Silk Road
It was the arrest that changed how people looked at the internet. On Oct. 1, 2013, 29-year-old Austin native Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI in the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Library for the contents of his laptop. What was on there was the key to a massive criminal endeavor known as the Silk Road: a secretive black market for drugs, guns, whatever, paid for with Bitcoin and shipped using the regular postal service. Ulbricht was the mastermind, operating under the screen name Dread Pirate Roberts.
It was immediately a hot story (hit men? Cybercrime? Smuggling?