4 Alleged Silk Road Meth Dealers Arrested in U.S.

A federal grand jury in Oregon has charged four Portland-area residents with selling methamphetamine through the defunct online black market Silk Road.
Prosecutors say the four — Jason Weld Hagen, 39; Chelsea Leah Reder, 23; Richard Egan Webster, 45; and Donald Ross Bechen, 39 — conspired to sell 17 pounds of meth for a total of more than $600,000. All four pleaded not guilty at their arraignment in a Portland court room on Wednesday.

black markets. The members later converted the Bitcoin to cash and moved the money using PayPal, Western Union and prepaid debit cards, according to the indictment.
The Oregonian reports that all four defendants were apprehended Tuesday; Hagen and Reder were arrested at their homes in Vancouver, Wash., sheriff’s deputies arrested Webster in Aloha, Ore., and Bechen turned himself in.
The FBI seized the Silk Road mentioned in the indictment and arrested its alleged owner, Ross William Ulbricht, on Oct. 1. A nearly identical replica sprang up several weeks after the original Silk Road went down, and this new Silk Road is still in operation.
These arrests are the latest in a series involving alleged Silk Road dealers, eight of which occurred a week after the site's closure.
Despite the string of arrests, law enforcement has only just scratched the surface of the one-time drug empire. FBI documents state that Silk Road consisted of 146,946 buyer accounts and 3,877 vendor accounts from Feb. 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013. The site presumably facilitated $1.2 billion in transactions during its two-and-a-half year run.

As for the latest arrestees, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Acosta ordered three of the four held in federal custody pending trial, only allowing Reder to go free under conditions of pre-trial supervision. The trial is scheduled to take place during a seven-day period beginning Feb. 18.
You can view the entire indictment against the four defendants below.

Indictment against four alleged Silk Road meth dealers

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Twitter Is the Social Media Gun for Spain's Police

With about 680,000 Twitter followers, 70,000 friends on Facebook and more than 4.2 million views of its YouTube videos, meet Spain's unlikely social-media star: the National Police.

Among law enforcement agencies, it has the second most Twitter followers after the FBI, according to Carlos Fernandez Guerra, social-media manager for the Madrid-based police force. It's also the world's most retweeted government institution, averaging 16,000 times a week, he said.

"While the FBI mostly publishes statements, we are more proactive and use social media in a preventive way," he said. "We find Twitter the most useful communication tool to connect with citizens and chase criminals."

Useful and inexpensive.

Although social media was initially geared toward helping people connect with each other and giving individuals a louder voice in the online world, some law enforcement agencies are finding it an effective — and cheap — way to fight crime.

"Twitter and social media in general have provided us with a very important platform to reach citizens massively as our budget is very low," Fernandez said.

But just having a Twitter account (@policia) isn't enough. Although the Spanish police have been tweeting since 2009, it wasn't until the arrival of Ignacio Cosido, a more tech-savvy director general, that the agency's social-media efforts took off.

Fernandez, a former financial journalist, also boosted the police's popularity by crafting provocative tweets such as "Droga = Caca" (drugs = excrement) and "Ayudanos y les trincaremos" (help us and we'll capture them).

It recently created one hashtag, #pedetecorporativo, which loosely translates into "corporate drunkenness," to remind people that they shouldn't drink during company Christmas dinners if they need to drive.

The police's social-media push seems to be paying off. Shortly after promoting the agency's email address, antidroga@policia.es, on social media last year, they received about 500 emails from citizens providing tips about drug dealers or crime in the country, Fernandez said. This "tweet raid" campaign led to about 350 arrests and the seizure of more than 450 kilos of drugs, including cocaine and pot.

Because of this success, other police departments from around the world, especially in Latin America, are approaching their Spanish counterparts to learn how they can use social media to catch criminals.

"They’ve been very smart in understanding how community management works, and have been effective in communicating and responding to citizens in a colloquial and close way," said Enrique Dans, a professor of information systems at IE Business School in Madrid. "That way, people feel more comfortable to get in touch with the police."

Twitter declined to comment.

Besides drug dealers, social media has also helped Spain's police fight online child pornography, as well as arrest fugitives, sexual abusers, scam artists and criminals threatening local TV celebrities.

Speaking of TV, one of the Spanish police's most popular tweets was timed to the airing of the last episode of Breaking Bad in Spain: "If you play Breaking Bad, you'll end in a scene fromPrison Break."

Who said the police don't have a sense of humor?

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Man Who Joined Anonymous Attack for '1 Minute' Fined $183,000

A 38-year-old man was sentenced to two years probation and a hefty fine for participating in a distributed denial-of-service attack organized by hacker collective Anonymous against the webpage of Koch Industries in 2011.
The surprising part? He only joined the attack for one minute.
Eric J. Rosol, a Wisconsin resident, was charged with being part of Anonymous’ attack on the Kansas-based company, Kochind.com, on Feb. 28, 2011, using a popular DDoS tool, which was found on his computer.
Rosol, however, says he was part of the attack for one minute. He pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer, and was sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay $183,000, the Department of Justice said in a statement acquired by IT World. The monetary amount is equal to what Koch paid for a consulting group to come in post-attack and fix their website. The attack itself only took Koch’s website down for about 15 minutes.
Similar crimes have also carried heavy punishments. Jeremy Hammond, 28, a member of Anonymous, was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison for hacking intelligence contractor Strategic Forecasting, also known as Stratfor.
Activists have claimed that such hacking sentences are disproportionate to the crimes and called for reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in the 1980s and is still used to prosecute online crime today.

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