Guy Accused Of Operating Silk Road 2.0 Arrested In SF... Just Like The Last One

from the yes,-the-FBI-can-track-you-down dept

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This morning, the FBI excitedly announced that they had arrested Blake Benthall as the alleged operator of Silk Road 2.0 , the replacement to the original Silk Road, which went down when the feds arrested Ross Ulbricht 13 months ago. As with Ulbricht, Benthall is a young tech-savvy guy living in San Francisco. Assuming he was actually running Silk Road 2.0, you'd think he'd have figured out that staying in the US while doing so is a serious occupational hazard. You can read the full complaint , but it again looks like (just like Ulbricht) he was somewhat sloppy in covering his own tracks. It didn't help that he apparently allowed an undercover FBI agent to become pretty high up as a "support" staffer, giving him access to insider forums.The complaint (as with Ulbricht's) is an interesting read, though it will be interesting to see what other information comes out of the next few months. It's not clear how the FBI found the server (in a foreign country) and had it imaged. That raised some questions in Ulbricht's case, and will likely do the same here. Benthall bounced around a variety of jobs, including for RPX (a patent aggregator that has tried to position itself as the "not evil" version of Intellectual Ventures) and SpaceX. In fact, it appears that when Benthall took over Silk Road 2.0 from its original creator, he was employed by SpaceX at that time. The criminal complaint also notes that at some point he bought a Tesla with bitcoins, though he appears to have done so about a month after someone else made news for doing the same.As for the actual charges, the specifics here matter. It still seems like a bit of a reach that merely running a marketplace online should make you liable for people doing illegal stuff in that marketplace, but things like Section 230 don't protect criminal activity. The complaint also has money laundering and CFAA hacking charges in there as well, though the details are still all a bit murky.It appears that this takedown is part of a larger global effort to take down a bunch of "darknet" drug operators and websites, with Silk Road 2.0 just being the shiny one that many in the public had already heard about.While it's reasonable to argue that this is criminal activity and should be taken down, others have suggested that by merely taking down online darkmarkets like Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0, the government is actually making the world more dangerous . Indeed, a study released a few months ago argued that Silk Road greatly reduced violence in the drug trade market . One could argue that keeping the drug market violent reduces incentives for people to get involved in it, but there is also the collateral damage that a violent drug market creates on third parties and innocent bystanders.Either way, I doubt that this will stop Silk Road 3.0 (or something similar) from springing up before too long. And whether or not the FBI gets whoever runs that, this will be a continuous cat and mouse game, and I imagine that future darkmarkets will get more and more secure.

Filed Under: blake benthall, dark market, doj, fbi, ross ulbricht, silk road, silk road 2.0

Companies: rpx, silk road, silk road 2.0, spacex