Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
When federal agents swarmed Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht at a public library in San Francisco, the arrest of the alleged kingpin did little to curtail others from selling and buying drugs on the Internet’s largely untraceable underground, the Baltimore Sun reports.
Silk Road is not the only online drug marketplace. Web sites such as Sheep Marketplace offer special browsers to allow users to anonymously buy just about anything.
There’s no way of telling how much money and drugs are being exchanged, but a look at Silk Road offers a glimpse into one enterprise: Authorities said the site sold $1.2 billion in drugs and other contraband in less than three years.
“People have had the ability to set up enterprises that violate laws for a long time,” said Phil Zimmermann, who developed PGP, or “pretty good privacy,” as a human rights tool in the 1990s, the Sun wrote. “I don’t think that Silk Road is any worse than any other … conduit through which you could sell anything legal or illegal.”
