"The markets will keep moving overseas, but law enforcement will keep going after the dealers," he said, referring to the people who actually ship and deliver the drugs sold online. law enforcement," said Nicholas Weaver of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. Newer dark sites (two major ones are Agora and Evolution) are likely to protect their servers by basing them in countries "hostile to U.S. The cat-and-mouse game may shift as well. "The long-term impact was the sites got smarter. "I think it's a mixed bag for law enforcement," Bartlett said by phone on Thursday. The jury took less than four hours to convict him.Īt the same time, however, the high-profile trial gave a lot of publicity to the dark web, and both the number of sites and the volume of people using them have increased since Silk Road was shuttered, notes The Dark Net author Jamie Bartlett, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. A college friend testified that Ulbricht had confided to him that he created Silk Road, and the FBI traced $13.4 million in bitcoins back to Ulbricht's e-wallet, according to Wired. Ulbricht, they said, had even asked applicants to his "bitcoin startup" to use his eponymous Gmail address. Using his laptop, journal, chat logs, and the network's servers in Iceland and Pennsylvania, prosecutors unloaded a mountain of evidence against Ulbricht and identified him as the man behind the pseudonym, Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht's arrest and conviction was a victory for the feds, which had caught him "literally with his fingers on the keyboard" at a San Francisco library after a Department of Homeland Security agent had infiltrated Silk Road and posed as one of Ulbricht's employees. With Ulbricht in the headlines, the price of Bitcoin plummeted, and the closures of Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0 forced other major hubs of the dark web to add new levels of security to evade law enforcement. In many ways, the largest shift came when federal agents arrested Ulbricht in October 2013 and accused him of being the mastermind of Silk Road, the $1.2 billion criminal enterprise that operated on the hidden Tor network and used Bitcoin as its currency. Yet beyond sending a 30-year-old to prison, what does Ulbricht's conviction mean for the so-called "dark web," which continues to grow even after the government shut down both the original Silk Road and its immediate successor? That's far murkier, say experts on cybercrime and privacy issues. law enforcement can not only find, but successfully prosecute online operators of the drug market who cloak their criminal dealings behind hidden web addresses-especially when those operators slip up by, say, talking about their drug deals in messages linked to a personal Gmail account. The Wednesday conviction of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht on seven felony charges demonstrated at least one thing pretty clearly: U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |