Slipping on Silk Road

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SAM MICHAELS
<Staff Writer>

    Ross Ulbricht – Mastermind behind the  Silk Road

This week, the FBI took down the site once thought to be the internet’s Forbidden City. The infallible Silk Road is gone, replaced with a United States Government warning, signaling the potential for sweeping changes in how the internet and society interact. If you don’t know what the Silk Road is, well, the secret is out, so a quick Google search will fill you in. Essentially, it’s an online black market for drugs, fake passports, and instructional manuals for everything from bomb making to money laundering. The holy grail of the infamous “deep web,” the Silk Road operated purely on Bitcoin (another no-longer-secret part of the web), and its disappearance means uncertainty and confusion for both these once sacred institutions of internet anonymity.

The deep web consists of the thousands of terabytes of information on the internet which are hidden from search engines. It is the collection of hidden pages and programs which fuel mainly illegal internet activity. Everything from terrorist training to meth manufacture is available somewhere on the internet, and most likely, you have to know the exact address to find it, and be using TOR (a network that provides you anonymity while on the internet) when you access it. If you do find yourself on such a site, under such conditions, you are in the dark web.

Once there, you will likely need bitcoins to get any meaningful work done. This currency, developed by a still unknown person or group under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, exists purely as an internet currency, part of an open-source protocol free from central authority. Bitcoin transactions are processed through servers called “bitcoin miners,” which in turn create newly minted bitcoins, which circulate the peer-to-peer network. The entire concept can be hard to understand, and is worth far more investigation than this paragraph can provide, but it’s important to get some definitions across so as to give substance to two important facts. Bitcoins ownership is anonymous, and the bitcoin market is only controlled by the process, which creates and maintains it.

When the FBI took down the Silk Road, important statements were made about the deep web, bitcoin, and the respective limitations of each. Firstly, the investigation was successful thanks to traditional evidence, not a new technique or technology. This is significant because it means that the barriers users thought they were building every time they accessed the deep web are not nearly as strong as they thought. When it comes to busting the creators of a drug marketplace it seems like the value of the privacy they thought they had is minimal. However, we must consider whether the FBI is trying to set the precedent regarding how all encrypted or hidden internet activity should be treated during criminal investigations.

This consideration is empowered when we look at what happened to the bitcoins Silk Road transactions operated on. The FBI seized over $3.1 million. In a physical sense, this means that the information with the privacy keys for various bitcoin wallets were placed on a server and secured. But can they really lay charges using as evidence a virtual currency? And what of the owners of the bitcoins? Each code is only owned by another code, the entire system would have to be retraced backwards to find the actual owner of each bitcoin wallet. Will the FBI dismantle a global currency in the pursuit of alleged criminals?

Bitcoins represent a possible future for our understanding of currency as a whole. The way the American courts interpret their purpose and use in the upcoming Silk Road case will likely determine in part what role internet currency will come to play in our society. Bitcoin is already traded globally, and it’s growth is likely to continue, but the laws on the issue are still being developed. Likewise for the laws on the deep web. It’s well established that acting on the deep web does not necessarily mean acting in anonymity, but is there no protection at all? As our social and professional activity increasingly moves online, it is important that we ask what the line between the open web and deep web is, or if there really is a line at all.

Though I can’t say I will personally miss a website which featured murderers-for-hire and instructional guides for hacking bank websites, I will still be watching the death of the Silk Road closely. As the first case of its kind, the way the courts decide to punish, or not punish, the website’s creators will set in motion many of the techniques and strategies that will govern internet crime prosecution for years to come. Our vision of the internet has so far been one of an open, global community, which is why concepts such as Bitcoin have taken off with such excitement and promise. Even the notoriously seedy deep web was thought to be just another element of the online community, but now that may change. The way these concepts are redefined (or left alone), and the way the Silk Road prosecution plays out, will help shape our understanding of what the internet is as a whole. It’s hard to know whether a controlled system is better or worse than an open community, but either way, the battle between these views is now most definitely underway.

 

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