It's no longer the
era of industry.
We're in a technological era,
fundamentally.
The fascists, they have
the resources.
But we have imagination.
We are making the tools to
take back our sovereignty.
When we make a giant "fuck you" to
the system, it's breaking that stranglehold
on the tools of power
that's used against us.
The fascists always use
the narrative of,
"We are the white knights
in shining armor
"protecting against
the threats.
We come here and we move out
the dark with pure whiteness. "
That's a false narrative,
because there is corruption
in those castles.
The real base of
power lies with us.
We are the darkness.
DEEP WEB
A trial, which potentially, could have
very far-reaching implications
has just started
in New York City.
A jury will decide a case that could
impact the future of internet privacy.
Thousands of drugs came through
the black website called "Silk Road. "
The government overstepped
their boundaries
- to acquire the info they claim they have.
- This is not going away.
This is gonna be the biggest takedown
of what is currently in existence.
On January 13, 2015,
a criminal trial began for the
accused leader of the Silk Road,
a black market in an area of the internet,
known as "the deep web. "
The deep web is vast,
thousands of times larger
than the visible internet,
what's called the "surface web. "
But the deep web is not a place.
It simply accounts for all of
the unindexed content online...
banking data, administrative code for
governments, corporations and universities.
It's like looking under
the hood of the internet.
Over time, the deep web became
inhabited by people of all types
who wanted to use this
terrain for privacy.
This hidden area of the deep web
is called the "dark net"
and it's accessible with
a software service called "Tor,"
originally developed
by the US military
and now open source
and publicly funded.
And while law enforcement
and the media
have painted a picture
that Tor and the dark net
are nefarious tools for criminals,
it's important to understand that they are
largely used for good by
government agencies, journalists
and dissidents around the world.
In the summer of 2011,
an ad for the Silk Road
appeared on the dark net.
The Silk Road was an underground
exchange for any type of goods,
but mostly it was
used for drugs.
There have always been
drug markets online,
but none with the scale, sophistication
and ease of use as the Silk Road.
It would not remain
underground for long.
Hundreds of thousands of users
use the impossible-to-trace
website which sells drugs,
forged documents
and even hit men.
It's called the Silk Road.
Just look at some of the 13,000 items
offered through that underground site.
Ultra clean cocaine,
clean and real LSD,
high grade MDMA,
also known as "Molly"...
all with fast and free shipping.
It generated roughly
$1.2 billion in sales
with nearly 960,000 users,
both buyers and sellers,
in the US and more than a dozen
other countries worldwide.
YouTube videos like this one
with 15,000 views tell anyone
how to download an untraceable
technology known as Tor, that pulls data
from thousands of computers worldwide
to create this wide open marketplace.
This hidden internet is underpinned
by a virtual currency called "Bitcoin. "
Bitcoins offer anonymized
transactions,
which can be almost impossible
for the police to trace.
Heroin, opium, cannabis, ecstasy,
psychedelics, stimulants...
opioids... and here they are.
So, oxycodone, all of those.
Codeine, black tar heroin.
You name it, they have it.
They're all listed in the...
in the light of day.
- It's unbelievable.
- The Silk Road's success
was largely due to an innovative
combination of Tor and Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a technology that
uses cryptographic code
to create digital currency.
The sender transmits their
Bitcoin code through a ledger
called the "block chain"
to arrive at the recipient.
Bitcoin is not
perfectly anonymous.
But if used carefully, it facilitates online
purchases without revealing identity.
Bitcoin was an ideal currency
for the Silk Road,
because it allows for anonymity
and is outside the control
of banks and governments.
I really became
aware of the Silk Road
when Adrian Chen at Gawker,
uh, did his profile.
I think in a way,
that story, as much as
it documented the Silk Road,
it created the Silk Road, too.
I mean it... it drove so many people
to the site. I think it probably
was an order of magnitude
increase in users on the Silk Road.
So from that point on, I felt
like I had missed the story
and I... I wanted the next big
story on the Silk Road.
But I was also just fascinated
with the community that was...
you know, being created there.
EBay doesn't have that
kind of user community.
This was like a really
tight-knit movement of people.
It was a fascinating thing
just to lurk around in.
It's a certifiable,
one-stop shop for illegal drugs
that represents
the most brazen attempt
to peddle drugs online
that we have ever seen.
It's more brazen than anything
else by light-years.
I mean, they had a really big,
you know, target on their back.
And they even had been taunting,
to some extent, law enforcement
and, you know, the powers that
be by doing this in the open.
And that's actually part of what
this marketplace is all about.
It's not so much about selling
drugs as much as it is to say,
to make a political
statement of sorts, right?
"This shouldn't be prohibited.
"We're free to do what we want
"and we have the technology to do it.
So there. "
The news around the Silk Road
came almost entirely
from law enforcement
and government officials
with little insight from those
who were behind the market itself.
So the core architects and
vendors of the Silk Road
were sought out using encryption
keys to verify their identities
and preserving their anonymity.
This is the first time
they have spoken publicly.
The Silk Road didn't appear
to have a single leader.
There were the regular posts
from the systems administrator,
but otherwise the service appeared
to be primarily community-run.
Then on February 5, 2012,
after a highly successful
first year of business, the Silk Road
administrator made an announcement...
- You're the Dread Pirate
Roberts, admit it. - With pride.
The Dread Pirate Roberts was cribbed
from the mythical character from the novel
and film "The Princess Bride,"
and the choice was no accident.
In the original story
by William Goldman,
the Dread Pirate Roberts was
a nom de guerre handed down
from user to user and
passed along eternally.
The man I inherited it from was not
the real Dread Pirate Roberts either.
The real Roberts has been retired 15 years
and I have been Roberts ever since.
I shall retire and hand
the name over to someone else.
This Dread Pirate Roberts,
or DPR,
would come to spearhead
the Silk Road forums and was
generally assumed to be the
creator and owner of the site.
The Dread Pirate Roberts
to me seemed to be
kind of the most interesting
figure in that whole world.
On the Silk Road forums,
he was constantly posting
these manifestos and love
letters to his users
and Libertarian
philosophical treaties.
And he even had like this, uh,
Dread Pirate Roberts book club
where he hosted discussions of Austrian
economics and free market philosophy.
At the same time,
nobody knew who he was.
He had never spoken
to the press before.
I approached him on the Silk
Road forum mid-2012 and, uh,
started kind of just like trying
to persuade him to talk,
chipping away at him and just
bugging him constantly.
The actual trigger,
I think that made him decide to talk
was this competing dark
website called "Atlantis. "
They were really much more aggressive
in their marketing than the Silk Road.
They put out this YouTube video
advertising Atlantis
as the... the new, better
dark web drug site.
So when I went back to
the Dread Pirate Roberts
and said, "You know,
I'm going to do this story.
It can either be about Atlantis
or it can be about you,"
I think he realized that,
you know, that...
He was a savvy business guy who
realized he had to talk at that point.
He did have a kind
of political message
that he wanted to get out,
and I could see that
in what he was posting
on the forums.
So I kind of played up to that
and I told him like,
"I can be the... the vessel
for you to talk about
what the Silk Road really represents,"
and I think that that appealed to him.
So it took eight months,
but finally he did agree to an interview.
Of course he...
he didn't tell me anything
about himself... where he lives,
you know, his age, identity,
uh, anything that could
be remotely identifying.
"I didn't start the Silk Road.
"My predecessor did.
"From what I understand it was
an original idea to combine
"Bitcoin and Tor to create
an anonymous market.
"Everything was in place.
He just put the pieces together.
"The most I'm willing to reveal is that I am
not the first administrator of Silk Road. "
He was incredibly
secretive, of course,
about the inner workings
of the Silk Road and,
you know, his own identity, of course.
I mean he was hunted by
every law enforcement agency
that you can imagine.
"The management of Silk Road
is a collaborative effort.
"It's not just me making sure
Silk Road runs smoothly.
"More often than not, the best ideas
come from the community itself. "
But he did tell me like
some interesting things
about how he viewed
himself and his... and...
and the way that
the Silk Road works.
"We don't allow the sale
"of anything that's main purpose
is to harm innocent people
"or that it was necessary to harm
innocent people to bring to market.
"For example, anything stolen is forbidden.
"Counterfeit money and coupons
"which are used
to defraud people.
"Hit men aren't allowed and
neither is child pornography.
No substance on Silk Road falls
under those guidelines. "
This went beyond just,
you know,
like legalizing marijuana
or even heroin.
He wanted to see a... a new
relationship between individuals
and the government,
where the government was,
you know,
basically hamstrung, and
couldn't control what
people bought and sold.
"At its core, Silk Road is a way to get
around regulation from the state.
"The state tries to control nearly every
aspect of our lives, not just drug use.
"Anywhere they do that,
there's an opportunity
to live your life as you see fit,
despite their efforts. "
I guess I shouldn't generally
say this kind of thing,
but I really liked the Dread Pirate
Roberts that I interviewed.
I thought he was, you know, uh,
a really super-interesting guy
with a really
coherent philosophy.
He came across to me as
this kind of middle-aged,
- wise man figure, you know?
- But not everyone on Silk Road
believed in Libertarian
philosophy.
Bringing an end to the drug war was the
agenda that truly united the community.
I could see that the Silk Road wasn't
just another cyber-criminal scheme.
This was a guy who saw himself
as the leader of a movement.
"One thing I've learned playing Dread
Pirate Roberts is that your actions
"are sure to please some
and infuriate others.
"But we can't stay silent forever.
"We have an important message.
"And the time is ripe for
the world to hear it.
"What we're doing isn't about scoring
drugs or sticking it to the man.
"It's about standing up for
our rights as human beings
"and refusing to submit when
we've done no wrong.
"Silk Road is a vehicle for that message.
All else is secondary. "
The Silk Road functioned because
the Dread Pirate Roberts was trusted.
At any point, he could have
shut down the Silk Road
and run away with
everyone's Bitcoins.
We've seen that happen with a
bunch of other dark web businesses.
And I think people believed that
he wouldn't because they felt
that he was a true believer
in this kind of radically
Libertarian, crypto-anarchic
philosophy that, you know,
goes back to the cypherpunks
of the 1990s.
Twenty-five years ago,
in the Bay Area,
a burgeoning group of mathematicians,
crypto-anarchists and hackers
began to meet in
each other's homes.
This tight-knit group came to be casually
known as the "cypherpunks. "
These original members were
not socially motivated,
but more concerned with the hard
math of cryptographic technology
and the broader philosophy
of anonymity,
- individual liberty and privacy.
- The government has this clear policy of
access to all plain text, meaning whatever
you're saying, they want access to.
If it's stored on your hard disk,
they want access to it.
If it so goes over the wire,
they want access to it.
If you are proxying speech for someone else,
they wanna know who it is.
The cypherpunks
were instrumental
in the growing movement towards
privacy and anonymity online.
And they would pioneer the way into
the hidden corners of the internet.
Maybe the big turning point
for the cypherpunks,
I think, was WikiLeaks
and Julian Assange
and Jacob Appelbaum's idea of
what it means to be a cypherpunk.
You cannot trust a government
to implement the policies
that it says that
it's implementing.
And so we must provide
the underlying tools,
secret cryptographic codes that
the government couldn't spy on
to everyone as a sort
of use of force.
And a government no matter how hard
it tries, if the cyphers are good,
uh, cannot break into your
communications directly.
Force of authority is
derived from violence.
One must acknowledge
with cryptography,
- no amount of violence will ever
solve a math problem. - Exactly.
And this is the important key.
It doesn't mean you can't be tortured.
It doesn't mean that they can't try to bug
your house or subvert it in some way,
but it means if they find
an encrypted message
it doesn't matter if they have
the force of the authority
behind everything that they do.
They cannot solve that math problem.
This movement is not about
the destruction of law.
This movement is not about
the destruction of law.
It is about the
construction of law.
These are guys
who want to create
encryption tools that everybody
can use. It's not just for the elite.
It's... it's trying to shift the
way that the internet works
to provide secrecy and anonymity
and privacy to everyone,
you know, so like, um, it's
a much more populist movement.
There is a community
of people in the security
and cryptography space
who want to live in a world
where the government cannot
record their emails,
cannot listen to
their telephone calls,
cannot see who they're
spending time with.
And they're trying
to build tools.
They're trying to build
protocols and services
that can facilitate
that kind of anonymous
and private exchange
of information.
I actually think this all comes down
to wanting to live a free life.
And the recognition which really
predates all technology,
that an observed life is not
a completely free life,
that a zone of privacy
is just a core human value.
And the technology to me
is just an incarnation
of those basic human values.
And I think that the people who
are trying to build currencies
that are free of tracking
and government control
and technologies that let you
have a private conversation
and those kinds of things are
just people who are seeing that
the technology can both enable
and disable that space.
There are more cypherpunks
than ever before.
They want to entirely cripple the
government's ability to enforce law.
They want cryptography to make the
rules instead of law enforcement.
Cody Wilson is a crypto-anarchist best
known for developing the Liberator,
a 3D printable gun, that was downloaded
100,000 times in two days.
When a group of baby boomers are told,
okay now 3D printers will print guns,
they can do nothing but say,
"Well, it's been nice living in
the world I used to know. "
We want to question the very foundation,
evacuate the very foundation
that this order, moral, ethical,
political, is founded on.
To see beyond good and evil and to
allow something else to happen.
This is where the figure of DPR
is so interesting to me.
Like is he a liberal? Like is he
a Misesian like he says he is?
Oh, he believes in Libertarian
market principles,
and you know man against
the state and all these...
these principles of freedom and axioms of...
Or... or is he someone else?
Like... like who I hope he is or someone
like I would try to hope to be,
who's just looking for
a way, a mechanism,
to help peek beyond good
and evil a little bit.
And is he more enthusiastic
about what he's...
what he's allowed to be opened
up, the doors he's opening.
Of course, there will be a
dark side to the dark web.
And if we want to enable this...
this true crypto-anarchic future,
anyone who's working on that,
I think, has to reckon with
the fact that they're going to
be enabling really nasty things
along with this kind of information freedom
revolution that they're taking part in.
By August 2012,
business was booming.
The Silk Road had become a thriving,
anonymous and unregulated black market.
The internet being
used in this way,
posed a major threat
to the government,
- greater perhaps than selling drugs.
- Even as a... a law enforcement officer,
I still wouldn't know where to
go and buy crack on the streets
or buy heroin, but I do know
how to go online and find it.
It's downloading some software and,
and the next thing you know
you're there and you can purchase
a service or drugs very easily.
Since when does a teenager become
obsessed with the daily mail delivery?
Fidgeting and pacing made
this Fisher's mom suspicious.
So when her family's mail
arrived, she grabbed it
and found a cartoon DVD box
addressed to her son
with something extra...
a package of white crystals.
So she confronted her 14-year-old,
and both their lives changed forever.
I don't think anybody really
cared in law enforcement
until Senator Schumer went, "Oh, my God,
we've gotta do something about this. "
Today I'm calling on the DEA
and the Department of Justice
to immediately shut this site
down before more damage is done.
Because if you think about
what law enforcement
at the federal level has
to do to even start a case,
I don't think this case
would have been started
if it wasn't for some
political impetus by, you know,
a senator saying,
"We need to look into this. "
The FBI today shut down
what it's calling
the most sophisticated
internet site
in the business of
selling hard drugs,
including heroin,
cocaine and LSD.
Anyone trying to log
on to the website today
found this notice:
"Shut down by the FBI. "
It was a sophisticated
electronic
smokescreen and it took federal
agents almost two years.
They were able to
infiltrate the site,
but they made some of these purchases
themselves using undercover identities.
The secretive
Dread Pirate Roberts
was arrested in the most
unlikely of places,
this local public library in this
San Francisco neighborhood.
The FBI seized $3.6 million
of Bitcoin's biggest haul
in its five-year history.
When the criminal complaint
first appeared in October,
it describes this 29-year-old
kid named Ross Ulbricht.
Not only do they say that he has
run this billion-dollar plus
black market conspiracy and they
accuse him of drug trafficking
and money laundering and somehow
computer hacking charges,
as well, which is something that I had
never associated with the Silk Road.
But then also in this criminal complaint
there is outlined his plot to
pay for the murders of a potential
informant and a blackmailer.
It seems at least
one Silk Road user
threatened to reveal the identities
of thousands of others.
So investigators say Ulbricht tried to
execute a Murder-For-Hire on that user,
offering $150,000 to a would-be
hit man because...
It threw me for a loop.
It was really not the Dread Pirate Roberts
that I had ever imagined.
This connection between Ross Ulbricht,
who plenty of evidence suggests
that he was involved in the Silk Road.
They, after all, seized his laptop
while he was logged in to the Silk Road.
He was caught red-handed. But these
two personalities, these two personas,
do seem to be almost
schizophrenic.
It's so difficult to imagine
that they are the same person.
And so the FBI's whole case
is based on the idea
if they can show that Dread
Pirate Roberts is Ross Ulbricht?
Right. That's... that's
the most important part, right?
Because he was trying to hide
his identity on the site as well.
So the first thing they're gonna
have to do is definitively link him
as the person
who runs the site.
Oh, man, it was like it
was yesterday, actually.
I was on my computer and,
um, I was on Facebook.
And there's this guy that I know
and he's very into like Bitcoin
and cryptocurrencies
and stuff like that.
He posted this article and it
says, "Ross Ulbricht Arrested. "
And I pull up Lyn's, uh,
g - chat and I'm like,
"What is going on?
Like why is... "
And I'm looking at Ross' page...
picture, you know, about being arrested.
What is this?
She says,
"We don't even know.
We're leaving Costa Rica right now. "
I mean, they were on their way,
but it blew my mind.
I mean totally blew my mind.
Ross William Ulbricht grew up in a suburb
of Austin, the only son of Kirk and Lyn
with an older sister
named Callie.
It's a loving, tight-knit,
middle-class family.
The Ulbrichts earn their income
from properties they built
and rent on the
Costa Rican coast.
Ross was an avid outdoorsman,
an Eagle Scout like his father,
and displayed an early
aptitude for math.
Ross earned a full scholarship
to the University of Texas
at Dallas, studying Physics.
He graduated in 2006 and then
won another full scholarship
to Penn State to pursue a Masters
in Material Science and Engineering.
It was at Penn State that
Ross began a deep interest
in Libertarianism, particularly
the work of Ludwig von Mises
and the Austrian School
of Economics.
Yet by 2009,
having completed his Masters,
Ross seemed to be having
a change of life plan
telling his mother he no longer had an
interest in pursuing a career in science
and instead wanted to
become an entrepreneur.
Ross moved back to Austin
and opened his own used book
company, Good Wagon,
donating a portion of
the proceeds to an inner city
youth program and to
a prison literacy project.
- I remember him saying,
when we had coffee,
the last time we saw each other,
I remember him saying
that he wished he had joined
a fraternity in college.
And I remember saying,
"Well, that's surprising. "
You know, I didn't really
understand that perspective,
um, and I just remember him
thinking, well he focused a lot
on his studies in school and
maybe didn't create the social
network that he was looking
for, um, in... in school.
But as far as where we saw each
other going or where we saw
ourselves going, um,
I think we both had
a strong desire to
be in control of our destiny.
You know, again like when he started
the book company, uh, totally natural.
Not even something that I would have
questioned, where there are a lot of people
that would never start their own business.
But for Ross, sure, you know, why not?
But the business floundered
and Ross eventually shut it down.
And if a post on his LinkedIn
page was any indication,
Ross had experienced a kind of
epiphany on the next way forward.
Ulbricht wrote,
"Now my goals have shifted.
"I want to use economic theory
as a means to abolish
"the use of coercion and
aggression amongst mankind.
"To that end, I am creating
an economic simulation to give
"people a first-hand experience
of what it would be like
to live in a world without
the systemic use of force. "
From this moment,
in late 2010,
Ross became something
of a free spirit,
eventually leaving
his parents' home in Austin
to live with his sister Callie
in Sydney, Australia
and then returning
briefly to Austin.
Throughout this period,
as far as his family knew,
Ross' means of employment
was working on freelance
projects in computer finance.
I am Rene Pinnell, age 29.
Today is December 6, 2012
and we are in the Jewish
Contemporary Art Museum,
and relationship to partner
is best friend.
So, Ross, how did you come
to live in San Francisco?
Uh, you twisted
my arm until I said,
"Ah, fine I'll come. "
I get a phone call from Rene,
"Ross, call me up.
I've got an opportunity for you. "
I'm like, "Okay. "
He's like, "Yeah, I'm doing
a startup here in San Francisco.
Um, I want you to
be a part of it. "
The more I thought about it,
and the more he, um,
laid out the pros
and cons, uh... uh...
the more it all just
seemed like cosmic
and the right thing to do.
So, um, yeah.
I bought my ticket and two weeks
later I showed up at his doorstep.
As Ross Ulbricht was
making his way
from Australia to Austin,
and eventually to San Francisco,
the Silk Road was online
and growing steadily.
So naturally it sparked the attention
of federal law enforcement
and specifically
the wing of the DHS
called Homeland Security
Investigations,
housed in the old Customs House
in Baltimore, Maryland.
You have postal
inspectors in Seattle
and Customs and Border
Protection, uh,
intercepting mail shipments
coming from overseas
full of drugs, full of,
uh, full of currency.
And one thing
that happens is
they all lead back
to the Silk Road.
And you have a number of
independent investigations
sort of cropping up around
the same timeframe
following different leads,
but all leading back to the same place.
At the same time,
the New York Cyber-Crime
Division of the FBI
began their own investigation,
headed by Agent Chris Tarbell.
There were people
essentially online 24/7
as part of the team that...
that was monitoring,
gathering, even just the
little bits of evidence.
Informants were activated.
The site was crawling with law enforcement
posing as vendors and buyers
from the very beginning
of Silk Road's existence.
In early 2012, HSI partnered
with Tarbell's FBI investigators
as well as the DEA to mount
an undercover operation
called "Marco Polo"
with the intention of
penetrating the inner
sanctum of the Silk Road.
The operation gained traction
when an undercover agent using
the vendor name of "nob"
was allegedly able to establish
direct communication
with the Dread Pirate Roberts,
which would lead to a
shocking turn of events.
Nob complained to DPR
about the small-fry nature
of most deals on the Silk Road.
"It really isn't worth it
to do below 10 kilos,"
the agent wrote.
DPR offered to help
find a buyer for nob
and allegedly turned to one
of his most trusted partners
known only as "chronicpain"
to put the deal together.
Chronicpain had been one
of the core administrators
of the Silk Road
from the beginning,
a frequent contributor
to the forums who shared
the Silk Road vision for
reducing harm in the drug trade.
But these halcyon days
were about to end.
In order to facilitate
this drug deal,
chronicpain gave the informant
his home address.
Federal agents immediately
apprehended chronicpain
at his Salt Lake City home and
were surprised to discover
that this 47-year-old family man named
Curtis Clark Green was a dark net criminal.
At some point they're going
to catch one of those people.
And what do you do
in a typical drug case?
You roll that person over
as a cooperating witness.
And in this case, one of them
they got really lucky
and he was an administrator
on the system.
Green had access to other Silk Road users'
accounts and financial records,
including Dread Pirate Roberts.
"I have to assume he will sing,"
DPR wrote to nob, the undercover agent.
"I'd like him beat up. "
Then, the next day,
he allegedly wrote,
"Can you change the order to
execute rather than torture?"
A murder was staged.
And a photograph of Green's
bloody body was sent to DPR,
who paid for
the hit in Bitcoin.
There would be five more
alleged Murders-For-Hire,
including ordered hits against
a blackmailer, a scammer
and an apparent contract
with the Hells Angels.
The names of two of these victims
were found to be fictitious.
And authorities have no evidence
of any murders being carried out.
The alleged attempted
murder of Curtis Green
allowed the authorities to obtain an
indictment against Dread Pirate Roberts,
charging him with drug offenses, attempted
witness murder and Murder-For-Hire.
Of course, they still had no idea who
the Dread Pirate Roberts actually was.
So the embedded agents continued
to communicate with DPR,
and DPR continued to respond.
In June of 2013, Ross moved into an
apartment that he found on Craigslist.
Allegedly, he did not give
his roommates his real name
and was known
as Joshua Terrey.
At the same time,
IRS agent Gary Alford
was investigating
the Silk Road
and through a simple Google
search was able to locate
an early email on the open
internet discussing the launch
of the Silk Road
marketplace
and connect that email to an
account owned by Ross Ulbricht.
One month later,
postal inspectors
at the Canadian border
seized a package of fake IDs
with Ross' image that were
en route to his home address.
Ross was visited at his apartment
by several DHS agents.
The agents handed Ross a false
California driver's license
that bore his picture,
but a different name.
Ulbricht denied ownership or
knowledge of the fake IDs,
and the agents simply left.
If you suspect somebody
may be involved in a...
in a large-scale
criminal enterprise,
going and knocking on a door
with some, uh, you know,
some evidence of fake IDs
is important, uh,
because you can see
the guy face-to-face.
Uh, you may get some useful
information out of an interview.
You may or may not want to take
him into custody on the spot.
Let's sit back and let's, uh,
let's really go after this
in a... in a... you know,
much more global way, if you will,
uh, because there's a lot more
here than just one count of,
uh, you know, fake IDs.
The next big break in the case would
be achieved by FBI agent Tarbell
and his cyber-crime team,
who had somehow located
the Silk Road servers
in Germany and Iceland.
How these hidden servers were found
has been a matter of controversy,
but the FBI had their own copy
of the Silk Road server,
and now they hoped to finally
unmask the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Over the course of a year,
a Chicago-based agent from the
DHS named Jared Der-Yeghiayan
had been embedded
in the Silk Road,
now posing as a high-ranking
moderator named "cirrus. "
With both the evidence
connecting Ross to the launch of
the Silk Road and the incident
with the fake IDs,
Ross became one of
the primary suspects.
On October 1st in
a coordinated effort
between Der-Yeghiayan from
the DHS and Tarbell's FBI squad,
a sting operation was launched.
According to
Der-Yeghiayan's testimony,
he staked out Ross'
new residence.
And using his
pseudonym of cirrus,
Der-Yeghiayan initiated a conversation
on the Silk Road with DPR.
Moments later, Ross went to the Glen
Park Library, apparently to use their Wi-Fi.
And when Der-Yeghiayan saw that DPR
was logged back into the Silk Road,
he gave the order for Tarbell
and his squad to move in.
It's an excitement that you
couldn't even buy off Silk Road.
Uh, all the drugs you could buy
on the site, you... you... you...
It's not the same excitement as catching
the guy. It's an adrenaline rush.
Ross was apprehended before
he could encrypt his laptop.
He was allegedly logged into a
Silk Road administration panel
for customers
needing DPR's attention.
He was a dream
for drug users,
because he was very technically
adept and he was able to hide
both the website
that he put together
and the actual sales of illegal
drugs that the drug sellers
would, uh,
make on his website.
The Silk Road was
seized and shut down,
and charges were
announced against
a number of core partners
and vendors from the site.
Ross was held for over a
month in a jail in Oakland,
awaiting extradition
to New York.
Ross's family was able to raise
over a million dollars for his bail.
But the prosecution argued
that due to the alleged
Murders-For-Hire, Ross was
too dangerous to release
and so his bail was denied.
I thought it was the
wrong decision.
He wouldn't have been a flight
risk and he's never been
and is not a
danger to anyone.
There was more than one person
using the DPR account?
The data seized from
the Silk Road servers included
all internal private messages,
which revealed that many people
collectively ran the site.
One vendor with the user
name "Variety Jones"
was active from the beginning
of the Silk Road.
Jones gave many of the orders
for running the Silk Road,
even instructing the systems
administrator to create
the Dread Pirate Roberts
persona.
But Ross Ulbricht remained the
primary focus of the investigation.
Ross has been incarcerated
for over a year
in the Metropolitan Detention Center
in Brooklyn awaiting trial.
Six weeks of that time was
in solitary confinement.
Ross plead not guilty and denies
being the Dread Pirate Roberts.
His trial was set for November
10, 2014 in New York City.
If convicted, Ross faces
a minimum sentence of 30 years
with a maximum sentence
of life in prison.
- Are you taking a video?
- Mmm-hmm.
He's a hairy fucker.
These big guys are
generally not too, uh...
I would let him off somewhere.
Where is he?
- You know it's hard.
It's... it's hard on a family.
It really is, especially when
you love that person so much
and you believe in
them so much, and
you have such a daunting
Goliath of an opponent.
It's, uh, challenging.
It's kind of like a death, in a way,
when you go like, "No, that can't be true,"
and then you're like,
"Oh, yeah, it's true. "
And you go through
that kind of shock.
His dad, my husband, um, of course,
he's trying to keep our business going
so we have a livelihood.
And, um, his sister
is in, um, Australia
- and she's been helping, too, from there.
- I'm Ross' sister and I can tell you
he has been a man of his word
and honor all his life.
I was shocked to hear
the news of his arrest,
but felt even more dismayed
at what the media was writing
about him, not even knowing him.
You know, I read things by people who
have not a clue who Ross really is.
He's been tried and
convicted in the media.
Nothing has been proven at all.
I don't know what's happened to
the presumption of innocence
in this country, but it is
a constitutional right here
that we are innocent
until proven guilty.
Ross sent me this picture of
himself about a week ago.
It was taken a couple of
weeks ago in prison.
I guess sometimes they go around
and take pictures for the families.
He is doing well, uh,
as well as can be expected,
of course,
under the circumstances.
And finally, after
five months of delays,
he has had access to the discovery,
the evidence that the prosecution has.
And so he's been working very
hard going through that.
We are asking the,
uh, prosecution,
"How did you find the server,"
and they're not saying.
Um, we have to know how they
found the server in order to see
if Ross' Fourth Amendment
rights have been violated.
And how would anyone know if the evidence
had been tampered with or anything else
if it's not revealed how
they found the server?
There were 14 searches
and seizures in this case,
which is a...
a fishing expedition
into a person's
total property.
Unlimited rummaging through all of
their things to see what they can find.
When the criminal complaints
first appeared in... in October,
I think the supporters of
the Dread Pirate Roberts
and the Silk Road
just scattered.
Because suddenly this thing
that had seemed like
an idealistic community
built around non-violence
and, you know,
Libertarian free commerce,
suddenly seemed instead like
this bloody criminal conspiracy.
And a guy who probably otherwise
would have been a kind of, uh,
political cause clebre,
who... who would have had
all of these supporters
calling for his freedom,
instead was treated as a...
was an immediate pariah.
He was seen as a criminal.
So there's a lot of, um,
circumstantial, uh,
evidence,
if you want to call it that.
There's a lot of technical bits
and pieces involved.
It got really crazy
in the middle of that.
Sort of one thing is taking down
this online drug market.
Another thing is pinning a number
of Murders-For-Hires on top of it.
It just seems really,
really far-fetched.
The 29-year-old seemingly
clean-cut entrepreneur was living
a secret life as a digital drug lord.
- They're claiming that he's living in a
manner of a... of a head of a cartel.
The distinctions between Ross
Ulbricht and the head of a cartel,
you don't have to see
too many movies to...
to recognize what the
differences are here.
Then when the indictment
finally came out,
there were suddenly
no charges around
these Murder-For-Hire accusations,
only the drug trafficking
and money laundering
and computer hacking.
They had six charges. They used them
against him to deprive him of bail
and yet two and a half
months later, uh,
the prosecutor
didn't indict him.
What they did instead was they
called it an "uncharged crime. "
Well, if something's a crime,
don't you charge someone for it?
And if it's not a crime,
why is it there...
because it's
prejudicial to a jury
to have that sitting
there unproven just...
just smearing him.
The portrayal they want is
of someone who they could
present to a jury of not
having redeeming value.
It's a way of poisoning the
atmosphere so that the jury
doesn't focus on the allegations,
but focuses on this
atmospheric that the government
has created that in some sense
is a diversion appealing to
the emotional aspect of it
so that if the proof is weak,
the benefit of the doubt
doesn't go to the defendant,
where it belongs, under the
presumption of innocence,
but it goes to the
government because, hey
there are these awful
things lurking out there
which aren't part of what
we're supposed to find.
The government doesn't have to prove
them beyond a reasonable doubt,
but they've injected them
in the case in a way
that is toxic to an
impartial evaluation of
what the evidence is on
the charged crimes.
So people come in with
a preconceived notion
and that's halfway
there to... to guilt.
Previously, the Murder-
For-Hire was in there
as a charge and then
it was dropped.
But it's not gone away.
It's included as what
they call an overt act
in the conspiracy and...
to sell drugs.
And so they actually made it
one of the things to support
the larger drug conspiracy
to either get a trial
- or get him to plead.
- It seemed like this bait and switch
that the government had accused
him in this almost informal way
of murder so that when
he was charged with these
non-violent crimes in the end,
he would still be seen
as a violent criminal.
I think that that has
really been effective in...
in coloring the portrait
of Ross Ulbricht.
Ever since Ross' arrest,
he and his best friend Rene Pinnell
have remained in
regular contact.
Rene declined to give
substantive interviews
to the press for fear they would
be used against Ross in court,
but agreed to answer
questions via email.
I'm a little teapot
Short and stout
Here is my handle
here is my spout
When I get all steamed up
hear me shout
Tip me over
and pour me out
Yay!
Because of the severity
of the charges,
Ross was not able to grant
an interview from prison,
which left only a scattering of his
personal photographs and movies.
But from the exhaustive discussions
with friends and family
and the public knowledge
of Ross's trajectory
from Physics and
Engineering major
to running a small home-spun
book-selling company,
it was difficult to understand
how he could possibly
have been the sole
mastermind of the Silk Road,
a vast and complex internet service
with over a million users worldwide.
Ross was certainly
bright and studious
with a deep interest in
Libertarian economic theory,
which clearly echoed the
mandate and philosophy
of many of the posts of
the Dread Pirate Roberts.
But he had no experience
whatsoever in computer coding
or scaling large
internet companies.
So how did Ross connect
to what little is truly known
about the
Dread Pirate Roberts?
DPR was motivated
by a pacifistic philosophy
and an agenda of creating
victimless exchange
and reduced harm
in the drug trade.
This ethos would be embraced by the chief
architects and vendors of the Silk Road
and reverberate through
the entire community.
The Silk Road appeared to be
a successful experiment in
creating a pacifistic community,
overseen by a figurehead with
a deep-rooted ideology.
But these core ideals of
the Dread Pirate Roberts
were completely at odds with
the Murder-For-Hire allegations.
Did DPR become corrupted
and turn his back on
the mandate of non-violence
and harm reduction?
Were there other people
using the DPR account
who were responsible
for these actions?
Or was there some other truth
behind these alleged
murder hits that
produced no victims?
We don't know the first
piece of evidence
that lead the feds down
this chain of investigation
to the San Francisco library
where Ross Ulbricht was arrested. All we
know is that at some point they located
the Silk Road servers in a data center
in Iceland and imaged them.
They copied all the data off
of them, and seized them,
but we don't know how
they found those servers.
The whole idea of... of
the Silk Road was that it ran
as a Tor-hidden service, which means
that Tor protected its physical location
and made it very difficult to locate
the computers that ran it.
So the mystery of how the FBI,
or the DEA, or possibly the NSA,
located those servers is still
unsolved and, in fact,
hasn't been mentioned in
any of the legal documents
surrounding
Ross Ulbricht's trial.
I think his defense has seized
on this as something
that the government
doesn't want to talk about.
And if that's the case,
then it does raise these
Fourth Amendment issues
of... of can the government
use essentially
hacking techniques
to dig up evidence on
a criminal suspect?
And if so, what kinds
of warrant do they need?
If in fact there was some kind of
violation of the Fourth Amendment,
in that initial part
of the investigation,
that really was the first
clue that lead them
down this entire chain to the
arrest of Ross Ulbricht, it could be
a giant problem for the prosecution
that then taints every other piece
of evidence that they
found subsequently.
The government has
prosecuted other people
for doing essentially what the
government did here, which is...
trying to get underneath
the public face of a website.
And they have alleged that
getting that information
that's not supposed to
be publicly accessible
by sophisticated computer,
uh, inquiries or activities,
uh, that that is a...
a violation of federal law.
And that's why they always say,
we didn't do anything wrong,
we didn't do anything
in violation,
but they really know what's
stake here, because they've
actually prosecuted people
for the same thing.
And the government's affidavit,
the affidavit from Agent Tarbell
about how they got to
the Silk Road servers
has been met with incredulousness
by the internet community.
The Tarbell declaration,
to put it politely,
seems vaguely disconnected
from the truth.
If you... depending on which
security expert you ask,
you will get it's vaguely
disconnected to the truth
to something filled with...
it is a massive pile
of bovine excrement.
What Tarbell's story was is he
was typing away at his computer,
visiting the
Silk Road website
and the CAPTCHA was
transmitted in the clear,
and he somehow saw the IP packets
go directly to the server.
And so he then connects to that
server and gets the CAPTCHA.
Game over, they found
the backend server.
Unfortunately, this was playing
fast and loose with the truth.
Because the logs provided
to the defense show that
what Tarbell found was
not the CAPTCHA image,
but instead a
php MyAdmin page.
The server was running some stuff
over the clear, but not the CAPTCHA.
So Tarbell's story doesn't mesh
with the FBI's own evidence.
They hacked the servers
and with that access
could essentially do
whatever they wanted.
Given just the institutional pressure to...
to take this thing down,
it's naive to think
that they didn't.
Of course it's on the table that
this is how they discovered him.
I mean he was dealing with Tor.
He was dealing with all these technologies
which we know are the subject
of NSA investigations,
as revealed by Edward Snowden.
It's at least reasonable to
assume that there's been
this kind of parallel
construction or interference
or like not playing by the rules that the
state deals out for you to play with.
But then again, we all know
that it deals the cards.
Uh, it... it runs the game anyway.
It's... it's not even...
It's naive to think that this
wasn't an available option.
The issue is whether the agent could
have done what he said he did.
The theory that's been brought
forward in a testimony
by the individual
agents that did it,
they were able to manipulate
part of the server
to cough up an address that
shouldn't have been given up
and that address came
back to Iceland.
And that server there was hosting
the Silk Road hidden service.
I think we're not gonna
know till we go to trial
and we may never
know for sure.
There's always this balance of,
uh, trying to be
forward leaning in your investigative
techniques and making sure that you don't
trample on rights
at the same time.
You wanna stay well within the
bounds of your legal authority,
because if you step
over the line,
the evidence is gonna be tossed.
It's not gonna be admissible in court
and you may wind up, uh, jeopardizing
the outcome of an entire investigation.
And so I think what agencies
will try and do is they'll,
want to step right
up to the line,
and maybe get a little bit of chalk on
their toes, but don't step over it.
Ross' lawyer made a motion
to dismiss the case based on the disputed
seizure of the Silk Road servers,
arguing that admitting this
material not only violates
his client's Fourth Amendment rights,
but would set a dangerous precedent
for the rights to privacy
of all citizens.
The judge, Katherine Forest,
sided with the prosecution
stating that the Tarbell
declaration was acceptable.
And the motion was denied.
Search and seizure law
in the digital age
is really, uh, doesn't have
the limitations on it that,
um, it does in
the physical space.
And um, we see it not only in
the search and seizure laws,
like what is the standard upon which
they can come and grab your computer?
Um, what kind of searches can they do
on your computer once they have it?
Do they just get everything?
We see this at the border.
Or we see this at searches into arrests.
People now carry around smart phones
that have their whole
lives in them.
And if they get stopped,
law enforcement is...
is certainly right now in a lot
of places taking the position
that absolutely anything
that's connected,
that's on that device, including
logging into your accounts
that you can log into from
that device, is fair game.
If the prosecution gets away
with this warrantless seizure
of Americans' data as well as
all these other foreigners,
it could have a lasting
precedent for how
the Fourth Amendment works
in the digital age.
I think that that, in fact, may be the
most lasting effect of the Silk Road.
Generally, what happens
in the criminal law field
is that there's a... some case
of... of major proportion
that is used as a means
of changing rules,
or expanding exceptions to
constitutional protections,
and once it's there,
once the precedent is set,
it then trickles down very
quickly and very easily
into all sorts of ordinary cases where,
you know, the ends justify the means.
- Then all of a sudden, it's now spread.
- The average citizen may say,
"Well, why is this important to me?
"Why do I care?
"I'm not buying drugs
on the network.
Nobody I know is buying drugs on the
network". But it's not just about that.
We're a democracy and
informed citizens, uh, um,
understand they have
a right to privacy
and that the Fourth Amendment
protects against
unreasonable searches and seizures.
Information has to be encrypted.
And that goes from a large
corporation down to an individual.
And so for those who are arguing that
information should not be encrypted,
certainly that makes it easier for
law enforcement to, um... combat,
but it also makes it easier for
the cyber criminals to attack.
It makes total sense that criminals
are among the early wave,
along with the sort of paranoid people,
of these new tools and services.
But that doesn't mean that they're
the only people using these services.
You know, there are a
hell of a lot of journalists
that I know and regularly
communicate with now over Tor.
But you know,
for the people who
oppose this technology,
who see it as a threat,
the fact that criminals use it is
a great way to... to demonize it.
I definitely do believe
that there are people
in the US that don't think that the
government is doing anything wrong.
It's not necessarily something
that you're concerned with
or that you care
too much about
or that you're really
passionate about until you...
- you're standing right in the middle of it.
- And it's something more dangerous
than any website
could ever be
is what our government has
become and how they operate.
This goes back to that
question of the government
kind of trying to treat the
internet differently without,
uh, following the same kind of,
uh, judicial processes.
Well the Supreme Court has
proven that they do not agree.
You know, recently with
Riley vs California
with an illegal search
of a cell phone.
Precedent can be set that will limit
their ability to infringe on our rights.
Someone asked how her
political views have shifted.
Because suddenly she's standing
right in the middle of Tor,
Bitcoin, the war on drugs,
online anonymity, encryption.
And she's had a... she's had to
learn a lot of different things,
and also not only just the whole
legal system but, uh,
everything around the
technology and the case.
After over a year in prison,
Ross delayed the trial two months,
stating that important discovery
evidence he needed to examine
had only just been delivered
to him by the prosecution.
The FBI shut down
what it calls
the most sophisticated and
extensive criminal marketplace
on the internet, but it may
be finding new life.
The arrest of Ross Ulbricht
and closure of the Silk Road
did nothing to hamper
drug sales on the dark net.
Many new markets
immediately appeared,
including a re-launch of
the Silk Road itself,
also run by someone calling themselves
the Dread Pirate Roberts.
And like its predecessor,
the second Silk Road
also claimed a mandate of reducing
violence and harm in drug transactions.
The Dread Pirate tweets, "Silk Road while
under my watch will never harm a soul.
If we did, then we are no better
than the thugs on the street. "
The new Dread Pirate Roberts
told me that he knows
he can't be around forever,
and when he's gone, someone else...
he's confident someone else
will step up and fill the void.
You can take down the man,
but you can't take down the idea.
By this time,
statistics appeared
claiming the first Silk Road
had succeeded in its mission
of reducing violence
in the drug trade.
While I was with the Baltimore
Police Department in the early 2000s,
I had two city officers in uniform
killed by drug dealers on the street.
And there was a family of seven,
the Dawson family on Preston Street,
they were killed by one drug dealer in
one night, mother, father and five kids.
And so as the years in the early
2000s start moving along,
I'm continuing to think about
this from a place of violence
and beginning to realize that
our policies of drug prohibition
were actually counterproductive
to public safety.
The one thing that I signed
on for to improve,
to better public safety in our
neighborhoods, was making it worse.
And, uh, I found...
a large number of police
officers and judges
and criminal prosecutors
and DEA agents
and FBI who think the same way.
If Baltimore moved from street
corners to online services,
oh, my God, do you know
how many shootings,
how many fewer shootings
we would have every year,
which equate to
fewer homicides?
Number one, it removes the...
the buyer from the back alleys
and from the street corners
and from those dangerous places
of dealing with the seller.
Buying it over the internet
where it's delivered to you,
- removes you from that scenario. - Well,
one of the interesting things that having
an online market
does is that it makes
sellers much more
accountable to buyers.
And one of the really interesting
innovations is the whole review system,
where buyers can review
the sellers and the items
that they bought from these,
uh, on these market places.
And what that does is it makes
sellers more accountable
and it lets buyers...
It gives buyers a way
to assess both the quality,
the purity and the potency of
the drugs they're getting.
It makes, uh, these transactions
much more safe for the buyers.
But we're shutting them down,
attempting to shut them down,
because we will
never shut them down.
We've been at this drug war
now for over four decades,
and what has happened since then?
At the beginning, it was just the cartels
and organized crime
making a ton of money.
Today, they make globally
$322 billion off this industry.
Corporate America's
also now in the game.
Private prisons, okay?
Corrections Corporation of America.
About a year ago they gave out
$675 million in dividends
to the shareholders.
Drug testing companies.
It's now become a
multi-billion-dollar industry.
And who gets tested?
Those who are in prison
or under the control
of our criminal justice programs,
on parole and probation.
So corporate America's making a lot of
money. What about law enforcement?
Law enforcement's
making a ton of money.
The government's 1033 Program,
you know,
where we get armored
vehicles and machine guns
and whatever we want of
the surplus military equipment,
that's because
of the drug war.
Over the years we've seen these...
these huge bureaucracies
build up around the drug war,
around prosecuting the drug war.
You've got the Drug
Enforcement Agency.
You've got the Office of
National Drug Control Policy.
So a lot of the... a lot of the
opposition is just rooted in
self interest among places
like the FBI and the DEA,
where if you're telling somebody
who's been in the FBI
for 30 years that drugs
are no longer a priority,
that's an existential
threat to them.
That kind of takes away their
whole reason for existence.
You really have to think about the
danger of some of these drugs,
the severe danger
of addiction,
uh, the havoc that it, you know,
that it reaps on families, and,
you know, and children,
and, uh, careers.
And so to say that, you know,
we need to step back and liberalize,
well, but you... that's one
approach you can take,
but then you've got to look
at a cause and effect.
If we do this, what are the
second and third order effects?
The FBI,
our federal government,
they're gonna go in and they're
shutting these places down.
But you know what?
New ones just open up.
'Cause there's so much money to be made.
They'll continue to open up,
and it's just a dog
chasing its tail.
We're a team, and we've been working on
this thing together right from the start.
The way it's affected me
is in some ways
very much the same
as it affects Lyn,
but I don't have to go out
there and talk to reporters.
And we've... we've kind
of set it up that way.
It's hard enough having your...
your loved one in prison,
but then the whole media thing is,
it definitely adds pressure.
I've known for a long time that the
media wasn't reporting the whole story,
that it was skewed.
I see what Lyn and I are doing
as a, um, as a pushback to that.
Ross has been in there a year and he's...
he's avoided all violence,
even though it's
been around him.
That has matured him for sure.
The fact that he's come out of this
unscathed so far, uh, speaks volumes.
He seems serious.
You know, there's a lot at stake.
He's, uh, feeling good
that we got the extension.
He had this mountain
of stuff to go through
and I felt like he was
running out the clock.
And now they have that
extra two months has made...
has been "essential"
is the word he used.
And so I think
he feels that, you know,
he's... he's much more
prepared and... and ready.
Yeah, he says he's ready for trial.
He's ready to go in there and win.
I have also matured
in this last year.
Matured in my thinking
about ethics, politics.
When I became more
and more aware of
what the drug war
was doing, the tragedy.
So many people have been
victimized by the drug war.
It's a giant mess and it's
a story that needs telling.
And we... we've got a pulpit,
in a way, to tell it from.
It's so weird to be doing
all this and it's...
it's distracting and it's...
it's challenging
and you wanna do the right thing,
and then it's all about Ross.
And then we go and we see him
and hug him and talk to him
and hold his hand and it's
just like Ross, you know?
It's such a disconnect, and, uh,
it's just so hard to see him in there.
Being in the prison, visiting...
it's a very emotional experience,
because there are all
these families there
and they get to see their
loved one one hour a week.
And so they're soaking
each other up.
And you're in a room
of 150 people,
sitting side-by-side,
tight-packed.
And, uh, there's just all this emotion...
saturating the atmosphere.
The prisoners have
segregated themselves.
But as loved ones coming to
visit, there's no sense of,
uh, segregation, um,
race at all.
We're just 150 people whose
hearts are breaking.
Of all the Snowden disclosures
that have come out to date,
the one that will have
the greatest long-term impact
is the revelation that the NSA
has been subverting
cryptographic standards and
making the internet less secure.
That disclosure, those articles,
have radicalized
a new generation
of cryptographers,
a new generation
of computer scientists
who are now intent upon
building tools and services
that can withstand pervasive
government surveillance.
Did you see our wireless
from Barclay's Bank?
They like Bitcoin, so they're
supporting our work.
They're providing us with
free Wi-Fi from the bank.
In the fall of 2014, as Ross
was preparing for his trial,
a group of hackers,
programmers and activists
met in a squat in
the center of London.
This gathering represented
the next wave of the dark net,
developing new and evolved
cryptographic tools
that would not be
so easily shut down.
Open source is
incredibly powerful.
Open source is responsible for
WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, Linux,
which runs all of our...
our infrastructure, for Firefox,
for Bit Torrent, for Bitcoin,
for all of these,
for encryption, for all of
these real uses of tech,
not the yuppie, uh,
Angry Birds or silly apps that,
that these people,
make, you know?
Open source is also an example
of how we can organize
economically, an example for the future,
to... to build the products we need
without needing proprietary industry,
without needing the points of control,
without needing masters
and slaves and babysitters.
It's not enough to build
privacy-preserving tools.
It's not enough to write
revolutionary research papers
and design amazing
cryptographic primitives.
You have to get them into
the hands of the users.
And I think in the future
what you'll find is that
tools like Tor, tools like OTR,
like PGP, like Bitcoin
will be built into the services
and applications that you use
and you won't know
they're there.
We want to empower the individual,
protect the small guy.
We have a mistrust
of central authority.
We believe in freedom
of information.
First of all, we have the centralized
drug marketplace, Silk Road.
Governments went in
and shut that down.
And then up sprouted dozens of different,
centralized drug markets.
And in a game of whack a mole,
they shut down one and now there's dozens.
And now we're entering the realm
of decentralized drug markets,
with no central operator,
no central point of control.
What are they gonna do?
They're gonna continue to
do these kinds of things,
and even if it's a
distributed network,
peer-to-peer is worked
continuously by the, uh,
state and local law
enforcement agencies.
And they arrest
people every week.
On November 6, 2014, law enforcement
agencies around the world
launched a coordinated effort
called "Operation Onymous,"
seizing hundreds of dark net sites,
including the re-launch of the Silk Road.
Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer,
once said to me,
"You know, in this
cat and mouse game,
the mice will win in the end,
but the cats will be well fed. "
I think that that's
the way to see it.
That, uh, this game is going
to continue forever.
There's a reason the Silk Road was
so powerful. And I... and I know
the cryptos now are writing
the kind of automatic Silk Road,
and Amir helped do this. This is now
the peer-to-peer model where there's
no one individual administrator.
And seeing that as the weak point,
technically speaking, this is all correct.
But there...
there's something kind of...
I don't want to make him
a hero, like a...
I don't want to say
that he's a hero.
But you know, DPR recognized
what was at stake
and he was willing to do
the things that most of
the Libertarians
weren't willing to do,
because he was serious about,
I think what the Silk Road meant.
Three weeks before the trial,
the issue of the Murders-
For-Hire suddenly resurfaced.
The prosecution announced that
due to these allegations,
they would not allow Ross's defense to
know the identities of their witnesses.
The defense responded that using
these uncharged crimes
in these manner was
prejudicial.
A hearing was called
to resolve the matter.
The judge ruled that some of the witnesses
won't be made available to the defense
until right before the trial.
It's based on her saying
that Ross might intimidate
or even murder people,
um, from jail.
When all this
first happened, I said,
well, it would still have been
necessary to say that, well,
this man's a murderer and,
and he was only out for his own gain.
And you know, he had...
what do you call it,
a callous disregard for human life.
It's necessary to paint a figure that way
rather than to make him,
you know, a martyr of the...
the war on drugs.
I think that's just good planning.
I think it's gonna be difficult, um,
to have a fair trial.
If you are innocent until proven guilty,
then with all the evidence
and all the stories
that have been written,
I think it's gonna be really difficult to...
to find people who are not influenced by...
by any of this
at all going into it.
The day before the trial,
Ross provided a written statement.
It was the closest anyone would
ever get to an actual interview.
Ross Ulbricht went on trial today.
A jury will decide a case
- that could impact the future of internet
privacy. - Good evening to you.
Opening arguments taking place today,
and the first witness took the stand
and actually just got
off a few minutes ago,
a Homeland Security
investigation special agent
who testified saying that,
"Thousands of envelopes of drugs... "
I think everyone was surprised
that Ross Ulbricht and his lawyers
took this to trial in the first place
instead of just taking a plea deal
like pretty much everyone expected.
And today, we saw why,
which is that they've actually
got a pretty compelling
alternate narrative of how this
whole case has played out.
The story that Dratel is
telling that Ross did create
the Silk Road, which is an
amazing admission to begin with,
and that the real operator of the Silk Road,
the Dread Pirate Roberts, framed him.
It's a kind of theory that
I never heard posed before,
that instead of Ross being the Dread
Pirate Roberts, he was framed by him.
But in many ways, you know,
it's something I should've expected
because it's what the
Dread Pirate Roberts told me
when I interviewed him in July of 2013
that he didn't create the Silk Road,
that he had inherited it from its creator,
kind of like a business acquisition.
The FBI has told me that that
was Ross Ulbricht lying to me.
If it is a lie, it would
require just a lot of...
a lot of foresight and planning,
kind of like the...
you know, an amazing game
of chess or something.
In the first days of the trial, the
prosecution presented evidence that Ross
kept a journal on his laptop
describing his involvement
in the Silk Road and that the
Bitcoins seized from his laptop
came directly from the site.
While the defense would argue
that Ross abandoned
the Silk Road after creating
it and that the journal
and the Bitcoin were
planted on his laptop.
Andy, you interviewed
the Dread Pirate Roberts.
What's the evidence connecting
Dread Pirate Roberts to Ulbricht directly?
Well, in the first couple
of weeks of this trial,
which is ongoing now, we've seen that
the prosecution has a very strong case.
Once they seized his laptop,
they found that he had kept a journal.
- If this is, in fact, Ulbricht's journal.
His defense claims it's not. - Right.
He documented the administration
of this site for years.
He has a log book
of daily activities.
So this is a really tight
case that's gonna be
very difficult for Ulbricht to...
to squeeze out of it.
Underneath, in the deep web,
we have an area
where this young man,
according to the government,
has made a decision that
he's going to run
an illegal drug empire
and we need to stop you,
swift and certain prosecution,
and ultimate certain punishment.
As the trial continued, Dratel planned to
reveal the government's own evidence
showed they suspected multiple
people of running the Silk Road.
During his cross examination of
DHS agent Der-Yeghiayan,
Dratel was able to expose that
the agent had long suspected
another person to be
the Dread Pirate Roberts,
going so far as to seek
a warrant for this suspect.
The protection protested this
entire line of questioning
on the grounds that
it was hearsay.
The judge sided with the prosecution, and
Dratel was no longer allowed to question
government witnesses
about alternate suspects
that came from the government's
own evidence.
When the time came for Dratel
to begin his defense,
he intended to use expert witnesses
to explain that the complex technology
behind encryption and cryptocurrency
made it difficult to prove
that the journal and the
Bitcoin belonged to Ross.
The prosecution objected
to these witnesses,
claiming they should have been
made known earlier in the trial
and they were not necessary for
the jury's understanding of the case.
Once again, the judge sided
with the prosecution,
stating that this case did not
require specialized knowledge.
Without expert witnesses
and unable to pursue
the government's own evidence
of an alternate DPR,
Dratel's entire defense
was effectively blocked.
The trial ended abruptly
the next day.
The trial of Ross Ulbricht raised
more questions than it answered.
Did we really know the full
truth of the Silk Road case?
Would this case set a precedent
for the warrantless search of
Americans' digital property?
Whatever the ultimate outcome,
it was clear that
the fall of the Silk Road was not the
end of a chapter, but the beginning.
And the movement to create tools
and services for online privacy
- is stronger than ever.
- The trial of Silk Road mastermind
Ross Ulbricht concluded
when a jury found him guilty
on seven different counts that
included three drug charges
as well as computer hacking,
money laundering
and even a kingpin charge of
continuing a criminal enterprise.
Ulbricht faces a minimum
of 30 years behind bars,
but his defense plans
to appeal this decision.
Anyone here, all of us, are going
to be judged by things for which
there is no attribution in real life.
There's only attribution on the internet
for things to be created,
codified, edited, moved, hacked.
- Was it a fair trial?
- No, I don't think so.
As the actual verdict was read,
the word "guilty" was said seven times.
Ross was just staring straight ahead.
I don't know what was on his face.
But afterwards he turned
back to look at his family
and he had this really heartbreaking
kind of stoic smile.
And he was just...
he wasn't crying,
but he was just blinking...
like blinking hard.
And, uh, then as he was led
away, his mom said,
"This is not the end. "
You know...
that was it.
The evidence against Ulbricht was so
powerful and Dratel's strategy had been
to try to cross examine
every government witness
and to pull out his alternative story
through that cross examination.
And when the judge essentially
shut that down and said
you have to limit your cross
examination to the scope
of the government's...
initial questioning,
that really prevented him from
telling any other story.
We have a much more informed perspective
than the rest of the world.
Uh, we have meetings
that we've had with Josh
through the last year and three
months, uh, regular meetings.
We know about
how he felt like
he might win the case,
uh, in cross examination.
Uh, we know that the government,
that his witnesses were...
were, uh, blocked
from testifying.
Um, we were in the courtroom and we
saw what happened and... and the...
the, uh, the travesty...
the, uh, appalling,
um, obstruction of justice
that happened.
There was 5,000 pages
of government evidence
to do with one witness alone,
Jarod Der-Yeghiayan.
None of that was allowed.
5,000 pages, and it was dumped on
the defense 10 days before trial.
Another 2,500 pages for other
witnesses was dumped
on the defense
a week before trial.
And it was full of
exculpatory evidence
favorable to Ross that was
not permitted to be used.
All this great,
huge field of evidence
that came out in the 3,500
material, a week before trial,
that was...
that would help
prove Ross's innocence
was excluded from being
brought out in the courtroom.
It would have been
a whole different case.
- This was the trial that didn't happen.
- The trial that didn't happen.
The trial just didn't happen,
because it was only
the prosecution's
narrative that we heard.
So then what about the hacking
of the Silk Road servers?
- What about the precedent issue of
the case? - We didn't get that far.
You know, we didn't get to even
have that kind of public hearing
where the FBI has to say how they
did it and then we get to decide
whether that was
legal or illegal.
That's maybe the most
frustrating thing about this
case from a legal point of view
is that American law enforcement
hacked a foreign server,
I believe,
and they didn't
have a warrant...
and they completely got away
with it and nobody's even...
nobody even gets to ask any
questions about it.
- How is Ross through all of this?
- He's an amazing guy.
You know, he's handling this
so much better than I would've.
I... I don't know how I could've
taken what he's, uh,
put up with and been subjected to
in this last year and three months.
And we pray that, uh...
his spirit won't be
crushed by this.
It seems that Ross conceived
of the Silk Road,
that he ran it for its
entire existence online.
I actually accept that the
government has proven that.
But Ross Ulbricht...
is a fascinating character.
He invented this brilliant thing.
He had principles.
He wasn't just a cyber-criminal.
He wasn't just a drug lord or a kingpin
as he's described in these charges.
He was also an idealistic guy.
And I'm gonna be conflicted
about both the kind of virtue of
the Silk Road and of Ross Ulbricht as
a person, I think, for the rest of my life.
I'm not gonna be able to come
to a conclusion about this.
Um, got any more questions
or should we wrap it up?
Yes.
What are you going to do
over the next five years?
In one sentence.
Um...
I'm going to do a few things
but one sentence isn't enough.
I'm pretty sure I want to start
a family in the next five years.
That's okay.
And a...
Yeah, make more friends and,
close people I love.
Focus on being more
connected to people.
And...
20 years?
20 years.
I want to have had a...
substantial, positive impact on,
the future of humanity
by that time.
Do you think you're going to
live forever?
I think it's a possibility...
I honestly do.
I think I might live
forever in some form
by that time with technologies
changing so fast.
Cool, I hope I'm going there.
Sweet.
sync, fix: titler