As we read into the FBI’s complaint, we find out more about the idiotic CEBro of Silk Road 2, SpaceX engineer Blake Benthall. Silk Road 2 was the resurrection of the pioneering darknet marketplace, Silk Road, which sold everything from drugs to fake passports, and was taken down by law enforcement in October 2013. Even before Silk Road 2 started, it fucked up.
Blake Benthall’s list of catastrophically dumb mistakes according to the FBI’s complaint:
-The day after he began working on a new Silk Road, the marketplace made an undercover federal agent a moderator.
-When three admins of Silk Road 2 were busted, the original founder left. Benthall was warned that that Silk Road 3 had been infiltrated, but stayed anyway.
-He invited yet more attention to himself when he bought a flashy new Tesla roadster with bitcoins.
-He sent unencrypted customer service requests for the Silk Road 2 server and used his own personal Gmail address.
-He accessed customer support, unencrypted and unTored, from a hotel network. He even tweeted he was at that hotel.
-He stored customer and vendor data on his laptop, unencrypted.
-He registered the server with his own goddamn personal vanity address: “blake@benthall.net” (are you sensing a pattern here?).
-When the Feds read him his Miranda rights, he ruined any chance of winning the trial by fucking confessing to everything.
If you miss Silk Road 2, don’t worry, there are still alternatives like Agora and Silk Road 3. But my favorite new darknet bazaar, coming this December, is Swift Road. That’s right — that Swift, as in Taylor.
While Blake Benthall is clearly too dumb, thankfully, it’s well known that Taylor Swift is very good at information security.
Hopefully Swift Road — if and when it arrives — will last longer.
The fastest way to visit the scary “deep web” darknet is to download the Tor Browser Bundle, which has Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions.
(Photo: Imgur)
