Danny Jones Podcast - #174 - The FBI's New Cyber Super-Weapon Is The Dark Web's Worst Nightmare | Andy Greenberg

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Andy Greenberg is an award-winning writer & journalist covering security, privacy, information freedom, and darknet hacker culture. He's the author of the new book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency.    EPISODE LINKS  Andy's new book: https://a.co/d/aIL02zf  https://andygreenberg.net  https://twitter.com/a_greenberg JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon DANNY LINKS https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE  0:00 - Introduction  6:13 - Hunting down Satoshi Nakamoto  14:00 - Interviewing Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht)  19:55 - Ross Ulbricht’s trial  22:55 - The Silk Road  39:24 - Chainalysis: The super-weapon against bitcoin  42:41 - IRS special agent Tigran Gambaryan  45:39 - DEA Agent who faked a murder and stole bitcoin from Silk Road  52:21 - Cryptography expert who cracked Bitcoin  59:47 - Mt. Gox heist  1:07:37 - Hackers & scammers in Ukraine  1:10:21 - AlphaBay darknet market  1:20:50 - The Kingpin behind AlphaBay: Alexandre Cazes  1:28:34 - The DEA sting that hijacked the entire dark web drug market  1:38:49 - Mysterious death of Alpha02 in a Thai jail  1:52:28 - How Hansa was hijacked by Dutch police  1:56:30 - The current state of the dark web  2:05:20 - Andy’s approach to journalism  2:14:15 - Interviewing Julian Assange  2:27:00 - State sponsored hacking & cyber war Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What have you been up to? You, uh, you're a busy guy. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess I've been sort of like talking about this book a lot, but also looking for the next big stories in this whole weird hacker world. Yeah, it's, uh, it's always a fun for me to talk to people like yourself who are like established real like big time journalists, you know, I'm just talking to like, I'm very used to, I'm used to talking to like the small time like independent YouTube journalists. I mean, I've heard the people you have on like these, these sort of independent YouTube journalists are often like digging up the most interesting stuff and like doing the craziest adventures so you know i'm i feel i don't know kind of lucky that i have like a pretty established

establishment media job but i still get to go on these weird down these strange rabbit holes and you know take time to do investigations and and books every few years what got you interested initially in this whole like crypto dark web hacker world yeah let's see i mean i i have covered this world of cyber security and hackers and surveillance and the dark web and all of that for um i mean before the dark web even existed since like 2007 or so and i don't know i came to it in this weird way of um i i i like had tried to be a china journalist and then i went to journalism school and i found in journalism school. It's hard to find stories because you're like just in school. You don't, you're not like out in the world. So I sort of turned to the internet instead. And I don't know,

I'm just like I've, I've always been like the kind of reporter, I think, who like looks for like weird and geeky and like strange underworld kind of stories anyway. So that worked out for me and I got a job at Forbes magazine. And then a few years into being Forbes's kind of hacker, cybersecurity, like internet underworld reporter, which nobody really thought was even could be a job back then. I think that Forbes was kind of like a little skeptical that that could even be a full-time beat. I mean, I came upon this phenomenon, which was described to me as a kind of like anonymous and potentially untraceable sort of digital currency, which was Bitcoin. This was 2011 or so.

And I'd been, I guess, at that point, writing about this movement called the cypherpunks. I had written like a cover story for Forbes about WikiLeaks, and I was writing a book about WikiLeaks in the way that it came out of this cypherpunk movement of these radical libertarians who believed that they could use encryption to take power away from governments and give it to individuals, like carve out spaces on the internet, like the dark web, essentially, where the government can't reach and where you can do black market transactions and communicate in total secrecy. And all, you know, that seemed to me to be this incredibly, like, sexy, fascinating world of where there were going to be, like, really dangerous, interesting things happening for years and years to come. And so when I came up on Bitcoin, it seemed to me to be the kind of like holy grail of that world. Like, this is real crypto money now, like not just secret communications, but secret financial transactions. And that's going to unlock this and monetize this whole online black market. And shortly after that, that's when the Silk Road appeared, the first dark web drug market

that traded, of course, only in, well, in drugs, but for Bitcoin. And it seemed to me to prove, yes, like, this is working. Like, cryptocurrency, we barely called it that at the time. But Bitcoin seemed to be unlocking and, like, you know, creating this flourishing, new lucrative worlds where you could buy and sell and also put into your body anything you wanted without government intervention. I guess, you know, fast forward to 2020 or so. I mean, that's a big fast forward. But I, by 2020, I began to realize how incredibly wrong I had been about that. How, in fact, it turns out that Bitcoin was the opposite of untraceable.

not just i wasn't just like a little bit wrong about this i was like completely incorrect uh and in fact so were all of the people in those early days who had told me that bitcoin was untraceable or anonymous um including i should say the the mysterious creator of bitcoin sotoshi yakamoto had had advertised bitcoin in an email to this cryptography mailing list as like among other things like in these bullet points sort of advertising it satoshi had written participants can be anonymous And a lot of people believed that. And the Silk Road certainly thrived on that principle. But by 2020, I could see that actually if you could decipher,

if you could crack the blockchain, basically, and find patterns in it, then actually you could trace bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, almost all of them, in fact, in some ways far more easily than you can trace transactions in the traditional finance system. And that, in fact, it took me a while to realize this, But years earlier, the small group of detectives, first in the research world and then in the tech industry, and then in law enforcement had figured this out long before I had

and had used cryptocurrency tracing as this kind of incredibly powerful investigative technique to surprise that whole dark web underworld and take down one massive criminal operation after another in this escalating spree of busts. So, you know, that is like how I came, you know, I did this sort of like strange path from being really fascinated by the potential of the anonymity and untraceability of the dark web to realizing that like that untraceability had this fatal flaw. And that actually created an even more interesting story, which is the story of this latest book that I published. Tracers in the Dark. This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right.

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Or were you... Right. You were still working for Forbes. Okay. And when it first came out, I remember you mentioned in your book that you interviewed, or you attempted to interview Satoshi Nakamoto, but you interviewed somebody else. How did that go? the person that I first found out about Bitcoin from, and this is like back when Bitcoin was worth a dollar.

And, you know, I wrote the first print magazine piece about Bitcoin for Forbes. And I called it, I called the headline of that piece was cryptocurrency. And I thought that I was clever, even like coming up with that phrase. It wasn't like a thing anybody had heard of. And the first person that I had heard about it from was Gavin Andreessen, who was kind of the, you know, one of the big early Bitcoin developers had worked closely. with Satoshi Nakamoto, but only communicating with him or her, whoever Satoshi is via email. I mean, you know, Satoshi's identity remains one of the great mysteries in the history of technology. Who do you think he really is? Or is it a group of people? Like, if you were to just, if you were to

speculate, like, I know you don't know, but if you were to have some like dying guess, who would you say it was? Oh, man. You know, I have almost like tried to stop thinking about it because I have I have gone down that that particular rabbit hole multiple times. I once thought that I had found Satoshi when in fact, I once thought that Satoshi was Hal Finney, the second ever developer of Bitcoin, who actually received first Bitcoin transactions from Satoshi. They worked together early on. Hal Finney sadly died of ALS, Luke Garrick's disease, who's paralyzed and passed away around 2014.

but I interviewed him on his deathbeds. He was fully paralyzed. He could only communicate with me with his eyebrow movements and with typing through his eye movements, which was very painful and slow. But he denied being Satoshi, and his family showed me some evidence that he was not. They showed me some of his communications with Satoshi

that would have been quite hard to fake, you know, retroactively. I looked at, there are other reasons, I should say, that like I came to believe that Halfini was not lying to me when he said that he was not Satoshi. But I thought at one point that I had found Satoshi then I once thought that I had found him in another guy. Craig Wright's a really wild story that I truly don't want to talk about it anymore because he, Craig Wright, I think I don't want to get sued by him as he has sued many people, but I do not believe he is Sotoshi. And in fact, I feel like I fell there for a strange trap that, like, somebody was trying

to convince perhaps, like, investors or somebody that Craig Wright was Sotoshi created a bunch of false documents. Somebody else unwittingly leaked those documents to me. Anyway, long, crazy story. Well, the reason I ask is if there's anybody on this planet who knows who it is, it's got to be you. No way. I mean, well, I, I, I would.

think that like if anybody knows it might be some of the characters you know in my book who have done these incredible tracing um you know investigations but i never heard from them that they figured it out i think if anybody knows it would be the nsa who you know for whom like almost anything digital is like that you know that's their territory and they have incredible surveillance powers i'm kind of surprised that like it hasn't come I mean, not kind of. It's amazing that it hasn't come out in, you know, more than a decade now. Even from like some former intelligence person or who knows what, like even intelligence agencies have not been able to figure out who Satoshi is.

That just seems like so uncanny. I mean, I don't, I still, I think sometimes that it had to have been a group because it's just Bitcoin worked so well. and it you know the smartest hackers that I know you know kind of would like examine it and think that they might have found a vulnerability and then oh that's a dead end like somebody thought of this ahead of me and like that I heard that enough times that it's like that's just so difficult for one person to to create on their own but if it were a group that also just creates a secrecy problem I mean you know like I don't know two two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead right Exactly.

So like, I just don't know what to think anymore. And I've just driven myself crazy enough trying to figure it out that I'm ready to leave that one mystery. In fact, I kind of appreciate that there is one mystery left in the world, even on the internet. You know, and I should say that like Satoshi said in that initial cryptography mailing list email, participants can be anonymous with cryptocurrency. I think that like that has proven to be true, but only for Satoshi himself. Like Satoshi has remained anonymous even while amassing a million bitcoins. Because there was only one transaction, right?

Well, because he received them from mining, mining Bitcoin. And then never spent any. He like, I guess he sent some to people in test transactions. But mostly he just sat on his gigantic multi-billion dollar fortune with like, inhuman restraint, you know. I think some people even believe Satoshi might be dead himself or herself or whatever, themselves because who sits on tens of billions of dollars like that. But yeah, I mean, but I guess the other half of that point I was trying to make is that

everybody else, essentially who's tried to be anonymous with Bitcoin over the years, practically speaking, has been unmasked at some point. thanks to this surprising trait of cryptocurrency that actually you can trace almost everything that happens on a blockchain. That was like the real dramatic irony of this whole thing is that cryptocurrency turned out to be this kind of trap, I think, for people seeking financial privacy and for all sorts of criminals who were lured in to this honeypot essentially, thinking that they could get away with every manner of crime, like, you know, dark web drug sales, massive thefts, money laundering.

Eventually, you know, the book tells stories of essentially human trafficking or like child sexual exploitation stuff. And so many of them have been caught on like a gigantic scale, thanks to the fact that the blockchain actually turned out to be this massive collection of evidence of every transaction they ever did if you know how to kind of crack that code now some of the stuff that you mentioned in your book tracers in the dark which is amazing by the way so like the story of the silk road and the story of ross olbrick and you know the the alpha bay story a lot of people are familiar with these stories but i feel like not a lot of people understand how

these things went down and how the how law enforcement was able to track these guys down yeah You know, and I feel like that's something that is a, is it one of the biggest revelations in your book. It really does a great job of explaining exactly how this was done. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, for the Silk Road, you know, I had like this weird perspective on it because I interviewed the dread pirate Roberts before he, the creator of the Silk Road who went by the pseudonym, the dread pirate Roberts, this like first dark web drug kingpin. I interviewed him, myself, before he was caught, before he was identified. and like turned out to be this 29 year old guy Ross Ulbricht in Texas.

Was the guy you interviewed, sorry to interrupt, but when you interviewed Dread Pirate Roberts, are you sure that was Ross or was it? Could that have been somebody before him? It's a fair question. I think it was Ross. I think that like, you know, I've turned that question over a lot of times since then. Of course, when I spoke to the Dread Pirate Roberts or didn't speak to him, I said, by the way, I said he was caught in Texas. He was caught in California, but he's from Texas. And when I communicated with him, that was over the Silk Road anonymous messaging system. Just want to be really clear. Like, I was exchanging text messages over the Tor anonymity system with him, basically. So you never know exactly. And I got the impression just sometimes, I think I interviewed him for like four or five hours. And I got the impression that he was maybe even consulting with somebody as he talked to me.

like he would take a while with some answers. And I know that the drive by Robert Roberts had this kind of second in command who called himself Variety Jones. And based on like covering his trial, Russell Brick's trial, eventually Russell Brick's laptop, by the way, was seized with all of his chat records on it. He tried to, he had full disk encryption on his laptop. And if he had just been able to close the lid of it, he could have protected all of that evidence, which I think. think made him kind of overconfidence in how much how much he could store on that laptop. But the FBI in this elaborate sting operation in the San Francisco library grabbed his laptop out of his hands with an undercover agent, got everything. So you could see his conversations

with Variety Jones and all of the other people working for him in his chat logs, which is crazy that he kept those. And you could see the Variety Jones at one point. suggested this idea like call yourself to dread pirate roberts then if you're ever caught you can tell this whole story you know like from the princess bride the movie which where that name comes from that that's just the kind of rotating handle that like it's inherited by one uh kingpin of the silk road after another and you can say like you acquired it from somebody else who created it and then and then pretend to be the person who created it but then sold it and then that'll cover your tracks you I mean, it was really brilliant, honestly.

Like, as cover stories go. So you can actually see the Dread Pipert Roberts, probably Ross, I think almost certainly Ross doing this in my interview with him where he says, actually, no, I didn't create the Silk Road. I bought it from its creator. And that seemed to be laying the groundwork for the defense he actually would use in his trial, which is that Ross Ulbricht, you know, in court said, I just created the Silk Road as an economic experiment.

Then it was bought from me by the Dread Pirate Roberts. And like the real criminals who ran the Silk Road and turned it into this giant narcotics, you know, bizarre tricked me in the last minute into coming back and running it again just before I was caught. You know, it's kind of like, it's a bit of an unlikely story. Not just a bit. It was a pretty weird defense.

And it kind of fell apart when, This is a big surprise, at trial. The prosecution put a guy on the stand who had traced all of the Silk Road's transactions on the blockchain and showed that for it's basically for years, money had been flowing Bitcoins from the Silk Road server to Ross Albrecht's laptop. So he was in charge of it for all of that time, including the time when I, or at least was like reaping the profits from. at all of that time, including when I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts.

You know, I know a lot of people, you know, are really skeptical of these stories. I have tried to apply as much skepticism as I can as well to this notion that Ross Lulberg is the Dread Pirate Roberts or the only Dread Pirate Roberts. A lot of people are particularly skeptical. I just want to air this out right away, like about the claim that he had people killed. right and say like he was never actually charged with that crime in court which is true and that is he was charged with like you know this kingpin statute of kind of like a general um you know running of a massive criminal enterprise and conspiracy and things but he was not charged in the case

that was actually brought to trial with murder even though he's accused of like having paid for the killings of one of his employees and like people who he thought threatened the Silk Road and scammed him and stuff. I was skeptical of that too, and I think that in all fairness, that absolutely should have been tried in court, given that now he is serving this life sentence. Yeah,

he's serving the same sentence as Alchapo. Is that right? I mean, it's a life sentence. Like, it's the maximum. I thought it was double life. Double life, yes. Yes, double life, you know, and may never see the lighted day again.

And I think that that is unjust, Just to be clear, I think that's crazy over sentencing, especially given that he was not actually convicted of murder or attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder or anything. But the same day that his trial, which I attended like every minute of it in Manhattan courtroom, like the same day that like the prosecution showed that they could trace the Silk Road cryptocurrency from the server to his laptop, they also showed transactions from his laptop to a would-be contract killer for these alleged murders, you know. And there were times exactly right. They were the exact amounts.

You could see his chat logs where he's saying to like somebody he thought was a hell's angel who was going to do these killings for him. Okay, here's the money. And then you see it on the blockchain. So I can see those transactions myself. I don't even have to depend on like a source to tell me that. I can look at the blockchain and see that stuff. That's the power of cryptocurrency tracing. I mean, it's and Ross, I'm sure thought that these transactions were untraceable and anonymous.

And it's the opposite. Like I, a journalist can look at the receipts, basically, you know, on the blockchain. So don't you have to know his wallet address, though? Right. And those did come from the prosecution, to be clear. but they were you know they were aired out and those were those were shown in court the defense had a chance to say no those are not his addresses and they did not you know so it's like you have to start doing some really convoluted thinking to imagine that a ross was not the dread pirate roberts when

i interviewed the dread pirate roberts um and b even that he didn't try to have these people killed like i am extremely sympathetic i'm not extremely i guess i'm i would say i'm more sympathetic to Ross Lulberg than just about any journalist who's covered these stories. I thought that the Silk Road was an interesting experiment trying to reduce violence in the drug trade, you know, by moving it into this virtual world, basically. And I thought that Ross was like an interesting principled person who collected ultimately millions and millions of dollars in drug money and never spent it and really believes in what he was doing as a kind of like political experiment. he saw himself as a revolutionary who was launching this like idealistic thing on the in a new world you know online um but i think that it's a story about kind of corrupted ideals of how ross despite his best intentions

um was pulled into a situation where he felt like he had to do extremely dark and immoral things to protect the experiment that he had begun you know um and And that is tragic, but like, I don't, I do believe that Ross tried to, that Ross did those things, that Ross did run this massive drug trade for better or worse. Some people I think probably still think that that was a good, a good thing. And then other, you know, and then I also think that he actually tried to have people killed, which is hard to defend. The interesting thing about the Silk Road, too, is, you know, the debate, was it, was it a good thing or was it a bad thing? Because obviously, we're talking about laws. It was illegal.

But if you look at the way it worked, you have drug dealers and you have drug buyers and the drug dealers are reviewed on how good their product is. And then some of those interviews with the drug dealers on that deep web documentary, they're talking about like, you know, I wouldn't sell. I could tell this guy was a newbie or a rookie. This guy had never bought shit on here before and he was trying to buy these drugs. And I know that these drugs are probably way too hard for him. So I said, go do your reading and come back to me when you read it. It seemed like there was at least some sort of code of ethics. within that world.

And people wanted to, you know, you wanted to take care of your reputation and not sell bad drugs. And it seemed like it was a net good. Yeah, you know, it's a super fascinating argument. I do think that there, you know, some people wanted to describe the Silk Road as like this evil underworld where there was no good. That is definitely incorrect. You know, people described that there was child abuse on the Silk Road.

There was not. People said there was contract killing for sale on the Silk Road, which is not even true. Ross had to go find his own contract killers, if that's what he did. But to say that it's a net good is really difficult to say. Like, I just don't, I can see the good. I can see how, like, it's, you know, for instance, there cannot be any violence in the drug trade. You can't get scammed.

You can't even be sold as easily, like, fake drugs. or laced, whatever, you know, stamped on, whatever. Because there's reviews and ratings, as you said. I mean, it is an amazing thing. If I was going to buy ecstasy like today, I would buy it on the dark web because, you know, I've been told that there's like fentanyl and everything, like all sorts of things when you buy them whatever in like the bathroom with some club. Exactly.

So like the Silk Road invented this new bottle of sales, you know, that was really smart and accountable on both sides, you know, to the buy and the seller. It also like made really hard, dangerous drugs available to people who otherwise would not have had them, I think, in some cases. I, as I said, like sat in the trial. I heard the parents of like people talk about their kids, adult kids and young kids, too, who overdosed on opioids and things that were bought from the Silk Road, some guy who had kicked the habit. He'd moved like some. He'd moved like somewhere, you know, farther away from, like, a major city where he didn't think he would be tempted as much. But then he learned about the Silk Road and he saw that, like, it's still possible

to, to, like, scratch that itch and overdosed and died. You know, I actually don't think that, like, like the it's it's more the the the I think a better argument I don't really want to like defend the judge in this case who who who gave him this draconian crazy double life sentence but she in that sentencing hearing also like read this this very long statements explaining her sentence and I thought it was really smart at points she she said yes you Ross you did reduce the violence in like one part of the drug trade, which is like the retail part, like the buyer and the ultimate, the seller and the ultimate buyer, you know, at the very end of that supply chain, basically.

But if you go further up, the supply chain, that's where the real violence is happening in Mexico, in like Afghanistan or wherever, where, like, or wherever these drugs are produced. And by expanding the market,

by finding, like, a new way for people to sell billions of dollars worth of drugs, you actually, you cut out the violence, in one part, but you expanded it overall and you did nothing about the violence further up the supply chain. So you probably have added, you know, in terms of like net harm to the world. You know, and I think that that's a compelling idea that by finding like a new way to expand just like a total volume of drug sales, you know, maybe you have, and of course like the people selling on the dark web have to have a supplier.

maybe you have actually caused harm. And Ross, I think that the answer, of course, is like, well, we should have, we should legalize all these drugs. I am pretty sympathetic to those sorts of arguments. Ross actually told me in our interview, or rather the drug pirate Roberts did, that he didn't believe in drug legalization. And that that is only just like a new way for like the state to control these things, to tax them. And as a sort of libertarian, he was, he didn't even want to see drugs legalized. He, he, he wanted just the black market underworld to expand and take over everything, you know. So like lawlessness.

Exactly. Like total crypto-anarchy as like, you know, as cypherpunks call it. Wow. You know, the thing about Ross's story is most people I talk to, they just think of him as this Dalai Lama type character. You know, like he's just this big. you know, idealistic savior of the world.

It's fascinating, that's who you talk to. Because, you know, like, I would say that most of America, most of the media, not to, like,

you know, cast dispersions on my colleagues. Like, think of the Silk Road as, like, you know, drugs, death, the dark web. Like, those are the headlines

you see on, like, the cover of magazines about the Silk Road when at the time that Ross was arrested. So, you know, it's interesting.

I've tried to, to just like sort of maintain my like mental independence on this and not be pulled into either in either direction. I mean you saw Deep Web where I was like made by my friend Alex Winter who was I think really sympathetic to Ross

and oh yeah you can tell at the end of that with the interviews of him and everything yeah at the end of the documentary and I'm like I think I'm you know a degree or two more like in the middle or like whatever just I feel like I you got to look at what the Silk Road was wards and all and it was fascinating it did come a place from a place of

ideals but those ideals were corrupted to some degree and like bad things happened um and as as they will like in that in that world of narcotic sales i mean that's um i think of it also is kind of like the uh i don't know like the third season of the wire like hamster dam you know like hamster dam was an interesting experiment. Maybe I'm like losing it. I've never seen the wire. Whatever. But it was basically like, you know,

a part of Baltimore in this story was like carved out and drugs were basically de facto legalized. And the result was that like the rest of Baltimore, like crime dropped hugely. But people overdosed and died. And that was like in Hamsterdam, this one little neighborhood was a hellish place. And I think that is in some ways like a sort of very rough analogy of like

of what the dark web or what silk web might have become if it was you know allowed to flourish right i guess the question is you know the the two main things are people can choose to take some sort of crazy illicit drug and kill themselves by taking too much or becoming addicted or falling down the falling down the rabbit hole and or on the other hand you have you know people taking shit where they don't know what it is and it's laced with stuff and you don't know what the product you're getting is absolutely i mean i think that seems like the more dangerous yeah i mean i think that the consumer experience of the dark web is way superior yeah i mean like i have um i i bought i like for a for a forbs article like even i bought drugs on the silk road and like it's an incredible

experience. It was like amazing at the time anyway. And, you know, people say like, oh, is it cheaper? No, it's actually more expensive. But the premium that you paid was for the reviews and the ratings and this assurance that like you're getting what you pay for. How did that work? What was that process like buying it? Like you got to get in through the onion router, through Tor. And then you have to, how do the, can you explain the process of what it was like? And what kind of drugs did you buy? Well, I want to talk about what drugs in total left from the dark web. But, but, but, but I, for Forbes, I mean, this was bizarre that Forbes let me do this. And they actually, like, I was going to do it as a sidebar and print in the magazine. And they were like, we can't publish that in the magazine,

like 65-year-old men read Forbes magazine. Like, uh, well, you can, we'll put it online. But, um, I just bought like a gram of marijuana each from three different, the Silk Road and two of its kind of copycat competitors at the time. Um, just to show that what was possible. I mean, this was 2013 when that was, that seemed pretty like interesting and edgy. I mean, people were like, had never heard of this stuff. So you would, yeah, you would like buy Bitcoins. I bought them from Coinbase. And which was like kind of the easiest way to, the easiest exchange to use at that time.

$5 a coin. I can't remember. I mean, I think by 2013 it was like getting up into the hundreds eventually would hit like over a thousand that year before this first a big crash or not the first crash. you know um but uh yeah and uh then you fire up tour the tor browser as you said you like get onto silk road and i you i think that you could probably search the the clear net as they say like the normal web to find the URLs which are these like long um convoluted uh URLs that end and dot onion because these are like tour hidden services is what they were called at the time which is like a website that runs on

this anonymity software tour you run tour they run tour you both kind of like put on uh i mean like the analogies you put on like a blindfold you get like put into a van and like driven to a place where um you can't but be followed you don't know where you are and you like meet in the middle um so that nobody knows like where the server is hosted nobody knows where you are um it's completely anonymous on both ends that's how tour that's how these the dark web works basically um the the real I mean, I guess like the real technology is that your web traffic is basically triple encrypted in three layers. And then it's kind of like bounced through three different computers run by volunteers

in the Tor network around the world. Each of those computers can strip away like one layer of encryption, but not the others, so that they can only see one step ahead. They can't like see around those blind corners to the next computer. And so, you know, after three hops, nobody can trace you. from your origin to your destination. And the server on the other side does the same thing. They also triple, you know, wrap there.

The tour stands for the Onion Router. So it's like this is called Onion Routing because it's in layers, you know. And that's how it works. Like you meet in the middle. Nobody can trace each other. And you like pay for your drugs. And it goes into an escrow, which is very clever. The escrow is not released until you've got your stuff and you like finalize

You say like, okay, got my package. It was here's a rating. Here's a review. I release the escrow and the seller gets their money. That's one of the most sophisticated parts of it because the price of Bitcoin is so volatile. And then how this escrow feature were. And not only that, but like, I mean, the Drive Pirate Roberts like would cover, he created like a feature where he would cover any like changes in the price due to volatility because dealers didn't like how volatile. Bitcoin was. So like while the money was sitting in escrow, if it went up or down, he would like cover the difference, which is just like such a smart financial innovation.

Because, you know, drug dealers are not trying to gamble or, you know, do speculative investment with their bitcoins. They're sitting in escrow. They just want their money. So like that's, I mean, you have to give credit to, I mean, where it's due. The Silk Road was an amazing invention. I think like a few people kind of realize how smart is. it was as a kind of financial innovation not just a like the combining tour and bitcoin which were kind of the two big ingredients but like the whole the whole thing was just so beautifully designed and it launched you know i think hopefully we'll get into like a whole world uh of follow-ons um you know copycats innovation evolution of this dark web drug kingpins that followed in Ross's footsteps yeah so this book it seems like it's not just something that you just decided to start on one day this book seems like it's been part of your entire career it's just sort of like a summary of everything you've been following since

the inception of bitcoin well you know i didn't intend to ever you know in fact actually around 2014 i was like trying to write a book just about the silk road and how you know and how crazy that story was And how at the time, I thought that that book was going to be about how cryptocurrency is unlocking a new world of crypto anarchy and cybercrime. And I couldn't sell that book, luckily. Like, I think because there had been like too much coverage of the Silk Road, too many other people writing their books. Nick Bilton's book about the Silk Road is fantastic. But I'm lucky in a way that I did not write that book because, as I said, like about, you know, seven, And let's see, like six years after that, 2020 or so, I started to see, I mean, of course I knew

that bitcoins could be traced to some degree. Like I had covered this really closely. I thought, I think everybody who was in that smart like cryptography world sort of could see that, yes, like, oh, Bitcoin is not actually as anonymous as it's supposed to be from the beginning. But it sort of seemed like if you were careful, if you never revealed your Bitcoin addresses publicly. If you put your transactions through, like, you know, a few hops of, like, moving it from one address to another to another before you spent it. If you used laundry

services, all these tricks, it seemed like you could make it pretty untraceable, pretty private. Only in 2020, and did I start to see the Department of Justice start crediting in their kind of announcements of major takedowns and busts and indictments. There's one company and they would say they would thank chain alice. This is one cryptocurrency tracing firm. Just the fact that there was a cryptocurrency tracing company was I sort of knew about that, but I was like, oh, they're actually really active. They're kind of like they kind of have their hands in a ton of these cases.

So were they, was chain alias was their sole premise just to work with the government and to help them trace these criminal, this criminal activity? or did they have some sort of other utility in the marketplace? Well, the founder of Chainalysis is a fascinating guy. I mean, there's a few founders, but the original guy who came up with the idea of a company, Michael Groniger, and this Danish. He's a fan of Bitcoin, and he, like, believed in Bitcoin.

But from the very beginning, he was like, no, this is not anonymous or untraceable. Like, this, I can, there's a whole blockchain here. You know, the blockchain is, by definition, like, a list of every transaction, every Bitcoin transaction ever. It's just between addresses rather than any identity. So like these long convoluted like Bitcoin addresses don't look like they have anything to do with an identity in the real world. But he, and actually he was, he based a lot of his first software on the tricks that had been published by Sarah Mickeljohn, this researcher at the University of California, San Diego. He saw that you could find patterns. He, rather

you know, Sarah found and he like kind of took this further, you could find patterns in the blockchain and then he built a piece of software that could essentially like implement these tricks to to create clusters to show that like sometimes thousands or even millions of addresses belonged to one person or service and to follow that money sometimes until it hit a cryptocurrency exchange where you know cryptocurrency exchanges where you trade bitcoins for dollars or vice versa, They have know-your-customer requirements under U.S. law. They have to have identity, identifying information for their accounts. But his idea in creating the first tool to trace cryptocurrency, which he called Reactor,

was that he would sell this to exchanges, to like Bitcoin exchanges. He'd worked, he had helped to found another exchange. He was the CTO there, I think. And he left to create channelysis in the hopes of helping exchanges just know who their customers are. like help them understand like help them deal with these know your customer requirements i think in a kind of more automated way uh like you probably want to know if you're in exchange if you're helping to cash out dark web drug money right um you know at least like you may not want to know but

but like um if the government is demanding that you know this is an easy way to do it so that was his first like he pitched it to exchanges and eventually like a lot of them did buy But his first customers, to his surprise, were law enforcement agencies. Wow. And he actually was just like in San Francisco and was pitching this to exchanges. And then like, he, a friend was like, oh, you should talk to this prosecutor who introduced him to this agent with an IRS criminal investigations in San Francisco named Teegreen Gambarian, who was in some ways like the central detective of the book. he was tegern was the guy who came from soviet union yeah he he grew up in armenia but then in post-soviet russia as well um had like a very tough childhood there i mean like he truly like war-torn armenia right um and

it's a very interesting character like irs criminal investigations is a weird place like yeah i don't think most americans know about it even but it's like this actual law enforcement agency within irs and they I mean they kind of have a chip on their shoulder about the fact that people don't even know this but they they carry guns they make arrests they like carry out search warrants they travel around

the world and like you know get people extradited to be prosecuted in the United States and stuff like you know they are a full-blown law enforcement agency but like get no respect from FBI and DEA or whoever Tegren so Tegren was like

you know a forensic account who carried a gun and like was kind of like this weird mix of like nerd and tough guy who also had looked at bitcoin from the beginning and saw him also like there's this blockchain here I don't believe this can be anonymous I can see these transactions and you know his first he was actually the first to ever show that it was possible to trace Bitcoin within law enforcement And this was not in the Silk Road case in the traditional sense, but in the wake of the bust of Ross Ulbricht, which did not actually use cryptocurrency tracing.

He was identified through other mistakes he'd made. Tegren Gambarian basically sat down, looked at the blockchain, and showed that a DEA agent and a Secret Service agent who were involved in the investigation of the Silk Road had stolen money from the Silk Road in the Silk Road, like as corrupt cops basically actually one of them had sold law enforcement information to the dread pirate roberts one of them uh had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin from the silk road but they these were two federal agents who in their own investigation of the

silk road had thought that they could use the you know the false promise of this this fake idea that bitcoin is untraceable that they could just take any money they wanted to that they could lay their hands on from the Silk Road and get away with it. And Tigran was the one, Tegren at IRS, criminal investigations, was the one who sat down and showed, no, look, I can see that Carl Mark Forst, this DEA agent, is receiving money from the Dread Pirate Roberts. Right. You know, like nobody thought that that was possible in 2014 when he did this.

Now, is Carl Mark Force, is that one of the guys who set him up with one of the first murder for hires? Exactly. I mean, that's, this is such a bizarre story. But yes, like Carl Markforce had gone undercover on the Silk Road, had basically like pulled off this kind of amazing thing. He was not actually working with the New York group of FBI agents who would eventually take down the Silk Road. He was part of this Baltimore task force. And they, you know, using him as an undercover agent did this crazy thing where they set it up where Ross would have like a

shipment of cocaine sent to one of his employees. And Curtis Clark Green is his name. He was his grandpa in Utah. I mean, it's bizarre. And then have him arrested. They had him arrested when he receives the cocaine shipment. And then essentially flipped him. And like Ross, understanding that his employee had then been arrested was like, okay, I guess

we got to have this guy killed. And you can even see in the chat logs with Variety Jones, his sort of second in command, where he kind of reluctantly comes to this decision. And orders, he orders Carl Mark Force as an undercover agent is under his undercover identity, who is, you know, at this point, like very close with the Dred Pirate Roberts. He orders, he asks, rather, Carl Mark Force to have his employee killed. So it's actually Carl Mark Force as undercover who is asked to kill Curtis Clark Green. Right. Bizarrely. And so they stage his murder for the benefit of the Dred Pirate Roberts.

They like take fake photos of him being tortured and killed and they use like Campbell's soup to show that blood coming out of his mouth. So one of the big things, one of the most interesting things to me about how they were able to manipulate the Silk Road was these federal agents. were able to so they were rating these users home they were like somehow rating the people who were users on the silk road taking all their shit taking over all their ship and not arresting them because if they arrested them that would sort of tip off dread pirate roberts that they could have that they could flip so they would purposely not arrest these guys who are working or a part of the silk road however they would take over their identities on the silk road is that right i think that they did they managed this with the actually the other group the new york group managed this with one other of um the silk road's employees a woman actually who um a homely and security investigations agents uh working in that new york group did somehow identify a silk road staffer can convinced her rather than to avoid prosecution to give him her account and then he became an undercover operative okay like working with the dread pirate roberts he he never became aware of that he was that was just like a successful kind of infiltration of the Silk Road

that was used up until up into the very moment of Ross Ulbork's arrest that undercover you know agent was communicating with the dread pirate Roberts and like telling him hey can you log on to check out something and then he logged on at this at the moment that the FBI was there with undercover agents ready to arrest him so that they could make sure his laptop was open right So, yeah, there were like so many different things happening. The whole Baltimore thing turned out to be like a total, you know, failed investigation. The Baltimore, all of that stuff with the fake murder, everything was, didn't really get them any closer to identifying the Dred Pirate Roberts. So going back real quick to when Carl Mark Force was talking to Dred Pirate Roberts about Curtis Green, is that his name?

Yeah. Yeah. And Dread Pirate Roberts basically said, you know, we need to kill this guy. Was Carl Mark Forrest sort of like inciting him or like pushing him down that path? Like, ooh, you got to be aware of this guy. You got to figure out what to do with this guy. Or was it just, did it all come? You know, he was not from what I can see in reading all of the conversations.

It was really Variety Jones, who was. Oh. His second in command. Ross was kind of like, I don't know, like I've never had anybody killed before. I mean, the Dred Pirate Roberts, you can see this in his. And Variety Jones is the one saying like, you know, if this were the Wild West, like this would be a hanging offense, you know. He's like, honestly, if you can't do this, I'm not sure we can continue to work together. He's really pressuring him.

And then amazingly, he turns to an undercover agent to get it done. In fact, the same undercover agent who arranged the whole situation. I mean, it is like just like Shakespearean like coincidence. It's bizarre. Yeah. But this is like, you know, I'll just want to be clear. like um this story is is told in in american kingpin this is like um a crazy the story of the silk road is insane i almost found it like difficult to get through it so that i could start to tell

the new stuff right which is which is that after all of that happens uh that's when tigran gambarian showed that this bizarre baltimore investigation was corrupt as hell and the way that he did that was by tracing bitcoins right which was not like something that anybody had ever done before and this has not really been like highlighted in that in the silk road story that like that is how these corrupt agents were found they too like ross elbrick fell for they were seduced by this false promise of bitcoin's anonymity and not one but two of these baltimore agents independently they didn't even know about each other were trying to skim hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their work right They both went to prison.

And that was in some sense, like the beginning of this new era of cryptocurrency tracing, like, as this golden age of law enforcement investigation on the dark web. And what year did this happen? What did they start to discover this? So that was 2014, the same year that chain analysis was founded by Michael Groniger. And then Michael Groniger and Tigrin meets in San Francisco and they become this kind of odd couple. chain analysis in fact in irs criminal investigations become this partnership that uses cryptocurrency tracing to just like carry you know just go on a spree like a bonanza of busts and takedowns over the years that follow and like solving many of the biggest kind of unsolved cases in

dark web and just like racking up a huge number of arrests yeah it's like what you were explaining what was the woman's name again who had shit a woman's warehouse and she was buying all this stuff from the Silk Road. Yeah, that's Sarah Michael John. Yeah, she was doing like this like, almost just taking these millions and millions of wallet addresses and just like using patterns to sort of like place them in certain buckets and figure out which ones go where. And how is she like what was her big revelation? What was her sort of value to?

Yeah. Yeah. So like this, I don't know, we're like rewinding about a year now flashing back. So, like, 2013 is when Sarah Micklejohn at UCSD was like, hmm, you know, she was a brilliant, you know, cryptography researcher, but she had not really looked at cryptocurrency. And she was like, you know, I wonder if this stuff is as anonymous as people think it is. And she took almost like this anthropological approach. Like, I wonder if I can just figure out like what people are doing with cryptocurrency. Maybe I can just like figure out how many people even are using it, which nobody knew, really.

And she was the one that came up with these clustering techniques, basically like a few clever tricks to show like that, you know, certain addresses all must belong to the same person or organization. Like one is if, you know, to spend bitcoins from an address, I don't know if you want to get into these like nerdy details. You tell me you want to stop. Yeah. But like to spend bitcoins from a Bitcoin address, you have to have the private key for that address. And so if you create a multi-input. transaction as it's called, which sounds complicated, but it's really just like sending Bitcoins from lots of addresses at once in one transaction, then you must control the private keys for all those addresses. That means like you look at that multi-input transaction and you

say, oh, all these addresses must have belonged to one person or to one in service. And if you then like take that sort of filth like lens and like look at the whole blockchain for every multi-input transaction, you can immediately start to create clusters that show I think like she she showed like right away there are there are maximum half as many people here or services as there are Bitcoin addresses she like cut the whole blockchain and half right and it's complexity algorithm exactly yeah and then like that's that's that was trick number one kind of like an easy one then she came up with her own like that in fact that was something that was kind of like an open secret in the crypto world already at that point but then she came up with another one which is like a Like, that when you spend Bitcoins, with many wallets, you basically cannot spend a fraction of the coins in an address. You kind of like crack open the piggy bank, like the whole piggy bank of that address. And you send all the coins to whoever you intend to like receive part of them. And then you get back change at an different address.

And that can make it like really difficult to follow the money because you don't know which is the recipient address and which is the change address. But she realized, oh, well, the change address very often is recognizing. recognizable because it's the new address, the one that was just, like, created to receive the change. The recipient address sometimes has been used before or it's old. So, you know, with that algorithm, that like little trick, she applied that across the blockchain and then could find like, oh, I can see like here's like a fork in the road where everybody else didn't know how to follow the money, but I can follow it. I can follow it to the change address.

And that still belongs to the first person sending the money. That's his address. In fact, all of these change addresses are his address. I can sort of like follow this wad of cash as it like as bills are peeled off and handed to somebody and it keeps getting like taken back by the spender and put in a different pocket but it's the same wad of bills you know and then eventually you see that that wad of bills like sent to a cryptocurrency exchange to be cashed out and there you can send a subpoena. She knows like the law enforcement agency can send a subpoena to that exchange and identifies somebody. So like already she's like building like powerful. tricks to follow the money and identify people that were not, you know, previously, like, obvious to anybody in this world. And then she also, as you said, started doing these undercover transactions, basically, where, you know, she would put money into the Silk Road and take it out again.

She never actually bought anything on the Silk Road, she says, but like she could have, obviously. And doing those undercover deals, she can see which addresses she's interacting with. And every time she does that, she can sometimes, like, say, oh, This address belongs to the Silk Road. It's part of this big cluster. So that whole cluster is the Silk Road. Now I've identified like a million Silk Road addresses. And I can see everybody interacting with them.

Each one of those is a drug deal. You know, that is so powerful. And it was the first, like, real, like, massive hole blown in this myth of Bitcoin's anonymity. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no one coasts.

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Make life easier with LG. See the latest models and savings now at LG.com. That paper came out in late 2013. Kigringa Berian read it before he traced these two corrupt agents money. Right. Michael Groniger read it before he built a tool that automated all these tricks. you know and um started selling that to law enforcement so that's like the true uh kind of like you know a hot moment right like this is possible and and then soon chain analysis was the one that really

built it into a company i mean it's very interesting i think to see that sarah micklejohn did not like become a professional cryptocurrency tracer or work with law enforcement and um that in part came out of her ambivalence about the like morality of this or like is it really um a good thing that cryptocurrency can be traced she saw it as you know as financial surveillance right and she like i think in a really legitimate way like believes that that there are good uses of financial privacy that that is important cryptocurrency was meant to be an antidote to like to financial surveillance in the traditional finance world where every credit card transaction you ever make is like extremely transparent to companies and governments who want to get that data.

For Groninger, there was obviously money involved. Yeah, so you asked me too about like Groniger's motivations, but I never quite like spelled it out. He, he saw it really differently. He was like, well, no, cryptocurrency was never meant to be private. You can look like at this whole blockchain. Like nobody could have ever had like any idea that it was private, which I think is not exactly right. I think Satoshi did think that it was meant that it could have had privacy properties that were important. But he was like this is this whole idea that it was anonymous.

You can it was just not there in the technology from the beginning. And the great thing about cryptocurrency, according to Michael Groniger, is that it's transparent. And you can see everything. And that's what's going to make this great. And we're going to like, you know, kind of fuel that we're going to show how transparent it is by selling this tool that will allow anybody to trace, not anybody, but his customers to trace cryptocurrency transactions. And we're going to clean up the wild west of the crypto world and make it legitimate and, you know, respectable and legal. That's how chain analysis sees these things. So when Groninger started first working with

Gambarian, what was sort of the first big case they started working on trying to crack? So Gronigar before even meeting Tegren, Tegren, Tegren Gambarian, had taken on this first case for chain analysis kind of pro bono on behalf of Mount Gox, or actually the bankruptcy trustees of Mount Gawks. So for people that I don't know, can you explain what Mount Gop's was? Yeah, Mount Gawks was the first Bitcoin exchange. For a long time, it was the only one. And like, I tried to buy like $40 worth of Bitcoins from Mount Cox when Bitcoin was worth a dollar, like when I was, you know, working on my story about Bitcoin for Forbes. And it was like buggy and, um, the transaction did not go through.

And I like gave up and I, you know, probably lost millions and millions of dollars by not buying those bit, those bitcoins at a dollar. But the Mount Cox, you know, as buggy as it was and it was kind of like always considered a little janky. It was the only way to buy and sell bitcoins for years. Wasn't there a big like a criminal conspiracy that went down? There's a guy who lives like two hours south of here who was like, largely involved with Mount

Gox and he went to prison there was a big investigation. What the hell is his name? He has a podcast. I don't know. I'm trying to think of who that could possibly be. He's got glasses. Fuck, he lives in Sarasota.

Is it the original creator? I don't know. I don't want to like say. Take a guess that who went to prison. I got a look. I got to look at his name. I know you know. I know who you know that this guy is.

Charlie Schrem. Oh, yeah, of course. Charlie Schrem. Yeah. Wasn't he involved with Mount Cox? I don't think he was He was He yeah

Charlie Shrem Yes It's an interesting guy I met Charlie in New York Like around the time I started covering Bitcoin And he was a really nice guy I can't remember

What his first company was I think it was like a payment processor Or something for the four Cryptocurrency It turned out You know I don't know the details of his case that well But I think he was essentially

He was accused I think of working with the Silk Road to launder money, basically. I think that's what he went down for. But he's out of prison. I didn't cover Charlie's, I can't remember the details of his case that well. I did cover it some of it, but it's been years. I don't know what it. I don't remember the details either.

All I just remember, I remember him being associated with Mount Gawks somehow. Well, everybody was kind of. I mean, like, he, Mount Gawks was like the only game in town for years. So it was the only way to get cryptocurrency. And I remember I actually was going to like write a, I wanted to write like a big feature about Mount Cox or Forbes. Like look at this, you know, look at this massive business at the center of Bitcoin.

And people warned me like, don't do that. This place doesn't, this place is shady. It's not going well. Like they just don't know what they're doing. And then in 2014, sure enough, like Mount Cox went bankrupt. Like suddenly just had lost everybody's bitcoins. Just froze all withdrawals. And they said that they've been hacked.

A lot of people didn't believe them. A lot of people thought like, oh, the Mark Carpellis, this kind of weird eccentric French CEO living in Japan had stolen all the money. That's what people thought. And Michael Groniger agreed to take on the case on behalf of the bankruptcy trustees in Japan for Mount Cox and figure out where all of the missing Mount Cox money had gone through cryptocurrency, tracing. And this was like half a billion dollars of Bitcoin at the time. I mean, much more now. And he basically, just to cut the story short, he traced that money to another Bitcoin exchange.

He showed that it had been stolen by hackers, essentially, and that it had not been embezzled by Mount Cox's own staff. He actually showed that, it seemed to have been taken by people in Russia's time zone, was his first clue. And then it had been cashed out through another cryptocurrency exchange, like a newer one called BTCE, that had by that point this reputation as a kind of black hole of money laundering. Like, Mount Cox would follow anti-money laundering laws. Like, you have to get people's identifying information to cash out their money.

BTCE was this mysterious exchange hosted like nobody knew where, by whom, and it had no, know your customer, anti-money laundering requirements. So it had become like this magnet for all kinds of

criminal cryptocurrency including it turns out it had cashed out it had been used to launder the half billion dollars of stolen Mount Cox money. Michael Groniger showed. So at the same time

Tigring Gambarian was investigating BTCE because it looked shady as hell. And he had taken on that case. And so their cases kind of converged again in this bizarre way. And like it turned out,

tegring through like other investigative means, not cryptocurrency tracing, but like more traditional law enforcement stuff, tracing like IP addresses and seizing the BTCE server, which turned out to be in Virginia, was able to show that the same person cashing out all those Mount Cox coins into BTCE was also one of the creators

of BTCE, that in fact, BTCE had been created, this whole cryptocurrency exchange had been created just as a way to launder the loot from this giant heist of Mount Cox. And then once the creators of BTCE had created this kind of trading platform to launder this half billion dollars, they were kind of like, well, we might as well keep it running. This is actually a profitable business. And BTCE became like, you know, started laundering all of these other kinds of cryptocurrency from criminals around the world. But it was all the same.

It was like BTCE, the creator of BTCE, one of them, and the sort of money man for the Mount Gawks hacking operation were one guy, and they showed that it was this Russian man, Alexander Vinick. And they had to keep that secret for years, but he eventually went on vacation. Greece was arrested. Sir prison time in France has now been exudited to the U.S. and is facing trial here.

So I should say like, I guess he's, you know, innocent and still proven guilty on some of these charges, but he was convicted of money laundering in France. So, but that was like the first major case where

they solved this biggest mystery in cryptocurrency at the time, like this missing half billion dollars. They basically vindicated the CEO of Mount Cox who was thought to have taken that money. They showed that it really was a Russian hacker who'd taken it more or less. And they took down B.C.

TCE, which turned out to be kind of this treasure trove of tracing also because once you have that server, that would be like they later turned out to be this wealth of information about who was cashing out money. They could get sometimes IP addresses and things from that server and like learn about some of the people who thought that they were anonymously cashing out stuff through this this completely like black market exchange. But that was kind of the beginning of this like golden age. of cryptocurrency tracing where IRS criminal investigations and chain alice and eventually DEA, FBI, everybody has used this massive like once kind of secret technique to as a super weapon to just like go after the biggest criminals on the dark web and in that whole world of like the internet's undergrounds basically. So Vinick was a Russian guy. What is so wild. Is he got is he the guy who was a former credit cards game or two? I've been told that he has a past, that he was sort of known. You know, I didn't want to like, I guess this is all a little thin because I have only heard it from like a couple people and I don't see it in court records or anything.

But he is sort of, I was told, you know, allegedly, I guess he had a history as a credit card fraud and money man, like the one who would do the laundering once you, who would help you cash out, basically. And so I think you might be thinking, though, of Alexander Koss, who was like the real credit card. Right. Alpha II. Who becomes like a massive, like dark web kingpin. You know, we can get to that. Yes. Yeah.

No, because I've had a credit card scammer on here before. And he was telling me, you know, when he was in his peak of, you know, buying these credit cards and manufacturing these fake phony credit cards and basically uploading people's money onto them, he said that everyone he was doing business with was in. Ukraine. Yeah, I've no doubt. And Ukraine is like a hotbed for this kind of stuff. I think that Ukraine is not like a great place to do this stuff anymore because Ukraine has, I mean, Ukraine has corruption problems. There's no doubt. But like Ukraine has become, you know, it's sort of shifted its, its alliances and is more cooperative with Western law enforcement than maybe used to be. Now Russia, but I mean, not now, but Russia remains behind a kind of like, I was going to say Iron Curt. And it feels like. It feels like. rude to kind of like anachronistic to say that but like um there is like a barrier though like you can get away with so many kinds of cyber crime ransomware like uh dark web drug whatever dark web cyber crime of all kinds like uh beyond that border with total impunity that like alex and vinick from inside russia's border oh yeah right um but alex and yvinnick made the mistake of traveling you know to Greece and like these kind of undercover agents like closed in on him on this beautiful

Greek beach and arrested him like and like that and that yeah was like a rare instance when one of these like massive criminals of the Russian underworld was actually like laid hands on I think I'm sure that like these stories kind of resonate within that world world and they're learning like do not go on vacation to Greece you know yeah um but yeah like uh should we get into alexina cause then like yeah so explain to people like when did alpha bay first come on the map and what was alpha bay was it basically just a reaction to silk road going down or was it like it was obviously way bigger than silk road but was it essentially the same thing well yeah i mean it's interesting we had the whole conversation about like the ideals of the silk road

And, you know, and in fact, like, when the judge in Ross Alberg's case sentenced him to life, double life in prison, she was trying to send a message, like, don't follow in this guy's footsteps. That did not work. Like, in fact, it just brought more attention to the Silk Road and, you know, created more copycats. And then, like, subsequently, like, there was just this power vacuum that was filled by one dark web market after another, each kind of, like, vying for supremacy. But then, um, and then, um, And a lot of them were, you know, scammers. They would just, like, get big enough and then steal everybody's money and run away. That happened. That's called an exit scam. It happened, like, a couple of them just disappeared. A couple of them were taken down by law enforcement because they made, like, dumb mistakes. But then, yes, like, Alpha Bay came on on the scene and did not go away.

It launched in 2014, but by, like, 2016, it was not only... the biggest dark web markets, but the biggest dark web market in history. It had like surpassed the peak of any previous market. And part of it's a part of what made it kind of like stick in that way was that its founder, this mysterious kingpin named Alpha O2, went by Alpha O2, was as you said, a credit card fraudster, a known credit card fraudster with a reputation who had like sold a guide to credit card fraud even online. And so Alpha Bay initially just sold credit card hacking tools,

stolen credit card information. It was like a cybercrime market. But then Alpha O2 sort of innovation was to combine that with the narcotics dark web, which is actually much more profitable. And so Alpha Bay became this like one-stop shop for like stolen hacking tools. sorry, stolen hacked information, hacking tools. You could search for like very specific stolen credit cards in your area to like better defraud people or whatever.

And then it also had, you know, heroin and fentanyl and everything imaginable on the drug side. And it did grow eventually to be 10 times the size of the Silk Road. Wow. And the, you know, and Alpha O2 was like this kind of like mysterious and seemingly untouchable kingpin of this growing dark web market have like a public persona like dread power Roberts did like this

mystique about him yeah this was what was interesting like you know he he um yeah he first of all had no ideals it was pretty clear he was a criminal who just wanted to make as much money as possible through alpha bay and as soon as alpha bay started to become giants he kind of like instead of like the way that, you know, the Dread Pirate Roberts behaved was like he was this political leader of a movement. He would post these manifestos and love letters and he did an interview with me and like, you know, and he had like a Dread Pirate Roberts book club where he would read about like Austrian libertarian economics and stuff. And this guy, like, he's like like a real gangster.

And this guy, yeah, he just like once he was making millions and millions, he just slipped into the shadows. He actually changed his name from Alpha O2 to just admin. He said like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, will no longer be like communicating with with customers or sellers on alpha bay you can talk to my right hand man you know these who is the snake uh which is like extremely to me that's like a real criminal that's like somebody who is smart and just motivated by survival and money completely take take ego out of it right yeah exactly um it turned out he was kind of like getting his like ego outlet elsewhere we can talk about that in a minute um But like it and also he would sign off his messages before he disappeared basically with Russian language like like he would write be safe brothers in Russian at the end of his messages

There were rules for Alpha Bay. I mean there were very few rules there were none of the Silk Road's rules about only victimless crime that kind of thing But there was one rule that you could only sell hacked information if it didn't come from Russians or former Soviet countries So like there was it seemed like it was this tradition like this is very common with Russians cyber criminals there are rules to prevent Russian law enforcement from coming after you and you just target the West and that way you say you kind of don't shit where you sleep you know so it was a sign that

everybody thought Alpha O2 and Alpha Bay were in Russia and that they might truly be beyond the reach of Western law enforcement and that this was going to be like the one that will never you know as I talked to agents and prosecutors you know they would say like this is not this might be like um the untouchable one one of them called him like the the the michael jordan of the dark web like what if he's just perfect what if what if he's just so good at this that we'll never

catch up with him he's not like going to you know it's not going to be the same story as with ross albrecht um yeah but they uh that around that time um this was like late 2016 when alpha Bay was truly taking off and growing into this unprecedented, like, giant bizarre of drugs and crime. That is when a tip came into the DEA in Fresno that was basically this email address. And it turned out that in Alpha Bay's very first days online before anybody was paying attention to it, its user forums. When you signed up, you would get a welcome email, and that welcome email contained the email address,

pimp underscore Alex at Hotmail. Pimp underscore Alex underscore 91 at hotmail.com. And somebody, like this one anonymous source, had recorded, had kept that email. That email leak was fixed very quickly, but this source had like held onto that email for you. years, more than two years, and then sent it to this DEA agents in Fresno. And that was the, by like kind of following that email address, this DEA agent and the

prosecutor in that office, whose name was Grant Rabin, the DEA agent has asked me not to like talk about his name. But he, but they found out other places and were eventually able to show that belonged to Alexander Caas, this French-Canadian guy, Pimp Alex 91, like the 91 is his birth year he was really young and he they could see like through his family's social media is like in-laws social media posts really that he was a web developer but he had moved to bangkok and and like his his he married a Thai woman and her family had like posted photos of him with a Lamborghini his he had like a villa in pukets and stuff and he sort of posed as like a early cryptocurrency investor and web developer who just had this money from like buying an early to Bitcoin.

But they had, you know, their first lead that he was perhaps Alpha O2. And it was a pretty, you know, it was like a strong lead, but they almost like didn't believe. All based on that email address. Exactly. And they thought to themselves like, yeah, this is amazing. It's almost too good to be true. Is somebody setting this guy up? Is he being framed by the real Alpha O2?

And it was just around that time that, in fact, like independently, completely not these two FBI agents in Washington, D.C., who asked me to call them just Ali and Aaron, they were totally independently looking, using chain analysis as software at the Alpha Bay cluster, like this constellation of 2.5 million addresses, Bitcoin addresses. that chain analysis had figured out belonged to Alfa Bay. They didn't know about what was happening in Fresno, but they thought, like, why don't we, like, find a way through cryptocurrency tracing alone to figure out who Alpha O2 is, which nobody had ever done that. Nobody had ever, like, identified a dark web kingpin with crypto tracing.

But they had this idea that, like, when an exit scam happens, as I mentioned, like, when the administrator of a dark web site, like just steals everybody's money. Every time that happens, the whole dark web freaks out and everybody warrants each other, like pull your money out. Like don't keep your, don't keep any cryptocurrency on a market that you're not about to spend right away

because it's not a safe place to leave your money, right? And they realize like the only person who is not going to be freaked out and pull their money out of those wallets when an exit scam happens is the boss himself, the admin. The one who controls it. Exactly, right, the one who controls the whole market. So they started kind of, I guess, in a similar way to Sarah Mickeljohn, just kind of using that idea to scan like a big chunk of the blockchain, just the alpha bay cluster within chain analysis, this software.

And they found exactly this, like some collections of like big troves of crypto that had sat unmoved even as exit scams happens. And then eventually, like some of them had been later moved out of addresses sent through like some hops and then eventually ended up at exchanges they found one massive amount that had gone to an exchange and they sent a subpoena to that exchange only after sending that subpoena did they kind of through the grapevine hear this tip about Alexander cause and um after learning that like you know fresno was onto this this weird french canadian guy in Bangkok. Only then did they get the results of their subpoena and like, lo and behold, the holder of

that account that had cashed out these coins from Alpha Bay was belonged to Alexander Cause. That was like real proof that he was Alpha O2. They traced the, you know, the millions of dollars and profits of this dark web drug lord and showed that they flowed out to this exchange and were being cashed out by Cause and his wife in some cases. So now they had like, you know, kind of nailed to the wall this theory that had just been totally unchargeable previously and they had their guy where was he located he was in bangkok he was okay yeah you said that a hundred times i don't know yeah but he like you know but that was just the beginning i mean the the the that was how they they'd identified him they still had to kind of like get him dead to rights in the same way that they did that the fbi had with ross

albrecht which was not easy because like cause was smart he despite that that email slip up um which he you know, which was brief, but really kind of just like head slapping, like amazing mistake to have made. Like, he was smart and careful. And he had learned from Ross Ulbricht to like, yes, you encrypt your laptop so that if you just close the lid, like, you never, you know, if you just close the lid, rather, like every secret on it is scrambled such that no law enforcement agency will be able to decrypt it in all of humans. and many human lifespans. But he had learned that you never work in a public library or a public place of any kind. He didn't open his laptop outside of his home,

which was like in this, you know, a house and like behind the gates, behind a wall, the outskirts of Bangkok. Like the logistics of getting that laptop opened and unencrypted to really catch him red-handed. It would be very hard. It was going to be like, a real challenge. But you asked me like, you know, where he didn't, like, did he not kind of like have the

public ego of the Dread Pyrgyro? It turns out that he was posting online really, you know, flurried, like crazy. He was very prolific. But under a different pseudonym, which was kind of his like pickup artist, sex addict pseudonym, he was on this pickup artist forum. Rushvi and there he had this handle Romeo he you know enjoys yes he was like a fan of unprotected sex as you might

what a fucking dork imagine yeah and he was he would I mean he just had like endless numbers of extramarital affairs and live blogged them basically like he would just like pick up Thai women and his Lamborghini from like 7-11 or whatever and then go have sex with them and then just write up in this like just it was called the i just had sex thread of like uh rushvi so he's picking up prostitutes and then writing about it well he was not even that like picky like he was just like picking up women from the parking lot of seven 11 whoever they were like oh and you know i don't think you had like that hard of a time unfortunately because he was he was

projecting wealth he was a white dude which just kind of signifies money unfortunately um in thailand and um and yeah i mean and he was extremely manipulative with women and a misogynist and you know these posts are like some of the grossest shit i've ever read and i read like everything that you posted sick fuck um he would he said he bragged about yeah like a second home he uses his like whatever fuck pad yes and he says that he recorded all of his sex there just in case like the women accused him of a sexual assault or whatever like he would have like evidence of it or something he says that he kept it on an encrypted hard drive and um you know like all this and and um but he also just like rampant misogyny homophobia like terrible amoral shit like he had a real like

whoever gives the least fucks wins yeah i think that was like an actual kind of quote from his that that was his philosophy though he was truly like business philosophy no from his his his his pickup artist philosophy but i think yeah sure it pervaded everything you know like he he was a true amoral person ross lbrick i think you know i'm i i feel for him and uh i think he was he's an interesting like sympathetic character and uh alexander cause is like the true he's like most american businessmen kind of like hollowed out uh monstrous kind of person i mean i'm sorry to say this because i'm like speaking ill of the dead we'll get to that well i mean it's like you know those the person who gives the least fucks wins. It sounds like that's a very successful recipe for in America.

Sure. I mean, and he was successful in business. He was, I guess, successful in his like sex life. If you call that success, I mean, he seemed to, I mean, if you read his Ruchfee posts, they're like a whole psychological portrait. Like, I don't want to be like too. I'm not a psychologist, but you can see him talk about how he was raised by his mother and his father was not around and like how he craved. It seems like the kind of guy who didn't get much attention from females when he was younger i'm sure that that's probably true as well but he also he he like he uh he just openly kind of um had i think a kind of daddy complex where he wanted to i mean this whole idea of alpha o2 alpha bay it was about his quest to become this weird idea of of a man uh that was absent

from his life i mean he he posted about like i was because i was my father wasn't around i didn't learn like how to use a chainsaw or like riding a go card or something until i was 18 um and that like these weird ideas of masculinity i don't know um it was all very strange but more like germane to the story we could talk about like his complexes for a long time but um he had posted in rushvi about like um his whole pattern of life he posted about the encryption that he used this was how long enforcement was able to kind of like create a profile of him and and start to make a plan about how they were going to actually nab him and more importantly his laptop. I mean, they could arrest him any time. That was the easy part. The hard part was going to be getting that laptop open. There was actually like a bizarre incident where like so after sorry, I'm skipping ahead of it like they, they, you know, they, the this becomes like a massive law enforcement investigation called Operation Bay. And that they bring in the tie police. least who are extremely cooperative like the Thai Thailand is not a good place to hide out as a drug lawyer yeah there's a lot of DEA there and a lot of it's like it's just like extradition heaven

practically you know it's like not it's not offshore or whatever um it's very similar to Mexico in that way where there's a lot of DEA right right CIA or absolutely it's like considered a kind of of I think like desirable outpost I think it's a DEA agent and that is who I mean the DEA is once they were brought into the case they're the ones who have all the connections to the local law enforcement they have the most agents abroad of any law enforcement agency they work like hand and glove with the ties in Bangkok and and so not a good place to be hiding out as like the drug lord although you know he thought he would never be identified so maybe he was just there because he likes the weather or the sex life yeah he likes the prostitutes yeah so the ties are now like

working with them and oh sorry i was just getting to this this you know we were talking about like how it would have been easy to just like arrest him they actually at one point um the whole this whole american delegation kind of of prosecutors and agents is like has come to thailand to bangkok and they're just sitting in the lobby of their hotel where they're planning the this they're kind of brainstorming and thinking about how they're going to do this takedown and um the ties who are now following causes every remove with the surveillance team, like, send them a message that says, like, we see, like, um, his white Porsche Panamanera has like, just parked in front of your hotel.

And, um, and then like the next second, and then like one of the FBI agents kind of like goes to like try to just look out the window and check it out. And at that moment, cause walks through the door of the lobby of this hotel. And the whole, this whole team that is by this point been tracking him for nine months is like. what the fuck is like that's him and it's uh you know from their perspective it's like seeing a ghost today they they're they think that they're they're blown basically they think the causes like figured out that he's being tailed that he's being surveilled and that they're onto him and they they imagine that he's going to like come over and say like i got you

just like fuck off like you're not going to get the evidence you need to charge me you know um or to extradite me. And instead he just sits down at the table right next to them where he just happens to have a business meeting. What? Yes, like it was a complete coincidence. It was totally bizarre and really freaked out like all the agents and prosecutors who just kind of like quietly dispersed

and, you know, tried to be like stealthy about it. But that's the thing. Like they could have arrested him at any time. But they needed to get him logged into Alpha Bay. They needed to like get his. his laptop open. And what, what did they want? What was the most valuable thing to them in the laptop?

Well, they wanted to get a Ross Ulbrick style arrest, you know, which is like they'll see him logged into the... Because there would be, if they arrested him without the laptop, there wouldn't be enough evidence, right? They would be going on these blockchain trails, which are strong, but like very rarely used in court up to that point. So that would have been a little dicey, this email, which is kind of like circumstantial almost, you know.

And then, yeah, it would have been difficult to like make it an open and shut case, basically. So they want like what they got with Ross Ulberg, which is he was logged into like his mastermind account on the Silk Road. Like that is his dead to rights evidence. They wanted that for, for cause. By the way, there's a whole other story.

And I've kind of skipped over here about how they found the Alpha Bay server, which was using this secret technique that chain analysis and the IRS, K. Gringhambarian actually developed together something that they didn't even want to tell me about. But I kind of like figured out by the end of the book reporting like this secret surveillance technique that they found the IP address of that server, which was in Lithuania, it turns out. But that's just to say that they had they knew where the server was, but they had to get cause like connected to it, logged in proving that he was without a doubt the owner of Alphabet. So with the help of this kind of like pattern of life that they've established with all these pickup artist forum posts on Ruch V, they make this plan, which is like very elaborate. If you're ready to like tell.

Yeah. They're like not on this morning, I think it was July, July 5th, 2017. There are like nine undercover agents all surrounding his house playing different roles. like one is pretending to be a gardener one is like pretending to be an electrician like working on a wiring box and um two are like seeing the movies yeah i mean it's like truly um just this whole cast of of actors almost and um one an american dea agent is like pretending to be shopping for real estate in this house at the end of the block um with his fake tie wife who was an undercover agent and like her job he's supposed to distract her while she goes up and like gets eyes on the house and

Like, it's just so complicated. But then the real players in this are these two Thai female agents who drive their car down this cul-de-sac pretending to be lost. And they drive to the end of the block kind of like trying to look like they're bad at driving. And the security guard like tells them to turn around. And instead, they back up and crash the car into Kasa's front gate. This is like the kind of like go time. In fact, what sort of triggered this is that. the team in Lithuania that was supposed to

basically connect to the Alpha Base server and surveil that while they do this take down and show the connection, they fucked up and crashed the server. So at that point is when like the Lithuania team is like talking to this war room of agents and police and prosecutors in the Bangkok office of the Thai, the Royal Thai police. And

they're watching surveillance feeds and everything and they are the ones who tell these two women like it's time like go and they crashed this Toyota Camry into Kaza's front gate that's like the diversion that's meant to pull him out of his house so they can start to get in to get his laptop this is after they crashed the server right

yeah they're like he's about to see that we've we've crashed his server he can close his laptop at any time and end this whole thing It turns out, like, they would find out later that when the server crashed, he was, like, frantically, like, sending emails to his hosting provider. Like, what's going on? Like, why is Alphabet down? And that actually helps us even more evidence. But he doesn't come out. His wife comes out. And she's like, oh, it's okay. Like, don't worry about it. She's very sweet, actually. I mean, I've just watched the video. I've talked through the whole exactly what happens with all the agents there. and his Thai wife is like, it's okay,

don't worry about it, but the driver of the car, this undercover agent woman, he's like, no, I'm so sorry. Like, please let me pay for it. Please have your husband come down so I can,

you know, talk to him about paying him back. Like, I don't want to pay in my next life, she says, like kind of like alluding, you know, some like Buddhist beliefs.

And so like, uh, cause his wife, his name is Sunisa, like, shouts up to him and, and they see that he's like in, um,

like his window actually opens and even on the surveillance footage the people in the war room can see oh that's him he got his attention like he's um uh and they can see that his wind that the blind is like cracked and and he's talking to his wife and then he does come down and he's like shirtless and shoeless like in his gym shorts um uh and i'm sorry i also i just know he was also he was also he was also commando i just wasn't didn't really want to say that he was naked yeah no no he was just going commando like like like no uh apparently. And he kind of like comes out and tries to mess with the gates and all of the kind of different undercover agents start to like get involved. And this one agent who was pretending to be the driver of the real estate shopping couple's car like comes out to kind of help. So at this point when he's walking down, they don't know if the laptops open or closed or do they? Exactly. They don't know. They're just hoping to God he didn't close it. They did see when they started this.

the thing about Rosh V as well is that you can see when someone is logged in. They're like their kind of icon on their name turns green and shows like this person is active. And they could see when I guess they could see that he was active. But they didn't know if the computer was going to go to sleep. But that's when they saw that he was active, that's when they were like, okay, we can start this. That was like part of his sort of operational security. Right, right.

fuck up here essentially um anyway so i i guess that's um to make a long story short like um at this point it's time for them to try to get the laptop they um there's a whole kind of other pantomime here about how they got his phone they had to get his phone as well um and like one agent kind of like grabbed it out of the waistband of his shorts and stuff but but the phone ultimately had nothing important on it so i'll skip that but like the um At this point, like the gardener, I think, was the one who put his police vest on and starts, like, running towards cause. Cause like turns and sees him, realizes what's happening and goes into this fight or flight mode. He immediately spins around. He knows he has to get back to his laptop. And one agent grabs him and then another, they kind of like tussle. But then like this one agent named M who was hiding in the backseat of the real estate shopping couple's car. this kind of short athletic guy breaks free and he his job is to like sprint into the house he's practiced

on like other similar layout houses and everything. Oh, they knew the exact layout of the house. Yes, they just like studied other houses in the neighborhood. He sprints up the stairs. He like thinks he's got it's in the home office. He like goes in there. He finds that there's like two house guests who are asleep in bed. He's like, oh, sorry.

And he like flips, spins around, goes into the bedroom and finds this like cheap white desk with the laptop. open, still logged into Alpha Bay, and he like, lunges for it and puts his hand on the mouse pad and keeps it alive. And that's it. Like, you know, you hear over the police radio. And I heard this in the recording, even, like, officers, like, we have the laptop. And then everybody in the war room, like, starts cheering and, like, yeah. It was just very dramatic.

Sadly, you know, cause is then brought to Thai police headquarters, kept in a jail there for the next week. And after one week, just after he's agreed to extradition, in fact, he's found dead in a Thai jail cell. Convenient for someone. Yeah, you know, maybe. Didn't he work with the Russian mafia or something? Right. He had a lot of like shady clients that possibly didn't want him to.

I did hear that, you know. I heard that from a friend of his. And it was like a bit vague. There's a lot of stories you can come up with about who would have wanted him dead. Maybe he had like local police on the take even, you know, like who then were worried that they would be found out when he was captured. You know, maybe he did like have local partners in Alpha Bay. D-Snake I mentioned was his kind of second in command. And I mean, D-Snake actually tells me, I did interview D-Snake through the dark, you know, through anonymous channels later.

And he says that he had a whole plan to get cause out. And he wouldn't tell me what it was. But it was a kind of like kills, I don't know what do you call this? Like a dead man switch. Kill switch, yeah. Kind of a dead man switch. Like if you don't hear from me for a certain amount of time, then activate the plan. and there was money like set up for it and everything like as in if he if he's if he's dead or if he dies or if he's just in jail okay

like you like release this money or something or like get hire a lawyer or I don't even know what at one point cause had like bragged to a DEA agent that I spoke to about having like a helicopter gunship that was going to come and break him out and I don't know if that was like a silly boast or just fucking with her or um if maybe that was the plan. for all I know. But no plan happened in time. I mean, Cause died.

And for DeSnake, D-Snake says that's evidence that he was killed because he would not have killed himself, which is what, so just to be clear, prosecutors, D.EA, FBI, everybody told me that that cause killed himself in jail.

And D-Snake says that's impossible because he would have waited for our plan at least to like to see if it works how long after he went into jail did he end up dead about a week about a week and what evidence was there that he actually killed himself well yeah so i like went i mean i i spent time in in thailand i like got as far as visiting the cell that he was in i got video of his last oh there's video of it there's there's jail cell video there was i saw that there were cameras in his cell when i was there. And I was like, give me this video, please. So maybe he did kill himself.

But the video, sorry, so the video shows, so just to be clear, like he, he was found asphyxiated, strangled in the back of the cell behind the kind of three foot high wall. There was a towel wrapped around his neck. The suicide theory is that he basically like wrapped this towel around his neck. neck, made a noose of it, put it in the hinge of the door, which is this kind of like swinging three foot high door, and then just like, you know, lean forward, which sounds totally implausible, but if you read the medical literature, which I like looked into, it's really grisly stuff. It is like, I mean, I don't want to get into, I don't want to give people ideas, but it's

easier than you think to kill yourself that way, to kill yourself without suspending your full body. But so I looked at this jail cell of a video. which I did get I mean they gave it to me the time well I don't I can't say exactly who gave it to me but I got it the law enforcement as a whole work cooperative about giving me that video I didn't like get it from a hacker or something okay okay and it shows him kind of looking out of the cell looking up and down the the jail like hallway and he disappears in the back the the part of the cell where he died

was not on camera. And in fact, there was a gap in the footage then, and the next thing you see, you actually see, you can kind of see him messing with a towel. Yeah. Even just like a tiny bit. By himself.

By himself in the corner of the frame. Nobody else in his cell. No one else in his cell. And then there's a half hour gap. And then the next thing you see in the footage is everybody rushing in and finding his dead body. So it's just totally... Why a half hour gap?

Well, this is the thing. Like, they tell me that, I was told it was because nothing happened. There's just nothing on the video at that point. Why keep it? And the ties, you know, I just have to, I feel like you should not. That's like so insulting to say that. You shouldn't, you should not like assume malice where it could just be incompetence.

Like the ties are probably not used to media scrutiny or, you know, and I could just, I could imagine that they thought it made sense to delete this like boring half hour of nothing happening in the cell just to save space on the drive. Like that is the part where he actually dies though? Well, you can't see anything. Oh, you can't see it. It's all in the back. It's all off camera anyway. Okay. Okay.

What it doesn't prove, I mean, what it would have showed if he killed himself, if we could, if he did kill himself. I truly am trying to be clear here that I don't know what happened. Right. Like I'm not taking, I'm not leaning either way. Right. I'm fully like, and then that's. Not just as a journalist.

Like if I had an inkling of like, if I could prove it either way, then I would say so. But what you don't see is like half an hour of nobody going into his cell. You don't see any, like the footage is not there. There's no footage. So what it doesn't, what I don't have is like is some dispositive thing of like seeing, yeah, he like goes to the back. There's half an hour of nobody entering his cell. Then he's found dead. That would have, I think, proved that it was suicide.

to me. Instead, we have this mysterious half hour that his lawyer, you know, his defense attorney who's convinced that he was murdered was like, what the hell? Like, that's even worse. Well, if he was murdered, why would he set up the noose or the out of the bed sheets himself? Well, like, if you were, you can't actually see him make a noose. You just see him kind of messing with the towel. Who knows? Maybe he was, like, taking showers, like about. Oh, you can't actually seem fashioning any sort of new. Oh, okay. So, like, the theory that he was killed is that he um i mean it would have had to have been in that half hour um it said somebody came in and like killed him choked him with the towel is there an autopsy there was an autopsy i read the i got the report i mean this is like a really impressive you know it's

impressive that i got it's impressive that they were willing to share it um but it is a tie corner report i don't know like how was there any sort of indication or any sort of details about that hyoid bone in the neck. You know the bone that they found in Epstein that was fractured. And I guess there's tons of reports. Wow. You've gone deep on Epstein, clearly. I mean, that's, and that is, of course, is the model for what everybody imagines

happened here. The missing footage, like there was a jail cell footage, but it's missing. And like, there's this, there's this bone in the neck that if it's broken, that they say that that bone never breaks when someone just sort of affixates themselves. It's only from some severe trauma. That's interesting. I you know it wasn't there was no mention of that in the report I'm learning about this bone from you right now okay pull up something on the hyoid boy maybe we can look at it yeah the the report just says like

death from asphyxiation um no sign of anyone else's DNA on his fingernails finger hands anything um for instance like which might have been um but you know the i just want to you know this is the tie police corner and if we're worried that like the Thai is where the Thai police or someone in Thai police, I talked to many of the Thai police involved in this investigation. They struck me as honest and not corrupt people, although there are absolutely like huge pockets of corruption in the Royal Thai police. I don't, I didn't see that in the, you know, in the people that I like spoke with who were involved in this and they kind of had a good reputation. That's part of why they were brought in to this global, this international

case. But yeah, if they, if there were corrupt people, who had him killed, then they could have easily, like, had the coroner's report written up in a certain way as well. So I'm not sure what any of that proves. You know, the prosecutor, like I mentioned Grant Rabin, the prosecutor in the case. He actually was in Thailand for all of this, and he interviewed cause before he killed himself, before he killed himself or was murdered, and says that he kind of saw this side of cause. like he he was kind of shocked by causes personality which seemed to be kind of flat and unconcerned about his fate and um not like a sociopath but but someone but very strange and uh grant grant would put like described it to me as like he was a gamer he kind of played his life like a game once you like the game is over you just turn the machine off like you you know once you you know once you got the highest score you can get and things are not working out for you you just hit the reset button you know that's how um that's how he thinks cause thought and lived his life interesting

cause his defense attorney saw it completely differently of course and um said that like cause was concerned for his safety concerned for his family wanted to like make sure nobody believes that he was cooperating which of course the prosecutors and agents wanted him to become a source and and flip and like become even possibly like an undercover, help them with undercover operations and things. And it doesn't buy any of this stuff about cause like being ready to die. Right. So what does this say?

Oh, hyoid bone fracture. Here you go. The hyoid bone fracture is a very rare fracture of the hyoid bone, accounting for 0.002% of all fractures in humans. It is commonly associated with strangulation. and rarely occurs in isolation. The fracture may be associated with gunshot injury, car accidents, or induced vomiting, huh? In 50% of strangulations and 27% of hangings,

the fracture occurs. And that was broken. His bone was broken. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah. Because if you want to get into it, like what I learned from reading the medical literature on strangulation and auto-asphyxiation,

like killing yourself this way is that it's way too easy like it's it's shockingly easy people die in auto asphyxiation accidents all the time like autoerotic asphyxiation do they really well it seems so i mean i'm not an expert in this but i read some studies just to see what i was trying to find out is like you know cause his defense attorney was like he hung himself from a three foot high wall and died like that That does not make any sense. Just the physics of that do not make sense. Right.

But then when you read about it, yes, like people die, like people hang themselves in a seated position and a kneeling position. Very often like in the like an autoerotic like asphyxiation scenarios. Right. Not so like, sorry, this is really grisly stuff to get into and then accidentally die. Yeah. Frequently from this. Interesting. So and that doesn't happen by like breaking a bone or like it's not like you've like violently

snaps your neck or something. Right, exactly. So if he like if his bone was not fractured, I would indicate that he did actually like strangulate himself. He actually did kill himself. But if the bone was broken in his neck, that would suggest that there was some violent trauma. Well, I'm now like just based on this conversation alone, you know, sounds pretty convincing that Epstein was

like strangled. Yeah. Because cause and the way that you do this like when you're, um, you know, if you were, sorry, cause,

the cause case is, I'm not, this doesn't prove anything either way about him. But he, all he had to do was kind of cut off blood flow. Mm-hmm. And, um, which is much less sort of high force,

violent act than, yes. Then what you're talking about. Yeah. Which would break a bone. So, um, cause his case remains unsolved.

Like I did truly everything in my power to come to a conclusion and I could not. But I don't know, like the Epstein thing seems really fucking suspicious. Yeah, yeah, extremely fucking dark and a deep rabbit hole to fall down. Yeah. So, but yeah, that was the end of the alpha-based. Well, in some ways it was the end. Like we didn't even get into this other thing. Like I mentioned that they wanted to flip cause.

But in fact, they had simultaneously, this is like the size of this investigation. It was so sprawling. At the same time that Alfa Bay was taken down, the Dutch police had taken over this second biggest dark web market called Hansa. And they were, they had, the Dutch police were running, running the entire market undercover. They had taken the positions of the actual bosses of that dark web market and had turned the whole. thing into a kind of surveillance trap such that when Alfa Bay was taken down, all of Alfa Bay's buyers and sellers just flooded into the second biggest market. This is what always happens on the dark web.

You just go to the next market when one is shut down, which was Hansa in this case, which was the whole thing, a kind of giant trap for all of Alfa Bay's refugees. Wow. And that was- So they had like a net on the backside to basically catch everybody. Yes. I mean, it was like truly an unprecedented operation in the history of dark web, you know, law enforcement. They, they had, they did this kind of one-two punch thing where they not only took down the biggest dark web market in history, but then had this net, as you said, waiting for thousands and thousands of, really the dealers is who they were going after, of course, just ready to catch them as they moved into Hansa, where, you know, like basically Hansa's code had been sabotaged to remove all the safeguards. that as I said like a dark web market is not supposed to even know who is visiting you know

they shouldn't know it who you are anymore than you know who they are you know um but hansa had been kind of like silently rewritten by the Dutch these Dutch police so that it could find out all these things about you it was recording like all this information it was like they tricked people into um basically downloading malware it was like you look like sort of sales spreadsheets but in fact it had a kind of homing beacon in it to identify drug dealers they even did this like complex thing they at one point pretended they were trying to hire a new uh kind of administrator for the market and if you applied they would say well we need to send you a ub key like a USB key to like um you to you would plug in to um confirm

you know for your security right and in the pack they would mail the UBee key hidden inside. It's common to use this kind of camouflage when sending drugs or sending anything, but they would hide it inside of a stuffed animal, like a stuffed panda. And this panda also had hidden a GPS beacon so that they could locate the,

even if you received your dark web mail at a drop address, which is like, you know, the smarter way to do it. You have some address. It's not your home where you receive this stuff. the idea is that you would take this stuff panda without thinking back to your house and it would have a GPS beacon in it and they would find the what you know the people who are applying to work for as administrators of a dark web market this way and this was a giant like just a feeding frenzy for law enforcement in terms of eventually arresting hundreds and hundreds of dealers and it it was sort of fed into a database of course of all this information. that they had collected from this huge thing, Operation Bayanette, about Alpha Bay users, about Hansa users, went into this database, and then, like, over the next years, there were

just one huge takedown after another. So it's not easy to trace exactly, like, where, you know, which arrests it led to, but, you know, there were just, like, dozens of tons of drugs and millions and millions of dollars and hundreds of people arrested as a result of this. So how has this all affected this underground drug market today? Like what is the current state of sort of dark web, dark web drug dealing and this kind of stuff? Yeah, this is the great twist ending, which is that just as I was finishing the reporting on this and really like finally, you know, it took me five years to really like get the full alpha base story. I mean, it was.

Wow. Publicly announced as like, yeah, we did this massive takedown. Then it became clear. Holy shit. They did like a take over of the second like this. But all of that was sort of understood, like, as a sort of almost just like a press release in 2017, it took me five years to really learn the details of how it all truly happened and to speak to everybody involved and, like, truly tell the story. And just as I was finishing that reporting, Alpha Bay came back online and is now being run by DeSake, the second in command. Oh, shit, the guy you talk to.

Yes, like Alpha Bay is back and the snake is in charge and he is like, you know, it's not going anywhere. And how long has he been in charge? How long has it been going on? I guess. Let's see. So I think it came back online in the summer of like late 20, summer 20, 21. Okay. And of course, it was relaunched from scratch.

So it had none of the met in the, I don't know, how it was like the thousands of dealers. had moved elsewhere. It had to be persuaded to come back, basically. And it's taken almost until now, probably to, well, not to even get close, I would say, to Alphabet's original, well, to its peak. But I think it has, by some measures, become...

I was looking at the numbers recently, and it's harder to analyze than you might think because Alphabet is doing a better job of obscuring. It's business. But it has by some measures become the biggest dark web drug market again. So I'm sure he's read your book. And I'm sure he's well aware of how this all works now. Well, he didn't need to read my book to know like what, you know, actually maybe he did.

But some parts of it he might have known about how cause got got got. And I think he definitely had learned lessons from that in some of them were pretty apparent. Like he he knows that cause his laptop was grabbed. he says he has all these kill switch things where like um if his laptop is taken if his server is used it'll be destroyed and like alpha bay can be rebuilt automatically with like on new computers and a lot of stuff it's hard to decipher how much of it is real or would work um but yeah you'd think that you know after alpha o2 and ross being caught with their laptops open they would figure out some sort of way to like remotely control their laptop being encrypted like either

on a phone or like absolutely but also the snake just says like he just doesn't ever walk away from his open laptop i mean that's the easy thing right he does it's like when he's just even when he goes to the bathroom he told me he does not he does not leave it open um you know everybody has their own claims everybody has their own reason for overconfidence you know each one of these guys thought that they had outsmarted the system the one thing that i was really impressed with is that This was the whole cryptocurrency tracing part of how they got cause was never really public. But somehow DeSnake did figure out that that was a big part of the investigation. Or maybe he just guessed.

And so Alpha Bay now only uses Monero, a newer cryptocurrency that is designed to be far less traceable. That's a big like sacrifice in a sense because most people don't want to use Monero. They don't, a lot of people never heard of it. So you're reducing your revenue by doing that. But, but D-Snake, like, understands that money laundering is just essential and that you don't take risks about, you know, financial trails. Isn't there like Z-cash or something to? Yeah, exactly. So that's very hard to trace, almost impossible.

Yeah. No, it's, it's, I appreciate you brought it up because Z-cash, I think is probably the least traceable. in fact, like perhaps truly untraceable. I know I made that mistake with Bitcoin once and believe that by Bitcoin, but I do just like talking to the researchers, looking at how it works. Zcash is almost like magically untraceable. It uses the Z in Zcash comes from zero knowledge proofs, which are these sort of very, I don't know, like hard to even get your mind around kind of mathematical proofs where you can essentially the whole Zcash blockchain is encrypted. But you can do a sort of mathematical kind of process on it where you can check that a transaction happens, that you cannot counterfeit something or double spend a coin or whatever. But you can do that while learning zero knowledge, basically, about the transaction other than the fact that it was real.

And that it can basically serve to guarantee this crypto-com. currency Zcash in the same way that the normal blockchain does with Bitcoin, but without a blockchain that can reveal anything to anybody, you know, to it's truly a black box. Right. And, you know, I've called Bitcoin, I think, like at one point I thought it was the holy grail of the cyphirpunks for financial privacy. But Zcash really does seem to be it. I mean, it's interesting. We're talking about this because like, maybe you can hear in the way I'm saying it that Monero, I'm not sure is that. Like, Minero, the one that that, that is much more popular, I think, I think it is at this point, still than Zcash is thought to be untraceable, is no doubt far, far harder to trace than Bitcoin is being used by people on the dark web like D-Snake and Alfa Bay.

But I don't think it is truly mathematically untraceable. And the degree to which it can be traced, you know, is just the fact that there is any possibility of tracing means that chain analysis and that now a whole industry of companies competing with chain analysis. Chain analysis is now an $8.6 billion startup. They have money to recruit the smartest people thinking of new tricks to, you know, unmasked, to trace to de-anonomize any cryptocurrency that has like the slightest foothold. little bit of like hints or a clue of how to follow the money so i would still you know if i were like a uh high net worth dark web criminal i would still be pretty concerned about using minero yeah and that's not just speculation like um it was actually de snake himself in our conversation at one point our conversations over like some weeks who was like hey look at this this just popped up and

it was a link to a dark web site called dark leaks that some hacker had set up that was a collection of documents from the italian police and it revealed like some some of the it was a lot of information about how the italian police had taken down a couple of dark websites and one of the files on it was a presentation that chain analysis had given to the Italian police about their capabilities. And in that presentation, in Italian, it says, like, we can trace Minero in the majority of cases. And it breaks it down. Like, in 60% of cases, we can get like a usable lead in another 15% of cases. We can find the sender, but not the recipients.

That kind of thing. They sort of admit in this presentation that it's kind of probabilistic. It's not, like, definitive in the way that it has. has been with Bitcoin. But that's often good enough to start just sending out those subpoenas. And like, you only have to have a kind of educated guess in a lot of cases to send subpoenas to start doing searches. Yeah. In some cases.

So I think that like a lot of cryptocurrency users are still probably falling for this trap of thinking that they're using an untraceable currency that is not quite untraceable. And that might just be enough for them to be completely traced and caught. So, but I do, I do think Zcash may be an exception to that. I can't imagine what it must be like to be you to be working on a story like this for five years and putting it together. And in the meantime, you're also doing active reporting. You're, you know, you're publishing all these other stories and the same time you're putting together these books. This is what your third book? Yeah, this is my third book.

You know, I, I've covered it all as as it was happening. you know in 2018 i managed to get a couple of those dutch agents to talk to me and i wrote a story about the hansa part of it that second biggest dark web market that they took over so and then for most of the rest of those years i'm just like running into dead ends hitting brick hitting my head against brick walls and and uh it's not like i'm like slowly consistently making progress and getting this and the true breakthrough was when i realized when i when i started to see the cryptocurrency tracing was this incredibly important new investigative technique not new it by 2020 but like new to me and digging into that and then i learned that it was the kind of crucial weapon used to well yeah the

kind of crucial like fingerprinting technique that has found cause and the identified alpha bay alpha-02 and was this kind of critical ingredient to taking down alpha bay that's when the thing kind of like opened up for me like I started to learn about the the crypto tracers who had been involved and then once you kind of like have your foot in the door and you're talking to some of the major players the other ones are like well we want to tell you are part of it too you know people don't want to get left out even the ones who whose names are anonymized and stuff like I think that they also you know I I really appreciate that people tell these stories even anonymously even with pseudonyms and stuff because they just know that like the

this story is too crazy to not to take to their grave, you know. Right. I appreciate that about people that, like, they want to tell their craziest stories. It must be so wild for you reporting on all these things from, you know, these cryptocurrency marketplaces and, and these dark web drug marketplaces and hackers that you talk to. And there must be so many dots that connect for you, like reporting on different stories and finding out how different things connect because you're in this like, you're so, like, engulfed in this dark web

underworld. Yeah, I mean, I guess so. How do you choose what stories you report on? Like, how do you pick? How do you decide what you're going to, what you're going to either write a book about or what you're going to report on? Well, you know, I have to know. I like, um, it, I got lucky in a sense that like, um, as you say, that it all kind of connected. I had been so obsessed with the Silk Road, um, when it appeared. And it just seemed like such a fascinating story and I was totally beaten to that story by like Nick Bilton who wrote the book about it and you know and I was like that is going to be the best story I ever encounter in my career and

and this whole story of like how cryptocurrency has like unlocked the dark web and then I was just lucky enough that it turned out that I had exactly the wrong idea about it and in fact cryptocurrency was the fatal flaw of the dark web and like the whole thing like I just kind of was able to flip it and instead of talking to the the criminal sides, which I'd always thought was the right approach to get the best story. It often is, but like it turns out that like in this case, law enforcement really was able to tell me the story better than anybody because they were the ones who figured out this like crazy revelation that you could trace cryptocurrency or, you know, with the help of chain analysis and Sarah Michel John and, you know, and that perspective,

I never really told a story from law enforcement's perspective in this way before. and I was a little wary of doing so. But I think that in a way, it's like even more dramatic because you can see, you can see the story in a way that even the criminals could not see it, you know. Like they thought that they were invisible. Right. And they were not. And like you can watch them through this kind of secret lens.

And like that provided just like an amazing dramatic irony, you know. But just, yeah, like I guess to your question of like, how do we find, how do I find the, the next big story. Like I write all kinds of sizes of stories. I write like web stories. I wrote like a story about like a chain analysis research report that I published today. And it's like, you know, kind of daily fodder kind of stuff. And I think it's important sometimes.

But really it's almost like I'm looking for like the storytelling arc. I mean, you're a storyteller. You probably like think about this too. Like you don't want to just for for a news story, it's like one fact can be the whole thing. For a magazine story, it's like maybe one character can be just enough. For a book, you need like an actual whole arc of like twists and turns and a climax and like and that kind of thing. And so I'm just, I don't know, in the way I'm just kind of like surveying like all these crazy stories happening in the hacker world and the dark web. And it's only when one of them kind of fits that almost like three act structure or whatever that I think like,

Oh, this needs to be a book. Yeah. Do you ever get any pushback from editors when you're working on stories? Because you've worked for big publications, Forbes Wired. Like, do you ever deal with any of that, like any sort of pushback or any sort of trying to like, you know, square the circle type thing with people? That's interesting. Like, when I was at Forbes, I sometimes I felt like, why do they let me write for this place?

Like, it was a pretty conservative. I'm not sure it's quite as conservative now. had definitely like some conservative leanings probably still i think it still does yeah i mean i think what anybody nowadays thinks about any big publication you automatically just figure out okay where do i paint them left or do i paint them right you know it's like politics are so like is so injected into every mainstream news publication now and so you know like i remember the editor-in-chief of forbes when i was i did like a big piece on the dry pirate roberts and based on my interview with him and he was a little bit like, why are we like giving a platform to this drug dealer to like to hawk his shit through our magazine, you know?

Like and and as a result, he there was like a little bit of like, I mean, I, this is typical stuff for, you know, when you work with editors. And it's not, I don't think it's like criminal or anything, but, but there were little injections of like of jabs at him. And it's like, um, there, you know, at that point the Silk Road was getting hit with a lot of, uh,

sort of low level cyber attacks from other dark web people and hackers and stuff. And, and, uh, I had mentioned that in the piece that like there was a kind of war like, you know, I guess, you know,

a bit of conflict within these groups and they were accusing, like the Silk Road was accusing other dark web markets of hitting it with these attacks. And, um, an editor added in like, as always happens with like the drug world now there's like internecine gang warfare and violence has entered and I was sort of like it's not violence you know this is like this is actually the alternative to real violence it's just like some dudes some nerds like hitting each other with data packets so like bullets so like I I do I do kind of like look at that piece now and think like oh that that that wasn't the right approach to to to talking about this like that does not give enough credit to whatever credit is due and you can

tell that i have like a very complicated feeling about the silk road um like it did eliminate some kinds of violence from the drug trade and deserves credit for that and i think that like the slightly older maybe just socially conservative um editors of Forbes like sometimes were i think a little wary of of giving it that credit you know but i have to say like four Forbes was a wonderful place to work in a lot of respects. Like I and they gave me the freedom to chase these stories even though it was not very Forbesy very often. And I spent like years just like I'm covering Anonymous and WikiLeaks and stuff that was not,

not at all like what you would think Forbes would be interested in. And Parmy Olson, who wrote a great book about Anonymous, also worked at Forbes at the same time. And Kashmir Hill, who now works at the Times and covers like some, you know, she covers surveillance and privacy was there too. It was actually a wonderful, like, newsroom, and we had a really long leash. And there was, you know, like, sometimes these bits of, like, editorial injections, but it was, like, not a,

it was a cool place to work. Is that, were you working for Forbes when you actually sat down with Julian Assange? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. And that was, like, you know, I mean, to be fair, like, I came up with a Forbesy sort of angle for the piece that we did based on that, which was, like, WikiLeaks has now,

disemboweled the U.S. military and like dumped their secrets on on the web but it could happen to you um CEO whatever like this could happen to your company too wiki leaks can and that model of leaking and whistleblowing um is just as right you know for disrupting companies as it is governments and that was kind of the the excuse that I had to write this big piece about assange and wikileaks for the magazine at the time and they put asange on the cover and It was like Assange wants to leak your corporate secrets, you know. But I was, I was happy to, I was fine with that angle because it was true. And, uh, and like it gave me and it also allowed me to like go meet Assange in 2010 just

before the biggest leak he ever did, which was cable gate, the, you know, quarter million state department cables that really, um, I think it was kind of like, in some ways, the climax of like what WikiLeaks ever was. explain what cable gate was again for people to understand that well yeah so there over the course this is all i think i think it's fair to say now was this was this after uh the collateral murder stuff yes okay so 2010 was the big year for wiki leaks now we're going way back like uh the april of 2010 is when collateral murder came out which was this that's what they called it uh that was wiki leeks title for it it was the video from i think it was an apache helicopter

cockpit like the view from the pilots the the gunners perspective as they fired on these civilians and journalists in iraq and killed like several of them wiki leaks obtained this and published in and and that was what when i was like holy shit i'd heard of wiki leaks but i never i it was like this is some extremely explosive shit that they're getting and they had not got it from a hacker they you know or or whatever they got it through a leaker like um they got it through their anonymous essentially dark web we didn't call it that so much back then but it was a same it was a dark web uploading uh portal basically they were using tour in the same way that the silver road was but or not in the same way they were using the same tool but they were using it to grant anonymity to

sources right so that such that like nobody could trace the leak right essentially um That was the idea. And, and, you know, Chelsea Manning was able to, to thus, like, share a giant trove of classified secrets with WikiLeaks. Chelsea Manning was found out, of course, through her associations with this other hacker, Adrian Lamo, and who kind of ratted her out. So that's not a very nice way to say it, but turned her in. And, but, you know, WikiLeaks, the reason that I, like, got interested in the dark web, really was because of WikiLeaks and sort of tracing its origins in this cypherpunk dark web world.

Julian Assange was a member of the cypherpunks in the 90s, you know, like talking about using encryption technology to, like, change the world. So, yeah, so then, like, collateral murder came out in April. I think then in July, the Afghan warlogue. came out the this giant collection of like classified documents from war in Afghanistan WikiLeaks published then the Iraq war logs or war diaries I think was called later and then it was a by that time I was like already like trying to get to Assange you know trying to make inroads with WikiLeaks I like found this weird guy named Penguin X on the WikiLeaks IRC channel who then I was like chatting with him

over like this encrypted thing and like he was like come to Iceland's and I did and like met him and sort of like hung out waiting to hear like Julian Assange at that point he was like come to Iceland but there's no guarantees you're going to meet Julian well they told me that I would but like they wouldn't say when or where okay stuff like that and and and Assange actually was sort of I don't know if it was quite on the run but he had been accused of these sex crimes against two Swedish women and gone off the map, I think it turned out that he was actually just like staying in this house in the English countryside. And so I was told to go to London. I flew from from

Reykivik to London and I met with Assange in London and interviewed him. And that was really like the genesis of my first book, which was about about WikiLeaks, but about the cypherpunk movement that gave rise to WikiLeaks and about the ways that people for decades tried to develop this cryptographic anonymity technology and, you know, how and hoped to change the world with it, which, you know, in the case of WikiLeaks and a lot of the other stories I tell in that book were about like trying to free the world's information to allow leakers and whistleblowers to, to just dump it, you know, or to hand it over to somebody like WikiLeaks.

Or, you know, in some cases, like the first person who came up with this idea was this cyphurpunk, like, crypto anarchist guy named Tim May. And he had envisioned this idea of like a kind of eBay for, like black market eBay for information where anybody can go on there and buy and using cryptographic anonymity. He imagined something like Tor, although it didn't exist, and buy and sell secrets, which is exactly what the Silk Road was. he just never imagined that like the contraband could be physical could be like drugs hidden in a package i mean um nobody thought that the mail system actually would would allow that that was the big one other

big surprise of how well silk road worked was julian everything you thought he would be what was he like in person what kind of guy was he yeah i mean this man this is like i don't know how long ago uh more 12 years ago um he was really charming um he was really charming um he He was like, I don't know, I was a little shocked like how tall and handsome was he had he just cut all of his hair to like this short kind of. And he was wearing a suit, which was all really surprising. And it wasn't how I, you know, thought of him at the time because he had he had had long hair and looked like a hacker and dressed like, you know, these hackery ways. And he was like, he was like good at sort of charming me and flattering me. and um he definitely like you know um he was a great interview he um he had like really interesting

things to say i was very taken by him to be honest really um yeah i mean i thought he was just like a super fascinating and admirable person at the time and i think it you know it was in the process of writing that book that i you know when i tried to talk to him again um when he of showed more of some of his true colors that like I realized that he was among other things just so arrogance yeah like to a degree that like you know i i i don't think it wasn't like the points uh to to like judge his character you know i wasn't um ever really just trying to like do the celebrity profile of asanj and like um but but i think that it does speak to Like he had an enormous amount of power and as the as the controller of all of these secrets ultimately.

And I think it both kind of like warped him a little. I talk about that in the book. I mean, everybody I think who lives in that secret world gets a little bit warped by it. Yeah. And also I think he was extremely paranoid for good reason. And that also like it's a hard way to live. Yes. Did you record the interview?

Yeah, I did. I don't know if I have it anymore. more. Oh, God. My God, like, it's just been so long. Like, how long was it? How long was the whole conversation? I think it was like four hours. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, we published the whole Q&A online, but I don't know if I have the audio anymore. I wouldn't have even back then recorded like to my phone or something. I would have used like a tiny, like one of those, like one of those old-fashioned digital recorders. And I remember, it's actually fascinating. Like, I remember that I had two to be safe

just to, you know, like just to be careful. And at one point his, he and his, I thought she worked like for him at WikiLeaks. It turns out that I would say like, this is Sarah Harrison.

Sarah Harrison came to our interview as well. She was, I think ultimately like a really important person and kind of took over a lot of the responsibilities of WikiLeaks was instrumental in helping Snowden get out of like well to get to freedom if you call it that in Russia yeah anyway at one point like they they were like can we have a moment to discuss something privately and I took my recorder with me but I accidentally left one in the room oh no and they just had a whole like conversation that I recorded but I didn't record it actually what I I just as as they were starting to talk I was

I was like, oh, I left the other recorder in. And I went back and I said, I have, uh, they've talking shit about you. I've got one more. I mean, they were probably planning like the drop of the, of cable gate, you know. They,

they just told me or whatever, you know, for all I know, they were just like talking about like, um, how to get to their next like meeting or whatever. Um, but, uh, I remember I went and I was like,

oh, I was sorry, I actually left another recorder in here. But I've, I thought like, wow, I could have recorded a secret conversation. about WikiLeaks, like, plans at that point.

I would have been, like, totally unethical to do that. But they had told me in that interview, we have something, we have our biggest thing ever planned. So it's this good timing when you come out with your cover story about, you know, this big interview with Assange. We're going to drop something, but they didn't say what it was. And it turns out that it was this collection of a quarter million state department cables, which are like, you know, secret communications between all the embassies in the world.

Is that when the communications came out between like Victoria Newland and the guy Gregory Piat, who is the guy in Ukraine? He was the U.S. head of the embassy in Ukraine. And there was like some conversations where they were trying to install a coup in Ukraine, like install a new leader of Ukraine. And they're like having a discussion like, oh, we should get this guy. Maybe this guy. Can we get Biden to sign off on this guy? I think that was a part of cable gate maybe. I wouldn't be surprised.

I mean, the thing is like it's a gigantic. trove of the way of like documents that show how the US really thought about international relations and it will be it will be studied and used for decades that come I mean it is like an archive of of incredible like material you know I I didn't like write about every revelation and you can write whole books and people have about what they revealed I was interested in how it was obtained. And like the techniques and the methods and the thinking of WikiLeaks and like how they wanted to explode institutional secrecy, which they really effectively, they did very well, you know, and would continue to do like an interesting ways for years to come. I mean, like we can get into WikiLeaks role in 2016, which is more.

We're going to have to do another podcast. I know. We haven't even talked about my second book, which is about Russian hackers. like yes you know the GRU military sandworm agency which which ties in with their like yeah I'm really interested in talking about that we're gonna have to do another podcast yeah I'd be happy to I mean there's yeah I think as you can tell like tracers in the darkest new book like it does kind of it it's like the culmination of like a decade of

reporting from me that's kind of about the dark web and about cryptocurrency which I I was like which when it appeared was this new fascination. But then I took like this year's long detour that I'm still on somewhat. So like cover state sponsored hacking and cyber war. And like that's still a big part of what I cover. I mean, it's all, it's all part of that hacker world. But like, but. Hold on a second.

I'm going to have, I'm going to have him order you an Uber so we keep talking and we don't have to sit here and wait for 10 minutes. Yeah. So I like, so I spent some years and I still am covering that world. of state-sponsored hackers who are really very, very different from the hacker undergrounds of like whatever, the dark web or the hacktivist community that I was really interested in and like, you know, a decade ago, they don't talk. They're incredibly sophisticated comparatively, you know, and yeah, the Russia Gay story is crazy too. I was listening to something this morning from Glenn Greenwald talking about Rushagate. He had an amazing quote about

it. He said, RussiaGate is the WMD of our generation. I disagree with Glenn Greenwald about a lot of that. Oh, do you really? Yeah. So, um, I, I think, I appreciate his skepticism. And, um, I think that, like, uh, there were definitely parts, like, of Russiagate that were overblown, you know, the people were looking for that smoking gun of, like, collusion or whatever. Um, I was not truly. Like, I, I, I,

but I man this is like a big topic to open up with the end of I know right we have five minutes talking about rushing three hour conversation no I'll just say this much

and I think Glenn Greenwald has come around on this too the GRU hacked the DNC and the Democratic and the Clinton campaign and the DCCC and leak that information

to WikiLeaks and everything like everything that was published by WikiLeaks was part of a Russian of a of a of a GRU information operation like all of those you know parceled out leaks that kind of you know dominated so many of the headlines of the 2016 election were absolutely engineered by Russian state sponsored hacking and like I have I mean this is truly a I thought there was a can of worms because I thought there was no evidence

though like the FBI's long report that that that came out, there was no actual evidence that Russia had hacked it. Is that? No, there is evidence. There is evidence. Absolutely. And there's some evidence that, like, you know, is just laid out in, like, kind of Department of Justice indictments where you can see what they did, but they don't exactly tell

you how they found it. There's other evidence that you can see just flat out, like, sitting in public from cybersecurity companies who, like, pointed out, like, look what we found. And cybersecurity companies, by the way, when they get things. wrong another one jumps on them and says look we're going to debunk this like the whole cyber security is um i would say researcher community knew that russia had done this right off the bat and yes there was well founded you know well well um i would say very risk very warranted skepticism about it but there's a kind of like community that that you know that uh through a process of like

checking each other's work found yes like this looks solid really looks like the GRU hacked the DNC. Oh, yeah. And now the hacker who seems to have done it says that he gave this stuff to Wikileaks, who was Goetrafer 2.0. The actual evidence of like how, I don't know, I don't mean to like point people to a competitor, but I talked through all of this with Julian. Oh, did you?

Yes. And Julian Dory and like. Oh, Dory. Okay. Yes, not Julian Assange. That would be a different. I don't know if you can. I mean, you and Julian are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Julian's amazing, man. Smart guy. And he, you know, is skeptical about this, too, as I think you are. But in the first episode that we did, you know, we walked. I tried my best on the spot. I wasn't really like, it was just off the top of my head to walk him through the evidence that I remember, remember just like, you know, off, you know, on the spot that shows that it was Russian hackers who hacked the DNC. So from what I understood was that the history.

Hillary campaign tried to get hackers inside Ukraine to get dirt on the Trump campaign. And then it sort of backfired. And it ended up being this this whole Russiagate thing. And then the media narrative kind of like spun out of control and was all one way. We should we could do a whole podcast just on this. Well, I'll just say this like, let me just say it like try to say this as quickly as I can. Because it's in a super technical, it's not super technical, but it's a bit technical. Yeah.

But the same hackers who like, um. Your driver will be here in four minutes. I got time. I got four minutes. You're on the clock. The same hackers who sent a fishing email to John Podesta that they used to like fake a Google login, get his account information. This was a group called Fancy Bear. You can see they made the mistake of like using a URL shortening service to create those fishing web pages.

And because they use one service, you can kind of identify a pattern. in all of the URLs that they created. And so you can actually see, like, everyone that they targeted. And several groups, except companies have, like, mapped out, like, basically where they sent all those phishing emails as a result. And it is, like, Ukrainians, people in NATO, like, people critical of Russia in U.S. academia. It is, like, very much, like, just to, like, try to highlight, not even just who they are,

but their motivations, they look like people extremely aligned with Russian state interests, not Ukrainian interests, for instance. But then also, like, the very first leaks that were published by Guzher 2.0 after the D&C was hacked. Guzher 2.0 was the kind of cover name for the hacker. They came up with his name pretending to be like a sequel to Guzherfer, who was a true independent hacker. Gutrovert 2.0 published some of these emails.

They were in the Word documents. There were Russian language formatting errors. They loaded them and edited them on a computer with Russian as its default language. Wow. That's pretty bad, right? I mean, there's ultimately, though, I just think that like, and I think even Glenn Greenwald agreed to this eventually. Like, when the FBI publishes a full indictment with listing all this evidence, And, like, even, like, the search terms used by these hackers, because clearly they got that stuff from, you know, Google or whoever.

Like, that is a conspiracy that is pretty easy to debunk if, like, the stuff listed in this indictment is just fully false, like, all of it. It would just take so much. It's just, like, eventually, just on top of the things that I just mentioned quickly, it's just the preponderance of the evidence suggests, yes, Russia hacks the DNC. I mean, of course they did. Like, I don't know. Clearly, like, they're sort of, like, it's just become such a part of, like, this very polarized debate that I feel like these sides are not talking to each other. But, but like the people who are saying this story you just told about Hillary Clinton and Ukraine and stuff, like, how do they account for this, like, blatant? glaring evidence of like the russian fingerprints on this stuff right right you know well it is true that

that hillary's campaign had a very tight relationship with the leader of ukraine at that time and they were constantly going back and forth dealing with them and especially during that time and you know going back to my don and all that but that's neither here nor there yeah i know i mean i've i've spent a lot of time in ukraine too and um i you know ukraine like i remember i visited the embassy and even the State Department officials I spoke to were like, this place is so fucking complicated. Yeah. Like nothing is like what it seems here.

I was kind of freaked out talking to them. But, you know, I have also found that like, and I think it's become more clear cut, like, that's, yes, Ukraine is the victim of like a massive amount of Russian oppression over decades, centuries, and now a full year of full-scale invasion. So, like, I don't know. Like, I'm, yes, I think it made sense for the U.S. to support Ukraine at that time and to support the Maidan Revolution. Yes, I mean, like, I'm, I guess I'm like a kind of just straight up pro-Ukrainian person, although I acknowledge that there, you know, as I've said, there's corruption there.

There's, like, extremism of fort certain kinds. It's like, I'm not Ukrainian nationalist, but I'm a Ukraine supporter. There's a lot of meat on the bone there. I want to do another podcast soon. We've got to figure that out. But your ride is here. So I will link, I'll put a link to your book. Your new book, Traces in the Dark in the description.

People want to learn more. I highly suggest listening to the episodes you do with Julian Dory on his podcast. They're fucking fascinating. They cover every single detail. Where else can people go to learn more about what you're doing and find you on the web? Yeah, you can find me on like, that's my personal website. You can find me on wire to do and just see what I'm up like writing on a daily. basis but yeah my website does like i usually put up like the big like uh deep dive features that i do

like i do only like you know a couple of those a year um but yeah i appreciate it um my yeah my website's andy greenberg dot net um cool i'll link it all below yeah thank you so much thank you for this uh clearly we have more to talk about next time my pleasure let's get you on your flight cool