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Re: [liberationtech] What I've learned from Cryptocat
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

----- Forwarded message from Brian Conley <brianc(a)smallworldnews.tv> -----

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Secrecy News -- 08/08/12
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

----- Forwarded message from Steven Aftergood <saftergood(a)fas.org> -----

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Re: [liberationtech] What I've learned from Cryptocat
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

----- Forwarded message from Moxie Marlinspike <moxie(a)thoughtcrime.org> -----

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Re: [ZS] IMPORTANT: Delegation, decentralization, personal initiative & flying the ZS flag
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

----- Forwarded message from Bryce Lynch <virtualadept(a)gmail.com> -----

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Re: [ZS] IMPORTANT: Delegation, decentralization, personal initiative & flying the ZS flag
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

----- Forwarded message from Bryce Lynch <virtualadept(a)gmail.com> -----

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У НАС ОЧЕНЬ НИЗКИЕ ЦЕНЫ НА ПОЛИГРАФИЮ!
by "ФАБРИКА ПЕЧАТИ" 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor as ecommerce platform
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

----- Forwarded message from grarpamp <grarpamp(a)gmail.com> -----

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by "Раиса Биренбаум" 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

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Black Market Drug Site 'Silk Road' Booming: $22 Million In Annual Sales
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/06/black-market-drug-site… Black Market Drug Site 'Silk Road' Booming: $22 Million In Annual Sales In the year since Senator Joe Manchin called for the b audaciousb drug-selling website Silk Road to be b shut down immediately,b the worldbs most high-profile underground pharmacy hasnbt just survived. With $22 million in annual sales and around double the commission for the sitebs owners compared with just six months ago, its black market business is booming. In a research paper (PDF here) released earlier this month, Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin has taken a crack at measuring the sales activity on Silk Roadbs underground online marketplace, which runs as a b hidden serviceb on the Tor network and uses tough-to-trace digital Bitcoins as currency, two measures that have helped to obscure its sellers, buyers and operators from law enforcement. His findings: the sitebs number of sellers, who offer everything from cocaine to ecstasy, has jumped from around 300 in February to more than 550. Its total sales now add up to around $1.9 million a month. And its operators generate more than $6,000 a day in commissions for themselves, compared with around $2,500 in February. Christin cautions that his study only looks at a six month period of Silk Roadbs sales, and that a big part of the sitebs measured success comes from appreciation in the highly volatile Bitcoin currency Silk Road trades in, which has itself increased close to 70% in value over the course of Christinbs study. But even accounting for changes in that crypto currency, the sitebs numbers point to very real growth. b Itbs very bursty and spikey, but overall the numbers are moving up,b says Christin. b Itbs a stable marketplace, and overall itbs growing steadily.b Silk Road's revenue over time. (Click to enlarge.) To dig up Silk Roadbs sales numbers, Christin ran a program that crawled the site and scraped its content, including sales and pricing information, about once a day for a six month period. He used the feedback reviews posted to sellersb pages to count sales and calculated the site operatorsb revenue based first on their 6.23% commission, and then later using the tiered model with higher commissions that the site switched to in the middle of the period he studied. The results, with both commission models, are shown at right. What surprised Christin most was the high level of customer satisfaction: 97.8% of customers gave sellers positive reviews, despite the fact that Silk Roadbs use of Torbs IP-masking abilities and Bitcoin makes it nearly impossible for anyone who uses the site to identify anyone else. b On a site like Silk Road, whereb&most of the goods sold are illicit, one would expect a certain amount of deception to occur. Indeed, a buyer choosing, for instance, to purchase heroin from an anonymous seller would have very little recourse if the goods promised are not delivered,b Christin writes. b Surprisingly, though, most transactions on Silk Road seem to generate excellent feedback from buyers.b Silk Road's number of sellers over time. (Click to enlarge.) Christin was also struck by the fact that Silk Road has managed to grow steadily even with its complete lack of advertising. Despite requiring visitors to run special software and know a long and impossible-to-remember URL that doesnbt show up in Google results, it now generates roughly as much revenue, comparing with numbers from another recent study, as illegal online pharmacies that drum up sales with spam emails and black hat search engine tricks. The site hasnbt had much of a public profile lately, either: After some early notoriety from a Gawker story on the site last year and some political attention to the sitebs criminal activities from Senator Chuck Schumer and others, itbs mostly slipped off the media radar, says Christin b If you imagine them selling paperclips and buttons, theybre a stable business thatbs growing without advertising or being in the news, just by word of mouth,b says Christin. b That was the surprising thing: How normal the whole thing seems.b The fact that it doesnbt sell paperclips and buttons, however, but rather psilocybin and benzedrine, means that law enforcement likely still has Silk Road in its sights. The business takes significant precautions: Tor masks both the location of its servers and of its users by ricocheting Internet traffic through proxies, and Bitcoin makes its payments difficult to trace by avoiding traditional banks or payment companies. But users on the site have worried in forum conversations recently that its operators may have been infiltrated by law enforcement, and that several of its high-profile sellers have disappeared. Eight operators of another anonymous drug-sales site, the Farmerbs Market, were indicted in April, possibly after the encrypted email service Hushmail decrypted their communications and gave them to police. According to the Farmerbs Market indictment, however, that site sold around $1 million worth of illegal drugs between January of 2007 and October of 2009. With Silk Road generating close to twice that amount in a mere month, its operation has reduced its recently-busted competitor to a street-corner hustler by comparison. Read Christinbs full paper on Silk Road here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139

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Appeals Court OKs Warrantless Wiretapping
by Eugen Leitl 08 Aug '12

08 Aug '12

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/appeals-court-oks-wiretapping/ Appeals Court OKs Warrantless Wiretapping By David Kravets 08.07.12 3:16 PM Judge M. Margaret McKeown The federal government may spy on Americansb communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision reversing the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bushbs once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program. b This case effectively brings to an end the plaintiffsb ongoing attempts to hold the executive branch responsible for intercepting telephone conversations without judicial authorization,b a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. (.pdf) The case concerned a lower court decision in which two American attorneys b who were working with the now-defunct al-Haramain Islamic Foundation b were awarded more than $20,000 each in damages and their lawyers $2.5 million in legal fees after a tortured legal battle where they proved they were spied on without warrants. They sued under domestic spying laws Congress adopted in the wake of President Richard M. Nixonbs Watergate scandal. The government appealed their victory, and the appeals court Tuesday dismissed the suit and the damages. Jon Eisenberg, the lawyer for the two attorneys, said he may request the court to reconsider its decision with a larger panel of judges, or petition the Supreme Court. b This case was the only chance to litigate and hold anybody accountable for the warrantless wiretapping program,b he said in a telephone interview. b As illegal as it was, it evaded accountability.b Jon Eisenberg. Photo: Ryan Singel/Wired The San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that when Congress wrote the law regulating eavesdropping on Americans and spies, it never waived sovereign immunity in the section prohibiting targeting Americans without warrants. That means Congress did not allow for aggrieved Americans to sue the government, even if their constitutional rights were violated by the United States breaching its own wiretapping laws. b Under this scheme, Al-Haramain can bring a suit for damages against the United States for use of the collected information, but cannot bring suit against the government for collection of the information itself,b Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote for the majority. She was joined by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins and Judge Harry Pregerson. bAlthough such a structure may seem anomalous and even unfair, the policy judgment is one for Congress, not the courts.b The court, during oral arguments in June, expressed concern that it may reach this result. Judge Hawkins, during those arguments, noted that the law spells out that those who were illegally spied upon may seek monetary damages. But if Congress did not intend for the government to be sued, b it would make the remedy illusory,b Hawkins said. The court did not comment on the spying allegations of those involved in the case. It also dismissed claims against FBI Director Robert Mueller, saying there was not enough evidence linking him to the spy program the Bush administration adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks. Subsequently, Congress authorized Bushbs spy program in 2008, five years after the illegal wiretapping involved in this case. The Bush spy program was first disclosed by The New York Times in December 2005, and the government subsequently admitted that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on Americansb telephone calls without warrants if the government believed the person on the other end was overseas and associated with terrorism. The government also secretly enlisted the help of major U.S. telecoms, including AT&T, to spy on Americansb phone and internet communications without getting warrants as required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law at the center of the al-Haramain dispute. A lower court judge found in 2010 that two American lawyersb telephone conversations with their clients in Saudi Arabia were siphoned to the National Security Agency without warrants. The allegations were initially based on a classified document the government accidentally mailed to the former al-Haramain Islamic Foundation lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor. The document was later declared a state secret, removed from the long-running lawsuit and has never been made public. With that document ruled out as evidence, the lawyers instead cited a bevy of circumstantial evidence that a trial judge concluded showed the government illegally wiretapped the lawyers as they spoke on U.S. soil to Saudi Arabia. The other major case challenging the wiretapping program, the Electronic Frontier Foundationbs case against the government, alleges a wholesale vacuuming of Americansb communications. That case was sent back to a district court after it survived an appeals court ruling in December. David Kravets David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

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