Now Silk Road has been taken down where will we all buy drugs?
YOU’LL have seen the news that Silk Road, the online drug bazar, has been taken down by the FBI. There’s a number of fun questions surrounding what actually happened.
For those who don’t know Silk Road was part of the “deep web”, the bit where Google doesn’t go. And it was a trading shop for just about anything: from heroin through computer trojans and all the way to hit men. All highly illegal of course and it seems the the bloke running it was a bit of an extreme libertarian. Which is going to cause problems for nice cuddly libertarians like me of course.
The bits of the story that make it fun (for a certain meaning of “fun” of course) are that the guy running it was so aggressive that he actually took out two contracts to have people he believed were crossing him in business killed. It’s actually quite a long way from even extreme libertarianism to acting like a Mafia Don but he seems to have managed it. There’s also the way in which the FBI appear to have actually had hold of the servers for a time as well. Or at least access to them. It’s thought that this ties in with the takeover of Freedom Hosting by the coppers back in August.
Freedom was hosting a goodly portion of the webs kiddie porn so obviously they went after that. But one story doing the rounds is that that’s also where the Silk Road site, or at least enough of it, was being hosted, to they got control of that too. What’s been happening since then is that they’ve been trying to track down the humans that ran it, not the computers it was running on.
But the really important point of this story is that, as we all know, closing down one drug dealer doesn’t mean the end of drug dealing. So, where is the next dealing site going to be?
And there’s actually an important part to this as well, not just speculation or statements of the bleedin’obvious. If the coppers had control of the site, or even just visibility of activities, why did they close it down? For they know very well that the drug dealing is going to carry on, if not there then elsewhere. But if they allowed that dealing to go on then they would be able to monitor the far more dangerous hit man and malevolent software stuff. Something made them decide not to do that, to lose that wonderful intelligance opportunity. My best guess is that it’s those conspiracies to murders that made them swoop.
Posted: 7th, October 2013 | In: Money, Technology, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
