Antifederal Security
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 10 years ago, in 2014, on the World Wide Web.
Shared Article from Business Insider
FBI Arrests Former SpaceX Employee, Alleging He Ran The 'Deep We…
The site was the deeb web's biggest drug marketplace.
James Cook @ businessinsider.com
O.K., so:
Frak, frak, frak. This is a shame. It’s also a sign of some things we need to get seriously careful about.
We need to talk about new security models for online black markets.
If the Feebs’ bill of particulars is accurate, then it’d seem that there were a lot of unforced errors here. That said, in this case it sounds like a lot of the case was allegedly built either by being in from the start and placing undercovers, or else by starting out with a series of controlled buys and then using their position over time to move on to actually infiltrating the support staff. From the looks of things their campaigns over the last year or so have been pretty aggressive. In either case, this sounds like a good reason to think that part of the security model needs to be working on ways of doing business in other ways — perhaps, in particular, through smaller federated sites and peer-to-peer relationships rather than through single clearing-house servers, — because Tor and Bitcoin at this point are not nearly enough to cope with the threat model.
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OpenBazaar (based on UnSystem’s DarkMarket prototype) is one potential solution. It’s a decentralized commerce platform. They’re marketing it more as an alternative to Ebay than as a replacement for Silk Road, but the system itself doesn’t differentiate between legal and illegal goods. It’s still in the alpha stages, but worth keeping an eye on.