Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby Read Free Book Online

vendors needed a verified reputation before any high-quantity resellers would purchase from them.
    By the end of May 2011, Silk Road had built up a healthy clientele through word of mouth among the communities of 4chan and Reddit. It had around 400 listings of all sorts of things, mostly drugs. It was a community built on trust and was generally considered to be secret and tight-knit.
    That is, until a young journalist from a tabloid gossip site crashed the party.

Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator.
    – Dread Pirate Roberts journal entry, 2011

The Gawker Effect
    ‘ I ’m just your normal, everyday half-Chinese half-Jew trying to make his way in our increasingly interconnected world,’ said Adrian Chen when introducing himself as the new nightshift editor at Gawker in November 2009.
    Gawker started life in 2002. The site recognised and embraced the emerging prevalence of technological distribution of news, and harnessed social media to find both stories and readers. It would employ tech-savvy young writers to trawl sites like Twitter, Tumblr, 4chan, Reddit and Craigslist, looking for entries by people that could be developed into news stories. Alongside sensational headlines were interactive features such as ‘Gawker Stalker’, which pinpointed celebrity sightings on a live map so that fans could track down their favourite star if they were nearby.
    Based in New York City, the site churned out thirty or forty stories a day, mostly salacious crime, celebrity news and happenings in the media. ‘Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news,’ it proudly proclaimed. While most of the content was fluff, it occasionally teetered dangerously close to delivering real news – and even the odd scoop.
    Chen worked hard for little pay, as is typical for those who are living their dream jobs – and for many a generation Y, writing blog posts for a gossip site is indeed a dream job. He started on nights and weekends, eventually moving from nightshift editor to regular staff reporter. He soon discovered there were stories to be found by scouring unregulated, anonymous online communities.
    ‘It seemed like everyone was writing the same eight stories all the time,’ he said in an interview. ‘I found it was pretty easy to find different stories by just going below to where people were just talking and there was just people just shooting the shit.’
    He wasn’t afraid to expose some of the goings-on in those places and could lay claim to some genuine investigative features over the years. In particular, he was never afraid to openly challenge and taunt hackers and cybercriminals. In 2011 he wrote a scathing piece accusing a group of bullying an eleven-year-old girl; they hacked Gawker in retaliation. ‘And that was the beginning of Lulzsec. That was the first time this group decided to get together and hack something,’ Chen said.
    Lulzsec went on to be responsible for some of the most notorious hacks in the world, including Fox News (they were upset that a rapper they liked was called ‘vile’ on air) and The Sun newspaper (they changed the front page to a story saying Rupert Murdoch had died of an overdose). They really didn’t like Chen, calling him ‘a brainless slug with no writing skills or friends’ in a Twitter update.
    In 2012, Chen exposed ‘Violentacrez’, a notorious and nasty internet troll and moderator of some of the most vile sub-Reddits, such as ‘Creepshots’ (candid photographs of bums or breasts of unsuspecting women taken during private moments) and ‘Jailbait’ (photographs of ‘hot’ or near-naked teen girls). Chen named and shamed Violentacrez in an article, causing the latter to lose his job and become reviled around the globe as mainstream media picked up the story and it was broadcast worldwide. Chen did this at considerable risk to himself – the Reddit community can be vengeful. All links to Gawker were