http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace) http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/ This is the story of how one 29 year old and a Mormon grandpa managed to build a billion dollar empire, challenge political power structures and change the global drug trade. I thought the political context and the general debate over encryption would be well-served by examining what happened here. I'm curious to know what the community here thinks about the story.
What's even more interesting is that the Feds assigned to infiltrate his site went rogue and extorted 100's of thousands off the users of the site. Of course DPR wasn't allowed to use this in his trial.
just as shutting down Napster spawned the unstoppable BitTorrent, Silk Road will evolve into something more nimble and anonymous and unstoppable
They spent years of investigation and millions of dollars just to catch this guy and they accomplished nothing...
Couldn't this be said for the war on drugs in general? Silk Road thrived for many reasons, not the least of which was that it made access to illegal drugs very easy. Whether it's on the street where violence rules the day or online where commerce is tied up in the founder's libertarian ideals, demand finds a way to be met by supply. You're right that, especially on the Internet, once it's "found out" by the feds or general population, something more hidden and secure has already taken root.
They shouldn't have shut it down but I understand why. Buying drugs off the street from a dealer in the traditional way is far more dangerous. The sellers on Silk Road had reviews and clearly labelled and tested stuff. If someone sold bogus or dangerous product they wouldn't get any action. If someone on the streets sells bogus or dangerous product (look up N-Bomes being sold as LSD leading to numerous overdoses) then there is no accountability. Yeah its just an online profile but it was better than buying it off the streets from some sketchy dude you don't know. If people want drugs they are going to get them but Silk Road was the safest way of purchasing.
Point being whether it's uber or BitTorrent or bitcoin, technologies are being developed that cannot be stopped or controlled by states and have no central point of failure Stomp on Silk Road and you only create something more powerful
Well they got a conviction on a guy breaking the law and will put him in prison for a couple of decades. They aren't going to save mankind's soul with a few million dollars, but I'm going to call it a win.
Uber is a service--there is a central point of failure--the servers that run the service and the American-based corporation built to provide a business layer on top of the technology, which requires access to talent and conventional finance. It has several points of failure if it were to be subjected to government intervention. BitTorrent is a protocol to distribute data used on multiple services and multiple clients and it is "unstoppable" so long as people have the need to move large amounts of data efficiently and it is the best approach to do so (it remains that way for now). Silk Road is a service that relied on a web server that ran through the dark net's Tor--nevertheless, locating the web server even if it wasn't in American jurisdiction is a central point of failure: you can seize it, arrest the owner, and move on once you've uncovered the server's IP address-which is what happened in this case. It's not the technologies being developed that are unstoppable per say when it comes to services vs platform or protocols, it's more the engineering mentality + economic incentives that might be--monkey see monkey do See: Napster -> Limewire when people realized there was significant money in the banana stand of free music.
They probably broke the law to do it, and most likely violated the Fourth Amendment and the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) while partly breaking an encryption network created by DARPA, and used by dissidents around the world. There wasn't just a monetary cost paid to this particular investigation. https://www.nikcub.com/posts/analyzing-fbi-explanation-silk-road/
I'd be concerned about any abuse of power in getting the arrest and conviction, though I'm not intimately familiar with the case. But, I won't be sorry this guy got busted and imprisoned. If he ultimately walks because cops violated his civil rights, so be it, but it'd be unfortunate that he's free. I can appreciate the need to protect our civil rights, but I also don't appreciate people hiding behind our civil rights to run large criminal organizations.
I don't believe they can shut it down. This is like what the internet was when it came out in the 90's and it's only going to get bigger. But internet drug sales does take the drug violence off the street because of limited to none human contact and it puts a huge dent in the "drug turf wars" which renders many of the law enforcement agents who are supposedly fighting "the war on drugs" useless and even more of a waste of tax dollars. They can parade it around as a win but it's not... Because all the vendors and buyers just went to different sites and I heard Silk Road was back up and operational a little while after they arrested this guy. This is equivalent to arresting a nickel and dime drug dealer off the street, which is no victory.
Do you feel this way about trying to control borders and stop other nations' nuclear programs and limiting abortion? After all, people will just find new ways to cross borders and develop new weapons technologies and create new abortion pills, so why try to stop any of these things?
