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Coordinated raids by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and 16 European countries have closed hundreds of underground websites, including dozens dealing in weapons and drugs, and led to the arrest of 17 people.

The raids took place on Thursday and were the biggest so far against sites running on the Tor network, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and Europol, which cooperated on the action.

Tor is an encrypted system that facilitates anonymous communication. It has plenty of legitimate uses, particularly for evading surveillance in countries with authoritarian governments, but its use by criminals has caused controversy. Police have increasingly been targeting underground websites on Tor, and Thursday’s raids are the latest in that work.

Troels Oerting, head of Europol’s European cybercrime center, said criminals using Tor have long considered themselves beyond the reach of the law, but that’s no longer the case.

“We can now show that they are neither invisible nor untouchable,” he said in a statement. “The criminals can run but they cant hide.”

The list of shuttered sites included names such as Blue Sky, Hydra and Cloud Nine, and the DOJ said they dealt in drugs, fake currency, stolen credit card data and fake ID documents. Executive Outcomes dealt in firearms and shipped worldwide, Fake Real Plastic sold counterfeit credit cards, Fake ID sold fake passports and Fast Cash and Super Notes Counter sold counterfeit Euro and U.S. currency in exchange for bitcoins, authorities said.

The first hint of the raids came on Thursday, when police in the U.S. said they had arrested the alleged operator of Silk Road 2.0, a website allegedly used to sell illegal drugs, computer-hacking tools and fraudulent identification documents. At the time they didn’t say that the arrest was part of a larger action.

“As illegal activity online becomes more prevalent, criminals can no longer expect that they can hide in the shadows of the dark web,’” said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, in a statement. ”We shut down the original Silk Road website and now we have shut down its replacement, as well as multiple other dark market sites allegedly offering all manner of illicit goods and services, from firearms to computer hacking.”

But despite the assertions of Oerting and Bharara, it still remains incredibly difficult for law enforcement to discover who is behind a Tor website. The same safeguards built into the system that keep the identity of a dissident secret from a government also help criminals stay anonymous. Typically, a true identity is discovered because of a clue such as an email address that has inadvertently been left in the open.

Source: PCWorld

 

Yeah I guess if you want to be involved in illegal activity the only place for you to hide is the United States government or the governments of it's Eurowhore allies.

 

the governments have always and will always sell/buy drugs, weapons and anything else they deem they can control and get away with, yet school boy joe bloggs on the other hand "sharing links" to music files get totally fecked http://torrentfreak.com/online-music-pirates-hit-with-lengthy-jail-sentences-141111/

 

ArticStorm
The problem is that there is no way to tell how many other sites that didn't sell drugs or weapons got shut down as well and we know that the government doesn't just pursue the worst offenders but pretty much anyone they don't like or agree with. Also there is no way to tell HOW they got that information, whether it was a slip-up or they've broken Tor. That's the scary part.

 

hey,

it seems that every outstanding solution gots misused, be it the internet (the deluge of senseless advertisement), any (visual) medium (through the unconcerned negativity provided), the secure seeming, anonymous, communication possibilities (by the same acts as any government's, now just done by some so called elements of crime)...

it also seems that government agencies really want to show off, pursuing to illustrate their capabilities...

right now, one might think, mankind is (at least part of it) not flying on one upward spiral...

there will be, exclusively, dishonest deception...

all the best of all of us, including, pray, the possible concentration on the rather shiny bright side (till still there exists any)...

 

hackers/crackers are one of the most giving persons and they dont like that, they wanna control f*ckin` everything

 

The first thing that occurred to me when "Silk Road 2.0" appeared, a couple months after the Feds shut the original down, was that the Feds put up 2.0 in order to conduct surveillance and stings of sites on the Tor network, in addition to other bogus sites for the sake of entrapment.

The thing that occurs to me when I read this current news is that the Feds may have detected or entrapped the proprietors of such sites, but also the possibility that some of the "shuttered" sites had been Fed-established ones, taken down "for show."

After all, the whole purpose and function of Tor is for anyone not to know exactly "who" is on it.

 

Whatever the method they used, they try to scare anyone using any mean to be anonymous.
It remembers me the TED vid about why you should care about your personal data
And may be they just realized it was working too good to be used...so they done fake/easy shutdowns but without any mean to really crack Tor.

After all, Anonymous already cracked Tor pedophile websites.

 

just a quick vent:
this is getting truly absurd now. nearly every day i sit here and notince some sites have been banned from access by my isp.
i do agree with previous commentator who thinks this is for the most part an attempt to show punitive powers. but that's all it is. the attempt to police the internet ( i.e. to control its money) has been going on since the net began. it's never ending. it appalls me that people who share their stuff can get sent to jail while the profits of the movie and music industry are at all time highs. you may as well get used to it, according to people like Naomi Wolf there are an absurd amount of people under surveillance which is increasing by something like 20,000 names a month. when she buys a plane ticket it has four x's on it which means she is on he govt. hitlist for potential terrorists.. that is just sooo wrong..
the whole point of the internet is that it's total freedom of information and it is to a large extent inviolable as it has NO CENTER so all this litigation, sending kids to prison while C**ts like billy clinton and his ilk run the biggest drug trade outside of the south Americas and seem to get away, literally, with murder ( allegedly) and rape ( allegedly). the real reason for afghanistan, heroin, poppy production up 95% since the American invasion from something like 5 % of the world supply. tee-hee.. colombia and peru, their cartels are being run now by PARAMILITARY forces. in effect they are in political control. and these paramilitaries, they are trans national MERCENARIES. war by remote , no need for any one to get caught in the sweet jar when you have an army for hire to make sure your drug business is run smoothly.
and then there are lots of lovely guns being run in the most iindiscriminate way to mexico ( what the f**k is going on there?? - actually mexico is a good example to judge the american leadership, criminals are now running USA ltd. , a terrible irony).
21 armed conflicts at this very moment with arms and american troups flowing freely, they are so arrogant these people that to be seen to lie and commit crime is water off a ducks back to them. arrogant, patronizing, assured they are above the law ( why is cheney not in prison instead of poor bradley manning ( apologies, i mean 'Chelsea'). why is g.w bush at liberty when there are people in america ( it's OWN citizens ffs!) who are kept in solitary confinement for as long as the government sees fit, sometimes for years at a time! with no habeaous corpus, your constitution is fucking toilet paper to these people. you don't have to worry about patriotism when nationhood is just a chimera, chuck in the magna carta etc, any thing remotely socialist or idealistic about the 'brotherhood of men' just the cheapest bog roll .. another reason to control the internet, well, who likes to be called out on being a murderer? i think the collateral damage video is the most frightening thing but these people are STILL in power. so what does that say? why??? What is wrong when a nation of that size could be run by major horror-bag hilary clinton? we are really going to hell in handcart. there has to be some hope coming the other way, surely? that young guy they put away for sharing music, and tony blair is waltzing all over the shop, using his newly aquired 'catholic faith' to disguise his murderous true nature, this c**t should be on trial, not those guys for sheffield, or the pirate bay guys and on and on.. some of the older folks may remember the days of home taping? in the uk we had posters with a skull and crossbones on it saying home taping is illegal? they couldn't shut that down and they cannot shut down the net or even begin to control it. it is not about heirarchy and centralism, it's all RELATIVE. this is the true nature of our post-modern world and these dinosaurs do not get it. a time is approaching when some solidarity is required to tell these fuckers, enough is enough. after all, this is a democracy isn't it?
sorry to go on. i am angry and lacking eloquence.it is time to start rejecting their language. there are criminals in all walks of life. they are beginning by subverting language as mr orwell did wisely predict.
obama says it's hard to find who is behind the tor network. yes, because its a fucking NETWORK. it is the sum of it's parts and such a fundamental misunderstanding from them is just laughable. except it's not really funny is it?. you can chop a tree down, but try attacking the roots system. it's holographic, built up by self -similarity, a rhizome, . there is no blofeld stroking a cat behind the tor network, it's all about relativism and that is why they will never EVER have control of it. doomed to extinction but not soon enough in my book.
i would so love to see cheney in jail.. blah blah...
ta ra

 

absolutely. you have hit it square on the head in my opinion.

 

oh, btw:

(1) bittorrent.am, (2) btdigg.org, (3) btloft.com, (4) bts.to, (5) limetorrents.com, (6) nowtorrents.com, (7) picktorrent.com, (8) seedpeer.me, (9) torlock.com, (10) torrentbit.net, (11) torrentdb.li, (12) torrentdownload.ws, (13) torrentexpress.net, (14) torrentfunk.com, (15) torrentproject.com, (16) torrentroom.com, (17) torrents.net, (18) torrentus.eu, (19) torrentz.cd, (20) torrentzap.com and (21) vitorrent.org.
that is pretty much a whole folder of bookmarks gone.
this is a list of sites that i found out today have been 'restricted' via a 'court order'
quote
"Also of interest is that Court didn’t differentiate between sites that allow users to upload torrents, those that store them, or those that simply harvest links to torrents hosted elsewhere."
here we go, the classic changing of the goalposts to facilitate their fascist policing

last quote on this latest bashing:
"“No doubt some of (these) users are using circumvention measures which are not reflected in the comScore data, but for the reasons given elsewhere it seems clear that not all users do this,” Justice Arnold wrote."
l m f a o
sigh

 

Isn't That the truth!

 

Only older versions of Tor were affected though. That's why I always keep shit updated.

 

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/

 

floond ...

thank you for posting the above, also for pointing to the link, really worth the read...

sorry for being so self plugging that the quote is from this here self of mine, but in this case, meaning government, including its agencies, this, hopefully, will be seen as only appropriate...

all the best of all of us, as always, then some more...

 

floond
Thanks a lot for posting that. So basically everything I said in my previous comment is exactly what happened.

 

hey, audiosexual fellows,

another thing comes to this spongiformificated tissue mass in the cranium of this here present me...

namely, that the whole thing might also serve as background conditioning, spreading one hidden opinion which states that nearly anybody who feels herself, himself, compelled to require anonymous communication, to use such services, is one potencial terrorist, criminal, whole sale weapon dealer, drug pusher, possible political dissenter, perhaps even some kind of security crazy fringe intellectual, not to mention conspiracy theorist (the choice is, as always, ours, yours, mine, also, quite possibly theirs)...

so, then, thus, them or us?

all the best for all of us, as above, so below, including the total burning down of all such systems...

 

Like filersweep "i am angry and lacking eloquence".

It`s a "whack a mole game", another "soap opera", many News articles using the expression "Crypto-War 2.0" and thats what it is.
The Governments want to control the largest biz in the world: Drugs. With Bitcoin they`ve found an invincible opponent, the "Dark Markets" pushing Crypto Currency
into life like nothing else possibly could. If you`re interested in Bitcoin have a look on the future of "Mining".

A List of the URL`s displaying a "take down notice".

This Propaganda crap is somewhat ridiculous, not even worth to call it a raid:
"Diabolus Market" is renamed to "Silk Road 3 Reloaded" and others affected are on train to relaunch because they still have the "money" on save servers, "Doxbin" is back, already...

I will add more later, too busy to put my head into it ...