I was doing it from the inside.Īnd some of the work you've done seems inherently risky. Plenty of people do it from the law enforcement narrative. And so a lot of people were very, very keen to talk to somebody who is not tabloid, who they could trust was going to give the story fairly from the side of the criminals. And surprisingly, not surprisingly, a few people had some very choice words to say about a journalist being in their forum, but more than that, the people that ran the Silk Road - so that the staff of the Silk Road and most of the major vendors on the Silk Road - were actually very, very keen to tell their side of things, you know? A lot of them were very much into ending the war on drugs, drug reform - a lot of people, especially the buyers that were on Silk Road, their only crime was taking drugs, which in and of itself should not be a crime. If you want to tell me your story, I'd really love to hear it. I've written this story, I'm writing more stories. Well, certainly in the early days, most of the time was spent on the Silk Road, and my process there was to let them all know, this is me. I'm curious, Eileen, so as a lawyer turned author turned journalist, what's your process for beginning a story? Are you out there looking for things on the dark web? Are you following leads that you found previously? Are you getting tips? What's the process like for you? So that made it fascinating, considering, you know, what they were doing was very, very illegal. ![]() It's not some secret place, they're actually trying to get as many customers as possible, just like any other e-commerce platform. It's actually advertising to get as many people to go there as possible. The very fact that this was a place that's on the dark web doesn't want to be hidden, it's not trying to be hidden. And it was, as I said at the time, a lot of people said, I came for the drugs, I stayed for the revolution and it's almost what it felt like at the time because it was so audacious, so different from anything you'd ever seen. So I started hanging around on the dark web very much every single day, but especially in that Silk Road because that was the most interesting place to be at the time, and it also had these really engaged forums where everybody that was using it was getting very, very involved and talking about not only buying and selling drugs, which you could expect, but also philosophy, they had a book club, they had a movie club, they had a lot of harm reduction stories in there. And it was a pretty fascinating story and it was still very much in its infancy at the time, so I pitched that to - as a freelance journalist, I pitched that to a newspaper, major newspaper, here in Melbourne and they took up that story, and so that was a pretty big story in, I think, April 2012, it finally went to print, and from there my editor just kept on asking for more and more dark web stories. It was like any other e-commerce platform, it had little pictures of the things that you could buy and pop into your basket and take home, and the only thing was that these things were cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, all that were ready to be delivered directly to your door by the postman. I'd heard about it and I logged on to have a look at it, and it was absolutely fascinating because it was simply like an eBay for drugs. Well, it sort of started for me around 2011, 2012 when I first heard about something called the Silk Road, which was the first major point-and-click dark web drugs market. So how did you get into this topic from a journalist and from an author perspective, the dark web? And did you know what you were getting into once you got started? You know, I was on your website and I had read, she has shopped on darknet markets, contributed to forums, waited in red rooms and been threatened by hitmen on murder for hire sites, so I can imagine you've seen some pretty interesting things and some things people couldn't even imagine. Thanks for having me, looking forward to talking about it. So, we're joined by true crime writer and investigative journalist Eileen Ormsby. ![]() Now in this episode, we'll hear from someone who has lived and breathed, and written, about the dark web for many years. Today we're continuing the dark web conversation as we've done in some prior podcasts. I'm your host Matt Ashburn and personally I like my dark web to have at least 70% cacao.Īnd I'm Jeff Phillips, tech industry veteran and curious to a fault. ![]() ![]() Welcome to NeedleStack, the podcast for professional online research. The only way that they can check that I really - they're really talking to me is by having me sign a note with PGP encryption. Obviously anyone could go on the Dark Web - and my handle on there is Aus Freelancer - anyone can go on there and say I'm Aus Freelancer.
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