Dutch cops reveal takedown of 'world's largest dark web market' The alleged administrators of the infamous Bohemia and Cannabia dark web marketplaces have been arrested after apparently shuttering the sites and trying to flee with their earnings. The arrests came after an investigation that opened in 2022 and saw Dutch Police identify servers related to the souks in the Netherlands. The …
Maybe dumb criminals. The internet can still offer anonymity should it be required and quite often does. That is until they forget to activate whatever measures they are using when logging into something like twitter.
I would say the police are getting better but only with high value targets.
The internet offers anonymity but it also leaves a data trail that lasts a lot longer than a few footprints in the snow or a drop of blood in a parking lot, so the cops don't have to act as quickly before the evidence goes stale and the case grows cold. So it helps criminals in some ways and hurts them in others.
And no matter how smart the criminals are technology wise they can't know everything, they will inevitably slip up somewhere. Now if they only slip up once or twice in small ways that the cops aren't aware of they still get away, but the "perfect crime" is IMHO harder to commit in cyberspace than it is in the real world.
EVERYONE needs note ..... the Internet guarantees nothing and no one impunity and immunity against predatory and prosecutorial action, even should any present day and past hereditary Powers-That-Be imagine and believe themselves exceptional and untouchable ...... which clearly so many quite obviously do.
Stupid is as stupid does, and apparently, according to Einstein, that is endless and a systemic vulnerability available for milking and bilking/exploiting and taking rewarding unfair advantage of ..... whenever either able or enabled to be considerably smarter than was ever before even imagined to be possible and quite normal.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ...... Albert Einstein [who many might truly believe would certainly know quite a lot more than anyone else about all of that]
Everything shows up on someone's radar somewhere, not least those owned by the swathe of intelligence agencies in America, such as NSA.
The issue is - do they risk compromising their covert snooping of everything for a small time bandit and do the local forces have the capacity to act on the tip-off.
There's no point having the greatest snooping tool of all time if you are going to send a spreadsheet with 20 million named UK citizens to Scotland Yard, listing every punishable action they took on the internet. For one, Scotland Yard hasn't the resources to pursue 1% of that, and two, it ends, once and for all, the illusion that the internet offers anonymity even for those actively seeking it, negating the whole point of mass surveillance.
But there’s no point having the greatest snooping tool of all time if you can’t find anyone to utilise it properly in order to discourage and prevent future activity that needs to snooped upon and acted against, is there, and that appears to be exactly where everyone is at down on Earth.
The head honcho/Director General Ken McCallum of MI5 [UKGBNI's Security Service] ......[and you can read all about what came out of that particular flogged horse's mouth here ..... Director General Ken McCallum gives latest threat update [08 Oct 2024]] ...... has also admitted his agency staff are running around like headless chickens and spending valuable time, whenever not licking political arses, tilting at virtual windmills that may or not be booby trapped to explode with succour empowering other deadly Global Operating Devices and their not so sleepy, sleeper agencies with Secret IntelAIgent Services, Sources and Forces mustered to safely and securely administer whatever Master Plan Programs be necessarily desired to render opposition and competition both impotent and ideally very quickly self-defeating.
One might think things haven't changed a great deal, but nothing is as it used to be in the past, both recent and distant, under conventional and traditionally inherited means of global command and inhabitant control, that’s for sure.
Since I am now old enough that all the people I bought weed from 50 years ago are dead of old age, I use the so-called dark web to get cannabis. I can get a home delivery quicker than Tesco. The park nearest my house has lovely wee 4 inch (10cm for you youngsters) stickers with nice pictures of a cannabis leaf, and a QR code. Same-day delivery. I note that rival 'gangs' tear off or obliterate the QR code and substitute their own.
The occasional exit scam is less overhead than the time and money one used to spend chasing down a dealer. Quality and weight much better than the 'old days'.
We have home delivery here -- see https://weedmaps.com/ -- but its easier to just drop by one of the local stores when you're out shopping.
I have to keep reminding myself that there are lots of places where its still the Devil's Lettuce, a threat to all that's Holy and Good etc. etc.
Incidentally, I'm still a bit clueless about what the "Dark Web" is. I've always thought that it just meant that there was no name registered with the Domain Name Service so you just had to use the actual address. I know that law enforcement tends to focus on domain names, they proudly state that 'such and such domains have been seized' but really its just a glorified look up table so they're not really taking ownership of anything particularly important. Am I missing something?
Often, they're referring to Tor hidden services. Not always, and when they talk about domains being seized it might not be, but quite often that is where the illegal markets are set up. If they're doing it correctly, there is no IP address you can enter to arrive there. You have to go through Tor and use the domain name, which is really a public key, to find and connect to the site. It gives people some of the tools required for anonymity, but if you're not careful, you can mess it up, and you also need to do more than just have a hidden service to not be found.
Nothing is as anonymous as you think it is on the internet. It can't be - you have to have the address of both ends of the connection for things to work. There are tools like TOR that can obfuscate that somewhat, but even they aren't absolutely perfect - some nations might have the kind of hardware and connectivity needed to track the connections over TOR (not that it would be easy or cheap to do so.)
> Administrators, sellers and buyers of and on illegal marketplaces often believe themselves to be elusive to the police and the judiciary
And why might that be? Could it be because you take decades to capture a single weed dealer and then parade him around like you've put an end to the Mafia?
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