As we learned last week, the FBI says they ended up at Ryan Chamberlain's apartment because he had been contacting sellers on a darknet site called Black Market Reloaded, which has come to take the place of Silk Road after the feds succeeded in shutting that down last October. Several of these sellers were apparently already under investigation as part of an ongoing effort to shut down this new black market, which includes this thing called Agora Market, a drug marketplace that cropped in March, and Black Market Reloaded, where instructions are immediately given as to how to access the site, and the "Deep Web," anonymously.
Like Silk Road, these sites operate through an exchange of Bitcoin, and the FBI has been investigating the entire black market for over a year, as the LA Times reports, hoping to shut it down piece by piece perhaps by having stories like Chamberlain's get out in the press and scare off sellers and potential buyers. It seems like this could be a Whack-a-Mole game for them for years to come, however, given humanity's capacity for finding ways to buy drugs, and especially if these new sites are decentralized and there's no Ross Ulbricht to bust.
As this recent post about the new Silk Road 2.0 explains, Ulbricht's bust and a subsequent hacking in February that resulted in a bunch of users having their Bitcoin stolen, the new Silk Road appears to be bigger and more impenetrable than before, so the feds have their work cut out for them. This guy Geoff, calling himself SilkRoadGuru, is currently one of the proselytizers of the underground online drug trade.
Whatever Chamberlain may have done to mask his URL and to allegedly shop for deadly poisons like abrin and pure nicotine, he was quickly identified when the FBI questioned sellers who had done business with him and shipped him these things.
Thus, they went into his apartment expecting to find a trove of lethal toxins, and then they happened upon his makeshift, remote-detonated bomb in a messenger bag. And, the FBI seems to be suggesting, someone was saved from possible death at the hands of Chamberlain all because a dude selling assisted-suicide poisons out of his house in Vacaville gave up Chamberlain's info.
Chamberlain remains in custody and last we'd heard his legal counsel had requested he be transferred to a mental-health lockdown at S.F. General. He is expected back in court Monday morning.
Sidebar: Why has no one mentioned the fact that he shares a name with a famous villain character on General Hospital?
