On the 12th of April, BBC News posted an article called “Liverpool ‘dropout’ jailed for Silk Road dark web site”. BBC News usually uses factual information, but the way their articles are written has a slightly left-leaning bias. Although the BBC News has a slight bias, I do not see a bias in this article. This article dives into a court case about a 24 year old University Drop out by the name of Thomas White. The article talks about his time as an Administrator on the notorious “Silk Road” dark web site, and the things he has done to deserve his jail time, mainly in the forms of selling over 400 images of child pornography, as well as trading over 128 million dollars worth of goods such as multiple different types of drugs, as well as confidential info from the F.B.I and NASA.
Many people don’t understand the sheer amount of influence the dark web has, and this is a perfect example. This man was a university dropout, and has made an estimated 40 million dollars in the past year from these mass illegal trades. Of course like this article states, the website has “achieved notoriety”, as it is a pretty notorious site, but there are many websites that are much smaller than this, and have horrible things on them, from instances of child pornography, to live kidnapping and torture sessions. This case is especially scary because of how small of a sentence this notorious criminal received. The article states that Thomas White, recieved 5 years in prison for the creation, possession, and distribution of child pornography, drug trafficking, money laundering, distribution of heroin, etc. The list of crimes go on, but how many years did he get in prison? Five! I believe this article reveals to us something really important that we need to take into account. The fact that people don’t seem to take online criminals as seriously as regular crimes. In Nebraska for example, a regular Class III felony (a basic conviction for possession of child pornography), comes with a sentence of 20 years. That’s one of his many crimes, and he got a quarter of that sentence. I believe that we need to work towards to judging these online criminals the same as regular criminals. I believe this article does a good job with talking about what the Silk Road is, as well as his crimes, and they don’t seem to have a bias throughout the article. I learned quite a bit from this article, and this has helped build on my understanding on the dark web.
Cybercrime Blog 