The dark side of the Internet: Drugs and Weapons

While the Internet has always led the way forward with different innovations leading to increased accessibility of a lot of information, it has also created ways for people to do malicious things. Silk Road is an example of how the Internet has enabled people to acquire illegal things. Silk Road was created in February of 2011 and was an online black market, a website where people could buy and sell anything, legal or illegal. This included drugs of any kind and information, among many other things. Seller accounts were, at first, auctioned off to the highest bidder due to limited accounts. Then, due to the success of Silk Road, they removed the cap on how many seller accounts could be created and seller accounts were just charged a fixed price to be created. When you think about it, how Silk Road did not get shut down within days of its creation is pretty incredible.

Eventually, after about two years of investigation by the FBI, the website was shut down and Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Prate Roberts,” was charged with being the site’s founder. Several months after Silk Road had been shut down, a new Silk Road 2.0 had been created with a new “Dread Prate Roberts” and assurances were made by the administrators of the new site that it had vastly improved security, however this website was too shut down about a year after it was created. There are many variations of this type of website that are created and shut down.

Another website very close to Silk Road is The Armory. It ran in a fashion similar to Silk Road in the way that it was paid for through bit coins and it allowed you to purchase things that shouldn’t be accessible to all people. The Armory allowed you to purchase pistols, rifles, shotguns, and more without having to do anything besides pay for it. No background checks were run or anything of that nature. That could have possibly allowed for a group of people to arm themselves through this website and, if they so chose, either shoot up a school or a hospital or do something of that nature. Thankfully, The Armory was shut down when Silk Road was shut down, but there are still sites similar to it, the same way there are sites similar to Silk Road.

It is inevitable that sites like Silk Road and The Armory continue to pop up due to the sheer demand for drugs, weapons, and the other things sold, and the lengths that some people will go to acquire these items. Silk Road was only one of these drug websites. There are other sites just like it up and running at this very moment that the FBI are seeking out and hunting down. These sites are only possible through the anonymity that the Internet allows a person to have through different codes and routing numbers.  Massive drug rings and markets on such a scale (totaling over 1.2 billion dollars in about two years) are simply not possible without the Internet providing the wide spread accessibility to said drug markets.