<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  The world&amp;#039;s most popular cyber marketplace for drugs, Silk Road, has been seized by the feds. Despite the U.S. government shutdown, at least four agencies\u2014the FBI, the IRS, Homeland Security, and the DEA\u2014are still active. The four took down Silk Road earlier today. They also charged the site&amp;#039;s owner, Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) with narcotics tracking conspiracy, money launder conspiracy, and computer hacking conspiracy. To collect enough evidence to make a case against Dread Pirate Roberts, FBI Agent Christopher Tarbell and others in law enforcement made more than 100 purchases on Silk Road over the last two years. They also got Bitcoin message-board subscriber info from Google, which they used to ID Ulbricht as Dread Pirate Roberts by linking posts he made on Google+ to posts he made on the Silk Road forum. Since its launch in February 2011, Silk Road has generated about $1.2 billion in sales. Many of those sales were drugs\u2014LSD, heroin, weed, ketamine, and pretty much anything else that might get a person high (including such creatively named concoctions as &amp;quot;Sacred Narcotic Lily of the Nile,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Mindfood capsules&amp;quot;). Buying most of the drugs for sale on the site is, of course, illegal in most places. What&amp;#039;s also illegal is sending drugs in the mail, the primary mode of transport sellers used. The site also trafficked in computer-hacking tools, including hacking programs and passwords. According to a supposed copy of the complaint, issued by the Southern District of New York, Dread Pirate Roberts also asked a fellow member of the site to murder a Silk Road user who threatened to identity thousands of Silk Roaders. Though the main Silk Road site (accessible only through the deep-web browser Tor at a sometimes-changing URL that ends in &amp;quot;.onion&amp;quot;) is down, related message boards are still up. There, former Silk Road users have been suggesting alternatives to their beloved marketplace. These alternatives may eventually lead to what a Bitcoin trader who goes by Cornfeedhobo predicts: &amp;quot;I would say wait two weeks,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;As we have seen in the past with The Pirate Bay, governments are all too quick to cheer victory only to have the same site pop up with new operators and a renewed vigor.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a9468/how-the-us-government-shut-down-a-cyber-drug-marketplace-15993969/>