How Buying Drugs Online Became Safe, Easy, and Boring
Brian Doherty
December 2014
Once upon a time, you could buy illegal drugs anonymously online from a site called Silk Road. The postman would show up at your door with your gas bill, maybe a birthday card from mom, and some carefully packaged pot or heroin. Even though you had never met the person you bought the drugs from, the delivery came just as you ordered it.
That's because the secretive "darknet" site that made this possible-before being shut down by the feds in late 2013-operated a lot like any other online commerce site. Silk Road's pages, like those at Amazon or Yelp, were dense with seller ratings and reviews, guiding buyers to vendors with good records and high-quality products. Boisterous online forums were a click away, jammed with customer-generated information about drugs, dealers, safety, and whatever else the anonymous technorati wanted to chat about.
From January 2011 to the beginning of October 2013, the FBI estimates, Silk Road facilitated 1.2 million drug deals, moving thousands of kilos of illegal substances and collecting nearly $80 million in commissions. Clients were "typically professionals in the 30- to 40-year-old range" who "want to be treated with respect," one Silk Road dealer named "Nod" told The Daily Dot in January. The site provided a safe haven not just from the state-sponsored violence of being arrested but from the street hassle of transacting with physical-world drug dealers.
Silk Road's 950,000 registered users were largely satisfied with their consumer experience. A May 2014 paper in the journal Addiction found that 89 percent of customers surveyed said they chose the site for its wide range of choices, 77 percent valued the higher quality of drugs available, and 69 percent preferred the convenience. A 2012 study by Nicolas Christin for Carnegie Mellon found that 96 percent of Silk Road sellers boasted a consumer rating of 5 out of 5.
None of that mattered to the FBI. By July 2013, after months of investigation, the bureau had located Silk Road's servers in Iceland. The Reykjavik Metropolitan Police seized the site's guts and handed over copies of the contents to their American colleagues. On October 2 of that year, the feds shut Silk Road down, keeping nearly 30,000 Bitcoin-worth around $3.7 million at the time, $13 million as this goes to press-that had been left in vendor and customer accounts.
continued here http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/11/how-buying-drugs-online-became
Brian Doherty
December 2014
Once upon a time, you could buy illegal drugs anonymously online from a site called Silk Road. The postman would show up at your door with your gas bill, maybe a birthday card from mom, and some carefully packaged pot or heroin. Even though you had never met the person you bought the drugs from, the delivery came just as you ordered it.
That's because the secretive "darknet" site that made this possible-before being shut down by the feds in late 2013-operated a lot like any other online commerce site. Silk Road's pages, like those at Amazon or Yelp, were dense with seller ratings and reviews, guiding buyers to vendors with good records and high-quality products. Boisterous online forums were a click away, jammed with customer-generated information about drugs, dealers, safety, and whatever else the anonymous technorati wanted to chat about.
From January 2011 to the beginning of October 2013, the FBI estimates, Silk Road facilitated 1.2 million drug deals, moving thousands of kilos of illegal substances and collecting nearly $80 million in commissions. Clients were "typically professionals in the 30- to 40-year-old range" who "want to be treated with respect," one Silk Road dealer named "Nod" told The Daily Dot in January. The site provided a safe haven not just from the state-sponsored violence of being arrested but from the street hassle of transacting with physical-world drug dealers.
Silk Road's 950,000 registered users were largely satisfied with their consumer experience. A May 2014 paper in the journal Addiction found that 89 percent of customers surveyed said they chose the site for its wide range of choices, 77 percent valued the higher quality of drugs available, and 69 percent preferred the convenience. A 2012 study by Nicolas Christin for Carnegie Mellon found that 96 percent of Silk Road sellers boasted a consumer rating of 5 out of 5.
None of that mattered to the FBI. By July 2013, after months of investigation, the bureau had located Silk Road's servers in Iceland. The Reykjavik Metropolitan Police seized the site's guts and handed over copies of the contents to their American colleagues. On October 2 of that year, the feds shut Silk Road down, keeping nearly 30,000 Bitcoin-worth around $3.7 million at the time, $13 million as this goes to press-that had been left in vendor and customer accounts.
continued here http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/11/how-buying-drugs-online-became
