how bizarre

How Bizarre: Tales from the mysterious dark Web

by ron evans

Did you know that the internet as we know it makes up about 5% of the entire web? Netflix, Facebook, Pornhub, iCarly.com (oh what?) and anything that comes up in a Google search are all part of this tiny slice of internet pie known as the surface web. So what’s the other 95%? That is what’s known as the deep web. And as intriguing as that sounds, most of what makes up the deep web is simply the unindexed parts of the internet. Banking information and systems, databases, email servers, password protected accounts and connective information along with gazillions of random files and images. Many of which were uploaded by you - still being stored somewhere in the ether, long after you lost steam for your cat poetry Blogger page.

However, there is a small, shadowy area of the deep web used for...other purposes. This area is known as the dark web. And as the name implies, shit gets dark here. Well, kinda.

The stories most of us hear about the dark web are that it’s where bad people go to do bad things. Human trafficking, illegal gun commerce, child porn rings and drug sales. And yes, all of those things have certainly been a part of the doings in the dark web but at nowhere near the level as what goes on at the surface web. So why is the dark web supposedly so scary? In short, because the powers that be (police, governments, corporations) have no power there. Or at least not nearly the flex they’ve become accustomed to up on the surface. This is, of course, what drew the denizens of the dark web to it in the first place.

In the age of being tracked by every website we visit, every email we send, every Google search -insert panic-face emoji here- and even everywhere we go throughout our day, the notion of privacy is almost an abstract novelty of nostalgic thinking. And it’s been several slippery slopes that led us here. 20 years ago, we would have thrown a shit fit at the idea of allowing anybody free access to all of those things but now...it’s a daily occurrence. You know those app Terms of Agreement you have agreed to 174 times without reading? Most of those contain some variation of “you allow us to access your camera, images, videos, social media accounts and microphone at our leisure. Dummy. But do enjoy using our app to find out what you will look like as a 100 year old walrus. Dummy.”

AGREE. SUBMIT.

Moments later…

“Haha, yo I look hilarious as an old-ass walrus!”

SHARE TO FACEBOOK.

A growing number of individuals around the globe have gravitated toward hiding all of their information from these info voyeurs who are more likely to sell your data (including HD scans of your face) to corporations than watch you while you poop. But some of them could if they wanted to, because you told them they could. For privacy activists/enthusiasts it’s more about the principle of privacy than the particulars of where the data is going and how it’s being used. There’s often a knee jerk reaction to hearing someone ‘protesting too much’ about not wanting their privacy invaded. “What do they have to hide? I’m not breaking the law so what do I care if the government or corporate America wants to snoop on me?”

The problems with that kind of thinking are many, but suffice to say - some folks are adamant about simply living in a more private manner than our modern society is getting used to. Many of these people have found safe-ish harbor in the murky waters of the dark web.

Now, since every story, essay and documentary I have seen about the deep/dark web gives this disclaimer I suppose I will as well. Don’t go looking around there. You may see things you don’t wanna see (always more encouraging than anything else - I know) and you may end up on a list or two that you would likely prefer to be left off. That said, since you can’t get to the deep web with your normal browser searches you may be wondering how you do access it. Through what’s called The Onion Router or TOR.

Per Wikipedia: “In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called onion routers, each of which “peels” away a single layer, uncovering the data’s next destination.” In other words a different kind of browser made for accessing the unindexed internet. And of course, the dark web.

So what goes on there? Well, all the seedy things mentioned above to some degree but there’s also a bustling anti-Big Brother movement growing like a mold in the darkness of anonymity in forums and newsgroups. A collective of like-minded people from all corners of the globe networking with an aim to spread awareness of privacy violations, pushing political changes and essentially building their own version of the internet away from the prying eyes and regulations of the Man, including the idea of a truly free and anonymous commerce system.

In 2011, a mysterious marketplace appeared from the shadows of the dark web offering every kind of drug imaginable. Free shipping! It was called The Silk Road. Heroin, crack, LSD, molly and coke right alongside prescription narcotics of every sort. Some guns and other miscellaneous goods like fake ID’s to be had as well. Forbidden in the market were any stolen items, making kidnapping arrangements or hired-to-kill tomfoolery. More on that in a bit…

Of course the trick is staying hidden whilst shopping this Amazon of the underworld. Enter: Bitcoin. It really took the development of cryptocurrency to make something like The Silk Road feasible. And while bitcoin transactions aren’t inherently anonymous, with a little tech wizardry here and there - they can be incredibly hard to trace. And so the market grew exponentially in a few short months. Shoppers could browse the products and read through the feedback left by fellow customers in a completely peer-based review system. No advertised or sponsored corporate reviews like many surface level stores are clogged with.

The FBI was aware of The Silk Road from the get go and various law enforcement agencies all over the world began attempting to infiltrate the community in all the usual cop-style ways. While they initially struggled to find deeper access to the site’s servers, they managed to set up several fake accounts as buyers and sellers. They also discovered that the operation was run by someone using the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts. The name represented more than just a fondness for The Princess Bride. Again, more on that in a bit. And trust me, to say this is the truncated version of the story is a laughable understatement. But the bastard that runs this newspaper keeps my word count down. Fight the system! Get back to work you! Who said that?

After Gawker posted a now-famous exposé on The Silk Road in June 2011, the underground site became flooded with curious...gawkers and serious customers alike. It also got the attention of US Senator Charles Shumer who went straight to work assembling a task force of top cops, if you will, to shut the whole thing down. One of the top cops assigned to (obsessed with?) cracking the Silk Road code was FBI Cybercrimes Agent, Christopher Tarbell. At some point Tarbell managed his way into some super dark secrety places of the site servers and after a couple years of trying - the Silk Road was shut down and the Dread Pirate Roberts was captured. Who was he? Nobody most folks had really expected, at least in the law enforcement world.

But first (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. There’s a lot to sum up here and I never said I was a journalist!) the way this takedown happened is in and of itself a complex and confusing story. The feds used one of these accounts to message the Dread Pirate Roberts complaining that the order limits of the site were too small for his liking as he wanted to make bigger deals. This led to Roberts reaching out to a trusted Silk Road associate - username “chronicpain” - to work out an agreeable deal with this seller/supplier. Chronicpain ended up giving the agent-in-disguise his actual home address for shipping and you can guess what happens next. Curtis Green AKA chronicpain was a middleaged family man living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He also happened to be one of the original administrators of The Silk Road. IE a cop’s wet dream catch.

As to how the agents managed their way into the actual servers of the Silk Road... agent Tarbell claimed he was at one of the many CAPTCHA gateways on the site -you know those things where you have to try to decipher what your dear grandad’s final words were that he scratched into the wall as he was having a stroke to prove you aren’t a robot- and he says the CAPTCHA script glitched out providing him server access. Soon after, visitors to The Silk Road were greeted with a graphic that said “THIS HIDDEN SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED” along with various badges and emblems.

Upon hearing of the arrest of Green, the agent pretending to be a Silk Road supplier reached out to Dread Pirate Roberts with concerns and eventually the conversation became Roberts asking the agent to help facilitate Green sleeping with the Salt Lake fishes before he could spill the beans about the site. This is a key...wait, are there fish in the Salt Lake? Are they salt water fish? I’d look it up but I’m already on too many fish-related searches watch lists. Anyway, in summary - there was “evidence” now that the Dread Pirate Roberts put out a hit order on chronicpain and those charges were added to the growing list stacking up against the site admin. Around this time an IRS agent, of all people, had found an old email that tied the earliest incarnation of The SIlk Road to a man living in San Francisco. The police had intercepted a package en route to this person of interest - the package filled with fake ID’s all bearing the suspects image. Police began watching this man closely and soon enough, it paid off. Still with me? It gets wackier. Take a break if you need. Grab a drink. Question authority. Delete the Aging Walrus app from your iPhone. Ready? Ok.

So the feds were closely watching activity on the site and correlating with what this suspect was up to. In October 2013, the man walked into a library in San Francisco, fired up his laptop and administrative activity immediately started pinging The Silk Road servers. The 5-0 moved in and arrested the suspect, still logged into the site granting authorities a whole boatload of names and evidence to help build their headline-making case.

As it turned out, the famous Dread Pirate Roberts was also 29 year old Ross Ulbricht, a completely unassuming young man who grew up in Austin, Texas. Raised in a loving and close knit family, Ulbricht was an Eagle Scout as a bright youngster showing promise for leadership. After graduating high school in 2003 he moved on to studying science and physics at the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship. More schooling followed but Roberts...er, Ulbricht soon began to lose interest in sciency stuff as he delved more into Liberetarian ideals. After a few small biz ventures that never took, Ulbricht soon took his political views to the next level by wanting to, in his own words: “create an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.” The Silk Road was born.

By the time a trial was underway, the official charges against Ulbricht were money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics at such a level that a “kingpin” charge was added to the mix which is key, as this tack-on prevented the accused from accessing the media before, during and even after the trial. Noticeably absent from the charges was the attempted hit on chronicpain. This was puzzling since the prosecution and politicians alike had explicitly pointed to this element as one of the reasons the feds moved in on Ulbricht in the first place. Still, he was found guilty on all the aforementioned charges and sentenced to an unheard of two life sentences plus an additional 40 years without the possibility of parole. Something to think about when you consider the average child rapist does about 9-12 years.

It was more than clear that those powers that be, the ones that were so threatened by this sector of the web that made their powers less...powerful, were making the mother of all examples out of this case. The defense claims were an amalgam of police corruption or an overstepping of legal procedures along with the provable fact that there were indeed several Dread Pirate Robertses associated with the site. Remember in the book/film The Princess Bride, how Westley had become (SPOILERS I GUESS?) The Dread Pirate Roberts but was merely one of many Dread Pirate Robertses that came before him? Allegedly that was the real reason for choosing that handle. Maybe it was one of these other Dreads who ordered the hit (which ultimately never happened). Maybe the feds created that whole part of the plot to gain access to Ulbricht along with skewing public opinion of him only to later dismiss those charges altogether before going to trial. Or maybe Ulbricht was just a clever criminal whose ego had been in-

I give the site 3 1/2 stars. Could use more Hardware options...

The Dread Pirate Ulbricht. Photo: WikiCommons

fl ated along with the sales of the Silk Road itself, causing him to lose sight of his original supposed intentions.

Interestingly, at the trial Ulbricht admitted to being in charge of The Silk Road but claimed the original Dread Pirate Roberts had set him up to be the fall guy as it became clear the feds were moving in on the site. A weak defense, maybe. But there were certainly many messages of some unknown administrator of the site essentially telling Ulbricht what to do, including taking on the Dread Pirate Roberts name. I know, it’s convoluted.

Much has also been said about the seemingly weak story that Agent Tarbell told about the glitchy CAPTCHA that magically showed him into the inner workings of the site. First, it just didn’t make much tech sense. Secondly, there was no trail of investigation that proved that that was even what had happened. And to this day the feds have never truly explained in detail how they managed to get into the servers of the site at any major hearings. Hacking into it would require specifi c warrants. Warrants that were never issued, leaving many to wonder if Ulbricht’s Fourth Amendment rights had been violated making his arrest and incarceration illegal. But ultimately the powers that be have sided against Ulbricht. In every possible way.

The debate goes on as to whether our current war on drugs is really a better option than the notion of a cohesive, organized market for obtaining the things that people are going to obtain one way or the other. From one entity or another. It also goes on as to whether we should be allowed to gather and trade or sell goods of all types, free from interference and restrictive regulation. And it certainly goes on as to whether or not we as a society give two single shits about the sanctity of privacy anymore. These debates go on. So too does the dark web. A few months after The Silk Road shut down clones started popping up. Some with the same philosophy. Some not. News of Ulbricht’s bizarre case has captured the attention of law-minded activists and pop-culture fanatics alike. It has become a case that many attorneys, journalists and celebrities have publicly weighed in on, often siding with Ulbricht and the idea of a market for illicit drug sales as a safer and smarter way of handling our planet’s drug use.

Many people side with the government, seeing the Silk Road and the dark web itself as a place in dire need of policing - to the point of seeking new legislation that would allow some major bending of that Fourth Amendment mentioned earlier. There will always be an underlying culture of people fi ghting for a free society, and a counter to that culture that doesn’t believe humans behave well under that kind of freedom.

I suppose there’s no real moral to the story, and I should probably stop talking about it before we get shut down. Ha. Imagine. The feds caring about a silly little rag printed in Wenatc -