This Bot Bought Drugs on the Deep Web — and Got Away With It
The bag in which the bot’s MDMA arrived. (Via !Mediengruppe Bitnik).
As the highly publicized Silk Road trial taught us, buying and selling drugs on the Internet is just as illegal as it is in real life. But what if you program a bot to buy drugs for you? And what if it’s done for art?
This was the question posed in a recent case involving Swiss art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Per a report by Hopes and Fear’s Marina Galperina, artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo designed a bot to trawl through more than 16,000 items on a Deep Web marketplace named Agora and purchase what it pleased. Dubbed the Random Darknet Shopper, it was given a generous 100 bitcoin-a-week salary for the purpose of the project.
Among the items it chose — including Chesterfield Blue cigarettes from Moldova and “Nike Air Yeezy II”s from China — was a package of 10 MDMA (Ecstasy) pills from Germany, vacuum-sealed in aluminum foil and placed inside a DVD case, so they would look like a DVD in an X-ray scan.
The MDMA pills, with their “stealth packaging.” (Via !Mediengruppe Bitnik).
Weisskopf and Smoljo included the item in a November 2014 exhibit in Switzerland named “The Darknet — From Memes to Onionland. An Exploration.” The showing earned quite a bit of buzz, causing one alarmed Forbes contributor to declare that “issues like these will go from hypotheticals, to art installations, to everyday facts of life. And I have to wonder how ready we are.”
The Swiss authorities were quite ready. A day after the show closed in January, they confiscated both the hardware used to run the bot and all of its purchases. Their tests showed that the MDMA — emblazoned with the Twitter bird logo — was indeed real. They summoned the artists to appear in court to defend the their project and the innocence of the bot itself.
Nearly three months later, justice has been served. Last week, the Random Darknet Shopper was reunited with its creators, along with the rest of the items it bought –– except for the ecstasy, which was destroyed. The artists themselves received an order for the “withdrawal of prosecution,” meaning they were freed of all culpability.
Products purchased by the Random Darknet Shopper. (Via !Mediengruppe Bitnik).
As a post on !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s website put it:
“In the order for withdrawal of prosecution the public prosecutor states that the possession of Ecstasy was indeed a reasonable means for the purpose of sparking public debate about questions related to the exhibition,” it said. “The public prosecution also asserts that the overweighing interest in the questions raised by the art work ‘Random Darknet Shopper’ justify the exhibition of the drugs as artefacts [sic], even if the exhibition does hold a small risk of endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited.”
It added: “We as well as the Random Darknet Shopper have been cleared of all charges. This is a great day for the bot, for us and for freedom of art!”
Congratulations on your hard-earned freedom, bot! Now go celebrate 4/20 like the rebel you are!
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