On Oct. 1, I began a search for the online market known as the Amazon of drugs: the Silk Road. I had heard stories about this place before from friends — and friends of friends — whose experience with drugs and technology far exceeded my own.
Named for the ancient trade routes running from China to Arabia and Eastern Europe, this website was a place where anything from books to art to cigarettes could be bought or sold without interference from any sort of outside authority.
Of course, in a setting like this, the majority of the market was dominated by drugs — 70 percent of the products traded on this site were drugs. Heroin, MDMA, marijuana, cocaine, even old world vices like opium — all this was available.
I hadn’t heard of anything like it since the tent city at Bonnaroo. I wanted to see this thing for myself, and finally, my curiosity got the better of me. So I Googled “Silk Road marketplace” and found several blog posts with detailed instructions on how to find this digital drug bazaar. One can’t find access to the Silk Road just anywhere. To find it, you need to download a special browser called Tor — the only browser capable of finding the Silk Road — and a proxy server service to protect your identity. On top of that, all transactions are carried out in Bitcoins, a digital currency, to further protect anonymity. All these things sounded complicated and very shady. So I put off finding the market until another day, perhaps indefinitely.
Twelve hours later, the FBI arrested the founder of the Silk Road and shut down the site. Ross William Ulbricht, known on the marketplace as the Dread Pirate Roberts, left clues to his identity on forums around the web. He also hired a hit man to kill a former employee, but unfortunately for DPR, the “hit man” was an undercover agent. The website itself was seized, as well as the government’s biggest haul of Bitcoins to date — 26,000 (more than $3,156,000).
Clearly, Ulbricht broke many, many laws, and he probably deserved to go to jail. But was his “economic experiment” shut down because he solicited murder or to win a victory in the drug war? Or is there something larger at play? It doesn’t appear to be coincidence that, in the midst of a government shutdown, the FBI continued its dogged pursuit to destroy this blatant challenge to the government’s power.
This wasn’t really about drugs or murder — this was about control. In this age of Snowden, Manning and Assange, the Internet is the government’s worst enemy. It’s an anarchic, decentralized place that doesn’t actually exist in the real world and manages to elude and embarrass the government at every turn.
Alec Carver is a UF journalism freshman. His column runs on Wednesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 10/9/2013 under the headline "Silk Road shut down, but not for drugs"
