> Kamphuis ... promoted anti-authoritarian, libertarian ideas. Among his tenets: free speech is supreme; everyone has a right to be online; the Internet erases the power of the state; copyright is twentieth-century bullshit.
> Such notions were in fashion during the nineties, when big technology firms had yet to dominate the Internet.
I'm finding this stark use of the past tense personally painful.
It's not very big outside of the USA culture as far as I'm aware. I suppose it depends on your location and cultural context as to the 'currentness' of those concepts.
Perhaps it's also a matter of scale; the classical groups that would be in to that stuff have changed both shape and size in that area of Europe and are not really all that visible or impactful.
It's hard to tell what's "fascinating" about spamming, blackhat seo, ransomware, botnet/cyberattack/ddos c&c, trade in illicit substances, etc. The article mentions that those boxen hosted petabytes of data, and so much of it must have been this sort of pure garbage.
Fascinating as an intro something I know nothing about, but frequently have wondered where and how these things exist?
hearing the phrase Mirai-botnet on the dark web and wanting to know where/how it exists is different than saying, "this is a totally great and brilliant idea"
> frequently have wondered where and how these things exist?
Quite often, they're simply hosted in permissive jurisdictions that are a lot more likely to look the other way wrt. such activity than a place like Germany or The Netherlands. The whole bunker angle was an interesting gimmick that these folks came up with but still, that's what it boils down to: a gimmick. Even the whole "cryptophone" side business is shady as hell, just notice how they all seem to go out of their way to market their products/services to organized crime. Why would anyone wonder when those folks get raided by law enforcement.
Something can be fascinating and appalling at the same time. It's only a term of interest. Talk to serial murderer podcast listeners and ask if they approve of murder.
Surprise has no intrinsic valence, neither positive or negative, that's why it's often considered its own emotional dimension.
Assuming a positive implication where none exists seems a little bad faith. Might want to watch that if you want to have civil discourse in the future.
I'm not ascribing that sort of positive implication to OP, and I don't think reading my comment in that way is very fair. I'm just saying that this stuff is a lot more banal and uninteresting than many people would think. It's not about "freedom against the power of the state", nor about "the future of the internet". It's the sort of crap that the vast majority of us would rather do without altogether.
I recall the turmoil across a few major DarkNet forums (namely Dread), which I used to visit occasionally out of morbid curiosity, the day on which the bunker was raided.
As I recall, at least one of the major drug trafficking sites had gone offline, which would infrequently happen, but the timing seemed obvious that it was being hosted in the bunker - and it wasn't going to be coming back.
Cybercrime and the DarkNet in general are truly fascinating subjects; the analogy used within this article of the group of misfits from the bunker going out in the local town and being regarded as a band of pirates coming ashore seems very apt - cybercriminals are much like the pirates of olde, and the DarkNet their network of hidden islands full of lawlessness and anarchy.
Yep, you're spot on - although in this case, as I recall, the market did return (from memory it was nightmare market or 'Sinaloa' market (perhaps a different cartel name)), but there had been some kind of canary device activated via a signed PGP message from the admin.
It wasn't long before the admin released a subsequent signed message claiming that it was a false alarm with some excuse as to what had happened, but it was clear that the operation was, from that point on, a honey pot.
I think about Ulbricht and his life without parole sentence periodically. On one hand, he was almost a pinnacle of libertarian ideology. On the other, he basically ordered what he thought were real hits on people multiple times. It’s hard to feel sorry for him after considering that.
He never even got the chance to argue against that charge in court before it was dropped years later. It doesn't matter though, the endgoal was complete.
It's straight out of the TLA handbook for "how to discredit a person 101"
I’m not sure I understand your comment. While he was never charged with murder-for-hire, the transcript that reveals that he did it was read aloud to the jury. It’s very clear that he absolutely tried to pay money to kill people. You can read the transcript yourself here:
Are we reading the same article from 2015? The only evidence that has ever held up whatsoever is from some junkies the feds gave immunity to for setting up the "fake" assassination with him. All the records are solely from the single laptop they seized.
From your link:
> In fact, the prosecution admitted in court that the purported victims of the Silk Road killings were never found, and that Canadian police couldn't even locate records for anyone with their names.
You really need to get up to date with the current evidence rather than some low effort linkposting.
Maybe it's best if we try an alternative situation: Would you say George Floyd was a counterfeiter? The police statements clearly say he is. Last I looked people get to argue their case in court before being convicted of crimes in the Western world and we very much go out of our way to discredit people who threaten existing power structures.
Ulbright never got to defend himself against these claims.
I'm always fascinated by the way these techno-anarchists are so drawn to symbols of the State, and State power. Cold War, nuclear artifacts seem a perennial favorite. And it's funny how every little collective seems to end up being a mini-State, with a little dictator on top. I don't have an empirical study to back this up, and am drawing this from this story, the story of Ross Ulbricht, and a little from my own personal experience.
I think most serious anarchists acknowledge that humans won't exist in a true state of nature for very long. People will always band together for security which with scale requires administration. That becomes a de facto state.
Ulbricht was a self-professed libertarian. He was an anarchist in the same way that libertarians are anarchists, in that they are not anarchists. Libertarians want a state that enforces property restrictions with violence and death, and an economic system that enforces class hierarchy.
I mean any anarchist that means it in the leftist sense will always fall into the same trap: that they're attempting to describe a system with very specific social and economic outcomes, while either failing to describe the apparatus necessary to achieve those outcomes, or invariably describing an authoritarian state while calling it anything but.
"It's not a state. It's a collectivist system of syndicate guilds that democratically allocate..." let me go ahead and cut you off there. That's a state, and an extremely authoritarian one at that.
It's also interesting if you look at the history of CHAZ/CHOP.
The first thing they did was enable a security force, and well, I'll leave the rest out but the decisions and fate are interesting and the correlation you make is similar enough.
I am impressed by the sheer length of that article. It's a reminder that however good I might be at communication, I will never have the full package of skills it takes to write well, day after day.
It was seven years (and an MFA) between when I resumed writing fiction seriously in my late thirties until I had my first publication. Since then, I've managed to publish at least one short story a year. I've managed to crack the bottom of the top tier (or maybe the top of the middle tier) and gotten a personalized rejection from The New Yorker. I ignore those kids who write something as an undergrad that their English professor passes on to their agent and end up with their first publication in The Paris Review when they're 19. The key is to just keep going.
All communication is tough for me. I have to manually assemble the sort of language skills that most folks take for granted. To achieve even basic communication, I have to collect and process huge amounts of social/human data.
For speaking, this means composing & practicing entire conversations until I've mastered enough variations that I can sound reasonably natural.
With text, I need rewrite my sentences numerous times, before I achieve basic readability between them.
However, when I can pull off mundane communication, getting out something that's excellent or interesting is normally ~0 steps further.
For another data center in a bunker (which is not a "dark web empire"): https://www.thebunker.net/ I always wondered what the point was - after all your data might be secure against a nuclear war or revolution, but that's not much use if the network is down.
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