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Courtesy of Flickr |
For
more than a thousand years, the route known as the Silk Road was the major
source of trade that connected East and West. Delivering everything from
Chinese silk to spices and precious gems, this trade route used everything from
camels to wooden boats to create a web of commerce that covered the known
world. Two millennia later, this concept was reborn online in a web portal
of the same name. The chief difference is that while the digital Silk
Road did indeed concern itself with connecting a worldwide web of virtual
traders, these entrepreneurs did not deal in frankincense and myrrh, but in a
cornucopia of contraband that openly advertised everything from cannabis to cocaine
and firearms to forgeries.
By the
following day, news of the arrest was making headlines around the world.
By Thursday of the same week, the infamous website had been shut down and a
notice was posted by the authorities that notified any interested party that
the site had been seized by the Feds. Also confiscated was a digital
wallet that contained thousands of Bitcoins reportedly worth more than four
million dollars. During the height of the illegal enterprise, Ulbricht
allegedly racked up commissions of $20,000 per day totaling more than $80
million according to authorities. During the two years that the site
operated, it was reported that nearly one million anonymous customers conducted
some $1.2 billion in sales through the portal.
What
was not surprising was that it was possible to conduct the sale of contraband
online. What was surprising was the sheer volume of the operation,
combined with a level of sophistication that made it very hard for the
authorities to follow either the customers of Silk Road or the money that
traded hands. ( In fact, all transactions made on the site were conducted
using Bitcoins, a so-called crypto currency that uses encryption to control
transactions.)
The |
What
was also surprising were the lengths to which the operator of Silk Road was
allegedly prepared to go to keep the business viable. According to an article in the
Guardian, “FBI indictments
claimed Ulbricht had ordered two hits against people whom he thought might
expose his clients, one against an "employee" of Silk Road in January
2013 and then against someone, who was in fact an undercover agent, threatening
to leak the names of his clientele. In the first hit, police say Ulbricht
offered $40,000 for the job, and asked for "proof of death" in the
form of a video.”
Also surprised were two
of the men who had rented a room in their San Francisco home to Ulbricht.
He had answered a Craigslist ad and identified himself to the other two tenants
as Josh, a Texas man who had just moved back to the states from Sydney, Australia.
For a man who was purportedly raking in $20,000 per day, Ulbricht apparently
spent very little since his rent was only $1,250 per month and according to his
housemates, he almost never went out and made it a habit to eat in.
In fact, many people
who read the headlines in the San Francisco Examiner were shocked that Ulbricht
had chosen to live and operate in the open. Stranger still was the fact that
while he had been running Silk Road he had even granted interviews to
journalists.
Quote from the
Guardian: "When you start giving interviews like the CEO of an
established company, it's just wrong," says Pavel Durov, another
29-year-old technologist who recently visited San Francisco and had been
following the story of the Dread Pirate.”
Indeed,
the 29-year old Texan acted as though he was CEO of a Silicon Valley startup,
rather than one of America’s Most Wanted. Had he been running his far
flung online enterprise from say Rio de Janeiro it would have made prosecution
that much more difficult.
This in
itself is an irony of monumental scope, considering the fact that every
transaction made on Silk Road was so closely guarded. Using the same
technology created by the Department of Defense to hide military
communications, Silk Road was able to transmit information using a computer
network called TOR. ( The Onion Router) TOR’s job was to encrypt and
transmit data using a number of different servers. This would make it not
only exceedingly difficult to collect and decrypt the entire message, but it
would also make it nearly impossible to track the identity and location of the
network’s users. Indeed, this was Silk Road’s unique selling
proposition. They routinely told prospective clients that no matter what
they promoted on the site that neither their activities nor their identities
could be traced by law enforcement.
While
the FBI did not reveal their tactics on how they were able to not only identify
the server locations, much less mirror Silk Road’s content in order to zero in
on the bad guys, this much is certain. In the end, the Feds used the same
kind of underhanded tactics that supported the network in order to bring it
down.
Of
course, it also didn’t hurt that the FBI had put the strong arm on Ulbricht’s
right hand man, Curtis Clark Green, who recently confessed to being a member of
Silk Road . Green was also one of the people on whom Ulbricht reportedly
put out a contract. Court documents filed against Ulbricht allege that he
had become aware of an employee’s contact with federal agents and had offered
$80,000 to have the employee killed. While Green’s name was not revealed
in the complaint, it is implied, since Ulbricht is currently being held at the
Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, while Green was conditionally
released.
The
real tragedy was not that it took federal agents more than a year to shut down
one of the most brazen criminal enterprises to ever hit the Internet. The
real tragedy is that less than one month after Silk Road went dark it is back
in business, according to cnn.money.com
“Silk Road 2.0 emerged Wednesday alongside a number of other
sites offering similar services. The new Silk Road, like the original, offers
everything from prescription medication to heroin. The new Silk Road owner also
took on the pseudonym of former leader Ross Ulbricht, Dread Pirate
Roberts. According to one former Silk Road user, the site was rebuilt by
most of the major players who were heavily involved in day-to-day operations of
the former site.”
Just
like any number of other online portals, as long as there is a marketplace of
willing buyers and sellers, there will always be those who are ready, willing
and able to set up a venue to facilitate them. Aside from Silk Road 2.0
there are other sites looking to fill the vacuum, including such portals as
Black-market Reloaded and Sheep Marketplace. ( Quoted from cnn.money.com)
While
the Feds were able to put this particular online operator of black market goods
out of operation, the question is whether the act killed the snake, or simply
cut it into a many-headed hydra that will come back to life bigger and badder
than the original? Only time will tell.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8XD03rqFpLgOWsfEIJ_6z3p1r4QaKmuDx89PMAZ7IMJ5mRLNw6ICsApC5QZSFDxtu4mS57x4ChyphenhyphenNe1BPwZckj38ee40RGP0abbW2v-SwAIDpXqLkf9eKRLtQYmIoBt6f1Quuor2gI4f0_/s1600/bookcover.jpg)
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Since 1995, Carl Weiss has been helping clients succeed
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including Working the Web to
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