Question

Type your impression on the issues surrounding the Silk Road legal case.

Answer 1

Silk road is an infamous dark-web e-commerce site. The federals wanted to hunt it down for the long time, since it sells nasty drugs in an anonymous fashion and is not good for the wellbeing of the society.

Once a news came out, saying that FBI revealed Tor Browser users using a malware, and it was believed to be motivated for the Silk Road operation.

FBI was successful to arrest the guy of the Silk Route, Ross William Ulbricht, from a public library, in a unexpected way.

FBI claimed that he solicited one of the Silk Road users in a murder-for-hire request, to go after another Silk Road user who was threatening to reveal the identities of people on the site (the second user claimed to have hacked a large vendor's account, and demanded $500,000 to not reveal names).

Another complaint against Ulricht said that Silk Road has generated more than 9 million Bitcoins in revenue, and it led to 600,000 bitcoins in commission. FBI, for tracking, made several purchases in Silk Road - including ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, LSD and others. Apparently, they wanted a lot of evidence.

However, FBI's claims and details (although thorough) are not very strong and iss questionable. Bitcoin and Tor does not directly refer to an illegal process. Also, Silk Road's use of proxies (for the anonymity) was considered a crime - bbut it seems funny in the way that wanting to anonymous can not be a crime, or an illegal behavior.