“Federal agencies will attempt to regulate Bitcoin, according to the Mercatus Center’s Jerry Brito. Given that regulation simply cannot control the new currency, the question is whether that regulation will foster its growth or relegate it to illicit uses.”
“You can gather all the bitcoins you want, but good luck trying to actually spend the dirty money. Large-scale exchanges are vulnerable to breaches, and can eventually be traced back to a real-world person. Law enforcement is certainly giving it its best shot to accomplish this. Motherboard’s Dan Stuckey recently wrote about a Reddit user whose bitcoin wallet was phished after someone connected his transactions to his real name. As bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik put it, ‘Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb.'”
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-isnt-the-criminal-safe-haven-people-think-it-is
“Almost all of the major Internet industry giants are based in the United States. The tradition of strong entrepreneurship practiced in the US since their inception, mixed with their purchasing power and history of acquiring any sufficiently profitable venture or fascinating technology from abroad, has put the US into a prime position to be the global leader in provision of Internet services. That may just have ended. While US dominance over the roughly $11 trillion/year global Internet services market is still unchallenged, the damage that the revelations made about NSA’s vast global surveillance scheme may stymie their growth and perhaps even turn them into a localized recession.”
“Imagine if there were an Amazon.com for drugs. That, roughly, is what the Silk Road, a mail-order drugs service hidden in the dark parts of the internet, tries to be. Many drug users cannot wait two or three days for delivery of their next hit. But it is all a lot easier than waiting for the man. The police may not agree. Still, there is probably less chance of a drug deal on the Silk Road turning into a murder scene, and customer reviews may be a better guide to quality—and so the risk of overdose and death—than a street-corner salesman’s patter. Buying a line online has never been easier.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/08/economist-explains-11
“When Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson sat down to write The Internet Police, Edward Snowden hadn’t yet decided to add some excitement to the National Security Agency’s summer by leaking a trove of surveillance secrets to The Guardian. As a result, Anderson’s book doesn’t mention Snowden’s escapade, which will likely become the security-and-paranoia story of the year, if not the decade. However, The Internet Police is a handy guide to the slow and unstoppable rise of the online security state, as well as the libertarian and criminal elements that have done their level best to counter that surveillance.”
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/the-internet-police-shines-a-light-on-the-online-surveillance-state/
“By late winter, Poitras decided that the stranger with whom she was communicating was credible. There were none of the provocations that she would expect from a government agent — no requests for information about the people she was in touch with, no questions about what she was working on. Snowden told her early on that she would need to work with someone else, and that she should reach out to Greenwald. She was unaware that Snowden had already tried to contact Greenwald, and Greenwald would not realize until he met Snowden in Hong Kong that this was the person who had contacted him more than six months earlier.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?pagewanted=all
“I am impressed that Ladar chose to shutdown his service rather than continue to promise something that he now unequivocally knew was no longer secure in the face of law enforcement’s quasi-legal incursions. It would have probably been better if he hadn’t attempted to offer security that was beyond his ability to provide. During my weekly Security Now! podcast with Leo Laporte, we use the acronym ‘TNO’ (Trust No One) to refer to any system where readily available cryptographic technology is properly employed in such a fashion that it is not necessary to trust the behavior of any third party.”
http://steve.grc.com/2013/08/08/the-lesson-of-lavabit/
“The hardest part of scoring drugs in the age of the digital black market? Choosing among all the consumer-friendly websites ready to sell them. Our results were mixed, and far from scientific, since we made only one buy per site, and each site hosts dozens or hundreds of vendors. (The sites’ third-party seller model is more akin to eBay and Etsy than Amazon or Zappos.) We also couldn’t test the quality of the products–Our lawyer insisted we destroy them. (See video below.) But this much is clear: the age of narcotics e-commerce has arrived.”