At the same time, however, the high-profile trial gave a lot of publicity to the dark web, and both the number of sites and the volume of people using them have increased since Silk Road was shuttered, notes The Dark Net author Jamie Bartlett, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. "I think it's a mixed bag for law enforcement," Bartlett said by phone on Thursday. "The long-term impact was the sites got smarter. They got more careful."

The cat-and-mouse game may shift as well. Newer dark sites (two major ones are Agora and Evolution) are likely to protect their servers by basing them in countries "hostile to U.S. law enforcement," said Nicholas Weaver of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. "The markets will keep moving overseas, but law enforcement will keep going after the dealers," he said, referring to the people who actually ship and deliver the drugs sold online.

On another front—the Fourth Amendment concerns raised by the FBI's discovery of the Silk Road server—Ulbricht's case may set less of a precedent than Internet-freedom advocates originally feared. To the surprise of Weaver and other close observers of the trial, Ulbricht's defense team never fully challenged the government's seizure of the Silk Road server on constitutional grounds, because to have legal standing under the Fourth Amendment, he would first have had to state definitively that the server belonged to him—in other words, he would have had to admit to being the mastermind of Silk Road. Yet as Weaver writes, such an admission would not have been as devastating as it sounds, because it would not have come in open court, with the jury present.

Such a declaration is not an admission of guilt: It can only be used by the prosecution if the defendant testifies. So as long as Ulbricht doesn’t testify, the jury never learns that Ulbricht admits to controlling the server.

The judge tossed Ulbricht's motion to suppress the government's evidence from the server, and he did not end up testifying in his own defense. While not denying Ulbricht's involvement with Silk Road, his lawyer, Joshua Dratel, had argued he was framed and that he was not the site's creator. Dratel said he'll appeal the conviction over the judge's decision not to allow the presentation of certain evidence and witnesses, The Wall Street Journal reported. In an interview Thursday, Weaver said the judgment against Ulbricht was sound even if the investigation was not. "It is fortunate for us that it looks like this case will have no legal precedent," he said.

For now, Ulbricht sits in jail, awaiting both his sentence and his appeal (and a second, related trial on murder-for-hire charges). The dark web that he helped to build and popularize goes on, with the FBI attempting to track increasingly sophisticated hidden drug, munitions, and hacking markets. "How will law enforcement try to strategically undermine these sites?" Bartlett asked. The answer, he said, might lie in the same undercover methods of monitoring and infiltration the government has used to take down vast child pornography networks, as well as Silk Road. "It becomes a little more like good, old-fashioned policing," Bartlett said, "but in a new space."

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