Darknet Sweep Casts Doubt on Tor
Tor Will Be Defeated Again, and Again, and Again
By Bill Blunden, November 7, 2014
When news broke of Silk Road 2.0’s seizure by law enforcement a lot of people probably wrote it off as
an isolated incident. Silk Road 2.0 was the successor to the original Silk Road web site and like its
predecessor it was an underground bazaar for narcotics, fueled by more than $8 million in Bitcoin
transactions and operated as a hidden service on the Tor anonymity network.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Blake Benthall, the alleged 26-year-old operator of Silk
Road 2.0, law enforcement officers caught their suspect using old fashioned police work. Specifically
they sent in a mole, or what the text of the complaint refers to as an HSI-UC (a Homeland Security
Investigations agent operating in an Undercover Capacity). Anyway, the undercover spy was wildly
effective, gaining access to the Silk Road 2.0 discussion forum while the scheme was still in its formative
stages and eventually acquiring administrative access to the web site after it launched.
But it turns out that the Silk Road 2.0 takedown was just the appetizer of a much larger main course
called Operation Onymous. Onymous, as in anything but anonymous. Within a matter of hours it was
announced that a joint operation involving dozens of officers from the FBI, the DHS, and Europol had
taken down a grand total of 414 hidden services on the Tor network. This wasn’t just a single bust, no
sir. This was a global dragnet that resulted in the arrest of 17 suspects.
The success of this international operation raises a question: how did they locate the hidden servers and
identify the people who managed them?
In this instance Tor hidden services failed to live up to their namesake. Was the sudden collapse of
several hundred Tor “.onion” domains the result of traditional police tradecraft ─developing informants,
patiently waiting for opportunities, doggedly following leads─ or were security services quietly wielding
advanced technical methods?
All told the cops are pretty tight-lipped. Wired Magazine asked Troels Oerting, head of the European
Cybercrime Center, this very question and he replied:
“This is something we want to keep for ourselves… The way we do this, we can’t share
with the whole world, because we want to do it again and again and again.”
Even with the discretion of insiders like Oerting there have been recent developments that hint at
what’s going on behind closed doors. For instance, the FBI has just proposed that the U.S. Advisory
Committee on Rules and Criminal Procedure alter federal search and seizure rules so that law
enforcement agents can hack into machines that have been “concealed through technological means.”
This is no doubt a thinly veiled reference to Tor. The FBI’s request infers that public gripes against ostensibly strong encryption by officials like FBI
Director James Comey, GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan, and former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker
are mere theater. The feds already have tools at their disposal to defeat encryption-based tools like Tor.
In fact, an internal NSA documents admits that “[A] critical mass of targets use Tor. Scaring them away
from Tor might be counterproductive.”
Really? I wonder why?
This past summer I questioned the wisdom of netizens putting all their eggs in the Tor basket, as did
other writers like Pando’s Yasha Levine. Granted there were protests voiced by advocates, some of
which I responded to. Still, the public record demonstrates that Tor isn’t a guarantee against the
intrigues a knowledgeable adversary. And now we clearly see the purported security of the Tor
anonymity network unraveled on a grand scale. Not just for one or two illicit websites but hundreds. As
to whether it’s possible for an app to safeguard essential civil liberties… the techno-libertarians of Silicon
Valley can eat crow.
The reality is that the Deep State’s minions aim to eradicate genuine anonymity for everyone but
themselves. The steady erosion of privacy is a part of a long-term campaign to consolidate control as
economic inequality accelerates and perpetual war expands. The looming Malthusian disaster born of
our leaders’ unenlightened self-interest will be a brutal spectacle and the members of the ruling class
want to make sure that they’ll have a good view.
Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security,
anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal
and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex. Bill is the lead
investigator at Below Gotham Labs.