End of the road for the Silk Road: what are the implications for the web?
On Wednesday, the FBI closed the Silk Road—for the last three years the web’s leading site for a range of illicit services, among them the sale of drugs—and arrested its administrator, Ross Ulbricht, AKA the Dread Pirate Roberts, accusing him of, among other things, hiring a hit man to kill one of his employees. Everything about the story suggests that the arrest did not come as a result of breaching the Tor deep web’s encryption or its bitcoin payment system, but as a result of other factors.
Nevertheless, the police operation makes one thing clear: a crime is a crime wherever it is committed, whether on the street or online. In the same way that it was never a crime to make a copy of a song or a record before the internet existed, and therefore is still practically impossible to prevent now that it does, drug trafficking was always illegal and remains so, and once it reaches a certain scale, can and should be pursued in either environment. If I set up a small lab in my home to produce methamphetamine and sell it to my friends and acquaintances, and keep my earnings hidden for a while, then my own sense of ethics and risk assessment will likely keep me out of trouble. But if my lab grows into something on a global scale, or generates huge amounts of money, or becomes the meeting point for hundreds of dealers from around the world who are all connected by computers and whose customers pay for their purchases with bitcoins, then I’m likely to end up in a prison cell.
In short, what the dismantling of Silk Road proves is that the laws that should govern the web should be the same as those in the wider world. That said, hyper-legislation is a bad idea that leads nowhere. The shutting down of the Silk Road doesn’t mean the end of the dark web, in the same way that arresting half a dozen leading drug kingpins doesn’t bring the global drugs trade to a halt (and yes,alternatives to the war on drugs are being discussed in some places). Ulbricht’s arrest is simply proof that within certain parameters and applying the relevant logic, nothing is beyond the reach of the judicial system, and nor should it be. Societies have always needed rules and surveillance: in fact, right at this moment, the philosophical problem we face isn’t about surveillance per se, but how we can find ways to make sure the watchers are also watched.
The police operation against Silk Road sent the price of bitcoins falling by around 20 percent on Wednesday afternoon, although prices soon picked up in the following hours. Around 4 percent of bitcoin transactions take place on the Silk Road, so we can reasonably expect a speedy recovery. This will likely prove to be positive for the bitcoin ecosystem: little good was ever likely to come out of an alternative economic system where the overwhelming majority of transactions were linked to illegal commerce. Neither the web nor most of its users are in any way criminal; nor, like everybody else, are they beyond the law: the web is simply an ecosystem within which logic and commonsense should prevail.
