Challenges in Prosecuting Deep Web and Darknet Crimes: The Case of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road

 

The deep web represents online information that is not easily accessible through search engines. Prosecuting crimes on the deep web is no more challenging than prosecuting crimes for any standard website because law enforcement can still track the user's location through a domain or IP address. Alternately, the darknet poses a challenge for law enforcement to address illicit activity because while the darknet is a web-based system, it is accessible only through the Tor protocol that encapsulates HTTP and HTTPS traffic, much like a VPN that hides a user’s location and identity.


The Tor protocol, often called the Onion Router, contains methods for encrypting and routing traffic between peers. The purpose of the Tor protocol is to make web browsing anonymous by routing each request through multiple peers and altering encryption at various steps until the request reaches its destination. Subsequent requests may hop through different peers, making traffic appear random, unpredictable, and untraceable. Today, the US Navy, CIA, and other high-ranking secure departments within the US government use the Tor protocol. The nature of the Tor router makes it impossible to crack in a reasonable amount of time.


Due to the security of the Tor router, tracking criminals proves challenging and relies on external factors such as information leaks, tracking forum profile usernames, and noting when users post privileged information that ties their user account to illegal darknet services. The Silk Road is an online marketplace for illicit sales of drugs, weapons, exploitation of minors, and assassination that started in 2011. 


The Silk Road administrator account belonging to the site owner Ulbricht was known as Dread Pirate Roberts. On January 27, 2011, a tax agent discovered a post about the Silk Road website on an online forum using the username altoid, a username Ulbricht used in the site's early days (FBI, 2020). Eight months later, the same altoid user published a job post directing interested parties to send their responses to Ulbricht’s personal email account (Wikimedia Foundation, 2024). In the forum post, Ulbricht announced the Silk Road website and asked for programming help (Wikimedia Foundation, 2024). A drug agency investigator gained admin access to the Silk Road site and discovered that the timestamps on the Dread Pirate Roberts user activity on the site showed a Pacific Time Zone that narrowed down Ulbricht’s location and confirmed the plausibility of his involvement with the Silk Road website. The FBI arrested Ulbricht at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library with his laptop. 


The challenges posed by the darknet require law enforcement to search the entire digital world for clues related to anonymous illegal online activity, find alternate ways to gather information, and use infiltration tactics to bring justice to darknet cybercrimes.


Reference:


FBI. (2020, December 1). Ross William Ulbricht's laptop. FBI. https://www.fbi.gov/history/artifacts/ross-william-ulbrichts-laptop 

Wikimedia Foundation. (2024, June 19). Ross Ulbricht. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#:~:text=Ross%20William%20Ulbricht%20(born%20March,other%20illegal%20products%20and%20services. 

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