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Illicit Markets and the Internet Age

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Illicit Markets, Organized Crime, and Global Security

Abstract

Communication has facilitated trade and transactions across states, helping to improve economic growth, development, and quality of life. The Internet, however, has taken this to a new level. While much is celebrated for this new era of information and learning, there is a dark side of the Internet that exists. This chapter will provide an overview of the Dark Web’s inner working as well as suggest prescriptions to neutralize, or at least clamp down, on these websites and practices.

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Notes

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    EMCDDA project group, J. Mounteney, A. Bo and A. Oteo “The Internet and Drug Markets” European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2016, accessed June 19, 2017, p. 135.

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    EMCDDA project group, J. Mounteney, A. Bo and A. Oteo “The Internet and Drug Markets” European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2016, accessed June 19, 2017, 136.

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    Matt Egan, “What is the Dark Web?” pcadvisor.com, June 19, 2017.

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    Zaklina Spalevic and Milos Ilic “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” p. 75.

  20. 20.

    Spalevic and Ilic “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” p. 75.

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    “Tor Browser in Numbers” The Tor Project, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-numbers, accessed June 7, 2017.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Lucinda Shen, “If You Bought $5 of Bitcoin 7 Years Ago, You’d Be $4.4 Million Richer,” Fortune, May 17, 2017; Ladislav Kristoufek, “BitCoin meets Google Trends and Wikipedia: Quantifying the relationship between phenomena of the Internet era,” Scientific Reports 3 (2013): p. 3415; Nikolei Kaplanov, “Nerdy money: Bitcoin, the private digital currency, and the case against its regulation,” Loy. Consumer L. Rev. 25 (2012): p. 111.

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    “Frequently Asked Questions” Bitcoin, https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#what-is-bitcoin, accessed June 14, 2017.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Zaklina Spalevic and Milos Ilic “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” p. 75; see also Hsinchun, Chen, Wingyan Chung, Jialun Qin, Edna Reid, Marc Sageman, and Gabriel Weimann, “Uncovering the dark Web: A case study of Jihad on the Web,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 59, no. 8 (2008): pp. 1347–1359; Tianjun, Fu, Ahmed Abbasi, and Hsinchun Chen, “A focused crawler for Dark Web forums,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 61, no. 6 (2010): pp. 1213–1231.

  30. 30.

    Thom Patterson, “Inside the illegal online weapons trade” CNN, August 11, 2016.

  31. 31.

    “How To Buy From The Silk Road 3.0 (now 3.1)” Silk Road Drugs, https://silkroaddrugs.org/how-to-buy-from-the-silk-road-3-0/, accessed June 14, 2017.

  32. 32.

    Spalevic and Ilic, “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” p. 76.

  33. 33.

    J. Pace “Exchange Relations on the Dark Web” Critical Studies in Media Communication, (34:1, 2017), 2.

  34. 34.

    Cyrus Farivar, “Just a month after shutdown, Silk Road 2.0 emerges” Ars Technica, November 6, 2013.

  35. 35.

    Kate Knibbs, “Silk Road is already up, but it’s not the future of Darknet Drugs,” Gizmodo, November 7, 2014.

  36. 36.

    Spalevic and Ilic “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” p. 75.

  37. 37.

    Cyrus Farivar, “Just a month after shutdown, Silk Road 2.0 emerges.”

  38. 38.

    Quoted in Jonathan Pace, “Exchange Relations on the Dark Web” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34: no 1 (2017): p. 5.

  39. 39.

    Sam Biddle, “The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything,” Gizmodo, July 19, 2012. Zaklina Spalevic and Milos Ilic, “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” p. 76.

  40. 40.

    Patrick Howell O’Neil, “Enter the Armory, the Dark Web’s Walmart of weaponry,” Daily Dot, April 4, 2014.

  41. 41.

    Sam Biddle2012, “The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything.”

  42. 42.

    Spalevic and Ilic, “The use of the dark web for the purpose of illegal activity spreading,” 76.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., o. 76.

  44. 44.

    Patrcik Howell O’Neil, “Enter the Armory, the Dark Web’s Walmart of weaponry.”

  45. 45.

    Ibid.

  46. 46.

    Patrick Tucker, “How the Military Will Fight ISIS on the Dark Web,” Defenseone.com, February 24, 2015.

  47. 47.

    Deep Dot Web, “Nucleus Market Has Removed Its Weapons Category,” deepdotweb.com, November 22, 2015.

  48. 48.

    Hsinchun Chen, “Nuclear Threat Detection Via the Nuclear Web and Dark Web: Framework and Preliminary Study.” In: Ortiz-Arroyo D., Larsen H.L., Zeng D.D., Hicks D., Wagner G. (eds) Intelligence and Security Informatics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014, vol 5376. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

  49. 49.

    Angus Crawford, “Dark net ‘used by tens of thousands of paedophiles.’”

  50. 50.

    Lindsay Murdoch and Tammy Mills, “Execution calls for Melbourne man Peter Gerard Scully accused of depraved acts in the Philippines,” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 6, 2015.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    “Catching a monster: The global manhunt for alleged pedophile Peter Gerard Scully,” 9 News, March 16, 2015.

  53. 53.

    Jessica Condit, “FBI hacked the Dark Web to bust 1500 pedophiles,” Engaget, May 1, 2016.

  54. 54.

    John E. Dunn, “Concern over FBI operation to catch users of dark web site,” Naked Security by Sophos, November 16, 2016.

  55. 55.

    EMCDDA project group, J. Mounteney, A. Bo and A. Oteo “The Internet and Drug Markets” European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2016, accessed June 19, 2017, 135.

  56. 56.

    BESA Mafia dark website, quoted from H. Zasper “Dark web ‘hitmen-for-hire’ service EXPOSED: Inside the ‘assassination marketplace’ that’s hiding a shocking secret” The Mirror, May 17, 2016, http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/dark-web-hitmen-hire-service-7988693, accessed June 14, 2017.

  57. 57.

    H. Zasper “Dark web ‘hitmen-for-hire’ service EXPOSED: Inside the ‘assassination marketplace’ that’s hiding a shocking secret” The Mirror, May 17, 2016, http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/dark-web-hitmen-hire-service-7988693, accessed June 14, 2017.

  58. 58.

    “How To Buy From The Silk Road 3.0 (now 3.1)” Silk Road Drugs, https://silkroaddrugs.org/how-to-buy-from-the-silk-road-3-0/, accessed June 14, 2017; see also: Monica J. Barratt, “Silk Road: eBay for drugs,” Addiction 107, no. 3 (2012): pp. 683–683; Van Hout, Marie Claire, and Tim Bingham, “‘Silk Road,’ the virtual drug marketplace: A single case study of user experiences,” International Journal of Drug Policy 24, no. 5 (2013): pp. 385–391; James Martin, “Lost on the Silk Road: Online drug distribution and the ‘cryptomarket,’” Criminology & Criminal Justice 14, no. 3 (2014): pp. 351–367; Amy Phelps and Allan Watt, “I shop online–recreationally! Internet anonymity and Silk Road enabling drug use in Australia,” Digital Investigation 11, no. 4 (2014): pp. 261–272.

  59. 59.

    For more information, see William R. Cheswik, Steven M. Bellowin, and Aviel D. Rubin, Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the wily hacker (Addison-Wesley: Boston, MA, 2003).

  60. 60.

    Joseph Cox, “The Dark Web Is Becoming a Safe Haven for Malware,” Motherboard Vice News, October 20, 2015.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Ibid.

  63. 63.

    Ed Leefeldt, “Hacker’s paradise: Secrets of the ‘dark web,’” CBS News, May 17, 2015.

  64. 64.

    Alex Hern, “University College London hit by ransomware attack,” The Guardian, June 15, 2017.

  65. 65.

    Alex Hernm “WannaCry attacks prompt Microsoft to release Windows updates for older versions” The Guardian, June 14, 2016.

  66. 66.

    Gautman Basu, “Concealment, corruption, and evasion: a transaction cost and case analysis of illicit supply chain activity,” Logistics, Information, and Service Economy, 7 no. 3 (2014), p. 218.

  67. 67.

    EMCDDA project group, J. Mounteney, A. Bo and A. Oteo “The Internet and Drug Markets” European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2016, accessed June 19, 2017, 82.

  68. 68.

    Jonathan Pace, “Exchange Relations on the Dark Web,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34 no, 1 (2017): p. 8.

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Kassab, H.S., Rosen, J.D. (2019). Illicit Markets and the Internet Age. In: Illicit Markets, Organized Crime, and Global Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90635-5_8

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