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After Silk Road 2.0 Shutdown, Rival Dark Net Markets Grow Quickly
apexcp writes: A week ago, Silk Road 2.0 was theatrically shut down by a global cadre of law enforcement. This week, the dark net is realigning. "In the wake of the latest police action against online bazaars, the anonymous black market known as Evolution is now the biggest Dark Net market of all time. Today, Evolution features 20,221 products for sale, a 28.8 percent increase from just one month ago and an enormous 300 percent increase over the past six months."
As far as I'm concerned, the only really legitimate reason for govt. to have gone after the original Silk Road operator was the allegation that the guy placed a hit on someone else. The act of hiring someone to murder another person for you is pretty clearly illegal and the law should pursue that.
The act of running an anonymous marketplace website seems to me like it should fall under "common carrier" status. Of course, the govt. hasn't been interested in looking at things that way ever since the BBS era in the 1980's.
The fact remains though.... the U.S. post office surely helped facilitate the actual delivery of many of those illegal orders placed on Silk Road, yet we never talk about arresting the mailmen who delivered the packages. We never talk about raids on the post offices to search through boxes held there either.
When criminals conduct illegal business via phone calls, nobody ever blames the telco for selling them the circuit that allowed it to happen either.
If you want to argue that Silk Road type websites are illustrating collusion with the criminals by offering categories such as "illegal drugs" to post ads in? You might have a valid point there ... But it seems to me that's little more than a detail that such site operators could get around by simply making broad, more general categories that are clearly usable for LEGAL transactions as well as anything illegal in some countries.
So far, I haven't really heard any evidence that Silk Road 2's operator was directly INVOLVED in any criminal activity. (No requests to murder someone else, no selling or buying of illegal substances himself, etc.)