Headline June 22, 2015/ ''' WELL-WELL : DRUGS? [OR] THE REVOLUTION? '''

''' WELL-WELL : 

DRUGS? [OR] THE REVOLUTION? '''

PRODUCTS simply arrived by regular mail:

''It generally looks like  junk mail  or information about moving here, or travelling there, or  consultation stuff, '' the user explains. ''Usually, when opening the package, you still won't know there are drugs in it unless you're looking for them.''

Silk Road's community had its own subculture, which skewed toward political outliers. ''One memorable thread asked whether we were there for the drugs or the ''revolution'' recalls the same user.

''A lot of people answered  'came for the drugs, stayed for the revolution.'' Dread Pirate Roberts, or simply  DPR, was hailed by the customers as an antiestablishmet hero.

Silk Road launched in January 2011. Its existence was hardly kept a secret  -with Tor making it possible to get in and out anonymously, why bother? Hiding would just have been bad for business. ''It was basically an open thumbing of noses law enforcement,'' Bharara says.

The FBI got its first glimpse of Ross Ulbricht that October. Someone named ''altoid''    had been promoting  Silk Road  in various chat rooms, then. In a Bitcoin forum, altoid posted an ad seeking an:

 ''IT pro in the bitcoin community'' for '' a venture bitcoin startup company,'' according to to the complaint against Ulbricht. Ulbricht listed his real e-mail address as the contact for the position.

Ulbricht had left more clues for the fed. His Google+ account linked to some of the same sites and videos  -including some from the Ludwig von Misses Institute -  that the Dread Pirate Roberts mentioned.

The FBI obtained records from Google that showed Ulbricht was accessing his email account from San Francisco, the server through which Roberts accessed Silk Road  showed an IP address corresponding to San Francisco cafe.

Ulbricht also posted a request for help with some computer code on a website for programmers, again under his own name. he hastily changed his user ID {to ''Trusty''},.... but the damage was done: that same code later turned up as part of the Silk Road site.

From there the thread becomes darker and more tangles. In January 2013, a Silk Road employee apparently stole bitcoins from users, then managed to get arrested on another charge.

Roberts, displaying a side investigators hadn't seen before, allegedly contracted with a Silk Road customer to have the employee tortured until he or she returned the bitcoins, then killed. This was the work not of libertarian idealist but of a sociopath.

Roberts was unaware that the  hit man  he was dealing with was an undercover FBI agent who had bought drugs on the  Silk Road  as part of a sting operation. The agent sent Roberts faked photographic proof of the murder. Satisfied, Roberts wired $80,000 from an Australian money-transfer exchange.

According to the testimony of  FBI agent Christopher Tarbell, who led the investigation, a Silk Road user in Canada began to blackmail Roberts, threatening to leak information about the site's clientele.

Roberts responded by by paying someone known online as  ''redandwhite'' the sum of $150,000 in bitcoins to kill the blackmailer. [Roberts received photos of that killing too, but the Canadian police can't match it to any murder they are aware of.]

In June 2013, Roberts ordered a set of fake IDs from  redandwhite. Later that month, U.S.Customs opened a package from Canada containing  9fake IDs bearing Ulbricht's photo and birth date. The package also gave them Ulbricht's address.    

The net was closing fast. Soon, FBI hackers had tracked one of  Silk Road's servers, in a foreign country whose name has not yet been revealed, which gave them copies of all Roberts' e-mails plus transaction records dating to the site's launch.

Just later, that month on July  26, agents from the Homeland Security knocked on  Ulbricht's door. He admitted that he had been living under a false name.

The authorities got another break on July 31, when they raided the condo of Seattle area dealer who sold meth, coke and heroin through Silk Road under the handle Nod; they quickly flipped him as an informant.

On Oct.1, two years after they first spotted him, federal agents followed Ulbrichit to the Glen Park Library and arrested him. The FBI says it caught him red-handed with evidence on his laptop screen.

Many in Washington stood troubled by the fact that it took so much time and effort just to close one illegal website run by a would be Walter White.

The FBI is policing an ever evolving Internet using static, often outdated laws.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which governs law enforcement 's warrant process and is known as CALEA  was passed in 1994.

"We're coming up next year on its 20th anniversary ," said Marcus Thomas, {at the time}   -the former assistant director of the  FBI's technology division, who now advises Subsentio, a firm that helps companies comply with CALEA.

"It's in serious need of being updated to keep pace with the current environment." 

The Honour and Serving of the  "Web Operational Research"  continues. Thank you for reading, and I hope sharing forward.

With respectful dedication to Students Maheen Amer, Waseem Safdar, Rachel Angelo, Ammar Saeed [ NUST University, Pakistan] and Student Mehboob Alam, [electrical engineering Hamdard University, Pakistan].  Student Umer Khan [Lahore School of Economics] and Student Ufeira [ Pir Meher Barani University, Pakistan].

See Ya all on !WOW!!

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Innovation Doesn't Come Easy "'

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless