Good. Fuck LE fuck the feds you'll never take me alive and if you want to cut a deal no deal I will expose you motherfuckers for cracking Tor.

All evidence of this guys crimes in reality is from tor being easily pwned and this is what is used to prosecute him. Not really, You can look up the name Alpha02 in Breaches and see he used that name tied to [email protected] on Forums long before AB even launched. I logged into his Jabber account before which is still Intact with his contacts in it. (Also in a Data Leak)

If LE is so powerful that can bust any darknet site any moment they'd like why they could arrest only 5 or 6 I don't remember exact number, less than 10 markets. Meanwhile most of markets did successful scam exit. Statistically LE just had random luck.

It surprised me when Paris himself said that no one should use a VPN with tor. Just rawdog the tor connection and hope your guard relay, or your ISP, or the ISP of the guard relay, or the autonomous systems in between all care about your privacy and don't log requests. Because if one of them does you might as well be committing crimes without tor network.

SUPPORTING FACTORS: 4. DEA is the biggest drug dealer in the world.

You're surprised to see stupid behavior and mistakes repeated over and over again when you're reading the stories of people who got busted? If they were criminal masterminds you wouldn't be reading about them getting caught.

it's not enough, using public wifi and tor, let's say they have a way to retro engineer the connections up to yours that address is tied to a system that has a name mac address some factory and vendor data so it's unique, there are so many other ways to find you if you are worth it. ex CIA hunting down taliban commanders, one had some very good opsec and you know what he did? travel without phone or technology on him, he got busted because eventually his kid toke the phone to play with while traveling. ex dw market vendor got busted for using an email tied to him multiple times. cases are 2 you are worthy enough to spend resources for your research or you are dumb enough to use telegram and email to do your dark business. first case you'll be at a point you have connections and network high up in the chain, cartel boss or pedo politician kind of thing. last case you just not worth the hunt so everyone knows who you are and what you do but no big deal, just like the crackhead down the block selling shit. or you are powerful enough to blackmail people so they let you do your business without bothering, but they will still know.

Eh. I kinda disagree. All of the busts that I've seen are simply due to human error. Everyone in the security world knows that humans make mistakes. So yes in a way, its basically guaranteed that you'll get busted simply because you WILL make a mistake at some point. But that doesn't mean that TOR is the main reason why people get busted all the time. Silk road - Ross accidentally put his personal email on a forum where he talked about silk road on that same account. He also got caught with fake ID's & literally told the police "Anyone can buy these on a website like the silk road. That doesn't mean its mine hudurrrrr" From what I understand, this is what started the investigation into him. Aplha - The dude used to have automatic "thank you for signing up" emails, using his personal email account... (Can't remember the name) - a vendor walked into usps carrying a ton of boxes, STILL WEARING GLOVES, and one of the boxes was leaking a strange powder. From what I've seen, its always because of some stupid mistake. With that being said though, I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has a vulnerability in tor. But they wouldn't use it on common crimes or give it to normal agents investigating a simple drug case. The government uses TOR themselves, They wouldn't want an enemy country catching wind of this vulnerability.

You are right that the evidence presented in front of the court is not necessarily the one that is actually responsible for the initial discovery of the person of interest, for the arrest and prosecution. There are attack channels that are in the category of secret or top secret. Those never appear in front of the court obviously. Tor itself is not resistant against the global adversaries (officially). Due to the characteristics of the Tor network, you jump around the world using the deep backbone of the internet. The ones that can observe these backbones can identify you. Also there are APTs active on the Tor network directly and they can occasionally deanonymize the Tor users. But to be honest, those are too high-level areas and most of the internet users never make it to those levels. DN users really do a lot of stupid mistakes and, very fairy-tale risk assessment as well as mistaking the good practice for OpSec. This is the main issue and reason they get caught.

Think about it for a few seconds. What is more likely? Do they set up a massive network used for a massive amount of illegal trades but suddenly don't have any idea to claim that an dnm admin made some mistake except for coming up with the same stuff over and over or is it more likely that there are just common mistakes that are easy to make?

Why did they let Dream go for six years and not bust SpeedStepper? Why did they let ASAP and WHM and Torrez retire? Why did they let Hydra go on for so many years? Why is Dread up? Why did they bust Kingdom instead of a bigger, more important market? Hell, why don't they just bust all of the markets at once and claim all the admins deposited bitcoin into an exchange under their own name? Why not take it all down? Why leave any of it up? Fine, I'll grant you they might leave up a couple (but not 13 markets) to justify funding their budget the next fiscal year. Why do you think darknet admins don't make noob mistakes? Most are just in it for the exit scam funds. They don't plan to be around that long enough to worry about LE.