“We can’t have a world where a government is allowed to use a black box of technology from which spring these serious criminal prosecutions,” Rumold says. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison, a punishment that far exceeds whatever Marques might receive at his sentencing date in May.įreedom Hosting and Silk Road were just the most well-known dark web sites that were brought down by law enforcement despite the anonymity that Tor is meant to provide. Then, in October 2013, Ross Ulbricht-a 29-year-old online bookseller-was arrested in San Francisco and charged with running Silk Road. Close to the end, the anonymous figure was giving interviews to magazines like Forbes and writing political essays about his cause and the ideology behind it. Although it lasted less than three years, it was clear that Silk Road’s founder, nicknamed Dread Pirate Roberts, felt invincible. After facilitating at least hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, Silk Road became a symbol of the apparent invulnerability of the criminals inhabiting the dark web. Two months after Marques was caught, the free-wheeling marketplace Silk Road was shut down in another FBI-led operation. Prosecutors chose to drop all charges in a case of child exploitation on the dark web rather than reveal the technological means they used to locate the anonymized Tor user.įreedom Hosting’s closure was the first in a series of stunning successes by international law enforcement that shut down some of the most high-profile criminal websites in history. In a 2017 criminal case, the US government put the secrecy of its hacking tools above all else. The users are diverse in every way, but software vulnerabilities can affect all of them. Users could include Americans sick of being tracked by advertising companies, Iranians attempting to circumvent censorship, Chinese dissidents escaping national surveillance, or criminals like Marques attempting to stay ahead of international police. Tor is free software designed to let anyone use the internet anonymously by encrypting traffic and bouncing it through various nodes to obfuscate connections to the original users. “It’s not uncommon to play these games where they hide the ball about the source of their information,” the EFF’s Rumold says. US officials say the vast majority of such vulnerabilities end up disclosed so that they can be fixed, ideally increasing internet security for everyone.īut if the FBI used a software vulnerability to find Freedom Hosting’s hidden servers and didn’t disclose the details, it could still potentially use it against others on Tor. This is meant to default toward disclosure, under the belief that any bug that affects the “bad guys” also has the potential to be used against American interests an agency that wants to use a major bug in an investigation has to get approval, or else the bug will be publicly disclosed. There is a formal system for deciding whether an issue should be shared, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. Sometimes these are disclosed to technology vendors, while at other times the government decides to keep these exploits for use as weapons or in investigations. US government agencies regularly find software vulnerabilities in the course of their security work. The ACLU criticized the FBI for indiscriminately using the code like a “ grenade.” While in control of Freedom Hosting, the agency then used malware that probably touched thousands of computers. The code had attacked a Firefox vulnerability that could target and unmask Tor users-even those using it for legal purposes such as visiting Tor Mail-if they failed to update their software fast enough. Hours later, as panicked chatter about the new code began to spread, the sites all went down simultaneously. When Marques was arrested in 2013, the FBI called him the “largest facilitator” of such images “on the planet.”Įarly on August 2 or 3, 2013, some of the users noticed “unknown Javascript” hidden in websites running on Freedom Hosting. It also maintained servers for the legal email service Tor Mail and the singularly strange encyclopedia Hidden Wiki.īut it was the hosting of sites used for photos and videos of child exploitation that attracted the most hostile government attention. The operation existed entirely on the anonymity network Tor and was used for a wide range of illegal activity, including the hacking and fraud forum HackBB and money-laundering operations including the Onion Bank. Freedom Hosting was an anonymous and illicit cloud computing company running what some estimated to be up to half of all dark web sites in 2013.
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