Police Busted the 'Darknet Shopper' Bot's Stash

If you buy drugs from the internet's darker corners, there's always a chance you could get caught. But what if it's a robot doing the buying? It turns out the police are just as happy to seize algorithmically-bought drugs, too.

In October, artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo of the art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik gave a computer bot $100 worth of bitcoin per week to spend on random items from the darknet market Agora. The items were shipped to the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen—a gallery located about an hour east of Zürich, Switzerland—where they were put on display as part of "The Darknet – From Memes to Onionland. An Exploration."

The exhibition, which ran from October 18th, 2014 until this past Sunday, January 11, included such items as a Lord of the Rings e-book collection, a hidden camera baseball cap, imported jeans–and, notably, 10 yellow ecstasy pills. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's the pills that drew the ire of local police.

According to a statement on !Mediengruppe Bitnik's website:

"On the morning of January 12, the day after the three-month exhibition was closed, the public prosecutor's office of St. Gallen seized and sealed our work. It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited by destroying them. This is what we know at present. We believe that the confiscation is an unjustified intervention into freedom of art."

Andreas Baumann, a media representative for the St. Gallen public prosecutor's office, told Motherboard's German office that police first heard about about the drugs on Friday evening, and obtained an order for seizure on Monday morning.

"Unfortunately we were not able to coordinate with the artist group due to the short notice, but the exhibition had ended anyways," Baumann said. "The police were there specifically because of the ecstasy. For us, it is important that no one be able to get their hands on it."

According to Baumann, an investigation has been launched, but police do not yet have a suspect—something that could be difficult, given how the drugs were purchased. "That the questions our work brings up are now part of a legal investigation only proves the relevance of what we are doing," said Weisskopf, speaking to the Swiss publication 20min.ch.

The collective cited a review of the exhibition by The Guardian in its statement, which asked some tantalizing questions—namely, "Can a robot, or a piece of software, be jailed if it commits a crime?"

Kunst Halle curator Giovanni Carmine told Motherboard's German office that the gallery is not currently under investigation, and that !Mediengruppe Bitnik even sought experts legal opinion before the exhibition began. Though the artists knew they couldn't eliminate all risks—such is the nature of a random shopper—they expected that the $100 allowance would at least limit what it could buy.

But if !Mediengruppe Bitnik is to hold a similar exhibition in the future, Baumann offered some advice: "They could just replace the ecstasy with other yellow pills."