The Dark Net Read online

  Child pornography forums on Tor Hidden Services were ablaze with rumour and discussion about the arrest. They were trying to work out collectively where the new sites were, and how to access them: discussing downloading times, the quality of material, and above all the security features of new sites. Shortly after Marques’ arrest, back-up or ‘mirror’ versions of the sites were up and running again on new servers. Slowly, functioning links started to reappear on the Hidden Wiki, as users began creating new servers and uploading their own collections again. Then it was the turn of a couple of lone vigilantes to take it down. In March 2014, a hacker called Intangir, together with another who uses the Twitter handle Queefy, managed to take control of the Hidden Wiki I had accessed, and close it down, along with its child pornography links. But, by the time you read this, there’s every likelihood that it will be available again.

  Arrest

  Although their job is difficult, the authorities still make hundreds of arrests a year. In 2013, one of their targets was Michael. He describes the moment the police presented him with a warrant for his arrest – he was at home with his wife and daughter.

  That experience can prove too much for many. In 1999, the FBI seized the database of a company called Landslide Inc., which it suspected of selling child pornography on the internet. The database was found to include the credit card details and IP addresses of over 7,000 Britons, data which was swiftly handed over to the British police, who subsequently made almost 4,000 arrests. It resulted in 140 children being rescued, and in the suicides of thirty-nine of those arrested. Although no data is available, Tink believes that suicide rates are higher among those arrested for offences online, than those perpetrated in the real world. The online offenders continue to retain Suler’s dissociative fantasy. ‘It was only when the police arrived,’ says Michael, ‘that I realised the severity of what I’d been doing.’

  For obvious reasons, Michael wants the machine to bear some of his guilt. ‘I cannot believe there is so much of it out there!’ he tells me, when I ask him what should be done to stop people accessing child pornography. ‘Why on earth was it so easy for me to find it?’ According to Professor Wortley, the potential to become sexually attracted to children is not as rare a phenomenon as we’d like to imagine. The human sexual impulse is extraordinarily flexible, and at least partly shaped by social norms. Without some degree of demand for these images, these images wouldn’t be produced and shared in such staggering volumes. This is why the net has led to such an explosion in both content and the number of people accessing it: by making it easier to find, the latent demand can be more readily realised, and in some cases, created.

  This does not excuse what Michael did. Just because something is three clicks away does not make it any less of a crime. Michael repeated to me several times that he never actively searched for the material. He clearly thinks that mitigates in his favour. But the distinction between searching and accidentally-finding-and-keeping is pretty meaningless on the internet. Michael clicked three times: and then he kept clicking. It’s not the computer’s fault. It’s Michael’s fault. But if it had been a little harder for him to find, if jailbait pornography wasn’t so easily accessible, perhaps Michael’s casual or vaguely formed attraction to children would never have been explored. Without the internet, I don’t think Michael would be a convicted sex offender.

  What Now?

  The task of ridding the internet of child pornography is exceptionally difficult. Michael is just one type of sex offender, and is at the less serious end of the scale. There are many more committed sex offenders than him, and no matter what we do, they will always search, find and share obscene images, and the police will always try to catch them. The criminals are getting smarter, but so are the authorities. The chief task for organisations like the IWF and the police is to keep bearing down on supply as far as possible to limit the content that is available and make sure people like Michael – browsers – realise that they might get caught. The flow of material probably can’t be stopped, but anything that can stem the tide can and does make a difference.

  But bearing down on supply is getting harder. In addition to Tor Hidden Services, popular culture is prevailing against the IWF. According to a major review into the sexualisation of teens, conducted in 2010 by Dr Linda Papadopoulos for the UK Home Office, many young people are developing unhealthy attitudes and patterns of behaviour towards sex. Pornography of all types is now widely available and easily accessible to young people – and more of them are watching it at an earlier age. This is the awkward secret of child pornography: a growing proportion of it is made by the victims. They, too, are subject to the same dissociative effect. Although data is highly variable – with estimates of teens in the US and UK who have created a sexual image or video of themselves or sent sexually explicit messages ranging from 15 to 40 per cent – the number is believed to have increased dramatically in recent years. According to the NSPCC, sexting has become the ‘norm’ among young teens. It’s quite a natural thing for young people to explore their own sexuality. But the moment a digital file is posted online, it is almost impossible to control who sees it, and what they do with it. There are sex offenders who trawl the net searching for this material, which they will find, save and share with others. According to the IWF, as much as one third of all material they see is now self-generated, and it covers all five levels of obscenity. Digital files: reproducible and shareable at almost no cost.

  After I left the Hidden Wiki, I went on to the safer and more familiar surroundings of Facebook. ‘Hottest Teens 2013’ popped up. It read: ‘Teens: post your sexiest pics on this page! Whoever gets the most likes from other Facebook users will be declared the winner.’ Twenty thousand had already signed up.

  * * *

  fn1 Not his real name.

  fn2 Which has since been taken offline and is currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.

  fn3 Marques denies all charges.

  Chapter 5

  On the Road

  THE INTERNET HAS transformed commerce and trade. It seamlessly connects buyers and sellers around the world, opens new markets and makes shopping simple, convenient and quick. Approximately 50 per cent of all global consumers now make online purchases – a percentage that grows every year. But alongside the multi-billion-dollar world of e-commerce with its buy-it-nows, one-click buys and next-day deliveries, exists another market that is growing just as rapidly. In this world everything – legal and illegal – is for sale.

  According to a 2014 survey of almost 80,000 drug users from forty-three countries, an increasing number of users are sourcing their drugs online. Last year alone, approximately 20 per cent of UK drug users scored from the net. And the majority of them went to one place. I don’t take illegal drugs, and I’ve certainly never bought them before, but this morning an innocuous-looking white envelope was posted through my door. It contains a very small amount of high-quality cannabis. With a few simple clicks I’d done what approximately 150,000 people have done over the last three years: I bought drugs on the Silk Road.

  In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana. It was the start of a small but very noticeable trend. Throughout the nineties groups of dealers would periodically pop up in online drugs discussion boards to sell niche narcotics to drugs connoisseurs.fn1 By the early 2000s the first large-scale online drugs market had appeared on the surface web. The Farmer’s Market offered an email-only service selling mainly psychedelics. According to an FBI indictment, between January 2007 and October 2009, the Farmer’s Market processed over 5,000 orders, and a million dollars’ worth of sales in twenty-five countries. Then in 2010, the Farmer’s Market became a Tor Hidden Service.

  Today there are around 40,000 Tor Hidden Service sites in operation. Wit
h a sophisticated traffic encryption system, Tor is the ideal place for unregulated, uncensored markets. Although many Hidden Services are legal, approximately 15 per cent relate to illegal drugs.

  On 27 November 2010, a user named altoid posted the following message on the surface net magic-mushroom forum, the Shroomery:

  I came across this website called Silk Road. It’s a Tor hidden service that claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online anonymously. I’m thinking of buying off it, but wanted to see if anyone here had heard of it and could recommend it.

  Two days later altoid turned up on bitcointalk.org, a discussion forum about the crypto-currency: ‘Has anyone seen Silk Road yet? It’s kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com. I don’t think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff.’ Altoid linked to a wordpress blog that gave further information: ‘Marijuana, Shrooms and MDMA’ were already for sale, and it urged users to register as buyers, or ‘join as a vendor’. Word started to spread, and by spring 2011, a handful of sellers had signed up, attracting a small number of buyers. By May 2011, there were over 300 product listings, nearly all of them illegal drugs. When news of this new ‘anonymous marketplace where you can buy anything’ was reported in the online magazine Gawker in June 2011, the response was predictable. Thousands rushed to join.

  What these new visitors found was a radical alternative to rickety, unprofessional sites like the Farmer’s Market or risky ad hoc deals through forums. As altoid suggested, the site was professionally and intuitively designed. On the left-hand side of the webpage there were categories listing the different products on offer, and, when you clicked through, photographs of each. Vendors, too, were well represented. Each was listed with a short description and contact details. A link to customer service complaints was prominently displayed, as was your shopping ‘cart’, and how much money you had in your account. Behind the slick facade was a sophisticated security system. The site was accessible only via a Tor browser, products could be bought only with Bitcoin, and visitors were advised to sign up with digital pseudonyms. Any correspondence between buyers and sellers took place using PGP encryption, and once read, messages were automatically deleted. In June 2011, a secure forum was set up in order to enable better communication between users of the site.

  As well as being customer-friendly, the site was also extremely well managed. In October 2011, altoid returned to bitcointalk.com, no longer posting as a curious potential shopper, but as a key member of the quickly burgeoning site, ‘looking for an “IT pro”’ to help to maintain it. At that point, a team of between two and five administrators kept the site running, dealing with buyers’ and sellers’ complaints, resolving disputes and scanning the site for signs of any possible infiltration by law enforcement agencies. These administrators submitted a ‘weekly report’ to the main site administrator – a user named Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) – via Tor Chat and an internal email system, describing work completed, any issues that needed resolving, asking for guidance and requesting leave. Silk Road received a cut of all the sales that went through the site, and the administrators received a salary of between $1,000 and $2,000 a week for their troubles.

  Despite the occasional hack, vendor arrest and dispute over site commission rates (most notably when the website announced key changes to its rates in January 2012), the Silk Road kept growing. According to the FBI, by July 2013 the site had processed over $1.2 billion worth of sales. Almost 4,000 anonymous vendors had sold products to 150,000 anonymous customers across the world, and DPR was believed to be making $20,000 a day on commission alone.

  This was by far the most sophisticated online drugs market ever seen. And it was a project that was motivated by more than financial gain. When you first arrived at the original Silk Road, a message from DPR greeted you:

  I’d like to take a moment to share with you what the Silk Road is and how you can make the most of your time here. Let’s start with the name. The original Silk Road was an old-world trade network that connected Asia, Africa and Europe. It played a huge role in connecting the economies and cultures of these continents and promoted peace and prosperity through trade agreements. It is my hope that this modern Silk Road can do the same thing, by providing a framework for trading partners to come together for mutual gain in a safe and secure way.

  The name Dread Pirate Roberts was taken from the 1973 book The Princess Bride in which the Pirate was not one man, but a series of individuals who periodically passed the name and reputation to a successor. The name was chosen for a reason. Silk Road was a movement. ‘We are NOT beasts of burden to be taxed and controlled and regulated,’ wrote DPR in April 2012. ‘The future can be a time where the human spirit flourishes, unbridled, wild and free!’

  Across Tor Hidden Service forums – but extending out into surface net forums like 4chan and Reddit – a bustling ecosystem grew up around the Silk Road, uniting an eclectic mix of ‘roadies’: libertarians, Bitcoin fanatics, drugs aficionados and dealers, all committed for their own reasons to the idea of an unregulated online market. This sprawling community constantly monitored the market, checked security vulnerabilities and performance, and updated others on what they found. I contacted one of the moderators who ran Silk Road’s popular Reddit group before it was closed down. ‘It’s become a sort of safe haven for people who agree that no government should be able to tell them what they can put in their own bodies,’ he told me. ‘Users and sellers alike can have the freedom to be open and express themselves in ways that are impossible in real life.’

  Everything changed in autumn 2013. Despite the efforts of site administrators and the Silk Road communities, undercover FBI agents had been making purchases on Silk Road from November 2011, and had been closely tracking DPR and other key vendors and site admins. On 1 October 2013, they arrested twenty-nine-year-old Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library on suspicion of drug trafficking, soliciting murder, facilitating computer hacking and money laundering.fn2 They believed that they had found the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  Ulbricht was a university graduate and self-confessed libertarian who, until his arrest, had been living under the name Joshua Terrey in a small shared flat near to the library. He had told his housemates that he was a currency trader, recently returned from Australia. The FBI alleges that they confiscated 144,000 Bitcoins (amounting to some $150 million) from Ulbricht’s computer. There swiftly followed the arrest of several suspected high-profile Silk Road administrators and dealers in the UK, Sweden, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands.

  Shortly after Ulbricht’s arrest, visitors to Silk Road were greeted with a new message: ‘This Hidden Site has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ The news quickly spread. ‘IT JUST HAPPENED OMFG OMFG OMFG OMFG,’ wrote one anonymous user on 4chan’s /b/ board, sharing a screen grab of the FBI take-down notice within minutes of the site being removed. ‘Do you guys realise what this means?’ replied another. ‘It’s not just about pedos with their pizza [a code word for child pornography] or us with our drugs. We are losing every safe haven we’ve got.’ Silk Road forums – which were still up and running, operating as they did on different servers to the site itself – were in a state of panic.

  Was this the end? Not quite. Seven days after Ulbricht’s arrest, Libertas, who had been a Silk Road site administrator since February 2013, re-emerged on the forum and posted the following:

  Ladies and Gentleman, I would like to announce our new home . . . Let L[aw] E[nforcement] waste their time and resources whilse we make a statement for the world that we will not allow jackbooted government thugs to trample our freedom!

  Silk Road had returned as Silk Road 2.0: a new, better and safer site. Libertas predicted it would be up and running within a month. For dramatic effect, the temporary Silk Road 2.0 landing page featured a doctored version of the FBI take-down notice. Libertas and other site administrators had been working around the clock to rebuild the site using some of the source code from the original and to reinstate as many of
the old vendors as quickly as possible. Although plenty of roadies were unhappy that the site had vanished along with their Bitcoins, most were desperate to get back to business. Inigo, one of Libertas’s fellow administrators, complained about being inundated with emails from sellers trying to get started again: ‘We are going as fast as we can,’ he apologised on the forum.

  One month later, they were ready to go. True to the name, a new Dread Pirate Roberts resurfaced to run the site. (As of writing, his identity remains a mystery.) ‘You can never kill the idea of #silkroad,’ announced the new incumbent on Twitter on the morning of 6 November 2013. He then switched over to the forum: ‘Silk Road has risen from the ashes and is now ready and waiting for you all to return home. Welcome back to freedom . . .’ Silk Road was up and running again.

  But despite Libertas and Inigo’s best efforts, Silk Road had lost its market dominance. It wasn’t the only dark net market, it was just the largest. Others had spotted an opportunity, and from 2012 several competitor markets began to appear, including the Black Market Reloaded and the Russian Anonymous Market Place. The disappearance of the market leader in October 2013 heralded six months of mayhem. New markets were founded, hacked, shut down by law enforcement and reopened again. There were dozens of spoof markets set up in order to trick buyers out of their Bitcoins. A number of Silk Road users flocked to the Sheep Market soon after the FBI take-down, but after a short period of activity, it disappeared – either hacked or deliberately taken offline – along with everyone’s money. The highly anticipated Utopia marketplace was set up in the first week of February 2014, but shut down by the Dutch police within a fortnight. Buyers and vendors who’d become used to the stability and reliability of Silk Road were struggling to work out which sites to trust.