Darknet Press Review

The Deep Web, Silkroad and Bitcoins

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Press File Project - 2013/2014

Table of Contents

Synthesis        

The darknet/deep web        

Silkroad        

Bitcoins        

Darknet : a space of liberty        

Article 1 - Silk Road arrest exposes a hidden Internet        

Article 2 – FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk Road founder        

Article 3 – How I Bought drugs from ‘dark net’ – it’s just like Amazon run by cartels        

Article 4 – How FBI brought down cyber-underworld site Silk Road        

Article 5 – Bitcoin creator may have ties to Silk Road founder        

Article 6 – How A Delaware Doctor Was Linked To Silk Road Drug Sales        

Article 7 – Why the Future of Bitcoin depends on the Silk Road Trial        

Article 8 – Buying your drugs online is good for you        

Article 9 – Bitcoin’s Star Entrepreneur was arrested by the Feds for Silk Road Money Laundering        

Article 10 – Drug site Silk Road wiped out by Bitcoin glitch        

Article 11 – Online drugs trade soars        

Article 12 – Scams, Hacks and Poor Management : Life After Silk Road        

Article 13 – Now there’s a Google for drugs – and a Dark Net site for fake Tesco vouchers        

Article 14 – Bitcoin ‘black market’ creators make money laundering app        

Article 15 – Silk Road successor DarkMarket rebrands as OpenBazaar        

Synthesis

The darknet/deep web

For the press file project, I decided to focus on the ‘dark net’, which can also be qualified as the ‘deep web’. The deep web is a special part of the internet, not accessible by the usual search engines. The Deep Web contains approximately 900 billion pages of information. In contrast, Google, the largest search engine, had indexed just 25 billion pages.

I chose this subject because in October 2013, the founder of Silk Road, a black market of the Deep Web that sells drugs, fake IDs or even hacked paypal accounts, was arrested by the FBI in a public library after 3 years of investigation (article 7). Silk Road was the most famous black market on the deep web. I chose, for this press file project, to focus on three different points:

• Silkroad, and the evolution of the investigation and the trial

• Bitcoins, and how it is linked to the darknet

• The darknet, its advantages and disadvantages

Silkroad

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The founder of Silk Road is Ross Ulbricht (Dread Pirate Roberts on Silkroad), a physic student and used book seller who lives in San Francisco. He is a libertarian and he explained that he created Silk Road because he wanted people to be free of their choices. Indeed, when interviewed by Forbes in September 2013, he said “What we’re doing isn’t about scoring drugs or ‘sticking it to the man.’ It’s about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we’ve done no wrong”. He just believes that the state has no right to interfere in the lives of individuals.