He is law enforcement. His interest is the vendors and mapping the network.
It would be useful for busting buyers, but no more so than traditional cop-on-the-street sting operations.
I have no one to share my thoughts with in physical space. Security does not permit it, so thanks for listening. I hope my words can be an inspiration just as I am given so much by everyone here."
Definitely a cop.
He and his team are specialists. They are to cops what the Navy Seals or Rangers are to an Army E1.
The primary goal is information. They could care less about busting any given small time vendor. They want a mapping of the network of trade, origination, distribution, communication, transactions and financing. Particularly to draw currently unknown or difficult to track network nodes out into the open.
It's the same thing that has been done with paedophilia online. It's a honey trap. There isn't much value in busting single nodes. They want to see how much of the network they can map out, and the leads it provides to larger players. If this concept didn't exist, they'd desperately want to create it. Given their history of creative honey pots and how long they've been leveraging technology heavily, I think it tilts Silk Road toward being a likely sponsored program.
1. How do you map the network if they are using Tor?
2. Just the idea of Silk Road is more dangerous to the powers that be than any drug networks.
3. It can not be called law enforcement if it does not go through the chain of command, which it most certainly cannot.
There are also techniques which may allow tor users to be deanonymized to vary degrees. Browser/OS fingerprinting , flash cookies etc. These will be easier if you control one of the end points.
I've never used silk road, but presumably if you want people to ship stuff to you , then you have to enter an address at some point?
The best way to map a drug network is to become a real part of it.
I can certainly imagine there is value in controlling something like SR as part of a larger investigation.
If you control the mechanism for key exchange would this not make MITM possible? Display different keys to different people for the same person.
From the webpage I linked, "Security-wise, Silk Road seems to be receiving passing grades from law enforcement agencies internally; a leaked FBI report mentioned no attacks against SR, anonymous anecdotes claim the DEA is stymied4, while a May 2012 Australian document reportedly praised the security of vendor packaging and general site security."
Right now a buyer's address is vulnerable if they don't use PGP when giving it to a seller, or if SR is indeed trying to do a MitM attack by replacing a seller's published public key with their own. But the latter case is easy for a seller to check against simply by creating a second buyer account and verifying the buyer sees the correct key. The buyer and seller can also arrange to exchange keys off of SR. A better plan (also mentioned on Gwern's page) would be to have law enforcement create their own buyer and seller accounts and act like normal users until it was time to start a crackdown -- the problem seems to be that law enforcement, or at least the FBI, either doesn't have permission to engage in mass entrapment and fraud, or it's just not interested in buyers.
In addition to TBB foiling all of those tactics, the only one that can done without being traced is fingerprinting. So if any of the others were being used, someone would probably have noticed.
2) Not if the powers that be control it, as they so often do
Not sure if it helps, but there's been that ``Revealing Hidden Services by their Clock Skew'' [1] 2006 paper, and some other stuff linked to from [2].
[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/ccs06hotornot.pdf
[2] http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/09/04/hot-or-not-rev...
I would also speculate that any of the big drug traders are very clever business people. They are used to switching their modes of operation, diversifying and building different routes and layers into their operation.
Any other examples? Sounds like fascinating reading.