Silk Road Takedown
In an attempt to wipe drug marketplaces off of the deep web the FBI seized the silk road servers in October 2013 and took them offline, if this had been a successful method then all it would have done is force drug dealing back into the real world leading to an increase in drug related deaths and violence. It is almost as though victimless crime such as online drug dealing isn’t what they desire, they prefer real life violence to keep the masses fully supportive of their over militarized police forces and to ensure there isn’t any drops in funding from the federal government.
In the scenario described by the FBI, the takedown of the Silk Road happened not because of a Tor software failure but because of a failure to properly secure the website, according to Forbes contributor and Tor expert Runa Sandvik. “To have a secure Tor service, one needs to ensure that the code is secure, that the web server only accepts connections from Tor, and that the server does not reveal its real IP address. The vulnerability through which the FBI says it discovered the servers is surprisingly simple. Sandvik says she’s surprised that the FBI would be the first to discover a vulnerability that simple when there were Silk Road users hunting for bugs daily on the website.”
The fact that the fault was with the webmaster and not the Tor software meant that further people would not be deterred from creating similar marketplaces if they believed they could secure them, this lead to the FBI completely failing to deal with the rise of the other identical darknet markets which boasted higher levels of security such as Agora.
Silk Road Seizure Aftermath
American organizations love to just steam into a plan without every thinking ‘what are we going to do afterwards to ensure this doesn’t happen again’, just look at the invasion of Iraq and you will realise cutting off the head of the snake does not work when 3 new heads grow in its place. After taking down Silk Road they should have put considerable effort into making sure no new marketplace steps up to take their place.
What the FBI didn’t realize was that Silk Road was not very popular, of course there was a lot of drugs being sold but when its happening in a safe controlled environment then why would you want to shut that down. It is almost as if they didn’t expect anyone to have the guts to become the new market leader, however when there is that much money to be made someone will always be willing to step up. This miscalculation cost the FBI dearly as they basically just told everyone about these secret websites where you can easily buy drugs that are discretely delivered to your front door.
At the time Silk Road was seized in October 2013, it had 13,000 drug listings, followed by Black Market Reloaded pushing 3,567 drug listings and Sheep Marketplace with close to 1,500, according to figures from the Digital Citizens Alliance. This is not a huge number of listings and the increase after the FBI gave all the darknets free advertising was substantial. Now the market leader AlphaBay had 21,372 drug listings when checked, Abraxas was next with 16,000 followed by Nucleus with 13,000. I would just like to say thank you to the FBI for accidentally growing the darknet market economy with your incompetence.
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