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November 07, 2014

How the FBI just made the world a more dangerous place by shutting down Silkroad 2.0 and a bunch of online drug markets

The FBI has seized the website of Silk Road 2.0, a major "darknet" marketplace, and arrested its alleged operator, Blake Benthall, in San Francisco. On reddit, the darknet community is reporting that several other marketplaces may be down as well.  
The Irish Examiner reports that "an international day of action to disrupt global activity on the Darknet and remove certain websites and forums is to conclude within the next 24 hours under the FBI/Europol operation codenamed 'Onymous'".
In the post below, originally published last month, I outlined the darknet economy and discuss the findings of a computer programmer who scraped Silk Road 2.0's site to determine what types of drugs were for sale.
This story is still developing, but I'll note that there's a strong argument to be made that the darknet economy makes the world a safer place overall. By taking drug transactions off the street and putting them online, you eliminate a significant link in the chain of violence between drug suppliers and end users. Drugs purchased online are typically less adulterated with dangerous contaminants than street drugs are, and a system of reviews rewards sellers who provide high-quality product.
In their statement, federal authorities don't discuss these broad implications but say that, generating $8 million in sales, Silk Road 2.0 was used by " thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors." They pledged to "return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars."
Regardless of how many of these sites the FBI has seized today, it's a near certainty that dozens more will spring up to take their place tomorrow.

In October 2013, the FBI shut down Silk Road, a thriving online black market where, with a bit of technical know-how, you could to purchase things like illicit drugs, forged documents and weapons. Think Amazon, but for drugs and other not-so-legal things. The FBI may have hoped that shutting down Silk Road would take a bite out of illicit drug sales online. But if anything, it appears the opposite has happened.
In the past year, dozens of similar sites -- so-called "darknet" markets — have sprung up in Silk Road's place. Just before it was shut down, Silk Road, along with three similar sites, had about 18,000 drug items listed for sale — everything from marijuana to ecstasy to heroin. By April 2014 -— six months later — there were 10 darknet markets listing 32,000 drug items for sale. By August of this year there were 18 darknet marketplaces with 47,000 drug listings, according to data compiled by the Digital Citizens Alliance.
Programmer Daryl Lau wanted to quantify the transactions happening on Silk Road 2.0, currently one of the largest darknet markets. From a purely practical standpoint, he also wanted to know if it was possible to scrape data from these sites, given the complicated security protocols. After "an hour or two of coding" he had a program up and running, and he's written up what he found at his Web site.
Not knowing quite where to start, he limited his queries to nine of the most commonly-used illicit drugs, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse: cocaine, heroin, opium, amphetamines, MDMA (ecstasy), ketamine, mescaline, LSD and marijuana. Taken together, these drugs account for about 28 percent of all drug items listed on Silk Road 2.0. Prescription drugs likely account for the lion's share of the remainder. A survey of the original Silk Road's users last year found that more esoteric drugs, with names like "2C" and "NBOMe", also accounted for a substantial share of purchases.

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