If the accusations against him stand up in court, the German authorities will have succeeded in closing an investigation that's as strange as it is surprising. The case could also offer a vivid example of how the darknet, the part of the web that can only be accessed using certain tools, shifts the paradigms of both crime and law enforcement—and how easily a 25-year old Bavarian student could find himself being called an international arms dealer.Ultimately, all the evidence disclosed thus far indicates that alleged darknet dealers can pretty much only get caught if they make mistakes—echoing the case of Ross Ulbricht, who was recently convicted in the US for masterminding the digital black market Silk Road.Some of Stefan's classmates knew that he used the anonymity service Tor and encrypted his hard drive. Some of them also knew that he enjoyed surfing the dark web.Just minutes before being busted by the SWAT team, he apologized for needing a few more minutes before joining the study session with his fellow students: "Someone in the darknet has a few more questions."Prosecutors are accusing a 25-year-old student of dealing weapons throughout Europe over the darknet
For the five semesters he was there, Stefan spent the majority of his time on campus—in addition to frequenting college barbecues, he was studious and hardworking. Admittedly, his permanent presence in the academic buildings was suspicious to some of his classmates. But none of them would have dared to think what the prosecutors are now accusing him of, even if after asking around campus, it's clear that there had been rumors circulating about his active darknet use for a while.Neither the prosecutors in Schweinfurt nor Bavaria's State Police wanted to confirm to us that the suspect was dealing the weapons they found on the darknet. However, the 25-year-old is facing up to 15 years in prison for activities that violated the War Weapons Control Act—and police also apprehended four other individuals over the course of their investigation.In a moment of quick-thinking, he yanked the power cable out of his battery-less, encrypted laptop
Karl-Heinz Segerer, from the State Police in Munich, which had been investigating for several months before the arrest, also referred to ongoing investigations that made confirming information difficult. "Our goal right now is simply to get these guys," he said. "Our goal right now is to get these guys."
Violating the student Code of Conduct
Stefan's fellow students at college were all completely surprised by his arrest. "He always took really thorough notes," one classmate, who had studied with Stefan for many exams, told me. "We could really use his help right now for our exams and we miss him already.""Cheating while being incarcerated is impossible."
Code: wtf
German state police in the Darknet
Moritz Bartl, of the Zwiebelfreunde, a group that operates Tor exit nodes, rules out the idea that the German authorities of all people could have found a way to tap into Tor's infrastructure. "I don't think the German authorities are competent enough to be able to infiltrate the hidden services technically."Yet it wouldn't be unthinkable that by now the local police are at least using a few crumbs of data from the fallout from Operation Onymous for further investigations. In November, 2014, in conjunction with Operation Onymous, the State Police in Hessen, Germany headed an investigation that led to the arrest of an alleged leader of a darknet drug shop, charging him with 12 counts of drug dealing.What is certain by now, is that only a few days after the FBI took the first servers offline, three international exit nodes, which Moritz Bartl and the Zwiebelfreunde run, were also seized by the police."I don't think the German authorities are competent enough to be able to infiltrate the hidden services technically."
As of yet, there are actually only a few cases known where the German police succeeded in pursuing activities in the darknet. One was in March, 2013, for example, when the drug dealer, "Pfandleiher," was arrested in rural Bavaria. The Bavarian State Police set up a special task force for the operation, and underscored their own innovative prowess by calling it "Seidenstraße" (Silk Road).In Germany, there are still only a handful of arms dealers that don't seem to be fraudulent scammers
And after repeated requests, neither the Bavarian State Police or the German Federal Police are able to give more precise information on their knowledge of extent and details of germans operating in the darknet. "It's not called the darknet for nothing," a spokesperson for the Federal Police said."It's not called the darknet for nothing."
"These operations only push the black markets into regions that are much more difficult for Western authorities to reach," he said. "Now we can see that these hidden services are mostly being hosted in Russia or Eastern Europe. Security services from all sides may know about them, but the people running them will not be extradited."These operations do nothing, he said, other than push the darknet servers further into Eastern Europe