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Saturday, March 23, 2013
Silk Road: the online drug marketplace that officials seem powerless to stop
Silk Road: the online drug marketplace that officials seem powerless to stop
Authorities around the world know about the website, but closing it is another matter – partly because it uses Bitcoins
The Silk Road online marketplace, which lists more than 10,000 items, 7,000 of which are drugs
Johnson has no idea who has sent him the envelope: he has never met his dealer, and never will. The delivery was facilitated through a website called Silk Road, an underground eBay-like site which has become the core marketplace for buying and selling drugs online – and despite law enforcement authorities across the world being fully aware of its operation they have, so far, been powerless to stop it.
The site has been shrouded in secrecy even since it was founded in February 2011, but research due to be formally published later this year tracked its growth during six months of last year. Over those months, sales on the site doubled, hitting $1.7m a month.
Johnson, a TV executive, is one of those contributing to those monthly takings. Describing himself as "not excited or impressed by drugs per se", but "interested" in them, he explains how he came to the Silk Road.
"I heard about it at a party, from the type of guy you only ever meet at parties," he said. "I missed the last train. I might as well go hard. His brown envelope proved to be a veritable party bag, reminiscent of Hunter S Thompson. Where had he found all this? The Silk Road."
Once you're in, it works much like eBay: sellers' reputations are verified through feedback, building trust. Money is typically held in an escrow (a trusted middleman) until delivery, with missing packages qualifying for partial refunds.
In all, he concludes, the quality is more consistent, the sale is safer, and the experience better than trying to find a street dealer. Johnson even claims the site helps combat addiction.
"There are some highly addictive and dangerous substances available on Silk Road, so instant access wouldn't be advisable," he concludes. "You must undertake the purchase soberly, with plenty of occasions to confirm your intentions."
Silk Road today lists more than 10,000 items, 7,000 of which are drugs, with erotica, books and fake IDs among the rest. Notably missing are weapons of any sort (a sister site selling weapons shut due to lack of demand last year) and child pornography, both of which are banned.
Dr Nicolas Christin, who researched the site, believes Silk Road is far bigger today than it was in July 2012 when his fieldwork ended. "It's not a matter of the police locking a few guys up to end this," he said. "It is very distributed: we are looking at more than 600 sellers each month."
How has a marketplace with millions of pounds of revenue survived the long arm of the law? The answer, according to its users, lies in the way it is structured.
Silk Road is no secret to law enforcement, who know where to find it online – indeed, shortly after the site's existence was first reported in 2011, the senior US senator Chuck Schumer vowed to shut it down.
"It's a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen," he said.
The site continued uninterrupted, thanks to two technological innovations that make it all but impregnable.
The first is that Silk Road runs as a "hidden service" on a popular internet anonymising tool known as Tor. This makes identifying the physical location of the computers operating the marketplace – or anyone visiting it – all but impossible.
The legitimate uses of Tor make disrupting the service morally difficult: it is a staple of activists avoiding internet censorship or government crackdowns the world over, including in China, Iran and Syria. Indeed, a large proportion of Tor's funding comes – albeit indirectly – from the US state department's internet freedom budget.
In his paper, Christin raised the possibility that authorities might instead try to disrupt Silk Road's other protection: its use of the anonymous, stateless, encrypted online currency known as Bitcoin. But that's a task that's only getting harder.
Bitcoins are a currency controlled by no government, no company, and no group, but rather by maths: a series of complex cryptographic calculations rule how many Bitcoins are in existence and how many are traded.
Silk Road is probably the biggest use of the currency, followed by an unregulated online gambling site known as Satoshidice.
But more mainstream services are adopting the currency: the blogging platform Wordpress accepts Bitcoins, as does the social news site Reddit. WikiLeaks opened up to Bitcoin when the mainstream banking system blockaded the site.
At the currency's birth, Bitcoins were almost worthless – five cents each. Today, a single Bitcoin trades at $70 (£46) – and the total value of all the world's Bitcoins has topped $800m (£500m). On the face of it, this makes Bitcoin the fastest-growing currency in the world.
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Unravelling the dark web
http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2013-02/07/silk-road-online-drugs-guns-black-market/viewall
By Oliver Franklin 07 February
13
Forget South American cartels
and Russian arms dealers: the black market has moved online
On a chilly April morning in
2011, in the Dutch city of Lelystad,
Marc Willems was sitting at home on his computer, surfing the web, when the
police burst in and seized him. At that moment, more than 5,000 miles away at El Dorado airport in Bogotá,
Colombia, migration
officials and agents from America's
Drug Enforcement Administration were arresting another man, Michael Evron, as
he was attempting to board a flight to Buenos
Aires. Within 24 hours, agents across America had rounded up six more men - in Iowa, Michigan, Georgia, New York,
New Jersey and Florida.
By the end of the day, the US
Department of Justice was hailing Operation "Adam Bomb" as the first
of its kind. They released a 66-page court indictment, compiled over two years
and listing numerous charges, but it boiled down to one thing: the men, they
alleged, had been operating a website, the Farmer's Market, that acted as an
online narcotics marketplace - an illicit eBay, if you like - where drug
dealers could peddle their wares to customers in 34 countries. But the Farmer's
Market wasn't your average website - for one, the address didn't work in a
regular web browser. It belonged to the "dark web": a growing number
of sites hidden from Google and the prying eyes of law-enforcement agencies,
using anonymity technology. In a written statement, Briane M Grey, the acting
special agent in charge of the operation, issued a warning: "Today's
action should send a clear message to organisations that are using technology
to conduct criminal activity, that the DEA and our law-enforcement partners
will track them down and bring them to justice."
Want to
buy an M4A3 assault
rifle, a forged UK
passport or a few grams of crystal meth and have it delivered to your door? On
the dark web you can
But on the dark web, the
Farmer's Market wouldn't be missed. Despite the dozens of agents involved in
Operation Adam Bomb, the site was small-time. Its competitors had long outgrown
it. Worse, in the eyes of dark- web users, the Farmer's Market had made
mistakes that allowed law enforcers to seize e-mails and payment details. The
site had been around for years, they said. It hadn't been careful enough.
Meanwhile, business on the online black market was booming.
Want to buy an M4A3 assault rifle, a forged UK passport
or a few grams of crystal meth and have it delivered to your door?
On the dark web you can
Silk Road
Around the turn of the
millennium, researchers at the US Naval Research Lab in Washington DC
had a problem: how to protect military communications from eavesdroppers
online. With help from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, they developed a solution: a program known as Tor. This hides your
identity online by encrypting transmissions and bouncing them between thousands
of users around the world - from Birmingham to Beijing via Berlin and Baghdad, say. Anyone
monitoring the communication would be incapable of discovering the location or
identity of the sender.
In 2006, Tor became a nonprofit
organisation and now attracts more than 500,000 users a day, from Arab Spring
bloggers to Chinese dissidents. But Tor doesn't just hide individuals - it can
also hide entire websites. Whereas a web page might be traced to a server farm
or your office's IT department, a hidden site's location is buried in the
network. The address operates only when accessed over Tor. You can set up a
site from a hidden location, with an unlisted web address, and - so the theory
goes - remain completely anonymous. Welcome to the dark web.
Silk Road
Want to buy an M4A3 assault rifle, a forged UK passport or
a few grams of crystal meth and have it delivered to your door? On the dark web
you can find it, on sites such as BlackMarket Reloaded, where AK47s are on sale
alongside Afghan heroin, or CC Paradise, selling stolen credit-card data. You
can even find dubious listings for contract killers (yours for £12,500, half up
front). But the biggest digital black market-place of all is called Silk Road.
Silk Road - named after the
ancient trade route between Asia and Europe -
opened in February 2011. The site is similar to eBay or Amazon: users can sign
up and buy and sell almost whatever they please. It has a rudimentary
green-and-white design, but all the functionality you'd expect from a legal
online marketplace: individual seller pages, buyer feedback, even an escrow
system to protect against fraudulent vendors.
Two
American senators described it as "the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs
online that we have ever seen"
Joining is simple and
anonymous. The home page shows off the latest deals, with crude home-shot
photos of the products, listed by category: drugs are broken up into classes
like "prescription" and "opioids". All you need to do is
place an order, send the delivery address to the seller (usually encrypted, so
only the intended recipient can read it) and wait for your package to arrive. Silk Road takes a small percentage of the fee. The site
quickly became a hit among drug dealers for selling everything from
prescription painkillers to uncut cocaine. Soon word was circulating across the
dark web. Then, on 1 June 2011, the gossip site Gawker published an article on Silk Road. The story went viral. Within days, two
American senators had called for the site to be closed, describing it as
"the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever
seen".
"It was wild," said
Adrian Chen, the Gawker staff writer who broke the story. "People were
shocked to know that it's actually happening."
The media frenzy had
unintended, if inevitable, consequences: visitors to the Silk
Road soared. "I got e-mails from people asking how to get
on," recalls Chen. New customers poured in through Tor. Soon you could buy
an even wider variety of illicit goods, from credit-card skimmers to fire-arms.
The growing presence of arms dealers on the site was a contentious issue. Those
who were simply there to buy and sell drugs started complaining to Silk Road's anonymous administrators - some major dealers
even threatened to quit the site. So Silk Road
launched a dedicated version of the site for weaponry called the Armory,
allowing gun sellers to advertise everything from Glock 19 handguns to plastic
explosives. (A few months later, Silk Road
closed the Armory - because it wasn't making enough profit. Clearly, it's
harder to ship a shotgun in the mail than a few tabs of LSD.) Meanwhile, trade
on Silk Road was roaring.
In spring 2012, Nicolas
Christin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon university's cyber-security research
centre, monitored activity on Silk Road for
six months and estimated sales on the marketplace of £14.2m a year. Not bad for an 18-month-old start-up.
"The total volume of sales was increasing quite significantly," said
Christin, on the phone from his office in Pittsburgh.
"The number of active sellers almost doubled over six months. So it
definitely was growing. The numbers are probably even higher now." In his
paper, Christin also calculated sales on the Silk Road
were earning the site's creators £1m
a year. Somebody was making a lot of money from Silk Road.
But who?
The founder of Silk Road calls himself "the Dread Pirate
Roberts", a pseudonym taken from William Goldman's fantasy novel The
Princess Bride. On the Silk Road forums,
"DPR" is described as a "hero", "revolutionary"
and "pro-viding a valuable public service". Soon after Gawker's
exposé, the hunt for Roberts went global. In America,
the DEA confirmed it was investigating the Silk Road.
Last year the Australian Federal Police announced they were investigating the
site, warning users that "anyone engaging in illegal activity through
online marketplaces such as Silk Road... will
not always remain anonymous". In Britain, the notoriously secretive
Serious Organised Crime Agency told GQ that it is aware of the
"so-called 'hidden' areas of the web" and that it has "the
capability to investigate organised criminal groups seeking to exploit
them". (Both SOCA and the Metropolitan Police have turned down Freedom of
Information requests regarding any investigation into Silk
Road, leading some to speculate that an investigation is ongoing.)
"Federal law-enforcement
agencies are all looking at this kind of activity," an American government
official told GQ. "Silk Road is
hardly a secret. The folks that are involved with that know that they are a
high-profile target."
Two American senators described it as "the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen"
Silk Road
But, so far, the creator of the
biggest black marketplace on the dark web remains elusive. Last autumn, GQ
met Runa Sandvik, a London-based Tor developer who has studied the dark web. A
petite Norwegian blonde, Sandvik has advised law-enforcement agencies
investigating hidden sites. "It's privacy by design," she explained.
"The same functionality that protects users in China
or Iran from oppressive
governments protects people using Silk Road.
We work with the law-enforcement agencies to make sure they know how Tor works,
what it can and cannot do, but we also make it very clear that we can't trace
users ourselves. Configured correctly, there's nothing you can really do."
Asked if there was any way to
shut down the site, Sandvik shrugged. "The Silk Road
is a custom-built website, so you could hack it - but even if it were possible
to take it down that way, legally you can't. In the UK, you'd be breaking the Computer
Misuse Act."
Intrigued, GQ messaged
Silk Road's administrator - the Dread Pirate Roberts himself - to ask whether
he was worried about the law-enforcement agencies trying to track him down. Two
days later, on returning to the site, there was a response on the glowing
screen in dark letters: "No." Asked why, he simply wrote: "I
have confidence in our security measures."
Silk Road is hardly a secret. The folks
that are involved with that know that they are a high-profile target.
American
government offical
They say when you're trying to
catch a criminal, follow the money - which led GQ to a blandly lit
conference room at London's Royal National Hotel on a weekend last September,
listening to cryptographers and laptop economists talk about a currency that
doesn't really exist. Bitcoin is a digital currency established in 2009 by
another pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency exists only online
and transactions are encrypted, so that users can be anonymous. Rather than
using named bank accounts, amounts are transferred between web-like addresses
called "wallets". Coins can be traded for real-world currency at
online exchanges. While the exchange rate has fluctuated wildly, at the time of
writing one coin is worth about £7.50, valuing the total number of Bitcoins in
circulation at around £75m.
"It's designed to provide
people with privacy," Mike Hearn, a British-born Bitcoin developer, said
between talks at the second annual Bitcoin Conference. "You don't have to
provide an identity simply to use the system, you can just get started. But the
underlying purpose behind this is not to allow people to buy drugs, or
terrorist financing. I see it as a tremendous way to open up innovation in
payments." Due to the anonymity it provides, Bitcoin has been embraced by
the online black market. Transactions on the Silk Road
are conducted exclusively in Bitcoin, and Roberts' association with the
currency seems inescapable. "[Previously] you could get anonymity on the
network, but there was still this issue with payment," explained Christin.
"There wasn't a way of guaranteeing anonymity at all levels before. [With
Bitcoin] there is, now. It's not perfect security - but people are confident
they're not going to get caught. I think this was the piece of the puzzle that
was missing."
In May 2012, an FBI report on
the currency leaked online. "Since Bitcoin does not have a centralised
authority, law enforcement faces difficulties detecting suspicious activity,
identifying users and obtaining transaction records," it read. More
damningly, it revealed the FBI had only "medium confidence" it could
"in some cases" identify criminals using Bitcoin on the black market.
Despite this, some think
Bitcoin could be the answer to finding the founders of Silk
Road. Transactions between "wallets" are all visible in
a public log called the block chain. Even if you can't know a user's name, you
could watch the movement of money across the network - and whoever is running Silk Road must be receiving a lot of Bitcoins. This
theory led to the growth of a small group of experts trying to trace the flow
of money into Silk Road, to see if it leads to
Roberts'. For months, there was nothing. Then, last summer, a user by the name
"Arkanos" on BitcoinTalk - a forum for enthusiasts - stumbled across
a wallet containing more than 500,000 Bitcoins. At the time, the exchange rate
was around £5 per coin, valuing the contents at more than £2.5m. Someone was hoarding one of the largest
sums of the digital currency ever discovered. Not only that, Arkanos claimed
that he had traced money paid into the large account from Silk
Road. Then he disappeared without a trace.
Silk Road is hardly a secret. The folks that are involved with that know that they are a high-profile target.
American government offical
Soon, a handful of the Bitcoin
community got to work: following money paid into Silk Road
and analysing the block chain to see if it turned up in the wallet. Though not
conclusive, the evidence pointed to one thing: whoever owned the wallet was
almost certainly involved in Silk Road.
Further evidence suggested a link between the account and Bitcoin Savings &
Trust, an investment fund (and widely suspected ponzi scheme) promising users
up to seven per cent weekly interest on deposits. But there was more: the
founder of the fund called himself Pirateat40.
The link seemed too good to be
true. Could the Dread Pirate Roberts and Pirateat40 be one and the same? What
if Bitcoin Savings & Trust was accepting "clean" deposits and
paying back investors with Silk Road profits -
paying seven per cent to launder digital drug money? But as users tried to
gather more proof, the investigation hit a wall. Even if the account really
belonged to Roberts, thanks to Bitcoin there was still no way of discovering
his real identity unless he cashed out into a real-world currency at an
exchange. Then, in August, without fanfare, the 500,000 Bitcoins disappeared.
"Now that there is
stronger evidence it was [related to Silk Road],
the wallet is empty and funds that were in it have been laundered somewhere
else," Christin told GQ in an e-mail. "Who knows... There is
no absolute smoking gun."
Dread Pirate Roberts remains
anonymous. "A year after an American senator came out and said Silk Road needs to be shut down, it's bigger than
ever," said Gawker's Adrian Chen. "It's hard to believe technology
could allow people to completely flaunt the law like that."
Silk Road
That does not mean the hunt is
over. "Traditional law-enforcement methods still apply," said
Sandvik. "Writing-style analysis, looking at how people behave - when they
post, when the site is available." Such analysis has already shed some
light on Roberts. For example, he's not working alone. Roberts' posts
occasionally refer to "we" and "our" - as he did when I
messaged him - and Silk Road has posted a job
opening for a database expert. His use of American spelling and the timing of
his posts - rarely late at night on the East Coast - could suggest that Roberts
is based in America.
It's also unlikely that they're moving. "The Silk
Road database is probably huge," Sandvik explained. "If
he starts moving stuff, there will be a lot of red flags." As for whether
they'll ever find him... "I imagine that maybe one day they'll pick up
some guy for some other drug-related crime, search his house and just happen to
stumble upon the server."
Meanwhile, the dark web is
growing. Tools like Tor, combined with Bitcoin, have transformed the black
market in the same way the web has for regular businesses: from traditional
top-down supply chains to a vast peer-to-peer network of anonymous individuals.
"It's not just one site - there's a whole hidden economy fuelling all
sorts of illegal activity," said John Lyons, CEO of the International
Cyber Security Protection Alliance and former co-ordinator of the UK's National
Hi-Tech Crime Unit. "It's a huge issue and one I've raised many times at
government level... There are measures we can take. The Government could work
with regimes around the world who might be capable of taking these sites down
without infringing their own laws. It could legislate against these
alternative-payment mechanisms; kill the transactions and you kill the
business. But, at the moment, there's no cohesive strategy."
At the time of writing, the Silk Road remains open for business. As for the Dread
Pirate Roberts, he recently posted a message to his customers. "I've never
had so much fun. I know we've been at it for over a year now, but really, we
are just getting started." He signed off with a yellow smiley face, grinning
ear to ear.
販毒網站絲路 各國拿它沒辦法
2013-3-25
| 非法網站「絲路（Silk Road）」在網路上販售多種毒品，每個月銷售達170萬美元（約5000萬台幣）的毒品，但由於該網站使用網路匿名工具隱藏主機地點和訪客、並透過虛擬貨幣交易，因此多國執法單位到目前為止也拿它沒辦法。 每月銷售額達5千萬台幣 根 據英國「衛報」、「每日郵報」報導，「絲路」運作方式類似拍賣網站eBay或電子零售商亞馬遜（Amazon），有賣家、買家，設有解決爭議和買家評價賣 家的機制，該網站上販售商品逾1萬項，其中7000項是毒品，包括迷幻藥、海洛因、大麻、古柯鹼等，其他如假身分證件、色情影片等，買家下訂後，物品會被 偽裝成普通包裹透過郵局郵寄。 「絲路」網站自2011年2月曝光以來一直相當神秘，但根據今年稍晚將發布的一份追蹤研究報告，該網站在 2012年的6個月期間，每月銷售額就加倍達到170萬美元，而且持續成長。進行這份研究的克里斯汀（Nicholas Christin）博士指出，要查禁「絲路」極為困難，「這不是警察鎖定幾個傢伙就能解決的，它非常分散，我們要找的是每個月有600多個賣家。」 虛擬位元幣 全球成長最快 美 國參議員舒默（Chuck Schumer）曾揚言要查封這個網站，但「絲路」至今難以查緝的原因有二，一是網站採用簡稱Tor的「洋蔥路由（The Onion Router）」匿名網路系統，隱匿架設網站的主機和訪客IP位址，令執法者無法追查實體位置。Tor是免費軟體，通常是中國和伊朗等這類國家內權益運動 人士為了避免遭當局壓迫，用來匿名突破政府網路封鎖的工具，而且Tor有一大部分資金間接來自美國國務院的網路自由預算，這種正當用途使得警方在道德上也 很難阻斷Tor系統。 另一個是「絲路」只用虛擬貨幣「位元幣（Bitcoin）」交易。「位元幣」以一連串複雜的數學運算決定流通量和交易 量，具有匿名性、無國界等特性，不受任何政府或企業規範和干涉，目前1位元幣匯率最高約70美元，而全球現有位元幣總值約8億美元（239億台幣），是全 世界成長最快速的貨幣。 |
