--- title: Silk Road Is Back: The Illicit Online Drug Trade Is Thriving Again description: The Dread Pirate Roberts sails the Darknet once again. canonical: https://time.com/82552/the-silk-road-is-back-the-dread-pirate-roberts-sails-the-illicit-online-drug-trade-again/ author: Jay Newton-Small article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-04-30T15:03:04.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:02:46.252Z article:section: Politics og:title: Silk Road Is Back: The Illicit Online Drug Trade Is Thriving Again og:description: The Dread Pirate Roberts sails the Darknet once again. og:url: https://time.com/82552/the-silk-road-is-back-the-dread-pirate-roberts-sails-the-illicit-online-drug-trade-again/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta9df32035d44ddd9/69868d1df983e7554d04d90a/ap414402739762.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3264 og:image:height: 1836 og:image:alt: Ross William Ulbricht og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Silk Road Is Back: The Illicit Online Drug Trade Is Thriving Again twitter:description: The Dread Pirate Roberts sails the Darknet once again. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta9df32035d44ddd9/69868d1df983e7554d04d90a/ap414402739762.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Silk Road Is Back: The Dread Pirate Roberts Sails The Illicit Online Drug Trade Again > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=4417c19e-7a88-413a-bb43-2c33b319ec76&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: TIME Explains: The Deep Web [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Explains: The Deep Web](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/DQbujPQY.m3u8) (2:19)  _Published 2013-10-31. The FBI takedown of the online market Silk Road reveals the challenges of regulating the Deep Web. Here's what you need to know._  by [Jay Newton-Small](https://time.com/author/jay-newton-small/)  ## Jay Newton-Small Apr 30, 2014 3:03 PM UTC  An artist rendering of Ross William Ulbricht during a federal court appearance in San Francisco on Oct. 4, 2013. An artist rendering of Ross William Ulbricht during a federal court appearance in San Francisco on Oct. 4, 2013. Vicki Behringer—AP  by [Jay Newton-Small](https://time.com/author/jay-newton-small/)  ## Jay Newton-Small Apr 30, 2014 3:03 PM UTC Six months after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged founder of Silk Road, the largest online marketplace for illicit drugs and other contraband, business has never been better for the website, according to [a new report to be released Wednesday by the Digital Citizens Alliance](https://media.gractions.com/314A5A5A9ABBBBC5E3BD824CF47C46EF4B9D3A76/5f8d4168-c36a-4f78-b048-f5d48b18dc0a.pdf) obtained exclusively by TIME. There are approximately 13,648 listings for drug on the Darknet website, which requires anonymization technology to known as Tor to access, compared to the 13,000 listed shortly before Ulbricht’s arrest. While that’s an increase of just five percent, the Darknet drug economy has grown an astonishing 75% in the last six months thanks to the proliferation of Silk Road competitors, according to the report. The [group ](http://www.digitalcitizensalliance.org/cac/alliance/content.aspx?page=about)spent eight months studying the Darknet drug economy both before and after Ulbricht’s arrest. Many believed that the Darknet drug trade would die out after Ulbricht’s arrest and the subsequent arrests of three original Silk Road employees. As Lev Grossman and I wrote in [a cover story last November](http://time.com/630/the-secret-web-where-drugs-porn-and-murder-live-online/), the genius in Ulbricht’s model was to create trust between drug dealers and buyers. He created an Amazon-style marketplace where users and sellers could rate one another, thus building a proven record that the person you’re selling to, or buying from, isn’t a cop in disguise. Following Ulbricht’s arrest and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s shuttering of the Silk Road website, traffic surged to two competitors, Black Market Reloaded, known for their anything-goes attitude (Silk Road, for example, refused to sell child pornography and weapons of mass destruction) and Sheep Marketplace. Within weeks of Ulbricht’s arrest, Sheep Marketplace shut down citing a security breach. But users believed the site’s owners had simply stolen the $44 million worth of bitcoin in the system when they closed. The online drug trade looked doomed. But Silk Road soon reopened, with a new “Dread Pirate Roberts”—Ulbricht’s alleged user name taken from the movie _The Princess Bride_—claiming ownership. At first, it seemed like Silk Road 2.0 might also falter when some $2.6 million worth of bitcoins were stolen in February, according to the report. But DPR2, as he or she is being hailed on the new Silk Road, devised a plan to repay those who’d had bitcoin stolen in order to rebuild confidence in the site. The scheme worked and Silk Road 2.0 is doing better than ever, according to the report. This, of course, was the Dread Pirate Robert’s plan all along. Why else chose the moniker? After all in the movie, it’s the name and the legend that matter—not the actually person. Here is how the character Westley described the legend in the movie: --- > “” --- And, so it goes for Silk Road. The Dread Pirate Roberts is dead. Long live the Dread Pirate Roberts. ## Transcript On October 1st in San Francisco, the FBI caught a guy named Ross Ulbricht who they suspect of selling drugs online through a website called Silk Road which is part of the Deep Web. And here is what you need to know about the Deep Web. The Deep Web is loosely speaking every part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines. Silk Road was on a part of the Deep Web of the Tor network. And what's interesting about the Tor network is it's a part of the internet where nobody knows who you are. It has complete privacy, complete anonymity. Anything you do there or say there cannot be associated with your identity or your life. The government actually created the Tor network-- it was the Navy in particular-- and they did this because intelligence agents find it very useful. Law enforcement uses it for dissidents, journalists. But unfortunately, increasingly, criminals use it too. A lot of criminals, who used to have to find dark alleys where they could do their business, now simply do it on the Deep Web. They sell drugs, fake IDs, hacking software, and increasingly, weapons and child pornography. The Deep Web poses a major problem for the government. The government built it, but it doesn't know how to control it. The laws that govern search warrants relating to technology and networks are very old. And as is generally the case, technology evolves a lot faster than the law does. Ironically, the need for Tor is even more urgent now than it was when Tor was first created. More and more, there are companies like Google and Facebook which make billions of dollars by collecting personal information. And we, as those users, are being asked to manage our personal information in ways that we never had to before. And Tor is the perfect tool for that. It provides all the privacy and the anonymity we could ever desire. Unfortunately, it has this terrible potential for abuse as well. Bottom- line, there really is no such thing as a bad technology. 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