Silk Road Bust & Pardon

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How is that I had not heard anything about this? I was aware that Silk Road got busted, but after 2015 it dropped off my radar. I suppose that's what I get for hanging out on the fringe, or maybe I'm just on the wrong fringe.

Silk Road case wanders into trial

by Susie Cagle

Silk Road was busted just 15 months ago and already the case has found it's way to trial. Sarah Jeong tells the story in Forbes, and it is very entertaining. Here is a sample:

But the judge declined to entertain the Fourth Amendment argument—that the seizure of the servers constituted an unreasonable search and seizure—because Ross Ulbricht could not demonstrate a property interest in the Icelandic server. If anyone had a property interest it was the Dread Pirate Roberts, and as long Ross Ulbricht insisted he wasn’t the Dread Pirate Roberts, he couldn’t possibly have standing to contest the government’s search.

Is Ross the Dread Pirate or not? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

Antonov in Iowa

 

The GP-4000 is driven into the Antonov cargo plane at the airport in Lincoln, Nebraska. July 2010.

In The Cobweb we have a giant Antonov cargo jet landing at a city airport in Iowa. The Antonov is a big plane. I'm wondering if there are really any airports in Iowa that can handle it, and I turn up this picture. OK, so it's not in Iowa, it's in Nebraska, but that's right next door (across the Missouri river) so that counts, right?. Nebraska used to be the home of SAC (the Strategic Air Command), so they would have big fat runways that could probably accommodate a whole fleet of Antonovs. Still, we're in the same neck of the woods and people are shipping big things by air.
    The machine in this picture is a "slip form paver" used for paving concrete roads. It is going to Georgia, the country in central Asia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, not the state of Georgia, currently part of the USA.
    The machine was going to Georgia to work on rebuilding the E60, which is the modern highway which basically follows the route of the old Silk Road, which leads from China to the rest of Asia and Europe.
    Silk Road was also the name of the clandestine website that the Feds busted last year.
    The Cobweb has Federal agents busting a clandestine operation in Iowa, which has hired the Antonov, or at least I think it's going to. I haven't finished the book yet, but that sort of looks like what is going to happen.
    Isn't it great the way all these things connect up?

Note: this plane is the Antonov-124, a large commercial jet air freighter. Several dozen were built and are still flying.. The largest jet aircraft is the Antonov-225, but there is only one of those. The 124 has four engines, the 225 has six.

NSA Versus Tor

I tend to think of Edward Snowden as kind of a Johnny-come-lately to the whole NSA Conspiracy scene. Of course the NSA is spying on you, of course most of the stuff they classify as secret is stupid, of course the NSA is trying to subvert any kind of secret communications protocol they discover. Earlier this week, the Feds busted Silk Road, an internet site that relied on Tor to conduct all kinds of illegal transactions, the very same Tor that kids use to download movies and music illegally. Then yesterday ARS Technica puts up a story and Scott sends me a link, and I post the headline and the opening section here on my blog on Google, who is like totally in cahoots with our new Spymaster Overlords:

NSA repeatedly tries to unpeel Tor anonymity and spy on users, memos show

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart have made repeated and determined attempts to identify people using the Tor anonymity service, but the fundamental security remains intact, as top-secret documents published on Friday revealed.

The classified memos and training manuals—which were leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reported by The Guardian, show that the NSA and the UK-based Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are able to bypass Tor protections, but only against select targets and often with considerable effort. Indeed, one presentation slide grudgingly hailed Tor as "the king of high-secure, low-latency Internet anonymity." Another, titled "Tor Stinks," lamented: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time."

An article published separately by The Washington Post also based on documents provided by Snowden concurred.

"There is no evidence that the NSA is capable of unmasking Tor traffic routinely on a global scale," the report said. "But for almost seven years, it has been trying."

P.S. The NSA's enormous data center in Utah shows up as bare dirt on Google's satellite images, even though it's scheduled to be finished this month.

Silk Road Busted

https://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion.to/

USA Today has a story.