As a clichéd magazine article on markets would have it, the world is literally ‘just a click away’ from the customer. If you’re tired of the shopping experience in the now-familiar jungles of Amazon, there’s the quirkier Alibaba for wishful goodies from China and beyond. But you can’t wish for just about anything. Internet as conventional, unadventurous users know it, is just the tip of the iceberg, manned perennially by watchful eyes of governments and corporates alike. Beneath this icy, regulated island stretch vast, unending roots—a virtual landscape that is, most efficiently, ‘beneath the law’, a terrain too dark to decipher through algorithms. It is this land that claims to fulfil all the darker wishes.
Ask the genie nicely and, a few file downloads and four or five steps later, India Post would deliver cocaine and other hardcores to your doorstep—and not even the messenger would know what’s in the message. But recently, sleuths in Hyderabad got a whiff of the fact that drug peddlers...
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