Ross Ulbricht, The Silk Road, and Organized Crime on the Internet

I'm a pretty big advocate of all things Internet -- messageboards, bitcoin, neknominations, cats...

This is a pretty big story and an interesting milestone of the days we live in.

Eagle Scout. Idealist. Drug Trafficker?
By DAVID SEGALJAN. 18, 2014

Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the science fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks: closing his laptop...

source

Wow closing one's laptop can cause that much attention?

When you are logged on as the Dread Pirate Roberts, admin of the notorious Silk Road, with $80 million of transaction records exposed.

But the limits of technology are only part of the reason that another Silk Road is unlikely anytime soon. To function, such a site needs a leader who is dedicated to the point of fanaticism, and, more important, has a strange kind of integrity. Dread Pirate Roberts did not take the Bitcoin and run because he was a true believer first and an outlaw second. He was a rare set of contradictions, a humanitarian willing to kill, a criminal with a strict code of ethics.

A $122 million fortune (source), the Al Capone of our time, a 29 yr old Boy Scout busted in the library.

I'd copy the whole article, but it's a long read.

Here's the link again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/bu...rafficker.html

That computer, according to the F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the world’s largest and most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD.

The site was like an eBay for the illicit, celebrated by drug enthusiasts, denounced by United States senators and stalked by four federal agencies. But because it was run on Tor, an encrypted Internet network, and because it merely connected buyers and sellers — rather than warehousing any products — it seemed to operate in a vaporous cloud. It was a business without infrastructure, other than a few servers and that laptop, which on 3:14 that October afternoon sat on a library desk, open.