Federal law enforcement arrested Ross William Ulbricht, also known as the "Dread Pirate Roberts" in San Francisco. The owner of the Silk Road, a black-market website, was taken into custody by the FBI on Tuesday.
The "Silk Road" is an online market on the so-called "Deep web" or "Dark web" which has been called the eBay for drugs. According to Reuters, Ulbricht was charged with three counts, including narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy, according to court filings.
Dread Pirate Roberts' Silk Road bills itself as a libertarian, anonymous marketplace where users can sign up for free and buy any of 340 varieties of illegal drugs - among other things - including marijuana, LSD, heroin, and cocaine. The site also sells jewelry, books, and clothing. These items are purchased using Bitcoins, an unofficial online currency that provides some anonymity to purchasers.
The website works on the dark web, which is a hidden internet network of sites that are hidden, secured, and anonymized using "Tor" networks, a free, decentralized technology which routes web traffic through a volunteer network of thousands of relays to conceal users' location and traffic from normal internet network analysis, as well as surveillance.
Dark, Deep Web Unmasked
According to Wired, in September, the FBI admitted it used malware to secretly take control of another Tor hidden service, Freedom Hosting, and bust its owner Eric Eoin Marques on child pornography charges. The malware took advantage of a bug on web-browsers, but wasn't discovered to be an FBI effort until months after the attack on Freedom Hosting's Tor servers.
The irony of the "dark web" of profoundly criminal, anti-social activity enabled by Tor routing services is that the anonymous routing service began as a project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory under DARPA, and has been financially supported by non-profits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. State Department.
That's because the Tor anonymous networks, or "deep web" can also be used to support freedom of expression and dissent in places where the internet is censored and/or scrutinized by oppressive forces.
In 2010, the Tor Project won the "Award for Projects of Social Benefit" from the Free Software Foundation, after enabling about 36 million people around the world to, as the foundation put it, "to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity." Tor provided services seen as vital for dissident movements in Iran during the Green Movement and later facilitated secure, anonymous communication for protesters and revolutionaries of the Arab Spring.
Around that time, though, Ross William Ulbricht's Silk Road began taking off. According to a criminal complaint filed by federal prosecutors, released Wednesday, "From in or about January 2011... the Silk Road website has served as a sprawling black-market bazaar."
Besides selling drugs on the site - earning Ulbricht the title "digital drug lord" - the prosecutors' filings accuse Ulbricht of, at once point, trying to hire a Silk Road user to "execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users."
The Silk Road site has been shut down, (with 26,000 Bitcoins confiscated), and U.S. law enforcement has put up a notice in its place, snapped by the New York Daily News, explaining that "This hidden site has been seized."
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