrency wallets are managed could be a benchmark secure solution for other businesses.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND THE FUTURE OF BLACK MARKETS

Whilst their main motivation for opening Atlantis is to provide a free market to facilitate trade in illicit drugs and make a profit, they also see it as an opportunity ‘to radically change the current drug trade paradigm’.

“The board and many other people all believe the ‘War on Drugs’ is a terrible failure,” says Vladimir.  I point out that an end to prohibition would logically put an end to their enterprise, as people would source drugs from legal alternatives. Loera puts a sunny spin on this, saying it would provide an opportunity for them to legitimise their business and widen the scope of their potential customer base.

“Even if this resulted in the death of our market,” he philosophises, “it would be a win for the people and the world as a whole. We believe people should have the right to choose what they do with their own bodies. Ironically, most of the drugs for sale are less dangerous then tobacco or alcohol. Marijuana is our number one seller”.

In the meantime, he points out, drug users can order compounds from the comfort of home, be certain that the item you purchased is of satisfactory quality (due to the reputation system) reduce the risk of violence. It’s a win on many fronts.

So, assuming they are not law enforcement themselves, are they afraid of getting caught?  Whether through flaws in the technology the markets rely on (the onion routing protocol and cryptocurrencies) or through the sophisticated social engineering and stylometry techniques law enforcement is using on similar operations?

Vladimir says the team is well educated on police techniques and the operation has “planned for the worse and mitigated all loose ends…We adhere to a strict set of rules to minimize the risk of data leaking”.

So, I wonder, how does if feel to go from geek to drug tsar?

“It’s definitely a welcomed change of pace,” says Leora. “Adds a little bit of excitement to the daily routine”.

You may link to this article but cannot reproduce it without the permission of the author.

Online illicit drug marketplaces are competing for a share of the profits

Newest kid on the block is BuyItNow, complete with a peculiar Code of Conduct, which includes such rules as “Never serve any government” and “Never hold significant assests in countries known to sieze assets” [sic].  The administrator seems to have put a great deal of effort into the creation of the site, but with only ten listings it hasn’t made much of a splash.

Sheep Marketplace arrived to a little buzz in mid February, but is waning at a mere 32 drug listings and 44 registered forum members two months later.  The administrator seems hopeful (or deluded) though, posting in early April: “Since the launch of Sheep, 35 days have passed. Since then there have been several thousands of experiments on SQL injection. We have over 5000 registered people and some sinner who received permanent BAN.”

RAMP – the Russian Anonymous Marketplace – seems to be fairly active, though having to use Google Translate to figure out what is going on is a little time-consuming, so check out what they are all about at the wonderful Weirder Web here: Russia’s version of Silk Road is growing fast.

Newcomer Atlantis has had an aggressive marketing campaign since its debut in March. As well as blatantly advertising on the Silk Road forums, Atlantis has actively recruited SR sellers and offered opening deals on seller accounts.  Any verified Silk Road vendor has been allowed to become an instant ‘Verified Seller’ on Atlantis, meaning they have the badge that usually takes a minimum of fifty flawless transactions to acquire and can ask unverified buyers to finalise early.

They’ve also been responsive to member suggestions and requests and are proactive in messaging members about scams.  One Silk Road member wrote, “The admins over at Atlantis are very flexible, and they have implemented almost all the reasonable suggestions that people have made to the admins here. I think in a years time the road will either adapt, or die.”  Originally only accepting Litecoin, the site recently responded to pressure from the drug-using community to accept Bitcoins as well.

Still, despite all this, Atlantis currently has only 355 drug listings.  They acknowledge making inroads into the black market share will not be easy. “You need to give customers a good reason to move from their existing market. We do this in several different ways: Usability, security, cheaper rates (for vendor accounts AND commission), website speed, customer support and feedback implementation. Other markets would need to improve on all of these aspects to make an impact. We welcome the challenge,” a representative said via email.

One marketplace that has steadily and quietly been growing with a reputed $400,000 in sales per month as of April is Black Market Reloaded. BMR has been around since at least February 2012 and currently has 3,940 drug listings (though many more non-drug listings than the other sites).  The site has responded to its growth – much of it a result of Silk Road’s two weeks’ downtime last year – by implementing some changes in an effort to fight scammers and lift sales.

Still, many drug users refuse to use BMR for ethical reasons.  Unlike Silk Road, which claims to take a “high moral ground” when it comes to what it will sell (it claims not to list any items or services the intent of which is to defraud or cause harm to another person), BMR sells not only drugs, but poisons, firearms and explosives, stolen Paypal accounts and credit card numbers, and online banking account numbers and passwords.  The site stopped the contract killing listings recently not for any moral reason, but because they were deemed to all be scammers.

Silk Road’s founder, Dread Pirate Roberts, is not too concerned by his site’s competitors yet.  “Competition is healthy and I welcome it,” he said, “so long as it is friendly.”

For the most part, despite some temporary defections during Silk Road’s outages and downtime, vendors and sellers alike seem happy to stick with the status quo.  Devotees of Silk Road are quick to forgive any issues and many staunchly defend the Road against any potential competitors.  As one disciple put it, “Don’t bother looking for a better version of the Silk Road… You’ll never find what doesn’t exist.”

You may link to this post but cannot reproduce it without the author’s permission. 

Can you watch this on a webcam?

I’ve trawled the Onion, far beyond what’s available on the Hidden Wiki, and have yet to uncover any evidence at all.  Yet, like all urban myths, those who wish to believe insist that its true.  There’s one here  for example:

“Even underground fighting tournaments to the death (I’m not joking very real very organized). Very Real trained professional fighters. It may seem surreal but they are guys that train with the best and want no part of UFC or any fight league. Dudes who really enjoy fighting to the death. It’s just crazy explaining it it’s not some barroom brawl. These things happen and alot of millionaires pay big money to see them. Modern Gladiator battles. I heard there are some with humans vs animals.”

Over on Words With Meaning  someone who calls himself ‘Online Investigator’ and claims to be an ex-government cyber security expert also insists they can be found:

“As well as this there are literally gladiators who organise ways of fighting to death. I know how exaggerated this sounds – trust me, I’m the one trying to convince readers it is true – but there’s no joke to this claim.”

I asked the author of that piece to help me find them, but sadly no response was forthcoming, though they did forward a text document that was like a badly-written ‘Rules of Fight Club’.

There is evidence that modern-day gladiatorial fights to the death do occur, but in very limited circumstances. The Zetas drug cartel for example, has been accused of pitting their kidnap victims against each other with hammers, knives and machetes.  Guards from a San Francisco prison staged ‘cockfights’ in the late 1990s by putting prisoners from rival gangs into exercise cages or yards and betting on the outcome.  Some of these ended in the guards shooting one or other of the prisoners and there is a video floating around of at least one of these incidents, where 25-year-old gang member Preston Tate was killed.  This video does not seem to be available on the darkweb or any of the gore sites.

Anyway, that is different from the idea that there are organised fights that millionaires can pay to go to a’la Django Unchained, or even better that really hokey episode in the older La Femme Nikita series where deranged billionaires pitted beautiful women against each other in fights to the death.

Los Zetas is considered by the U.S. government to be the “most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico” so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that they would branch out into webcasts of their atrocities, or personal invitations to those who want to watch.  However, so far, no evidence of such whatsoever exists.

There is no doubt the world can be a place where evil happens.  Just the other day, at a BBQ conversation, someone said “The Chinese should sell opportunities to execute their prisoners. I bet people would pay for it.”  He was probably right.

However, at the moment, it appears that organised rings are the stuff of books and movies.

Red pill, blue pill or no pills?

Aussie vendor EnterTheMatrix had a simple and effective business model.  Purchase Australia’s most popular party drugs from overseas vendors on Silk Road, add a 400% markup and resell them to Aussie Silk Road customers.  Although there were plenty of grumbles about the prices, those who wanted their drugs quickly (ETM sent by Express Post) and did not want to take the risk of importing via Customs (legal consequences are much harsher when ordering overseas) begrudgingly paid a premium.  After all, it was around the same as street prices and at least the quality of the goods tended to be consistently high.

ETM was a master of self-promotion, building up the business over more than a year, eventually becoming one of the top 1% of Silk Road sellers with over 99% positive feedback.  Despite the high prices, users lavished praise on the service and the quality of the product.  By February 2013, EnterTheMatrix was easily the most successful and trusted Australian vendor on the Road.

That’s when ETM offered a new product – ‘Matrix Secrets! Learn from the Top 1% of SR’ promised to reveal all the tips and tricks necessary to run a Silk Road business safely and profitably.  The price tag – 86 bitcoins, which at current exchange is over $2000 – was too steep for many, but five potential Escobars ponied up with the money.

Then ETM was feeling the love on Valentines Day and announced a sale, offering tempting discounts on their usual prices for MDMA, LSD and other goodies.  Everyone assumed this was in response to a couple of new Aussie vendors who had popped up in recent months, offering similar quality drugs at slightly lower prices.  Orders flooded in for the ‘one day only’ sale, which was soon pushed out to two, then three days by the generous ETM to loyal customers.

A couple of customers expressed surprise that ETM told them that the ‘small print’ of the sale required them to finalise early (release money from escrow) on the cheap products to keep the cash flow going.  They could stay in escrow if they wanted, but they would get the product at the regular prices.  Knowing they were dealing with the top-rated and most highly respected Australian seller on the Road, many customers finalised as requested.

By Friday there were a few pissed off customers – the Express Post hadn’t arrived.  ETM wasn’t responding to messages.  This all sounded very familiar to those who had been on the Road for a year or more.  The MO was identical to that of Tony76, the Canadian seller who pulled off the biggest ripoff in Silk Road’s history in April 2012.

It seems that ETM has decided to retire and go out with a big ‘Fuck You’ bang.  Late last night they added an ASCI up-yours finger made out of number 5 digits (5555 translates to ‘LOL’ in Thai) to their seller’s page. A little later, a quote appeared:  “The game’s out there, and it’s play or get played.  That simple.”  It is one of the most famous quotes from The Wire, by Omar Little, a character known for double-crossing and outsmarting drug dealers.

It’s too early to estimate how much Australian customers lost to ETM before the website pulled their listings, but it is certainly well within the tens of thousands of dollars.

Who knows for how long ETM planned the con?  Perhaps they are one of the other Aussie vendors and have already started reselling.  But my guess is that they started planning it very soon after Shadh1 was sentenced to 3.5 years jail for running a far smaller and less professional operation.  Perhaps it hit home that, although business was lucrative, it’s not worth that sort of serious time.

As a drug dealer, shadh1 was really really bad at his job.  One of the key performance indicators is an ability to stay off the radar of law enforcement authorities, who are obliged to arrest and prosecute people who sell drugs to other people when they find out it’s happening.

Shadh1 failed miserably at the whole stealth thing.  He allowed customers to pass on his phone number to complete strangers for the purposes of ordering drugs, kept every single incriminating text message ever sent or received and left all the paraphernalia that screams ‘drug dealer’ strewn around his house.  He ordered drugs to his home address and his own name from countries from which mail is known to be more heavily scrutinised.  When twelve pieces of mail went missing, he just kept ordering more – to the same name and the same address – without stopping to wonder what happened to the ones that never showed.  He created a vendor account on the most famous online black market in the world, choosing an unusual username – the only other place it could be found was on his BMW’s numberplate.

So it wasn’t altogether surprising that he got busted 6 months into his new career.

He pleaded guilty to two charges of importing a marketable quantity of a controlled substance (MDMA and cocaine in a total of 11 packages) and one charge of trafficking (encompassing MDMA, cocaine, LSD, speed, ice and weed).

He received a sentence of:

• 2.5 years on the ‘importing a marketable quantity’ charges, and
• 18 months on the trafficking charge (to begin when the above sentence has 6 months to go),
• for a total of 3.5 years (non-parole period of 1 year 9 months).

Putting aside the fact that the definition of ‘marketable quantity’ is a joke (half a gram of MDMA or 2 grams of cocaine* ‘marketable’?), there is a bit of an incongruity here.  He got a longer sentence for buying the drugs than he did for selling them.

If shadh1 had sourced his drugs locally instead of importing them from overseas, he would only have been charged with the trafficking offences.

Shadh1 was a fairly small time dealer in the grand scale of things.  He dealt to end-users, supplementing his job as a bouncer and certainly didn’t seem to be making much money (the prosecution described the BMW as old and decrepit, not worth impounding).  He was the guy you could buy a single pill from for your night out or a bag of 10 to share with your mates.  There are thousands just like him, operating every weekend.

Now here’s how it usually goes:  Dealers of Shadh1’s size source their drugs from medium-sized dealers.  Medium-sized dealers source their drugs from bigger medium-sized dealers, who in turn source their drugs from large dealers.  Large dealers source their drugs directly from the organised crime groups who import very large amounts of drugs into Australia, often with the assistance of corrupt people in positions of convenience to facilitate importation.

That’s a string of middlemen in Australia (ranging from That Shady Guy up the Street  to The Person They Make Underbelly Series’ About) that shadh1 had bypassed by ordering his small quantities directly from overseas.

So if shadh1 had supported the chain in Australia, he would have had an 18-month sentence instead of a 3.5 year sentence.  By cutting out these guys and doing the job that would normally be handled by the top echelon of organised crime (albeit on a one-thousandth of the scale), he’s added two years to his time.

The laws are what they are and there are (usually very good) reasons for all of them, but it seems to me there has been an anomalous consequence of this one.  If you take out the fact that shadh1 was a dealer, a person ordering a single gram of MDMA for their personal use – enough for two weekends of partying – faces the same penalty**, even though they have cut out all middlemen in Australia.

There is, I suppose, the argument that the small-time importers increase the overall amount of illegal drugs crossing into our borders and this may be legitimate, but I would think at some point the law of supply and demand would kick in.  Also, in handing down the sentence, the judge said that general deterrence was an important consideration (and no doubt many Aussies are now rethinking importing their weekend party drugs) and that the use of the ‘internet’ added a level of ‘sophistication’ to the operation.

But the fact is, a guy with no priors, who the judge described as having excellent rehabilitation prospects and who was described by a psychologist as being desperate for admiration from his peers, is now facing a very long time in jail, partly because he chose not to buy local.  There was no evidence of lives being ruined or people being hurt – the text messages made it clear people sought him out for their party drugs.

The other fact is, if instead of prohibition we had a policy of legislate, regulate, educate, Shadh1 would not have had a business and would not be in jail at taxpayers’ expense.

At the very least, the absurd quantities of border-controlled drugs that are deemed ‘marketable amounts’ should be revised to something approaching reality.

* shadh1 imported considerably more than the minimum marketable quantities

** actually, in reality, that person would probably get a fine. But they are still committing the same crime that carries a 25 year imprisonment maximum.

Screenshot of the Vexnews article

I said I wasn’t going to give it any oxygen in my last post, but I really think it should be pulled apart for the appalling piece of journalism it is.  Let’s have a look at Andrew Landeryou’s Vexnews piece, para by para:

A criminal defence lawyer has told the County Court that a writer for The Age newspaper was responsible for informing his drug dealing client about how to obtain his supply from the internet.

Defence barrister JJ Jassar tendered an article on Silk Road by Melbourne writer, journalist and blogger Eiley Ormsby from which he said Howard found the website.

He got this bit right.  Bravo!

A sanitised account of the submission appeared on the Age’s website that neglects to mention:

‘Sanitised’?  Because they didn’t report the entire 5 hours of proceedings? Um, that’s not what journalists do.

■ The offending article was published – and is still published to the present day – on The Age’s website; and

[n.b. the above bullet point linked to The Drug's in the Mail]

Wrong.  This was not the article tendered.  The article tendered was a feature that appeared in Kill Your Darlings, six months after the offending and three months after the arrest.  It wouldn’t have taken much investigating to figure this out, as Butcher named the feature in his article from which Landeryou apparently got most of his information, as well as the date. 

Even if this was a sloppy but innocent – rather than malicious – mistake, the Age feature came out 7 days after ‘Shadh1’ registered for the forums.  And it was the first time I had ever written about Silk Road.

This shows an appalling lack of research, or even basic reading comprehension skills, by Vexnews.

■ The writer – Eileen Ormsby –  appears to be wheeled in by Fairfax management for strike-breaking purposes, suggesting she’ll come in handy for management going forward as it navigates the tricky territory of letting go most if not all of its editorial staff has written for The Age a number of times in a way many could regard as promoting the online drug site.

Strike-breaker?  I am a freelance journalist.  I had been commissioned for, and written, the article in question before a strike had ever been called.  I had been told it was due to run on the Monday.  According to my editor, management came in on the day he was on strike, found my article ready to go and pulled it forward to the Friday.

And ‘a number of times’?  Try once.

While the effects of illegal drugs varies, even the most supposedly innocuous of them have been associated with causing schizophrenia, memory loss and prompting addicts to get into a drug death cycle, taking ever more powerful narcotics

Uninformed hyperbole. ‘Drug death cycle’?  Really?  Do people really still trot out the old ‘gateway’ argument?  I hope Andrew Landeryou has never had a cigarette or drink – he’s well on his way to the ‘drug death cycle’ if so.

The Age online was not alone in talking up the drug-dealers’ site, Radio National had a red hot go at it too, giving Ms Ormsby’s pro-drugs views a credibility most would think they do not deserve.

Pro-drug reform views are not the same as pro-drug views.  I am unashamedly pro-drug reform.

While we won’t go into it in the same kind of detail as Ms Ormsby has, her writing frequently explains in detail how people can access this online operation in a manner you’d hope she might have feel cautious about if it related to child sex abuse, for example.

I’d like to see where I have ‘explained in detail’ how people can access Silk Road.  Significantly, I have never published the URL or the method of obtaining bitcoins, the cornerstones of being able to purchase from the site.

Does Landeryou think it would be better to ignore news such as the rise in online black markets?  He is squarely with many of the site’s users – who would prefer no publicity so the site can keep on operating under the radar – if so.

As for the unintelligible reference to child sex abuse – the mind boggles.

This is because Ms Ormsby makes it clear that she thinks the “War on Drugs” has failed and that online purchasing of dangerous, illegal online drugs is the way to go. It’s one thing for a blogger to be a spruiker for an online drug trafficking site but it does seem puzzling indeed that Fairfax would give these somewhat unorthodox views a serious profile.

Whilst I have stated that purchasing online is preferable to purchasing in a face-to-face deal, I have always made it clear that what I believe is the ‘way to go’ with regard to drugs is legislation, regulation and education.  Such measures would eliminate sites like Silk Road.  The site’s owner disagrees with my pro-reform views for obvious reasons. 

‘Spruiker’?  Some of my blog articles have turned people away from Silk Road.  I report on the scams, the hacks and the problems the site encounters.  I think Landeryou misunderstands how journalism works.

In her interview with Radio National, Ms Ormsby insisted the operation was “highly professional” and was akin to eBay in its methods, saying it was open to “anyone” and that it was all “completely anonymous.” Anyone familiar with these things will tell you there’s no such thing as completely anonymous online, no matter how much people fantasise to the contrary.

And yet Vexnews claims ‘anonymity and confidentiality guaranteed’ for anyone submitting tips to them.  People who are not taking precautions such as Tor and PGP.  So can they guarantee anonymity or not?

And sure enough, one young dope, inspired by what The Age’s writer Ms Ormsby had described, has found out the hard way that acting on information contained within it can only lead to trouble.

Wrong.  Please try harder.

Where’s the love SR?

The court heard evidence of 12 parcels containing drugs that had been intercepted between 27 March and 29 June 2012.  In his opening, the defence barrister said he would be tendering a news article into evidence that he claimed led his client to discover Silk Road. I figured it couldn’t be one of mine, as the first time I had ever written about Silk Road was 27 April 2012.

The prosecution’s case covered:

• Howard was charged with:
  • Importing a marketable quantity of MDMA (46.9g pure weight) via 9 separate importations;
  • Importing a marketable quantity of cocaine (14.5g pure weight) via 2 separate importations
  • Trafficking of cocaine, MDMA, LSD, marijuana, methamphetamine and speed
  • Possession of 32 prohibited weapons
• Of the 12 items seized by Sydney and Melbourne Customs, ten came from the Netherlands and two came from Germany and they were packaged in a variety of ways – within greeting cards, DVD cases, baggies within cardboard, inside a thermometer – and the substances varied in purity from 0.3% to 56% pure.
• On 18 July 2012, the Australian Federal Police raided Howard’s home, finding close to a kilo of marijuana, envelopes from Canada and the Netherlands that ‘got through’, a variety of drugs such as those he was charged with trafficking as well as DMT, $2300 in cash, a money counting machine, scales and baggies.
• Howard worked as a bouncer and drove a BMW with the numberplate ‘SHADH’
• The police seized three computers and two phones.
• The phones contained thousands of messages from apparent customers requesting goods and messages from Howard such as “I’ve got 5 grand worth if you want it,” “promote the LSD” and “I’m at the mercy of Australia post”.
• The computer housed pictures of drugs sitting on a piece of paper saying ‘shadh1’, kept in a Dropbox folder called ‘SR’.  His Google searches included “Does Australia Post record tracking” and “Silk Road Tor address”.
• Howard himself showed police how Silk Road worked and his account, registered in the name Shadh1.
• That account was registered on the Silk Road forums (which have a separate registration process to the sales site) on 20 April 2012.  He started a thread called ‘New Aus vendor , thought i’d say HI’ on that day:

Hey guys , I’m just starting out here. I’m Aus based and only shipping to Aus so as not to roach on anyone’s turf . I’ll be basically doing dutch speed and peruvian charlie to start and branch into more as I get coin back in my pocket. I source from both sr and non sr vendors but I prefer the sr system as far as selling securely is concerned ! So yeh that’s me story and I’m keen for any tips or just some chat from you guys as I’m still learning !

• Many of Shadh1’s forum posts were read out in court.

When a recess was called, I was surprised when the defence barrister shoved a printout of an article under my nose and asked whether I’d written it.  I was surprised to recognise a piece I’d written for literary journal Kill Your Darlings.  “Yes,” I said, and he rushed off again.

“I wrote that in October” I whispered to the court reporter beside me, confused as to what it had to do with the case.

After the recess, the defence barrister tendered the article.  “The author of the article is in court today, Your Honour” he said, pointing at me.  The judge acknowledged me and noted that I blogged at All Things Vice and sometimes wrote for The Age.

I didn’t write down exactly how my article worked it’s way into evidence (the hearing went for 5 hours or so), but it was along the lines of: my client was down to his last cent and his marriage was on the rocks.  He found this article describing how to get on to Silk Road and how cheap drugs could be bought there.

I walked out of that courtroom stunned and bemused.  The next day, a piece appeared in The Age, recounting the events.  It was a straightforward and factual account, so I put it out of my mind.

Later that night, a nasty personal attack containing much hyperbole and few facts emerged at an odd little site I’m not going to give oxygen to at the moment.  Suffice to say, it was vicious and unprovoked, completely inaccurate and used terms like ‘drug death spiral’ whilst somehow trying to link my pro-drug reform views with child abuse.

That’s ME they’re referring to!

Since then, the myth that I was somehow responsible for the defendant’s decision to deal drugs has been perpetuated over Twitter, reddit, Wired, Ars Technica and numerous blogs, forums and lesser-known websites.  The typical paragraph is:

“During the trial he said that he had been drawn to the site after reading an article by a journalist called Eileen Ormsby, who regularly covers the Silk Road in Australian newspapers. Since Howard’s conviction, the Silk Road has warned its users via its Twitter account not to follow their feed nor the feed of Ormsby with their real names.”

I realise these articles are just reporting what was in the Age story, but that article did note that I had written the piece in October.  And yep, that really happened in Twitterverse.

Weirder Web seemed to be one of the only places to notice the discrepancies in dates, and subtly pointed them out without editorialising about them.

So, to reiterate:  the offending dated from March 2012.  Shadh1 registered on the Silk Road forums on 20 April 2012.  My first ever article on Silk Road came out on 27 April 2012.  The article tendered to court came out in October 2012.

No doubt the defendant was led to Silk Road by an article, but it wasn’t my article.

This may well have been one of the most surreal weeks in my life.

re-edit:  I’ve posted a response to the nasty little piece that launched a personal attack on me even though they really don’t deserve the hits:

The Quickbuy Scam (see below) – this vendor’s image has been hacked with a fake bitcoin address

It’s hard to tell whether this is a concerted attack by one group determined to piss the website off or each one is separate. The most pervasive ones have been:

Forum Spam
The Silk Road forums have been under attack from a scammer spammer for months. Hundreds of posts per day fill the forums with repetitive, too-good-to-be-true offers of Bitcoin exchange.

Late last year a number of ‘spam busters’ were appointed – forum moderators with the limited power of deleting useless posts. But when the strange happenings of November occurred, all mods and admins were unexpectedly stripped of their powers, causing one of the original and most respected Silk Road team members to leave permanently. No explanation was given other than the spam was under control so their services were no longer required. Only this wasn’t exactly true as the spam kept ramping up.

Although a couple of people fell for the con, it seems unlikely anyone is being caught by it now. Stickies have been placed at the top of the main forums warning people and Silk Road has implemented a ‘Newbies Forum’. Members with under 50 posts are restricted to posting in that forum, much to their chagrin. But the spammer persists. You have to wonder if it’s malicious rather than a money-making scheme.

Wiki phishing

A more successful scam has involved someone changing the URL for Silk Road in the Wikipedia entry. It looked enough like the real URL to fool many people. Entering that URL into the
Tor browser brought the user to a login page that looked just like Silk Road’s page, except it requested the user’s PIN (which the legitimate site does not require) as well as their password.

Users who fell for the scam had their passwords changed and their accounts cleared out. Several members claimed to have lost thousands of dollars worth of coin.

One vendor also had his forum account hacked, with the scammer posting as the vendor, stating he had been busted. The trusted vendor requested help from the community to fund his defence. Several members transferred a total of $600 worth of Bitcoin to the scammer before the vendor was able to regain control of his forum account and reveal what happened.

Wikipedia no longer provides the URL to the website.

Quickbuy Image hack

Perhaps the most concerning attack for members has been an image hack by way of SQL injection. On 18 December 2012 hackers placed an image (see above) on vendors’ product listings claiming it was a ‘Silk Road Quickbuy’ button with a fake Bitcoin address for payment. They also disabled shipping options so that buyers could no longer make purchases in the usual way and so were forced the copy and paste the fake ‘quickbuy’ address.

Apparently only a few members were caught by the scam as it was a poorly-executed image and the fake BTC address needed to be manually cut and pasted.  The vulnerability was patched within 24 hours. However, the admins of the site were unable to fix the hacked images.

On 19 December, Dread Pirate Roberts wrote:

The issue has been resolved. The hole that lead to the hacker gaining access to other vendor’s images and postage options has been plugged. I’ve sent a message to all vendors asking them to update their images and postage options if their listings were affected, so hopefully the listings will be back to normal soon. I’ve turned off incognito mode on all accounts, so if you were using incognito browsing before, you’ll need to re-enable it on your setting page.

The message that was sent to vendors was:

Dear xxxxxxxxxx,
This is an automated message to all sellers at Silk Road :
Many of your listings were recently altered without your consent. Postage options were deleted, and images were changed. We’ve corrected the problem that allowed this to happen, but we cannot restore your listings to their former state. Please take a look at your current listings and be sure to add back in any missing postage options, and update any altered images.
Best regards,
Silk Road Vendor Support

Neither vendors nor buyers were very happy, one vendor saying:

You’ve been hacked, really hacked for the first time ever and I’m sorry but you just don’t seem concerned enough for me. Apart from Leo [law enforcement] closing you down this is as bad as things can get.

But as with everything that has been going on at Silk Road lately, angry members demand answers, no answers are given and eventually everything just goes back to business as usual.