by Power, Mike
Of course there is a sinister side to this libertarian technology. Dig a little deeper around this hidden, or Dark Web and you’ll find pages that would give even the most extreme libertarian pause for thought. The Quick Kill page offers to ‘remove the problem in your life’ – for a payment of US $10,000 up front and US $10,000 once the target is eliminated. ‘We are here to do business’ say the site’s owners, reassuring – or disappointing – prospective customers that they will not kill political figures. It’s probably a scam, but it’s a disturbing one nonetheless. Hidden deeper in the layers of these .onion sites are weapons dealers who tell customers looking to spend less than US$10,000 to look elsewhere. They draw the line at biological weapons.
‘Somebody showed me a forum run by the Italian mafia on Tor and they traffic weapons and drugs and tonnes of garbage and toxic waste on a BBS,’ says one anonymous interviewee. ‘It’s hidden from public net, but it’s out in the open. They don’t use any code words, and they have the same juvenile jokes you’d see on a usual bulletin board system.’
Lewman is realistic about the fact that the network can be used by criminals, child pornographers, drug dealers and fraudsters. ‘Tor is just a technology. Silk Road and these other things would exist on something else if it wasn’t for Tor. I don’t know why they picked Tor and I don’t care. Our code is all open source, everything we do is open source, and is mirrored all over the world. So even if for whatever reason, let’s say the paedophile-terrorist-druglords and the four horsemen of the apocalypse take over Tor and that’s the majority usage, then the current Tor network could shut down, and just like a phoenix it will get born again. Then maybe we’ll have 10 or 1,200 Tor networks because everyone starts running their own.’
Drugs, you might consider, are the least of the authorities’ worries when it comes to the hidden underbelly of the net. But not so: in June 2011 the US demonstrated that it is not content only to fight endless and expensive wars in real life, but that it now intends to take its pyrrhic battles online. That month, Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Joe Manchin of West Virginia wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and DEA Administration head Michele Leonhart calling for the Silk Road to be shut down. Their startling lack of insight into how this part of the internet actually works might be forgivable in an uninterested or general web user. For legislators lobbying for its closure to fail to understand that the site is not findable, and even if it were found, could simply resurface elsewhere on the Dark Web, virtually guarantees that the network, and others like it, will exist, grow and gain strength for many years to come – for as long, in fact, as drugs are illegal. There really isn’t any way to shut down the Silk Road unless multiple governments synchronize a worldwide jam of the entire internet – as Egypt did for a few brief days in January 2011 during the Arab Spring revolution. It soon came back online when businesses started losing money.
‘All the war on drugs does is knock off the idiots on the corner because they sell it to undercover cops,’ Lewman says. ‘The big drug cartels can afford submarines and planes, and bribe entire police departments, which means the money is flowing somewhere. The DEA are going after the humans.’ He says the DEA’s interest was piqued by Senators Schumer and Manchin’s bluster. ‘In a long line of things that will kill America, Silk Road is the worst right now. That got a lot of attention and press but had the opposite effect to what they wanted. What people heard was that Silk Road has really good drugs!’ he says.
Silk Road’s owners are entirely anonymous. But the name of the current site administrator is an intriguing clue as to the way the service may be run. Though Dread Pirate Roberts was previously named Silk Road in the market’s attached forum pages, and Admin in the marketplace itself, he renamed himself in February 2012, delighting in posts for days beforehand in the appropriateness of the name he would soon reveal. It turned out he had chosen to call himself after a swashbuckling pirate character in the 1973 fantasy novel The Princess Bride by renowned American screenwriter William Goldman. In that work, the Dread Pirate Roberts is a persona assumed by many different characters, each of whom hands the mantle, name, responsibilities and ship to his chosen successor. It seems possible that the Silk Road site is run not by a single operator, but by a loosely tied conglomerate of individuals, each of whom successively takes the risk – and reaps the rewards – that running the site must entail. It’s impossible to say. Perhaps the name more simply nods at the popular respect for the outlaw-pirate hero figure who has thrived in a world where torrent downloads are far more respectable than shoplifting a DVD.
Appropriately enough, it was William Goldman who wrote the line ‘Follow the money’, in the 1976 film All the President’s Men, a phrase that has become the battle-cry for investigative journalists looking for examples of official corruption.2 The architecture of bitcoin, the currency used on the Silk Road by dealers and users, and other services deployed by the site, mean the money cannot be simply followed. Transactions are almost anonymous, and communications are encrypted between the intended recipients, making eavesdropping impossible.
Proof that the site delivered was broadcast in the UK in February 2012 when researchers from BBC Radio Five Live ordered and received a sample of very high-purity DMT. The sample was tested by John Ramsey at St George’s, and he said it was indeed excellent quality. The story was broadcast and published on the BBC’s website. Andrew Lewman audibly facepalms as he relates the story over the telephone. ‘What better advert could they have given? Not only does this illegal site sell rare drugs, it sells very high-quality product.’ But you didn’t need to trust the BBC. The forums at the site offered crowdsourced proof of the best vendors and worst scammers. In June 2012, reviews for the best LSD vendor ran to eighty-one pages, with 50,000 views, heroin to twenty-two pages with 8,000 views. Cocaine vendors were reviewed in a 292-page behemoth with over 90,000 views, and MDMA ran in at 129 pages with over 60,000 views.
One vendor said dealing drugs on the site wasn’t without its moral problems. ‘The prospect of a twelve-year-old loaded to the gills on my MDMA is not a pleasant one. Enabling self-destructive/addictive behaviour is also upsetting to me. Dealing in real life [IRL] you can recognize abuse and let customers know you’re concerned, but online, there’s no way to tell.’
He admitted, though, that vending on the site was financially much more lucrative than selling in real life: ‘IRL, you’re limited by your social circles, but here it’s only a question of supply, capital and hours in the day. Packaging straight-up sucks to do. It’s extremely monotonous and requires a good degree of concentration to avoid making any mistakes that might endanger the customer receiving. Sometimes during especially busy periods I spend 70, 80, 90 hours a week packaging, all of it extremely dull. Apart from the risk of being locked up for the next decade it’s definitely the worst part. Dealing in real life is much more pleasant.’
Greater paranoia about the authorities is another downside: ‘Public drug markets [such as this] are a giant middle finger to many powerful interests and so the political motivation to shut them down and lock up the people participating is out of proportion to the actual volume of illicit trade taking place. Last summer I was the “number one” (basically highest-volume) vendor on the site for a while, and the fear really crept up on me. I’d lie awake at night thinking about it, worrying I was going to have my door kicked down and be dragged away at any moment. I’m much more comfortable with it now, but if I had known from the start how much mental torment and stress were involved with vending, I probably wouldn’t have started.’
However, there are upsides, he says: ‘I find the day-to-day grind of vending online worse than dealing IRL, but the human interaction online is often a lot more uplifting in some ways. Most people I sell to IRL are club kids/raver types so they’re more predisposed towards hedonism (which I of course have nothing against!) than using for more spiritual/emotional reasons, so the feedback is less touching, which is a definite negative for me. I get emai
ls from Silk Road customers telling me how the drugs I sell have helped them with emotional or spiritual or sexual problems, people mending broken relationships, rekindling intimacy.’
If predictions that sites such as the Silk Road will become more popular, or even commonplace seem far-fetched, think back just seventeen years. At that point, Amazon.com was a three-person startup launching from a garage; today, it’s the first place most people look to buy almost any object that can be delivered.
And exactly the same issues confront users of online drugs markets today as faced those who dared enter their credit card details on to a bookshop’s website in the 1990s. Will the vendor deliver? Can I trust this software with my money? The only difference is that Silk Road customers might find themselves wondering whether their purchase will result in a jail sentence.
The motivation for people to use the Silk Road is high, given the prevailing legal climate. Considering that the Royal Mail in the UK delivers 15.9 billion items a year to the UK’s 29 million addresses3 and that small envelopes and packages are seldom opened, much less X-rayed or sniffed by dogs, capture, prosecution and imprisonment look unlikely.
One vendor on the site even offers a fake package service for the super-cautious: he’ll deliver you an empty box or envelope for a small charge, just to get the postman used to delivering packages from overseas.
Packaging by many vendors on the site is said to be exceptionally ingenious, and the protocol on the forums and in feedback forms below purchases is never to discuss the details of these. What’s more, there are vendors in many countries so there’s no need to worry about international postal or customs issues: users in the US or UK or the Netherlands – or indeed, in dozens of countries worldwide – can buy drugs from dealers in their own countries, removing the danger of border staff targeting their packages.
Technically, while the Tor network is now small, meaning its pages load more slowly than those on normal websites, in coming years the power of cloud computing means that more relays carrying the service will be able to be set up cheaply. In November 2011 Amazon’s cloud servers started hosting Tor bridges. For three dollars a month, users click and support the project, with no knowledge of the technology required. And in late 2012, the Noisebridge group of online activists made supporting the Tor network as easy as clicking on a donate button at Noisetor.net. Anonymity 2.0 – click here to buy now.
Most politicians speak as if they believe there is an ‘off’ button for the net that can be thrown without affecting business interests, too. But the dreams of early net pioneers, for better and for worse, are now coming true.
People are now connected to each other with no central hierarchy governing that process; information flows freely and respects no authority, and the network is indestructable.
As Roy Amara, a futurologist and Stanford computer engineer, and president of Institute for the Future, said: ‘We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.’
A new kind of currency is making official control of this area even harder. Bitcoin is an electronic cash system, produced using cryptography. It is a peer-to-peer currency, made by users, meaning that no central authority issues money or tracks transactions. For every legal bitcoin user, selling web design services or carrying out coding jobs for which they are paid in the currency, there are many more using bitcoins to buy drugs on the Silk Road. Bitcoin is today the preferred choice of hundreds of online drug dealers. You can buy bitcoins using cash or other currencies in hundreds of ways, with varying levels of anonymity. Using bitcoins can be, depending on how you use them, almost completely anonymous.
Originally, bitcoins were produced by ‘miners’ – a figurative term for computer owners who donated their processor time to the project and were rewarded with coins for their efforts. The currency, or rather, the system that creates the currency, was released to the web on 1 November 2008, as the world economic system teetered on the brink of systemic collapse. Anonymous software coder Satoshi Nakamoto issued the open source application, and included a sly reference to the latest banking bailout by Britain’s then-chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, buried in code for the so-called Genesis Block – the first coins ever ‘mined’, in January 2009.4
The main reason no purely digital currency has ever gained traction is because data-as-cash has a central flaw. As the music industry has discovered in recent years, digital information is infinitely copyable. Digital money, until now, could be spent again and again. To prevent this, a central banker would be required, someone who would maintain a sales ledger. But who could be trusted with such a thing? Bitcoin solved that problem by turning to the crowd for the answer, distributing the record of transactions much like a .torrent file.
Torrents are shared downloads, so when a user fires up their bit-torrent client and downloads, say, a film using a torrent file from an illegal site such as the Pirate Bay, they actually download millions of chunks of the file from a swarm of users at once, rather than one file from one central server. The torrent software on the downloaders’ machines then assembles the pieces of data into a film or music file.
Nakamoto’s elegant solution to the double-spend dilemma was to create what he called a ‘block chain’, a distributed, or shared ledger of all transfers of coins from one person to another. Crowdsourced, decentralized, massively distributed cryptographic cash had arrived.
Users, known as miners, donate processor time to maintain and update the block chain, which records all transactions between users, and in the process also ‘dig’ for new coins. Miners’ computers send evidence of those transactions to the network, racing each other to solve these irreversible crypotographic puzzles that contain several transactions. The first miner to crack these puzzles gets fifty new bitcoins as a reward, and those transactions are added to the blockchain. The puzzles are designed to become more complex over time as more miners come on board, which maintains production to one block every ten minutes, keeping the creation of new coins steady. The reward for successful mining also falls over time, from fifty to twenty-five coins per block, and drops sequentially by half every 210,000 blocks. In the year 2140, there will be no more bitcoins minted or mined – the software limits their production, meaning there will only ever be twenty-one million coins in existence, preventing inflation. They can, though, be divided to eight decimal places, with each sub-unit known as a satoshi, after the coder who invented them.
Bitcoin could almost be seen as performance art; it demonstrates in the most practical way what many people have never considered: that the system of money, of currency issuance, is illusory at best, deceptive at worst. As if to illustrate this, one truly psychedelic item was put up for sale on the Silk Road in July 2011, when a vendor named Uglysurfer offered pound weights of American copper pennies for 10.43/lb. The face value of the pennies was US$14.60, but at the time, copper prices were such that the metal contained within a American penny was worth almost three cents. Uglysurfer was demonstrating that the ‘fiat’ system of money and fractional reserve banking, whereby banks can and do create money from thin air, was not to be trusted.
‘Under the best conditions, I could walk into a bank and provide US$25 dollars in paper Federal Reserve Notes, and walk out with a box of 95 per cent copper pennies with a metal value of approximately US$64 (in copper),’ he explained. ‘Not a bad deal! Of course not all of the pennies will be 95 per cent copper, but the portion of 95 per cent copper pennies in the box have the proportional gain,’ he told me. ‘I have to sort the copper pennies from the zinc pennies and I have designed a system to automate the sorting based on pattern recognition of metal composition. So I use technology to sort and reach a scale of efficiency that makes the process profitable. In my opinion, fiat currencies are doomed simply because of the deception involved. As the populace is educated (and it looks like that education is about to be painfully forced on the masses – look at Greece) it will be a force of nature – the de
struction of the fiat model. Anonymity or the ability to act anonymously is a critical means to preserving individual freedom in the midst of tyrants. I am a true believer in financial privacy. My belief is today those that seek personal freedom become enemies of the state (as far as the state is concerned) and are in the eyes of the state criminals. Not unlike those who deal in drugs on Silk Road.’
