An anonymous digital underworld

The Dark Web, as it is known, is everywhere and nowhere, and it's growing fast

So this is where they collared the man they call the Dread Pirate Roberts. It's up a flight of stone steps, past the circulation desk and the Romance stacks, over in Science Fiction, far corner.

On a sunny day in October, federal officers entered the public library in the Glen Park section of this city and arrested a young man who they say ran a vast Internet black market - an eBay of illegal drugs.

Their mark, Ross William Ulbricht, says he is not the FBI's Dread Pirate Roberts, the nom de guerre of the mastermind behind the marketplace, Silk Road. And the facts, his lawyer says, will prove that.

However, this story plays out, Silk Road already stands as a tabloid monument to old-fashioned vice and new-fashioned technology. Until the website was shut down last month, it was the place to score, say, a brick of cocaine with a few anonymous strokes on a computer keyboard. According to the authorities, it greased $1.2 billion in drug deals.

That this story intruded here, at a public library in a nice little neighborhood, says a lot about the dark corners of the Internet.

No sooner was the old Silk Road shut down than a new, supposedly improved Silk Road popped up.

And the Dread Pirate Roberts - the old one, a new one, who knows? - is back, taunting the authorities. "It took the FBI two and a half years to do what they did," the Dread Pirate Roberts wrote last week on the new Silk Road site. "But four weeks of temporary silence is all they got."

The new Silk Road has overhauled its security and "marks the dawn of a brand new era for hidden services," he wrote.

The question is, can anyone really stamp out the Dread Pirates? Like the rest of the Internet, the Dark Web is being shaped and reshaped by technological innovation.

First, there was Tor, short for The Onion Router, a suite of software and network computers that enables online anonymity. Edward J. Snowden used Tor to leak government secrets, and the network has been important for dissidents in places like Iran and Egypt.

Then there is bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been skyrocketing in value lately. Bitcoin is basically virtual cash - anonymous, untraceable currency stuffed into a mobile wallet. The kind of thing that comes in handy when buying contraband. Some security experts wonder how authorities can effectively police the Walter Whites of the web. Matthew D Green, a research professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, says buying illegal drugs online is now easier than buying them on the street corner.

© 2013 The New York Times News Service