On Februrary 5th, 2015, Silk Road (SR) founder, Robert Ulbricht, was found guilty by a federal jury on all seven charges he faced for his involvement with the Silk Road website, including narcotics and money laundering charges. Silk Road was a $1.2 billion black market on the Dark Web launched in February 2011 and shut down by the FBI in October 2013 and again in February 2014. It allowed users to buy and sell illegal goods and services anonymously via a Tor network, a privacy network designed by the US Navy, using bitcoins, a cryptic form of digital currency.
The site was used mostly for discreet drug transactions, but other products such as medical supplies, original Red Bull, and legitimate products like cigarettes and literature could also be purchased (in March 2013, the site had 10,000 products for sale by vendors, 70% of which were drugs). Ulbricht faces a sentence of 20 years to life in prison that will be determined on May 15th, 2015 for his role as creator, owner, and operator of Silk Road.
When the original site first shut down, Silk Road 2.0 popped up a month later and functioned until its administrators were similarly arrested early the following year. Since then, other drug-markets have opened up, the biggest two being Agora and Evolution, as well as dubious Silk Road sites that function as scams exploiting the SR brand name and newcomers to the Dark Web. Agora and Evo are prepared and well-suited to fill SR’s void, learning from its mistakes; Agora currently switches servers multiple times a week to avoid detection
Dark Web drug markets aren’t going anywhere and neither users nor moderators are being deterred. In fact, in August 2014 the number of product listings on Agora ballooned to 16,137 (more than SR ever had) shortly after SR2.0’s closure. Evo’s PR rep “Boogie” claims Evo has “38,000 users with an average of 500-1,000 new signups daily,” and that “drug listings are over 4000.” Numbers like these aren’t surprising considering all of the attention SR’s shutdown received, and as such tor sites have been “getting a surge of new users recently…as more find out about tor.”
When asked whether or not he’s afraid of getting arrested, Boogie simply responded, “I love sticking it to the man... Not to sound cocky. But honestly, just keep your wit and stay safe.”
SR and sites like it can be thought of as a reaction to the War on Drugs, of which has been deemed mostly a failure, but a win for private prisons everywhere. Drug dealers left the streets for their computers, and it seems law enforcement will follow, especially considering the amount of money to be seized (the SR raid produced 173,991 bitcoins, or $30-40 million). However, Dark Web programmers will consistently adapt. For every step forward law enforcement makes, the Dark Web will likely be ahead by ten. Thus, just like its predecessor, the Digital War on Drugs is doomed to fail.
Evo’s PR Boogie states, “I feel that the staff are very adamant about making Evo as one of the safest markets, they are always adding new features, updates, making the servers run smooth, and now just added multisig due to popular demand. We have yet had any types of attacks/exploits on the market and even provide bug bounties to those who find an issue. Another market that wants to thrive and prosper and be the place everyone loves to go to and just have fun. No drama or nothing like that.”
While Agora allows for arms transactions, and Evo allows for the sale of stolen credit card information (both of which SR prohibited) these Dark sites do feature boundaries, or “market rules,” the likes of which prohibit “assassinations or any other services which constitute doing harm to another,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “poisons,” “child pornography,” and “live action snuff/hurt/murder audio/video/images.” All of this adds up to a fairly safe and well-regulated online drug marketplace.
-Bryan Diaz, FSUnews Editor