Silk Road ends: Feds arrest 'Dread Pirate Roberts,' alleged founder of largest Bitcoin drug market

Maybe. But consider: according to the complaint, the FBI obtained the Silk Road site data on July 23. They also took over Freedom Hosting (a Tor hidden service provider) servers around the same time. They then used the Tor FH servers they controlled to distribute malware (CIPAV) that identified users of the Tor Browser Bundle and reported that information to a (presumably) Federally-controlled server in Virginia. The FBI took down Freedom Hosting for the child pornography sites it hosted, and likely compromised Tor to snare users of those sites, along with whoever else they could snag. But CIPAV has been used by the FBI for about a decade. The bug in the version of Firefox that the Bundle is based on has since been fixed (reportedly), but it does suggest that the FBI might have the capability to pull this off on its own, without NSA help, and that, furthermore, that it might have nabbed Silk Road by compromising Tor itself.

Opinion on that last part is, of course, divided.