The Dark Web Drug Lords Who Got Away

WHEN ROSS ULBRICHT was sentenced to life in prison without parole last Friday, the judge in his case made clear that her severe punishment wasn’t only about Ulbricht’s personal actions in creating the Silk Road’s billion-dollar drug market. As Judge Katherine Forrest told the packed courtroom, she was also sending a message to any would-be online drug kingpins who might follow in his footsteps. “For those considering stepping into your shoes,” she said, “they need to understand without equivocation that there will be severe consequences.”

But despite Ulbricht’s ultimate punishment, the lesson for anyone closely watching the Dark Web drug trade has hardly been one of inevitable consequences. As independent researcher Gwern Branwen has documented in an ongoing survey of more than 70 Dark Web drug markets created after Ulbricht founded the Silk Road, only five of those sites’ administrators have been arrested. For many of the others, the security model Ulbricht pioneered—using Tor and bitcoin to protect administrators, buyers and sellers—has successfully kept law enforcement fumbling in the shadows.

In fact, the difficulty of laying hands on Dark Web drug market creators was one reason Ulbricht’s prosecutors asked for a lengthy sentence. If law enforcement can’t apprehend all Ulbricht imitators, went prosecutors’ argument, it had better compensate with harsher punishment for those it does catch. “Although the Government has achieved some successes in combating these successor dark markets, they continue to pose investigative challenges for law enforcement,” read the prosecution’s letter. “To the extent that would-be imitators may view the risk of being caught to be low, many are still likely to be deterred if the stakes are sufficiently high...”

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/dark-web-drug-lords-got-away/

Memex In Action: Watch DARPA Artificial Intelligence Search For Crime On The 'Dark Web'

Of late, DARPA has shown a growing interest in open sourcing its technology, even if its most terrifying creations, like army robot wildcats designed to reach speeds of 50Mph, are understandably kept private. In a week’s time, the wider world will be able to tinker with components of the military research body’s in-development search tool for the dark web. The Memex technology, named after an mechanical mnemonic dreamt up just as the Second World War was coming to a close, has already been put to use by a number of law enforcement agencies, who are looking to counter crime taking place on networks like Tor, where Hidden Services are protected by the privacy-enhancing, encrypted hosting, often for good, often for bad. In its first year, the focus at Memex has been on tracking human trafficking, but the project’s scope stretches considerably wider.

It’s likely that in the coming weeks many other law enforcement agencies will avail themselves of the search tools, which will land on DARPA’s Open Catalog next Friday (though DARPA told FORBES the release could be pushed back to the following Monday). FORBES got an exclusive look at the front end of one of the search technologies created by one of the Memex team, a group of self-proclaimed hackers called Hyperion Gray.

According to Alejandro Caceres, who heads up the Hyperion Gray team, a handful of his firm’s tools will be available, including “advanced web crawling and scraping technologies, with a dose of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, with the goal of being able to retrieve virtually any content on the Internet in an automated way”. Its solution to the problem of finding crime on the so-called “dark web” (a term anathema to Tor’s supporters), is called SourcePin. It is trying to overcome one of the main barriers to modern search: crawlers can’t click or scroll like humans do and so often don’t collect “dynamic” content that appears upon an action by a user.

“Our approach to solving this problem is to build a system that sees the web more like a human user with a browser, and therefore actually behaves like a human user by using a browser to crawl the web, to the point of being able to scroll down a page, or even hover over an object on the page to reveal more content…. we are teaching the system how to act like a human and handle virtually any web page scenario. Eventually our system will be like an army of robot interns that can find stuff for you on the web, while you do important things like watch cat videos,” says Caceres...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/10/darpa-memex-search-going-open-source-check-it-out/