FBI seizes $3.6M in BitCoin
Dread Pirate Roberts arrested
Silk Road site shutdown

Ross Ulbricht == Dread Pirate Roberts

The Silk Road underground/black market trading site lived in what's been termed the "deep web" or DarkNet, vast area where normal search engines don't usually yield usable results. Most is completely legit mundane stuff, some not so legit. Apparently drugs, weapons, etc were offered for sale on Silk Road. If it could be bought/sold for a price, it was traded there with no restriction.

The seizure order.

BitCoin takes hit on arrest news, but seems to have bounced back some.

Apparently Silk Road used TOR for security. Back in Sept I posted this about how the FBI has compromised the TOR servers to distribute some malware to unmask user anonymity. At the time, the nominal excuse being given for compromising TOR was a child porn sting, which seemed kinda thin. Casting such a wide net and compromising thousands of user's machines to locate one dude, who they pretty much had ID'd and located already smelled a bit funny.

Now with the Silk Road/Dread Pirate bust and seizure of millions in Bitcoin maybe we know the real reason the FBI compromised the TOR servers. They were hunting much bigger game than some child porn dude. They had their sights set on the hundreds of thousands of sketchy dark web users of Silk Road going through TOR. I imagine the freeways are clogged with people suddenly blowing town who left no forwarding address.

More on this bust HERE, HERE, and HERE.

It looks like the US media isn't ignoring this story even though it doesn't look good at all for San Francisco where Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts seem to have been based.

posted by Purp at 01:00 PM

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