It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Everyone assumes I must be technically illiterate to not be repeating the standard cipherpunk talking points on this issue.
I've implemented ciphers and hash libraries and protocols. I've bought drugs on darknets. I've run cryptocurrency trading companies. I've worked at Google (most boring job of my career).
Let’s say that it is quite interesting that Tor relays seem to be located in Western, industrialized countries…and not Russia or China. It’s also true that Tor data can be deanonymized through certain types of attacks. The NSA and their counterparts in countries like France or Australia don’t bother catching puny small-fry dudes buying weed or something on the black market, just like the FBI doesn’t arrest these kinds of guys.
However, they can and do bust the owners and operators of large-scale darknet markets. You can go and buy weed (or even things like heroin or fentanyl) on the dark web fairly easily, but things like hiring competent reliable hitmen are considerably more difficult and may get you in trouble with law enforcement.
A site that ran a lucrative child-porn business would have a lot of motivated enemies. You’ve got to produce that shit somewhere. So too, consider the technical savvy of your average Joe. He’s no Satoshi Nakamoto; if there’s thousands of these sacks of shit a few will fuck up and become compromised by the alphabet soup gang.
Fighting out of the Red Corner: a bunch of dedicated hobbyists who are into evil things.
Fighting out of the Blue Corner: an agency full of competent professionals who make it their business to catch things like this, supported by the American people (at least here; I’d bet the average Joe on the street doesn’t give a fuck about illegal wiretapping if it’s being used to catch evil pedos sitting on piles of ill-gotten
cashcryptocurrency)I suppose this might work if it was all done overseas, in a country with lax laws and politicians that were amenable to bribery. Might. They’d still have issues with needing to produce this material and not get fucking killed.
Why is it interesting that Tor relays are mostly in "large, developed countries" and not the country with strict internet censorship, i.e. the great firewall, that presumably blocks Tor ... or Russia, a single country with less population than half the US? That's what you'd expect.
Not to say US intelligence hasn't tried to deanonymaize tor users, of course they have, and there are accounts of attacks on Tor where large percentages of new nodes are potentially malicious.
That is another explanation. That being said, these countries are more or less allies of America and the French or German or Australian versions of the NSA are cooperating with us. Hell, even famously neutral Switzerland helped us during the Cold War. If these dudes found out about a gigantic, well-funded pedophile murderer website…the guys running it, and a lot of their customers, would have law enforcement knocking at their doors.
You still have a bunch of dedicated hobbyists going up against large, powerful national governments with lots of resources and the backing of the general public…people would be literally calling for these guys’ heads.
The only way this would be possible, I think, is if these people had powerful patrons protecting them. I don’t know if that would mix well with just any evil shitbag with a laptop and a few hundred bucks’ worth of crypto being able to log onto these sites…I don’t think it would. Mr. Evil Pedo gets busted by law enforcement. There’s a good chance he sings like a canary…and if he doesn’t, there’s the next guy, and the next…someone’s going to spill the beans in hopes of a lighter sentence. Feds use that dude to go after bigger fish, with the cooperation of the NSA and the other alphabet soup boys.
There’d have to be a fairly large conspiracy and powerful people protecting something like this…if peasants (that means us) found out about this shit we’d be pissed. Could be a reasonably plausible way to get the American people to give up a lot of our civil liberties and accept an NSA headquarters at every police station or something, to be honest.
To sum up: you’ve still got like 100 militia dudes, who are decent at fighting but not professional grade, going up against hundreds of high quality professional soldiers. These guys are dog meat without a hell of a lot of help.
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