The End of the Silk Road

            It’s amazing what you can buy online these days. The internet has become a one stop shopping destination for groceries, video games, movies, furniture, clothes, and illegal drugs. The last one came courtesy of an online black market known as “The Silk Road” that operated on the “Deep Web” or World Wide Web content that is not part of the normal internet and is not indexed by standard search engines. Just a few days ago, the FBI announced that it had taken down the infamous black market website Silk Road and arrested its creator Ross Ulbricht AKA “Dead Pirate Roberts.” The FBI reported that $1.2 billion of transactions had taken place on the site in its two and a half year run which netted the Silk Road $80 million in commissions.

Since its founding in 2011, Silk Road has become notorious as an online black market, often being referred to as the eBay of illegal drugs. The site was only accessible through the anonymizing service TOR and users conducted trades in Bitcoins to further conceal their identities. Users of the website could access hundreds of illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and prescription drugs. Other services included personal hacking services, fake ids, and weapons. The website specifically prohibited weapons of mass destruction, child pornography, the sale of stolen banking information, and anything else whose purpose was to harm or defraud. Sellers could access the site by purchasing a sellers account in an auction while buyers only needed a free account. FBI agent Christopher Tarbell stated that “The site sought to make conducting illegal transactions on the internet as easy and frictionless as shopping online at mainstream e-commerce websites.”

Undercover Federal Agents lurked on the site since November of 2011 and worked to track down Dead Pirate Roberts. The major break in the case allegedly came when the FBI found a post on a forum from 2011 in which Ulbricht asked for advice on how to set up his new website and included his real personal gmail address in the post. Ulbricht has been charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. In an interesting twist, a second complaint charges him with conspiracy to commit murder. The second charge alleges that a user of Silk Road attempted to blackmail Ulbricht by saying that he had obtained the names and addresses of thousands of Silk Road users and would release them unless he was paid $500,000 to pay off his drug suppliers. Ulbricht then allegedly contacted the supplier and negotiated a hit on the user for $150,000.

The arrest has ignited numerous discussions of privacy and security online. Some commentators allege that the NSA’s monitoring of communications may have played a role in the bust. In either case, the incident raises some interesting questions about the security of TOR and privacy on the internet as a whole. What many people don’t understand is that TOR and other similar services do not completely mask your identity. They just create a much longer route between you and the server you’re accessing and make it much harder, but not impossible, to track you. However in the case of Ulbricht, his arrest can largely be blamed on his own sloppiness.

I feel one of the most interesting aspects of this story is the mainstream media reaction. Many reports focus on the fact that the website used Bitcoin and TOR to help users remain anonymous. Some reports describe TOR and the Deep Web as a haven for pedophiles, drug dealers, and even terrorists. Many reports ignore the fact TOR is not only used for criminal purposes and in fact have many legitimate uses.  TOR is often used by activists in authoritarian countries as a way to communicate atrocities to the outside world. It is also used by whistleblowers who wish to remain anonymous and even by law enforcement agencies who wish to hide their investigations from criminals. Most importantly, TOR is used by many average users who simply wish to remain anonymous online. The Silk Road may have been one use for TOR, but it’s far from the only use.