The Armory began as an offshoot of
The Silk Road,
notable as the Internet's foremost open drug bazaar, where anything
from heroin and meth to Vicodin and pot can be picked out and purchased
like a criminal Amazon.com. It's virtually impossible to trace, and
entirely anonymous. But apparently guns were a little too hot for The
Silk Road's admins, who broke the site off from the main narcotics
carnival. Now guns, ammo, explosives, and more have their own shadowy
home online, far from the piles of Dutch coke and American meth. But the
same rules apply: with nothing more than money and a little online
savoir faire, you can buy extremely powerful, deadly weapons—Glocks,
Berettas, PPKs, AK-47s, Bushmaster rifles, even a grenade—in secret,
shipped anywhere in the world.
The Amazon comparison might not be fair—The Armory wants to make
itself hard to access (for obvious reasons that have to do with not
going to prison), so it's not as easy as just firing up any old website.
In fact, it's not really on the web in any traditional sense. To get to
The Armory, you need to deploy a free piece of software called
TOR. Originally (and ironically)
developed by the Navy,
it's become the anonymizing software par excellence among criminals,
hackers, schemers, and the otherwise paranoid. TOR routes and reroutes
your connection to the Internet through a sprawling maze of encrypted
nodes around the world, making it a herculean feat to find out who's
who. The Armory's URL—ayjkg6ombrsahbx2.onion—reflects that, a garbled
string of letters and numbers deliberately impossible to memorize. Once
you're actually signed in, you then have to turn to Bitcoins as
mandatory currency, a further exercise in computer secrecy and
complexity in itself. This ain't exactly walking into a gun show and
walking out with a pistol.
Still, the site prides itself on being about as easy to use as an illegal underground weapons dealership can be:
The Armory is an anonymous marketplace where you can buy and sell
without revealing who you are. We protect your identity through every
step of the process, from connecting to this site, to purchasing your
items, to finally receiving them.
That receiving part is almost as tricky as the labyrinthine
purchasing process. How exactly do you illegally ship illegal guns to
potential criminals? In pieces. Small pieces. The crafty gun dealers of
The Armory aren't going to just stick an assault rifle into a manilla
envelope and drop it into a local mailbox. Rather, buyers get each gun
component shipped in shielded packages—disguised to look like other
products—that then require self-assembly. You get your gun, the dealer
gets his money, The Armory retains its secrecy, and the mail carrier
doesn't realize it's part of an international weapons smuggling
operation.
The Armory shouldn't scare you, really. There are plenty of ways for a
crook to buy guns, and there have been since both crooks and guns
existed. The site doesn't represent some new influx of bullets into
murderous hands, so much as it's a harbinger of things to come—and a
klaxon for what's already here. The Armory is a tiny community, but the
network that hides it is immense and near impossible to dismantle. We
should find solace knowing that there are tools like TOR to keep our
emails away from, say, the prying eyes of an oppressive regime.
1 Comments in Response to The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything
I wonder how their customer service works.