Tag Archives: Crypto-Anarchism

Meet The Man Behind Booming Black Market Drug Website Silk Road

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“Anyone can download and run Tor, exchange some dollars or euros for the digital currency Bitcoin and go shopping on Silk Road for drugs that are vacuum-sealed and discreetly mailed via the U.S. Postal Service.  By one measure, Roberts’ eBay-like service was grossing $1.2 million a month in the first half of 2012. Since then the site has doubled its product listings, and revenue now hits an annual run-rate of $30 million to $45 million by FORBES’ estimate. One analysis found that Silk Road received around 60,000 visits a day, mostly users seeking to buy or sell drugs, along with other illicit items including unregulated cigarettes and forged documents.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/

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Lavabit.com owner: ‘I could be arrested’ for resisting order to turn over user info

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“The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.  ‘I could be arrested for this action,’ Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.  Levison said he started Lavabit 10 years ago to capitalize on public concerns about the Patriot Act. Until he shut down, his small company was generating about $100,000 in revenue annually.”

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100962389

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Bitcoin Comes Under Full Scale Attack by Regulators

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“Cryptocurrencies are threatening because no central entity can fully control them and they also represent a nearly free and anonymous payment application.  It’s an algorithm that has the potential to make central banks, commercial banks, private banks, and the tax collectors obsolete.  In other words, cryptocoins may be epoch changing for society.  In the same way the Internet killed publishing or how VoIP killed long distance telephone carriers, cryptocoins may in fact kill debt-based money and brick-and-mortar banking. The banking cartel along with the government are scrambling to protect their territory and regulate Bitcoin.”

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/08/bitcoin-comes-under-full-scale-attack.html

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On 10th anniversary, Pirate Bay launches PirateBrowser to evade filesharing blocks

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“The PirateBrowser website explains that the application combines Tor client Vidalia – which anonymises data connections – with the FireFox Portable Edition browser, the FoxyProxy add-on and ‘some custom configs’. The site also claims that the browser is an anti-censorship tool rather than purely for piracy, citing countries including Iran and North Korea alongside the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland as places it expects PirateBrowser to be particularly useful.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/12/pirate-bay-celebrates-10th-anniversary-with-launch-of-piratebrowser-to-evade-isp-filesharing-blocks/

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Treating Surveillance as Damage and Routing Around It

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“Even as the U.S. security state becomes more closed, centralized and brittle in the face of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, civil society and the public are responding to the post-Snowden repression by becoming more dispersed and resilient.  That’s how networks always respond to censorship and surveillance. Each new attempt at a file-sharing service, after Napster was shut down — Kazaa, Kazaa lite, eDonkey, eMule, The Pirate Bay — was less dependent on central servers and other vulnerable nodes than the one before it. Wikileaks responded the same way to U.S. government attempts to shut it down.”

http://c4ss.org/content/20720

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Mega to run ‘cutting-edge’ encrypted email after Lavabit’s ‘privacy seppuku’

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“Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is working on a highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server. It comes as the US squeezes email providers that offer encryption and Mega’s CEO calls Lavabit’s shutdown an ‘honorable act of Privacy Seppuku.’ The concept he was referring to was developed by secure service providers such as Cryptocloud, which made a ‘corporate seppuku’ pledge to oppose the mass surveillance and shield the privacy of their users’ data. The name for the move apparently derives from a Japanese ritual suicide, which was originally practiced by samurai to preserve honor.”

http://rt.com/news/mega-secure-email-lavabit-359/

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Bitmessage: Choice Of A Rightly Paranoid Generation

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“Bitmessage is an open-source communications protocol for keeping your email private. Unlike PGP and similar programs that hide just the content of messages, Bitmessage also hides metadata like the sender and receiver of messages. And unlike PGP, Bitmessage doesn’t require that users manage public or private keys to use the system; Bitmessage uses strong authentication so that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed. Bitmessage is also decentralized and trustless, which means that you don’t need to trust root certificate authorities or any third parties who, under legal duress from a government, might give up your data.”

http://readwrite.com/2013/07/15/bitmessage-choice-of-a-rightly-paranoid-generation

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Jeffrey Tucker: Is Bitcoin Real or Not?

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“Certainly government can regulate exchange between government currencies and Bitcoin. It can also regulate income in Bitcoin the same as with other currency. This is not some tax-free nirvana in the making. The government can also oversee contractual regulations and securities activities in Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin itself is a peer-to-peer system of cryptographically guarded exchange, and it lives on a distributed server model. It is not a company. It is not a stock. It is not a product. It is a ledger that no one in particular runs or owns. It is not possible for Bitcoin as such to be destroyed any more than government can destroy algebra.”

http://lfb.org/today/is-bitcoin-real-or-not/

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Another US encrypted email service, founded by PGP inventor, also shuts down

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“Later on Thursday, an executive with a better-known provider of secure email said his company had also shut down that service. Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle Inc, said on Twitter and in a blog post that Silent Circle had ended Silent Mail.   ‘We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now,’ Mr Callas wrote.  Silent Circle, co-founded by the PGP cryptography inventor Phil Zimmermann, will continue to offer secure texting and secure phone calls.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10232473/Encrypted-email-service-linked-to-Edward-Snowden-shuts-down.html

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Facing pressure from U.S., encrypted email service Lavabit shuts down

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“An encrypted email service believed to have been used by US leaker Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday apparently as a result of pressure from US authorities. Lavabit owner Ladar Levison posted a message at the website telling users that the he was pulling the plug on the secure email service launched in Texas nearly a decade ago. Levison lamented that he was barred from sharing details of what prompted Lavabit’s demise. US law allows national security officials to make requests to companies that come with the caveat they must be kept secret.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/08/facing-pressure-from-u-s-encrypted-email-service-lavabit-shuts-down/

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