Australians are now regularly buying drugs online from vendors who go by aliases such as "PostmanPot" – and the government is yet to figure out how to stop them.
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The existence of Silk Road, an anonymous online marketplace functioning as a kind of eBay for illegal drugs and other contraband, was first reported in June. But now Australian sellers are trading regularly on the site. Online records show they have made more than 100 sales of drugs such as marijuana, magic mushrooms and a range of pharmaceuticals, and sales are increasing daily.
The government's mandatory internet filter, which is now on the backburner, could have been used to try to force ISPs to block the site, but even that is unlikely to be effective. As it stands there is no way to prevent Australians using it and police say the site is beyond their remit because it is hosted overseas.
PostmanPot is the collective username of a group of Australians - "no more than seven" - selling marijuana in small quantities on Silk Road. "All of us have experience selling afk (away from the keyboard)," one member of the group said via a private message on the Silk Road website.
"I myself sold cocaine in an earlier life [...] some of the other postmen are currently active [offline] in the cannabis and psychedelic market". He hastened to add that none of the group dealt any longer in so-called habit forming chemicals.
He described himself as in his early 20s and studying physics at university. "There is profit made but it's more 'take the mates out to dinner' kind of money rather than 'buy a sports car'."
The "postmen" offer one gram of marijuana for around $20 – or 1.87 bitcoins, the currency used on the website. According to the Australian Crime Commission this price is roughly in line with national median street prices for a gram of marijuana.
Bitcoin is the peer-to-peer online currency favoured by people who prefer to keep their transactions anonymous. Their value fluctuates wildly: one bitcoin is today worth around $11 Australian dollars; at the start of June it was worth $30.
Avoiding the censors
People can only access Silk Road by first downloading a program that channels their internet connections through a complex international web of proxy servers that and conceals their identities in the process.
A spokesman for the office of the Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, said that the Silk Road website had been refused classification by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in June. The government's policy is to require local ISPs to block the URLs of Refused Classification websites, the spokesman said, but this would not happen until after a review of the classification system being undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission.
But even if the government were to exercise such power over ISPs, it's unclear how this would stop people accessing Silk Road. Because users must first direct their home connections through encrypted overseas servers, blocking access to such sites was "pretty well beyond the reach of government," said Dr Chris McDonald, an associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Western Australia and Dartmouth College in America.
The office of Senator Conroy declined to comment on these obstacles.
Surging demand
Silk Road records show that PostmanPot has made fewer than 20 sales. Another Australian seller, operating under the name "novocaine", specialises in magic mushrooms; his Silk Road profile shows he has completed 50 transactions in two months of operation.
"Demand is increasing beyond my expectations, beyond my ability to keep up with customers. I have had to look elsewhere for stock. I went from a couple of orders in my first week to getting several a day," novocaine said.
Novocaine described himself as being in his early 40s and said he squeezed his illegal online enterprise in between working a full-time job in education. He styled his business as a protest against drug laws, one motivated by his conviction in the mind-expanding power of drugs.
"I was anti-drug, homophobic and extremely racist up until my early 30s before I took my first substance, mdma. That one dose changed my life.
"I think it's hypocritical that users of 'illicit' substances are classified as a criminal under current legislation while other highly addictive and harmful substances can be purchased legally".
Other Australian vendors are currently offering drugs such as Phenazepam, a powerful benzodiazepine developed in the former Soviet Union, and have previously sold psychedelics like LSD and DMT and obscure research chemicals.
As on eBay, buyers on Silk Road can rate the quality of a seller's product and customer service. Neither PostmanPot nor novocaine said they had ever encountered difficulty shipping products to customers, which are typically packed in vacuum-sealed packages and sent through the domestic post.
But Australians who buy from Silk Road do not do so without risk. Those who buy from international sellers may have their packages screened by Customs. A spokesman for Australia Post said that they conduct ongoing covert monitoring of domestic mail but declined to detail these arrangements, citing security concerns. The spokesman also noted that Australia Post handled five billion articles of mail each year.
Both sellers said they feared prosecution: "How's business?? stressful haha," said novocaine.
Authorities rendered powerless
But it remains unclear how law enforcement will respond to the emerging online front in the Australian drug trade.
An AFP spokesperson said while they were aware of Silk Road, the site was beyond their remit because its content is hosted on servers outside of Australia.
The office for the Minister for Home Affairs and Justice noted that the government was committed to disrupting the drug trade, citing activities such as seizing drugs at Australia's borders, but it would not say what the government was doing to stop the domestic online trade.
Dr McDonald said the government would find it difficult to monitor activity on Silk Road because the site's visitors were passing their home connections through overseas servers encrypted by algorithms of the same sophistication as those commonly used to protect online banking : "I doubt very much they could do that".
