Silk Road 2 Founder Dread Pirate Roberts 2 Caught, Jailed for 5 Years
see you in five, Cthulhu! :0 (in the US this would have been a *much* longer sentence...) --- https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx59a/silk-road-2-founder-dread-... by [Joseph Cox](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/contributor/joseph-cox) Apr 12 2019, 1:04pm Silk Road 2 Founder Dread Pirate Roberts 2 Caught, Jailed for 5 Years For years, the arrest and case has been kept under-wraps. Friday, a court sentenced Thomas White to 5 years and 4 months for his role in running a huge dark web drug marketplace. In 2015, WIRED published a list of the ‘dark web drug lords who got away.’ That list included the Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2), the creator of the second Silk Road site, which launched almost immediately after the FBI ended the first with the famous arrest of founder Ross Ulbricht. Under DPR2, Silk Road 2 went on to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. The FBI shut that one down too and arrested its remaining administrator. By that time, DPR2 had already passed ownership of the site on and, publicly, it looked like he had evaded prosecution. But today, a court in Liverpool, England, sentenced Thomas White, a technologist and privacy activist, for crimes committed in part while running Silk Road 2 under the DPR2 persona, among other crimes committed under another persona. White pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as making indecent images of children, and was sentenced to a total of 5 years and 4 months in prison. White’s arrest took place in November 2014, but the case has remained largely under-wraps because of the UK’s strict court reporting rules, which prohibit journalists from covering some cases before their conclusion. This is to stop suspects facing "trial by media," and in order to let cases run their course. Paul Chowles, an investigator from the National Crime Agency (NCA) who worked on the case, told Motherboard in a phone call one piece of evidence included the private encryption key belonging to DPR2 on one of White’s computers. If someone possesses the private part of a PGP key, which is used to decrypt and sign messages, it can be a good indicator that they are behind a particular online identity. White has been out of prison on bail since his arrest in 2014, and became reasonably well-known in security circles under his real name in the time between his arrest and sentencing. After working on the Silk Road 2, White adopted the handle ‘The Cthulhu,.’ a moniker that may be familiar to those who follow technology news. On Twitter he mused about security and privacy topics, and has appeared under his own name in articles in Motherboard, Forbes, and more as an expert on Tor and other subjects. He previously ran a website archiving large data breaches that anyone could download, including the MySpace breach, data from hacked affairs website Ashley Madison, and customer information from a Muslim-focused dating site called ‘Muslim Match.’ White wrote blog posts on his own website, including a guide on how to securely setup a Tor hidden service, and he also ran a number of nodes for the volunteer-driven Tor anonymity network. White declined to speak to Motherboard on the record about his case. White deleted his Cthulhu Twitter account on Thursday. ComputersWhite's computer equipment seized by the NCA. Image: NCA *** After the FBI took down the original Silk Road site in 2013 and arrested Ulbricht, a small cabal of Silk Road veterans banded together to create its replacement. Those included moderators of the first site, and “StExo,” White’s persona which he used to offer money laundering services. White spear-headed that effort, and told others he would drop StExo and take on the mantle of DPR2, according to Chowles from the NCA. The Dread Pirate Roberts is a reference to the character from the book and film The Princess Bride, in which the title trickles down from successor to successor. “DPR2, aka Thomas White, was the boss. He was the controlling mind in all of this, and he was the one driving it forward,” Chowles added. Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com. One Silk Road moderator that White directed went by the handle “Cirrus.” As Motherboard showed in 2014, Cirrus was an undercover law enforcement official who captured chat logs detailing White’s transition from StExo to DPR2. “He was able to capture that; that kind of transition,” Chowles said, referring to Jared Der-Yeghiayan, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent who controlled the Cirrus account. Chat logs US authorities recovered from the computer of Blake Benthall, Silk Road 2’s co-administrator, reflected much the same thing, Chowles added. In a longform 2016 profile, DPR2 told Motherboard what it was like to create the second Silk Road. “Once you hit that enter button, you've just launched something that you know there is going to be an absolutely fucking huge manhunt after you,” he said. In December 2013, when law enforcement agencies arrested a number of the original moderators, DPR2 stepped back from public view. When the FBI launched Operation Onymous the following year, which took down Silk Road 2, UK authorities arrested White. “This [wouldn’t] have been achieved without the significant assistance we’ve had from the [Department of] Homeland Security and the FBI and the Department of Justice,” Garry Tancock, a second NCA investigator who worked on the case, told Motherboard in a phone call. "He was the controlling mind in all of this, and he was the one driving it forward." The NCA investigators linked White first to the StExo identity in part by following financial and bitcoin transactions in the early days of the account’s creation. “We effectively got him from his day one, week one, of activity on Silk Road,” Chowles said. Chowles explained that included tracing a loan from payday loan company Wonga in White’s name, which was then sent to cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, which then transferred bitcoin funds to the StExo account on Silk Road and paid for some items on the site. Other evidence included receipts for items seized from other Silk Road vendors addressed to White, and White being in possession of bitcoin wallets associated with DPR2. John Williams from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told Motherboard in a statement that White "received an income that allowed lavish spending with no credible explanation." The case has not been straightforward, however. Chowles said the NCA had challenges with White’s use of encryption. The agency was eventually successful, in part because of gaining access to a password manager which contained the unlock phrase for one of White’s encrypted laptops. The whole process has also taken years. According to a source familiar with the case, the investigation data didn’t arrive in the UK until June 2016, and the FBI didn’t provide full copies until December 2018. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more openly about a criminal case. White’s motivation was a mix of financial gain and power, Chowles believes. Chat logs between White and Benthall said White planned to start a paid-for child pornography site to make money, Charles said. White would tell Benthall to work on a UK timezone and write in a particular way, the investigator added. “Might set a forum up in onion land to bring together people who run hidden services to share knowledge? What do you think?” White tweeted in 2015. This piece has been updated to include comment from the CPS.
On April 12, 2019 4:01:49 PM UTC, coderman
see you in five, Cthulhu! :0 (in the US this would have been a *much* longer sentence...)
---
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx59a/silk-road-2-founder-dread-...
by [Joseph Cox](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/contributor/joseph-cox) Apr 12 2019, 1:04pm
Silk Road 2 Founder Dread Pirate Roberts 2 Caught, Jailed for 5 Years
For years, the arrest and case has been kept under-wraps. Friday, a court sentenced Thomas White to 5 years and 4 months for his role in running a huge dark web drug marketplace.
In 2015, WIRED published a list of the ‘dark web drug lords who got away.’ That list included the Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2), the creator of the second Silk Road site, which launched almost immediately after the FBI ended the first with the famous arrest of founder Ross Ulbricht.
Under DPR2, Silk Road 2 went on to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. The FBI shut that one down too and arrested its remaining administrator. By that time, DPR2 had already passed ownership of the site on and, publicly, it looked like he had evaded prosecution.
But today, a court in Liverpool, England, sentenced Thomas White, a technologist and privacy activist, for crimes committed in part while running Silk Road 2 under the DPR2 persona, among other crimes committed under another persona. White pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as making indecent images of children, and was sentenced to a total of 5 years and 4 months in prison.
White’s arrest took place in November 2014, but the case has remained largely under-wraps because of the UK’s strict court reporting rules, which prohibit journalists from covering some cases before their conclusion. This is to stop suspects facing "trial by media," and in order to let cases run their course.
Paul Chowles, an investigator from the National Crime Agency (NCA) who worked on the case, told Motherboard in a phone call one piece of evidence included the private encryption key belonging to DPR2 on one of White’s computers. If someone possesses the private part of a PGP key, which is used to decrypt and sign messages, it can be a good indicator that they are behind a particular online identity.
White has been out of prison on bail since his arrest in 2014, and became reasonably well-known in security circles under his real name in the time between his arrest and sentencing. After working on the Silk Road 2, White adopted the handle ‘The Cthulhu,.’ a moniker that may be familiar to those who follow technology news. On Twitter he mused about security and privacy topics, and has appeared under his own name in articles in Motherboard, Forbes, and more as an expert on Tor and other subjects. He previously ran a website archiving large data breaches that anyone could download, including the MySpace breach, data from hacked affairs website Ashley Madison, and customer information from a Muslim-focused dating site called ‘Muslim Match.’ White wrote blog posts on his own website, including a guide on how to securely setup a Tor hidden service, and he also ran a number of nodes for the volunteer-driven Tor anonymity network.
White declined to speak to Motherboard on the record about his case. White deleted his Cthulhu Twitter account on Thursday. ComputersWhite's computer equipment seized by the NCA. Image: NCA
***
After the FBI took down the original Silk Road site in 2013 and arrested Ulbricht, a small cabal of Silk Road veterans banded together to create its replacement. Those included moderators of the first site, and “StExo,” White’s persona which he used to offer money laundering services.
White spear-headed that effort, and told others he would drop StExo and take on the mantle of DPR2, according to Chowles from the NCA. The Dread Pirate Roberts is a reference to the character from the book and film The Princess Bride, in which the title trickles down from successor to successor.
“DPR2, aka Thomas White, was the boss. He was the controlling mind in all of this, and he was the one driving it forward,” Chowles added.
Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
One Silk Road moderator that White directed went by the handle “Cirrus.” As Motherboard showed in 2014, Cirrus was an undercover law enforcement official who captured chat logs detailing White’s transition from StExo to DPR2.
“He was able to capture that; that kind of transition,” Chowles said, referring to Jared Der-Yeghiayan, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent who controlled the Cirrus account. Chat logs US authorities recovered from the computer of Blake Benthall, Silk Road 2’s co-administrator, reflected much the same thing, Chowles added.
In a longform 2016 profile, DPR2 told Motherboard what it was like to create the second Silk Road.
“Once you hit that enter button, you've just launched something that you know there is going to be an absolutely fucking huge manhunt after you,” he said.
In December 2013, when law enforcement agencies arrested a number of the original moderators, DPR2 stepped back from public view. When the FBI launched Operation Onymous the following year, which took down Silk Road 2, UK authorities arrested White.
“This [wouldn’t] have been achieved without the significant assistance we’ve had from the [Department of] Homeland Security and the FBI and the Department of Justice,” Garry Tancock, a second NCA investigator who worked on the case, told Motherboard in a phone call.
"He was the controlling mind in all of this, and he was the one driving it forward."
The NCA investigators linked White first to the StExo identity in part by following financial and bitcoin transactions in the early days of the account’s creation.
“We effectively got him from his day one, week one, of activity on Silk Road,” Chowles said. Chowles explained that included tracing a loan from payday loan company Wonga in White’s name, which was then sent to cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, which then transferred bitcoin funds to the StExo account on Silk Road and paid for some items on the site. Other evidence included receipts for items seized from other Silk Road vendors addressed to White, and White being in possession of bitcoin wallets associated with DPR2.
John Williams from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told Motherboard in a statement that White "received an income that allowed lavish spending with no credible explanation."
The case has not been straightforward, however. Chowles said the NCA had challenges with White’s use of encryption. The agency was eventually successful, in part because of gaining access to a password manager which contained the unlock phrase for one of White’s encrypted laptops.
The whole process has also taken years. According to a source familiar with the case, the investigation data didn’t arrive in the UK until June 2016, and the FBI didn’t provide full copies until December 2018. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more openly about a criminal case.
White’s motivation was a mix of financial gain and power, Chowles believes. Chat logs between White and Benthall said White planned to start a paid-for child pornography site to make money, Charles said. White would tell Benthall to work on a UK timezone and write in a particular way, the investigator added.
“Might set a forum up in onion land to bring together people who run hidden services to share knowledge? What do you think?” White tweeted in 2015.
This piece has been updated to include comment from the CPS.
It's always the opsec that gets you. Gotta tumble the coins! And, use localbitcoins or similar service for more anonymity in cashing in and out of coins. For fucks sake don't keep a journal or copies of your admins drivers licenses on your laptop (like Ross Ulbricht did), and configure torchat so it doesn't keep a local chat history!! And you need to run the service in such a way that you basically assume anyone you operate with is a Fed. Ross was a fool to think he was really having hits carried out by the Hells Angels... fucking entrapment on murder for hire is just about the only murder for hire you ever hear about (maybe cuz the legit hits don't get busted .. although I suspect it's because, outside of various mafias, including the government, it rarely happens). I think the agora guys got out before they got busted? Or maybe the alpha bay guys? IDK what the current biggest market is....
journo:
White pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as making indecent images of children, and was sentenced to a total of 5 years and 4 months in prison.
lol? only five years?? What, the english govt is run by 'libertarians'? "making indecent images of children" - I wonder what that can possibly mean? Maybe the guy DREW something? Anyway 5 years for 'drug trafficiking' 'money laundering' and 'child porn' which are the most horrible crimes against humanity is incredibly...lucky. Or maybe the guy 'donated' a few millions to the english govt. Or something.
There were a lot of datasets and hash commitments, hopefully people and the internet still have them, and keep them in distribution in various places now and then.
On Friday, April 12, 2019, 9:02:33 AM PDT, coderman
see you in five, Cthulhu! :0 (in the US this would have been a *much* longer sentence...)
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx59a/silk-road-2-founder-dread-...
by Joseph Cox Apr 12 2019, 1:04pm
Silk Road 2 Founder Dread Pirate Roberts 2 Caught, Jailed for 5 Years
For years, the arrest and case has been kept under-wraps. Friday, a court sentenced Thomas White to 5 years and 4 months for his role in running a huge dark web drug marketplace.
In 2015, WIRED published a list of the ‘dark web drug lords who got away.’ That list included the Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2), the creator of the second Silk Road site, which launched almost immediately after the FBI ended the first with the famous arrest of founder Ross Ulbricht. [stuff trimmed]
Although it's stating the obvious, people use dark markets (among other reasons) to reduce the risk of buying contraband. Human contact leads to risk: Any trust that exists can be betrayed. One main reason contraband is so expensive is due to this risk. As that risk is reduced, the necessary profits (necessary to motivate people to stay in an illegal marketplace) can be reduced. And so prices are reduced, in part because of increased competition. I assume most physical transactions on the dark markets involve delivery by commercial services, such as US Mail, UPS, FedX, etc. This isn't bad for occasional use, but the residual risk is now being addressed by Dropgang techniques. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18899207 But rather than depend on the limited number of physical nooks and crannies in existence in the urban and suburban world, using accurate GPS would allow drops to be made in millions of locatable spots in areas of grass and dirt. × Nevertheless, shortly after the first Silk Road Dark market fell in 2013, I pointed out that such dark markets should be protected by a limited-purpose AP-type organization. https://cryptome.org/ap.htm , which would function as a catch-all deterrent mechanism even when all other protection systems fail to work. × I use the following example: Imagine a generic Dark Market doing $1 billion per year in sales. If 1% of that value, or $10 million per year, were offered as a bounty against any law-enforcement people (judges, prosecutors, prosecution witnesses, etc.) involved in any legal case associated with it, it would become a very unforgiving role to try to stop such activity. For concreteness, I'd use the example of $250K bounty for each judge or prosecutor, and probably smaller amounts for investigators and policemen. Think of this as an 'insurance policy', quite probably a very effective one. This system would have a "virtuous circle" (as opposed to a "vicious circle"): The fewer prosecutions which are attempted, the larger the amount of award which would remain available to further deter it. And the payment of these awards does not increase the price of (example, illegal drugs) contraband, it will actually decrease it greatly. Ask yourself: If you were involved in a dark market, either as an operator, a seller, or a buyer, wouldn't you prefer that if you were eventually prosecuted, a $1-2 million collective lethal bounty was aimed at the heads of anyone involved in your prosecution? "Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the FEAR to attack." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mUCLHzWiJo at 1:50.× Five years after the first Silk Road was taken down, I think it's foolish for there to be a dark market that ISN'T protected by an AP system. Jim Bell
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