A lot has happened since the fall of Silk Road—the online black market phenomenon known for selling drugs, weapons, and stolen credit cards—in 2013. Just weeks after the Feds shut down the original Silk Road network, another Silk Road popped up like a resilient weed. Silk Road 2.0 worked much like the original version, using bitcoins as currency and running on a sophisticated anonymous browser network called Tor.*

Last fall, the FBI quashed Silk Road 2.0 and arrested Blake Benthall, a guy they've alleged is "Defcon," the pseudonymous online identity who minded Silk Road 2.0's store. This morning, the US Attorney's Office in the Western District of Washington announced that law enforcement had made another arrest as part of the Silk Road 2.0 dragnet. The complaint, filed by a Department of Homeland Security special agent, alleges that 26-year-old Bellevue resident Brian Richard Farrell is "DoctorClu," a Silk Road 2.0 staffer who worked closely with Defcon.

According to the complaint, the agent—who testifies that there's probable cause to accuse Farrell of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, heroin, and meth—picked up on DoctorClu's trail after a source leaked a list of Silk Road 2.0 IP addresses. The Feds then traced one of those IP addresses to Bellevue, where Farrell lived. You can read about more details outlined in the complaint (like the roommate who turned in a package full of Xanax to the authorities) here.

Farrell will be making an initial appearance in US District Court in downtown Seattle this afternoon. From there, the judge will set a detention hearing date, and a grand jury will decide whether to indict. Farrell's lawyer could not immediately be identified.

The Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0 cases are shaping up to be some of the weirdest, gaffe-riddled technological trials of the new millennium. Federal prosecutors are currently in their second week of trying to prove that 29-year-old San Franciscan Ross Ulbricht is "Dread Pirate Roberts," Silk Road’s alleged original mastermind.

Of course, none of this means that the Feds have successfully rooted out the dark net trade. According to a December 2014 report from the Digital Citizens Alliance, the Silk Road-shaped hole in the black market has been filled by even more dangerous criminal elements.

*The Tor Project offers a browser package, but it's really an onion routing network. Bitcoin is also better described as a commodity over currency. We regret the errors.