Deep Web Page #8

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informed citizens, uh, um,

understand they have

a right to privacy

and that the Fourth Amendment

protects against

unreasonable searches and seizures.

Information has to be encrypted.

And that goes from a large

corporation down to an individual.

And so for those who are arguing that

information should not be encrypted,

certainly that makes it easier for

law enforcement to, um... combat,

but it also makes it easier for

the cyber criminals to attack.

It makes total sense that criminals

are among the early wave,

along with the sort of paranoid people,

of these new tools and services.

But that doesn't mean that they're

the only people using these services.

You know, there are a

hell of a lot of journalists

that I know and regularly

communicate with now over Tor.

But you know,

for the people who

oppose this technology,

who see it as a threat,

the fact that criminals use it is

a great way to... to demonize it.

I definitely do believe

that there are people

in the US that don't think that the

government is doing anything wrong.

It's not necessarily something

that you're concerned with

or that you care

too much about

or that you're really

passionate about until you...

- you're standing right in the middle of it.

- And it's something more dangerous

than any website

could ever be

is what our government has

become and how they operate.

This goes back to that

question of the government

kind of trying to treat the

internet differently without,

uh, following the same kind of,

uh, judicial processes.

Well the Supreme Court has

proven that they do not agree.

You know, recently with

Riley vs California

with an illegal search

of a cell phone.

Precedent can be set that will limit

their ability to infringe on our rights.

Someone asked how her

political views have shifted.

Because suddenly she's standing

right in the middle of Tor,

Bitcoin, the war on drugs,

online anonymity, encryption.

And she's had a... she's had to

learn a lot of different things,

and also not only just the whole

legal system but, uh,

everything around the

technology and the case.

After over a year in prison,

Ross delayed the trial two months,

stating that important discovery

evidence he needed to examine

had only just been delivered

to him by the prosecution.

The FBI shut down

what it calls

the most sophisticated and

extensive criminal marketplace

on the internet, but it may

be finding new life.

The arrest of Ross Ulbricht

and closure of the Silk Road

did nothing to hamper

drug sales on the dark net.

Many new markets

immediately appeared,

including a re-launch of

the Silk Road itself,

also run by someone calling themselves

the Dread Pirate Roberts.

And like its predecessor,

the second Silk Road

also claimed a mandate of reducing

violence and harm in drug transactions.

The Dread Pirate tweets, "Silk Road while

under my watch will never harm a soul.

If we did, then we are no better

than the thugs on the street. "

The new Dread Pirate Roberts

told me that he knows

he can't be around forever,

and when he's gone, someone else...

he's confident someone else

will step up and fill the void.

You can take down the man,

but you can't take down the idea.

By this time,

statistics appeared

claiming the first Silk Road

had succeeded in its mission

of reducing violence

in the drug trade.

While I was with the Baltimore

Police Department in the early 2000s,

I had two city officers in uniform

killed by drug dealers on the street.

And there was a family of seven,

the Dawson family on Preston Street,

they were killed by one drug dealer in

one night, mother, father and five kids.

And so as the years in the early

2000s start moving along,

I'm continuing to think about

this from a place of violence

and beginning to realize that

our policies of drug prohibition

were actually counterproductive

to public safety.

The one thing that I signed

on for to improve,

to better public safety in our

neighborhoods, was making it worse.

And, uh, I found...

a large number of police

officers and judges

and criminal prosecutors

and DEA agents

and FBI who think the same way.

If Baltimore moved from street

corners to online services,

oh, my God, do you know

how many shootings,

how many fewer shootings

we would have every year,

which equate to

fewer homicides?

Number one, it removes the...

the buyer from the back alleys

and from the street corners

and from those dangerous places

of dealing with the seller.

Buying it over the internet

where it's delivered to you,

- removes you from that scenario. - Well,

one of the interesting things that having

an online market

does is that it makes

sellers much more

accountable to buyers.

And one of the really interesting

innovations is the whole review system,

where buyers can review

the sellers and the items

that they bought from these,

uh, on these market places.

And what that does is it makes

sellers more accountable

and it lets buyers...

It gives buyers a way

to assess both the quality,

the purity and the potency of

the drugs they're getting.

It makes, uh, these transactions

much more safe for the buyers.

But we're shutting them down,

attempting to shut them down,

because we will

never shut them down.

We've been at this drug war

now for over four decades,

and what has happened since then?

At the beginning, it was just the cartels

and organized crime

making a ton of money.

Today, they make globally

$322 billion off this industry.

Corporate America's

also now in the game.

Private prisons, okay?

Corrections Corporation of America.

About a year ago they gave out

$675 million in dividends

to the shareholders.

Drug testing companies.

It's now become a

multi-billion-dollar industry.

And who gets tested?

Those who are in prison

or under the control

of our criminal justice programs,

on parole and probation.

So corporate America's making a lot of

money. What about law enforcement?

Law enforcement's

making a ton of money.

The government's 1033 Program,

you know,

where we get armored

vehicles and machine guns

and whatever we want of

the surplus military equipment,

that's because

of the drug war.

Over the years we've seen these...

these huge bureaucracies

build up around the drug war,

around prosecuting the drug war.

You've got the Drug

Enforcement Agency.

You've got the Office of

National Drug Control Policy.

So a lot of the... a lot of the

opposition is just rooted in

self interest among places

like the FBI and the DEA,

where if you're telling somebody

who's been in the FBI

for 30 years that drugs

are no longer a priority,

that's an existential

threat to them.

That kind of takes away their

whole reason for existence.

You really have to think about the

danger of some of these drugs,

the severe danger

of addiction,

uh, the havoc that it, you know,

that it reaps on families, and,

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