RedHanded - Episode 291 - The Silk Road: Drugs, Data & The Dread Pirate Roberts

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

For some, the end of the world's most infamous online marketplace was a major victory in the never ending war on drugs. But for others, the global, multi-agency investigation into the Silk Road set a dangerous precedent for law enforcement – who rifled through the personal data of countless innocent users in their hunt for the elusive online drug-lord/revolutionary: Dread Pirate Roberts. So prepare for a trip on the Silk Road, and find out how a tax inspector hanging out on a hallucinogenic mushroom forum caught one of the most slippery criminals we’ve ever covered. GET YOUR NORTH AMERICAN TOUR TICKETS: https://redhandedpodcast.com/ Become a patron: Patreon Order a copy of the book here (US & Canada): Order on Wellesley Books Order on Amazon.com Order a copy of the book here (UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus): Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Foyles Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Visit our website: Website Sources available on redhandedpodcast.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah. And welcome to Red Handed. Digital edition. Digital. Red Handed goes digital. Yeah, we've been analogue this whole time. Yeah, it's a very techie one. Yeah. I've actually wanted to do it for ages. Yeah. Because I watched a documentary about it years ago. And I meant to rewatch it last night. But I didn't.

I watched 90 Day Fiancé instead. Yeah. Because I forgot. I watched Maths Australia. Oh, the new one. The new one. So I actually didn't do a rewatch, but that's okay because I think I watched that documentary about six times. Yeah, we got it. We got it. And we're going to do it now. So pay attention. Digitally. On the 1st of June, 2011, Adrian Chen, a writer for Gawker, published an article titled The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable. The article was, of course, referring to the Silk Road. And as the title suggested, it was indeed a website hidden on the dark web

where you could buy pretty much any drug you wanted anonymously. This article caused a media firestorm. The concept of an online drug bazaar was enough to catch the eye of almost every publication on the planet. And for the likes of Fox News, it was confirmation that the world had fully gone to the dogs. As things often do when Fox News get involved, Silk Road quickly became a political issue. However, it would take the DEA, Homeland Security and the FBI two years to shut down the anonymous online drug market. The high-profile court case that followed, for some, was a victory. For others, it was a miscarriage of justice that set an alarming precedent for people's right to privacy. But before we get to all that, we need to talk about what the Silk Road actually was,

how it worked, and why it was so goddamn successful. Apart from the fact that people love drugs. If we've learned one thing on this show, it is that humans are flawed and they love drugs. The first ad for the Silk Road appeared on Darknet forums early on in 2011. It was hardly a high-budget production. The advert looked like it had been made on Windows Movie Maker and was basically just some luminous green text wobbling around the screen, followed by some stock images of cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy, before cutting to an end card which said, pay only using Bitcoin.

While that ad wasn't Super Bowl halftime quality, the intent was clear. Come to the dark net, buy drugs, and do it with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. And you already know what the dark net is because you wouldn't be seeing this if you weren't on it. And it was this combination of Bitcoin and the dark net that set Silk Road apart and made it such a success.

Online drug marketplaces had existed for years, but they all posed a significant risk for the user. Some of them existed on the regular internet, also known, of course, as the clear net. These narcotic emporiums were available via a simple Google search. However, that simple search exposed your illegal activities to your internet provider, who could easily knock on you. So the risk of being caught was pretty high. The same went for the payment method. Regardless of how careful you were on these sites, you eventually had to pay for your drugs,

and that meant sending proper money somewhere. Whether it was via bank transfer or a cash-filled envelope, this could be traced back to you. But then came Silk Road, hidden from internet providers via the darknet, and hidden from the tax inspectors via Bitcoin. All right, we cannot escape the fact that we've said the word darknet three times already, and we haven't actually explained what it is. We've also said clear net once and a couple of other bits of jargon for good measure. Give me World War One any fucking day of the week.

This stuff turns my brain inside out. But I do understand it now, I think. Let's have a little quick breakdown of a few terms that are going to be coming up quite a lot this week. Firstly, clear net. When we say clear net, what we mean is surface web, anything available via a Google search. So like the front page of YouTube, Facebook, BBC News, Amazon, blah, blah, blah. They all exist on the clear net. Easy peasy. Then there is the deep web, which sounds spooky, but we actually use it all the time. The deep web is anything on the Internet that you can't find through a web browser like Google. Anything hidden behind a

paywall, for example, or even a login page. So our Patreon page, for example, patreon.com forward slash red handed, exists on the deep web. And so does anything you store on your Google Drive or even the little admin pages you get when you're trying to change your YouTube username from like sexybunny44. Yeah. And like if you work at a business where you use the intranet to talk to other people within your own network, that is the deep web. So yeah, anything that isn't available via a simple Google search yet is on the internet is the deep web. Next, we need to have a very quick chat about Bitcoin.

Now, we are not experts in this, so please don't come well-actuallying us, we're doing our fucking best. Bitcoin is a data-based currency that relies on lines of cryptography to create unique tokens which can be exchanged for goods and services, or for other mainstream currencies. As we've said before, Bitcoin is not untraceable. In fact, it's quite the opposite. In order to make sure there are no duplicate tokens, every single Bitcoin has to be accounted for. However, it can be bought and sold anonymously and held in an anonymous online wallet that isn't connected to a real world identity. So if this wallet is accessed carefully, it's very difficult to pin onto a real world person

directly. So Bitcoin is the perfect currency for buying and selling illegal goods online. Then comes the darknet. The darknet is a bit more spooky and a bit more complicated. Websites on the darknet are only available through a web browser called Tor. So you can't use fucking Mozilla Firefox or, you know, if you're still using Internet Explorer for some reason, you can't use any of that. You have to download and use Tor. And Tor stands for the Onion Router. And it's a way of anonymously browsing the internet. The code that makes Tor work was actually developed by the US Navy for anonymous communication via the internet.

However, it has now become publicly available and is run by a network of volunteers around the world. But the user, Tor, doesn't look particularly different from Google Chrome or Firefox. It's just a web browser. However, if you use it correctly, Tor is completely anonymous. And it manages that in quite a complicated way. What it does is Tor packages up all of your data, scrambles it before it's sent to whichever website you want to browse. And it doesn't even send you to the website you want directly. So your information is scrambled up and then bounced all over the globe to a bunch of different servers,

making it absolutely impossible to know where that data came from. You can view regular websites on Tor just like any other browser, but it also allows you to access the.onion websites. And those websites, which end their domain name with.onion, are only available through Tor and are completely anonymous to both the user and the host. Neither the user or the host of the website is able to see where their communication is coming or going from. Even if they wanted to, you can't do it. It's impossible. That is what the dark net is. So the Silk Road certainly wasn't the first drug marketplace to appear on the dark net. But its scale and professionalism were leagues above anything that had ever come before.

It looked more like Amazon or eBay than some sort of like sketchy drug site. Everything that went on was overseen by an anonymous administrator who checked on user safety and made sure that Silk Road ran smoothly. This administrator also made sure that every seller on the site stuck to Silk Road's core values, which in the words of the administrator, were to avoid selling things which were designed to, quote, harm or defraud. Contrary to popular belief, the site never offered stolen goods, stolen credit cards or child sex abuse images. So unlike other drug websites, buying your next block of hash didn't mean rubbing shoulders with career criminals or

outright paedophiles. The administrator of the Silk Road also implemented a review system similar to the one on Amazon or eBay or whatever. So that meant sellers were held accountable for their products. Anyone found to be selling low-grade drugs or scamming users were given poor reviews and sometimes taken off the marketplace altogether. They really did step things up, didn't they? Yeah, big time, man. Yeah. What this review system meant is that the users of Silk Road got their gear from reputable sources. They knew it would be pure and they knew exactly where it came from.

In short, the users felt safer and safety itself became a central value of Silk Road. Not only did people feel protected from prosecution by authorities, they felt that the anonymous administrator of the site was really looking out for their best interests. For the first few months, Silk Road maintained a small but committed group of core users, buying regularly from the site. However, when the Gawker article was released in June 2011, traffic on the site skyrocketed. Suddenly, thousands of sales were being made

through the site every day, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin were being transferred around the globe. Naturally, the article also got the attention of the authorities and politicians. Just four days after the article was published, the article also got the attention of the authorities and politicians. Just four days after the article was published, New York Senator Chuck Schumer made a highly publicised announcement, vowing that Silk Road would be taken down. And he was right. Little did the users of Silk Road know. But by November 2011, DEA agents had started to infiltrate the site, posing as both buyers and sellers. As the site grew, its mysterious owner began to employ trusted members of the community. They did all the boring admin shit that comes with running a business that no one wants to do,

like dealing with customer complaints, shipping issues, refunds, stuff like that. And the new system was almost corporate in its efficiency and ease of use. And while the customer base expanded, so did the community with it. There were message boards where people chatted politics, traded coding tips and maintained online friendships. Then, on the 5th of February 2012, the site's owner and administrator posted an update on the Silk Road's progress. Within its first year, the website had facilitated hundreds of thousands of

individual sales and had hosted transactions totalling to about $15 million. And that's big news for the Silk Road and its users. A $15 million economy that was hidden from the eyes of the state was a huge part of their libertarian dream. However, the administrator was there to give more than just a sales report. They announced that they would be changing their name, and this small change had enormous consequences on the Silk Road. The admin explained that they needed to step out of the shadows and take on a moniker that people could recognise and rally behind as the figurehead of Silk Road. The moniker they chose was Dread Pirate Roberts, lifted straight from the pages of The Princess Bride. Please tell me that you

have read The Princess Bride. I have read The Princess Bride. Okay, have you seen the film? I don't think I've seen the film. That's okay. Yeah, I don't think I've seen the film. Okay, well, you understand the concept of Dread Pirate Roberts, that's amazing. Yes, yes, I do. And so, yes, lifted straight from the pages of The Princess Bride, it was of course a fake name and title handed down from one masked hero to the next. The Silk Road's administrator was making a bold statement that they would not be the first or the last person to lead the synonymous online community. And that was really starting to piss people off. From this moment on, the Dread Pirate Roberts took on a much more public persona. And that was really starting to piss people off. essays and manifestos on the Silk Road all about their libertarian ideals and their belief in the Silk Road as a force for good.

Like all card-carrying libertarians, Dread Pirate Roberts believed that drugs were a personal choice and that the government had no right to dictate what people ingested or injected into their eyeballs or whatever. The Dread Pirate Roberts also waxed lyrical about how the Silk Road was actually lowering the risk of violence for drug users. They no longer needed to meet a shady dealer in a back alley or a car park. They could conduct their business with anonymity and entirely online. Dread Pirate Roberts even started their own book club to discuss libertarian literature and delve deeper into economic theory. Sounds fun. But the important thing is, these libertarian beliefs united the

users of Silk Road, from occasional pot smokers to functional heroin users. Everyone wanted the freedom to use drugs safely and anonymously, and of course, when you're not going to get arrested. And this shift from anonymous arbitrator to political leader is very important. Remember it, So as time went by and sales soared, the Dread Pirate Roberts was becoming an internet celebrity. He even sat down for a virtual interview with Forbes called Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind booming black market drug website Silk Road. In this interview, he discussed the competitors to Silk Road that had

sprung up over the last year and went into more detail about his libertarian beliefs. And here's what he said. We can't stay silent forever. We have an important message and the time is ripe for the world to hear it. What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or sticking it to the man. It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we've done no wrong. It is kind of about sticking it to the man. Come on. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. I would say increasingly I am being drawn more and more towards a libertarian light view of the world. I think there are libertarian themes to your personal

philosophy, but I wouldn't say it's overarching. No, let's go with LL, libertarian light, diet libertarian, coke free, coke free libertarian. I am a coke free libertarian. Coke's not the drug for me. But yeah, so I can empathize what he's saying. But I do think he has the idea that it's not about sticking it to the man I would disagree with. Yes. Yeah. But I understand. I understand what he's saying, but I do think he has the idea that it's not about sticking it to the man. I would disagree with. Yes, yeah. But I understand. I understand what he's saying.

He also told Forbes that he wasn't the first Dread Pirate Roberts, rather that he was an early user of the site who would help the original creator patch up some vulnerabilities. He was then taken in as one of the trusted employees, and then he actually purchased the site, taking on the moniker of Dread Pirate Roberts. If you haven't read The Princess Bride, calling himself Dread Pirate Roberts is like saying, I am Spartacus. Yeah. Like, it immediately displays that there is more than one. Now, if an online drug lord flaunting their anti-establishment ideals in the press

wasn't enough to light a fire under the ongoing government investigations, then what the Dread Pirate Roberts said next was sure to get them red in the face. When asked roughly how much he was making, personally speaking, from Silk Road, Dread Pirate Roberts was suddenly pretty cagey. But he did eventually divulge the following. At some point, you're going to have to put Dread Pirate Roberts on that list you keep over at Forbes. Obviously talking about the Forbes rich list. Not only was the Dread Pirate Roberts a drug dealer and a revolutionary, he was now flaunting that he'd become incredibly wealthy in the process. And that is always how they get you.

Yes. I mean, I feel like it's obvious that he's making money because the website is fucking making bank. But don't say it. That's how they get you. Just don't give an interview to Forbes, man. Like, this really is a big mistake. This is a big mistake. Although the exact personal wealth of the Dread Pirate Roberts remained a mystery,

conservative estimates suggested that by August 2012, Silk Road had facilitated around $22 million in sales. And Silk Road took a 10% commission. Boom. Leave it in. Forgot to mute my laptop, but that was perfect timing. Not the right sound, but perfect timing. But yeah, fucking boom. That is money all the way to the drug bank. How many monies? Well, $22 million and they're taking 10%. The 10% of commission would probably not be on sales, but on, well, I guess it would be on the sales because it's what's being generated through the website. So yeah, it would be $2.2 million that they would have been taking every single year,

if that's how much they're selling. Thank you for the maths. I can't do it. So what that maths tells us is that Dread Pirate Roberts was making an income of several million dollars just from sales. And when you take that into account, his ownership of the Silk Road site, and the steady increase in the value of Bitcoin, Dread Pirate Roberts' personal wealth could easily have been in the tens of millions. However, you won't be surprised to hear that this increased wealth and success brought an increase in unwanted attention. Because the higher you fly, the more people hate you for it.

By mid-2011, the DEA, the FBI and Homeland Security all had task forces dedicated to hunting down the Dread Pirate Roberts and shutting down the Silk Road. But as hard as these government agencies worked to infiltrate Silk Road as buyers and sellers, none of them had any luck getting close to the Dread Pirate Roberts. He stuck to his very tight circle of trusted friends and never ever gave his personal information to anybody because he's not a fucking idiot. That all changed when a package was intercepted from a dealer, an admin of the Silk Road in Australia. The identity of this dealer has never been revealed, although they did speak anonymously on the documentary Darkweb. This dealer was not arrested or charged for their crimes and was instead offered the chance to be a cooperating witness. Sneaky Australia.

Fucking narc, that's what it is. Their user account and identity was taken over by DEA agent Carl Force. Carl Force! DEA agent Carl Force. Carl Force. DEA agent Carl Force. Mega narc. Who began to communicate directly with the Dread Pirate Roberts. Carl Force insinuated that he was unable to sell shipments big enough through the Silk Road to fulfill his needs as a dealer. Dread Pirate Roberts naturally was concerned about losing an incredibly lucrative customer. So he put Carl Force in contact with one of his most trusted employees, a user who went by the name Chronic Pain.

Chronic Pain was a long-standing admin of Silk Road and could facilitate large international drug shipments through the website. And over time, Force and Chronic Pain built up a relationship until eventually Chronic Pain felt safe enough to give Force their home address. No. To facilitate one of these large drug shipments. No. And this was a landslide moment for the DEA.

It is funny, isn't it, how you're kind of rooting for... I was going to say this because, like, it's very similar in terms of the investigation, right, when you listen to something like Hunting Warhead. Exactly, yeah. They're trying to infiltrate this website. In Hunting Warhead, it's, of course, Child's Play, which was the largest, like, online child abuse website.

And they need to get a reputable person that they can sort of use to infiltrate the site and here they're obviously doing it with drugs and there you're like yeah fucking get them

team Artemis yeah and here you're like knock drugs but no like obviously we understand like drugs

ruin people's lives we're not saying that doesn't happen and we're not saying no of course not we're not drugs ruin people's lives. We're not saying that doesn't happen. And we're not saying. No, of course not. We're not like here to advocate everybody just getting on drugs. But yeah, for some reason, maybe again, it is my LL showing. I'm like.

I would say I'm less libertarian than you are, but I'm rooting for them. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting feelings to dissect on Red Handed this afternoon. So Chronic Pain's home address was raided by the DEA. And I can't say DEA without seeing Hank from Breaking Bad in my head. That's all I see. So an army of Hanks raided this house. And this house belonged to a middle-aged family man in Salt Lake City called Curtis Green. Green's arrest quickly became public knowledge and the

Dread Pirate Roberts began telling Carl Force that he was pretty sure that Green would cooperate with the DEA. In January 2013, the Dread Pirate Roberts offered Carl Force 40,000 US dollars to kill Curtis Green. Force went right ahead and staged Green's murder. He sent fake pictures of Green's bloodied body To Dread Pirate Roberts As evidence that the job was done And that meant that Carl Force Had proved himself to the Dread Pirate Roberts

And he was finally allowed into the trusted circle of users That the mysterious admin was a bit more open with No! Aladdin's cave had opened. Open sesame. That's what Carl Force is saying. Carl Force! Open sesame.

So a few months later, a second breakthrough showed up, this time from the FBI, who had been working hard to find the Silk Road servers. And on the 23rd of July 2013, they did. Silk Road's home was an anonymous server farm in Iceland, rented by an even more anonymous user called Frosty. Good joke. How the FBI pulled this off is very much up for debate.

The team that found the server in Iceland have always maintained that they exploited a vulnerability in the site's Captcha software. Now, Captcha is something that we all obviously use all the time. It's that frustrating little thing that pops up and asks you to click on pictures of bikes and traffic lights in order to prove that you're not a robot. What I will say about Captcha is I hate doing them because it is also rumoured, I believe it, that it is to teach AI. Oh I believe that, yes. So it's not just to check you're not a robot, it's also directly feeding into like AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of how to make the robot understand.

Exactly. I actually, because we are in 48 hours time, we will be in Dublin. So obviously we've been looking at dresses and stuff. And one of the captures on one of the websites I was using was Witcher boots and Witcher shoes. And I thought that was pretty funny. That's quite funny. But stay away from me, robot. But still, fucking ai farming your

brain as i click on these things because i have to as i'm doing what exactly what you want me to do i know i hate it i hate it so yeah basically capture that's what they're doing so the fbi claim that while logging into the silk road they were able to track the data from their capture entry back to the server in Iceland. Except, as we discussed earlier, every time you use Tor, it packages up your data, scrambles it, and sends it all around the world before it gets to its destination. It is impossible to track. Even for the FBI. It is just not physically or mathematically possible. So yeah, this capture claim has been described by cybersecurity experts as, quote, laughable and bullshit. Pretty damning. The only thing worse I've described is how Milf Manor,

the brand new reality TV show, has been described as, quote, grotesque and unhinged. And I cannot wait to watch it. I think you mean Cougar Cabana. Cougar Cabana. Cougar Cabana. Which is our accompanying podcast. Sign up at patreon.com slash redhanded for more. Current dark web dwellers also think the FBI are full of shit.

Every single website that we looked at on the dark web while we were writing this episode has a capture login before you're able to access any site. So if capture didn't work, if the FBI had very publicly penetrated this system, why is anyone still using it? And also why, you might ask, did we go on the dark web to look at illegal drug markets? Well, firstly, we wanted to see if they were still there, and they are. And secondly, we're switching up the format a little bit, and we're going to do a little quiz about how much things cost on the dark web.

I don't know the answers. Neither does Saru. We're going to see. Ah, this is exciting. I see the clever little tactic here to hide the answers, highlight to see. Okay, smart. And this quiz game, extravaganza is called Dealer or No Dealer. That's very good.

So we asked our trusty Seb to scour pages of one of the currently most popular darknet marketplaces, which is called ASAP Market. Do you remember when Liam Gallagher called ASAP Rocky WhatsApp Ricky? No, but that's great. Anyway, so it's WhatsApp supermarket sweep is what we're playing. And it is important to point out as an unbiased show here, other illegal marketplaces are also available. So take your pick.

You don't have to use WhatsApp supermarket sweep. So Seb's put together this set of questions all about how the most popular listing costs on the dark web so first question how much is a kilo of tripe diesel indoor weed on the dark web saruti bala tripe diesel indoor weed okay a kilo of it no well i've seen the answer now can you see when I do that? Yeah. Oh, sorry.

That's all right. I only saw it for a split second, but it looked like it might have been about just under $5,000. Yes, sorry. That's all right. Okay, I won't look at the next one. Okay, so I'll ask you this one. Okay.

How much, Hannah, do 2,000 Adderall pills cost on the dark web? I know for reasons that are none of your business that a singular Valium is between 20 and 50p. Okay. So times that by 2,000 and then... No, don't make me do maths. And then, you know, reduce it by like 10% for the sake of buying in bulk.

I'm done. 2,000 Adderall pills. 2,000 Adderall pills, I i'm gonna say 4 500 a lot cheaper 1 608 us dollars so there you go bargain all right what about 20 grams of pure crack cocaine get all of the nonsense out of the way. Straight to the crack cocaine. I want to go back to the tripe diesel indoor weed. Okay, 20 grams of pure crack cocaine. Like, I have no idea how much cocaine costs. If you were to buy a singular gram, street value is between 60 to 80 pounds. 60 to 80 pounds.

Jesus. A gram. Okay, so. Allegedly. Let's say it's, let's say, let's land in the middle. Let's call it 50 and then times that by 20 so that is taking us to a thousand but then this is pure crack cocaine so i'm assuming it's a higher quality than what you're buying on the street so then i'm gonna i

think all of i think it is safe to say that everything that was on silk i don't know now but on silk road everything was above street quality. Okay, in that case, I'll double it. Let's say 2,000. Oof, 1,493 US dollars. Do you know what? I actually worked that out in pounds thanks to your handy input. So it is about 1,500 US dollars. Nice. Okay, Hannah, how much would 11 fake 50 euro banknotes on the dark web cost you?

Okay, firstly, why would you ever buy a 50 euro banknote? Because nobody takes them and they attract more attention. People have pens to test them. Yeah. Also, who's using cash? Anyway. 11. Uh-huh. 25p. 25p for 11? Yeah. Okay. No. 140 US dollars. All right.

And how much, cut force, for 25,000 real followers on Instagram? You can also get those on the dark web, apparently. Oh. Real followers. 25,000. I'd hope that this wouldn't be too much,

like maybe 500? 201. Oh, bargain. That is bargain. You just also have to like sign away your soul because that sounds so miserable to be buying Instagram followers. Okay, final one.

Final one. Hannah. Yes. How much is a stolen credit card with a balance of 20,000 US dollars on it? A balance or a limit? It says a balance, but... Probably a limit. Limit. Okay. 20,000 dollars.

So I assume there's also going to be the risk of you've got to use it before that person blocks it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. A grand. 25 US dollars what fuck well I've learned absolutely nothing

but hopefully listeners you have so there you go that is the end of our quiz dealer or no dealer well done everyone now we're going to

leave all the fun behind and get into more tech bullshit I'm Jake Warren and in our first season of Finding I set out on a very personal quest

to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read, in part,

Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+.

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So, let's get back to the story. The FBI have just found the servers that are hosting Silk Road and they found them in Iceland and they found out that they were being rented by a person called Frosty. Because the FBI are the FBI, we won't ever actually know how they found those servers in Iceland rented by a man called Frosty. Yeah, because the other admins on the site didn't know where the servers were.

In fact, even the Dread Pirate Roberts didn't know where the servers were. The whole point in renting a server through an anonymous service is that the location is anonymous, even to the person paying for it. However, the explanation that most people believe is that the FBI broke the law. Shock. Horror. Either the FBI themselves or with the help of the NSA, the FBI gained access to data in other countries that they were not allowed to view. Now, this might not seem like a big deal,

but it means that the FBI almost certainly trawled through countless terabytes of data, which was completely unrelated to the Silk Road and belonged to users way, way, way out of their jurisdiction, which, once again, is setting my LL fucking spidey senses tingling because that is bad vibes. However... That's going to be the name of your manifesto. The LL spidey senses.

Yeah, exactly. Going on bad vibes. However, in terms of our story, it doesn't really matter how the FBI found the Silk Road service. It just matters that they did. But for the sake of your fucking security, it does. Cut to two years' time and you're suddenly a prepper living underground. So now the FBI had the physical server,

agents were able to view every message, every sale, and every transaction that had ever happened on Silk Road. It also meant that, in theory, the FBI could shut down the whole operation. Did they? No. And when we all found out about that, the FBI did get quite a lot of stick, given that they technically helped to run Silk Road for a number of months before it was eventually closed. But in fairness, if the servers got a lot of stick for, why didn't you just shut down Charles Play as soon as you got access to it? But then they wouldn't have caught anybody. Exactly.

And Silk Road and Charles Play would have gone down for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks, but they would have popped up again, hosted by a completely different anonymous server somewhere else in the world, and the FBI would have had to start all over again. Whereas, if the FBI kept things quiet

and let the business run as usual, a la Hunting Warhead, then Dread Pirate Roberts would be very exposed and none the wiser. Besides, the server had already given them some key information. The user, Frosty, who rented the Silk Road server, logged in from somewhere in San Francisco, California. Silk Road was now in serious trouble. Because in a backroom of the FBI, a much less glamorous team

was also working on destroying the world's biggest online drug marketplace. The tax inspectors. Woo! They're here! Hooray! Woohoo! And much like Al Capone,

it would be them that would catch up with Silk Road. One of these tax gremlins was Gary Alford. He was tracking all of the Bitcoin that went through Silk Road. Bitcoin may not be untraceable, but Gary still wasn't getting anywhere. All the money was just jumping from one anonymous wallet to another, none of which could be connected, like we said earlier, to a real-life identity. So, in his spare time, Gary, who sounds like a right laugh, started doing some research of his own into Silk Road using Google. On his weekends, Gary started searching for mentions

of Silk Road before the article in Gawker was published. Again, if he was a detective and he was just working his spare time to crack this child, we'd be like, Gary's a hero. He's what we're missing from law enforcement and the government, competence and hard work. And we're like, fuck you, Gary. Narczilla. Anyway, what he's doing, he's looking for people who knew about Silk Road before it went mainstream, which is why he's looking for posts that happened before the Gawker article. And in time, Gary found someone posting on a hallucinogenic mushroom forum

asking if anyone had tried Silk Road and prompting users to give it a go and then report back. That post had been submitted by a user called Altoid. And Altoid had been a very busy person. Altoid posted similar listings on a number of different forums, all pushing people to try Silk Road, almost as if they were advertising it. Gary then searched for posts by Altoid, made before Silk Road was set up. And voila.

He found a series of posts on a Bitcoin forum discussing setting up an anonymous marketplace on the dark web. There were several posts asking for help and advice on this anonymous project. The last post from Altoid that Gary found was written in October 2011, after Silk Road had gone viral. And in this post, Altoid asked if anyone was interested in participating in such a project, and if they were, they should contact them. And then, this is so fucking dumb, Altoid listed their real life email address.

No! Altoid! And it's even worse because it isn't honeybunny3000 or whatever at hotmail.co.uk It's ross.albrecht at gmail.com Fucking hell, Ross.

So Ross Albrecht was born in March 1984 to a middle class family in Austin, Texas. He was hard-working, if a little goofy, and as a teenager became an Eagle Scout, just like his father Kirk. Ross was also a maths prodigy and got a full scholarship to the University of Texas to study physics. Then he got another full scholarship to Penn State to study material science and engineering. Once he got to Penn State, Ross's outlook on life began to change. And with the speed of a feckless philosophy student,

Ross became obsessed with libertarianism and Austrian economics. Ugh, is your favourite philosopher Nietzsche? Fucking grow up. So after graduating from Penn State, Ross told his mum that he no longer was interested in engineering. He was going to run an online bookshop instead. And I've watched a documentary about Jeff Bezos and everyone laughed at him too. This bookshop sold second-hand books nationally and donated a portion of those proceeds to a local charity. Bezos didn't make it by giving to charity and neither did Ross. It wasn't long before the bookshop went bust. And it was shortly after the collapse of his book dream

that Ross posted a very long and rambling update on his LinkedIn of all places. Worst place to post long rambling updates. Don't do it. It doesn't make you look particularly hireable, does it? No, don't. That's the last place you should be posting that kind of shit. That's why Redditdit exists ross wrote my goals have shifted i want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind oh no ross sounds like the start of a manifesto yeah he went on to write i am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force. I think someone's been on too many hallucinogenic mushroom forums. That's what I think.

So after he posted that, Ross moved to Sydney in Australia to live with his sister, whose name is Callie. His family thought he was freelancing in computer finance while he was out there. He wasn't. After this stint in Australia, Ross returned to America in 2011 to begin working on a new and undisclosed project with his friend, Rene Pinnell. The pair even filmed a 30-minute interview between themselves documenting their new chapter.

So apparently, the idea that Rene had was so lucrative, he managed to convince Ross to come back to America and join him in San Francisco. Now back to Gary, the tax gremlin, and a stand-up guy at his work. Man doing good job. Well, he found this 30-minute video that Rennie and Ross had filmed. And he also found the LinkedIn post. And he also, of course, found Ross's actual email address. Which is his name!

With his fucking full name in it. I'm surprised he didn't also include his mother's maiden name in his first fucking page. And the worst thing is that Gary found all of this through a simple google search so gary scuttled off to his mates at the fbi but no one was that bothered everyone was far too focused on the ip address linking dread pirate roberts to san francisco excuse me guys i've got an idea shut up gary yeah this is the thing they're all like so tied up with the highbrow technical side of it that Gary's just literally fucking Googled this

and found it through some good old-fashioned detective work, you know? So Gary went over their heads when he got ignored by everyone at the FBI and he went straight to his supervisor. Luckily, his boss had the sense to get Gary on a call with the DEA, Homeland Security, and again, the FBI. But again, nobody particularly cared about what Gary had to say. They'd never heard of anyone on the Silk Road posting under the name Altoid, or someone called Ross Ulbrich. Why don't you just put one person on following up with Gary?

You haven't got one intern that can just do this Google search and double check Gary's work? The arrogance of it all. So the call was almost over when Gary offhandedly said that he had also seen some posts which he thought were from Ulbricht using another moniker, Frosty. He said that he couldn't be sure though and that's why he hadn't brought it up at first. At this point the call went silent. Everything clicked. Frosty owned the Silk Road. Frosty was the Dread Pirate Roberts and the Dread Pirate Roberts was Ross Ulbricht. Sob! But still the FBI needed a lot more for an arrest and that would be tricky.

Anything that physically connected Albrecht to the Silk Road would be encrypted and hidden deep on his own computers. Unless the FBI caught Albrecht actually logged in to Silk Road, it would be impossible to prove that he was Dread Pirate Roberts. So undercover agents began staking out Albrecht's home in San Francisco, a place he'd found on Craigslist and rented under a fake name. It soon became clear that whenever Albrecht signed into Silk Road, he did so from a public library. Which is a good idea for an online drug lord,

but it also left him incredibly vulnerable offline, in the real world. Once it was established that Ulbricht was signing into Silk Road via the library, it was simple enough to lure him there. On the 1st of October, the DEA and FBI ran a sting operation to catch Ulbricht logging in as the Dread Pirate Roberts in that public library. An undercover agent, who had established themselves as a trusted seller on the site, messaged the Dread Pirate Roberts, asking for some help with an order. And sure enough, Old Brick left his house and travelled to the local library to respond to this message. Agents followed Old Brick on this journey,

and watched as he walked into a library filled with even more undercover agents. Albrecht sat down, unfolded his laptop and logged into the Silk Road. At this very moment, a small green circle lit up on the Silk Road's messaging service. The Dread Pirate Roberts was online. Two agents staged a loud argument behind Albrecht, who spun around to watch the commotion. As he did so, a DEA agent wearing rubber gloves swooped round and grabbed Ross Albrecht's laptop. Albrecht was signed in as the Dread Pirate Roberts on the Silk Road. The jig was up. Ross Albrecht naturally was arrested, and later that same day, Silk Road servers went down.

Ross was held in a jail in Oakland and denied bail based on the attempted murder of Curtis Green. Prosecutors argued that if Ulbricht was released, then he might try and take out any witnesses who could make statements against him. After a month, Ross Ulbricht was extradited to New York, where he was finally indicted for a litany of crimes. The 27-year-old middle-class boy from Texas was charged with conspiracy to traffic narcotics, criminal enterprise,

computer hacking and money laundering. Ross spent the next year in prison awaiting trial, several weeks of which were in solitary confinement. While this wasn't ideal for him, it did give his legal team, led by Joshua Draytel, the opportunity to create a multifaceted defence. When the trial began in December 2014, the word on the street was that Albrecht's team were confident. So confident, in fact, that they had rejected a plea bargain. However, from the moment the trial began, it became incredibly clear that their confidence may have been misguided.

Their first form of defence was attack, as Joshua Draytel tried to have the case dismissed altogether because of the shit the FBI pulled on finding that server in Iceland. Because, as we already know, there was strong evidence to suggest that the server in Iceland had been hacked by the FBI without a warrant. Which is so many different kinds of illegal and also, as we discussed earlier, kind of the only way they can have done it. Yes. And so if this was true, which like Hannah just said, seems like the only way that they could possibly have found this information, then therefore any evidence collected through that illegal hacking should have been inadmissible in court. And that means there would have been a mistrial, or at the very least, it would make an enormous amount of damage to the prosecution's argument. But no dice. The judge dismissed this

request, unsurprisingly. So Draytel tried something different, rewriting the narrative. Draytel said, sure, Albrecht had set up the Silk Road, but he'd never been Dread Pirate Roberts. They argued that Albrecht had actually sold the site to another user in the middle of 2011 and hadn't been involved with it since, a story that was backed up by the interview in Forbes. The defence also argued that several people had been operating as the user known as Dread Pirate Roberts, which of course is what the name suggests. And that meant that even if Ulbricht had been able to log in as Dread Pirate Roberts to the site, there was absolutely no way of proving what had been written by him and what had been written by someone else. Therefore, it was impossible to prove

that Ulbricht had ordered the hit on Curtis Green. And to be fair, that is a logical argument. Plausible, even. And on top of that, Ulbricht's libertarian ideals didn't really leave that much room for murder. And neither did the ideals of Dread Pirate Roberts. Whoever had been posting long essays on Austrian economics and running their own book club on Silk Road didn't really seem to have that much in common with the Dread Pirate Roberts who'd been asking to have people killed. Actually, we've seen several ex-Silk Road admins stating that they knew for a fact there was more than one person using the Dread Pirate Roberts account. And that makes sense. It's not like Amazon's Twitter account is run by a singular

person. Why would one person run Silk Road's main form of communication? It's a big job. Yeah, I mean, we've got a team of six and we run a podcast. And we're still exhausted all the time. Yes. But regardless, this argument didn't get very far in the courtroom. During cross-examination, Dratel did manage to prove that one of the undercover agents who'd been talking to Dread Pirate Roberts had long suspected he was talking to more than one person. However, this was dismissed as hearsay, and the line of questioning was struck from the record. The defence was then forbidden from questioning witnesses on other potential suspects. On the other hand, the prosecution argued that Ulbricht had been logged into the Silk Road

at the time he had been caught, and that there were journal entries and bitcoin on his laptop that proved he had been running Silk Road. And unlike the evidence from the FBI, this was pretty watertight. Draytel then tried to bring in an expert witness who could help explain to the judge and jury how Tor worked, how the Silk Road was encrypted and how it was impossible to pin it all on one person. However, again, this was denied by the court, who felt that no further explanation was needed. How are you going to tell me that no further explanation on all of those very, very complicated technical things are needed for a jury that probably is made up of people that haven't got a fucking clue?

Josh Stratel and his team had run out of lifelines for Ross Ulbricht. The trial ended abruptly the next day, with the defence unable to submit anything worthwhile in the case. And so, Ross Albrecht was convicted on seven counts, distributing narcotics, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit computer hacking being among them. But, interestingly, Ross was never charged with murder for hire. So the attempted murder of Curtis Green that Dread Pirate Roberts ordered. Although that crime

was used to keep the identities of some witnesses in the trial anonymous, and it also put restrictions on the defence's line of questioning, which they can't really do if he hasn't been charged with it. Tricky stuff. Ultimately, Ross Ulbricht was given a whole life sentence with a minimum term of 30 years. And the judge had this to say about his libertarian ideals. No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the court. It is a privileged argument. It is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege within our criminal justice system. Ouch. So where does that leave us? Was Ross Ulbricht the Dread Pirate Roberts?

Probably at some stage. His ideals certainly matched with those posted by the notorious admin of Silk Road and also some journals and Bitcoin on his laptop and the fact that he was logged in as Dread Pirate Roberts do seem to point in that direction too. That's quite difficult to argue with. But did he order the hit on Curtis Green? Maybe. I mean, it's impossible for us to know for sure, but it does seem a little bit out of character for him. So let's zoom out and have a look at

the bigger picture. Did Silk Road back up the big social claims made by Ross Ulbricht? Did he really create an economic simulation to give people first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force? Well, according to Judith Aldridge, a law professor at the University of Manchester, and David Dikari-Hetu, her counterpart at the University of Montreal, maybe. This pair published a paper in May 2014 that described the Silk Road as a quote paradigm shifting criminal innovation and I would have to agree with that. They said that the risk to both the dealer and the user had been reduced

massively by Silk Road although as many others have pointed out it doesn't negate the other human tragedies involved in the production of drugs. It simply makes them safer for those people using them. And finally, what is the legacy of the Silk Road? It's believed that over the site's lifetime, about 1.2 million transactions took place with around 9.5 million bitcoins. From that, it's believed that Ross Ulbricht alone took around 600,000 bitcoins in commission. The value of Bitcoin between 2011 and 2012 was pretty volatile. But by taking a rough average of around $200 per Bitcoin or so, this would point to a turnover of around $1.8 billion that the website was taking, with the Silk Road slash Dread Pirate Robert slash Ross Ulbricht making around $120 million in commission. However, the price of

Bitcoin has risen in the 10 years since the Silk Road was seized to around $22,000 per Bitcoin. So this would mean that the total value of the Bitcoin made on Silk Road in 2023 is roughly $14 billion. Meaning that if Ross Ulbricht still has access to just 10% of his earnings through the Silk Road, he's still within the top 3,000 richest people on the planet. And this is the thing. Everyone was trying to shut him down because of the money.

Let's be clear if they could have got a piece of that tasty tasty tax pie no one gives a fuck but we're gonna leave you with some thoughts about drugs and the dark web as we proved earlier with our dealer or no dealer quiz the hidden internet is utterly filled with marketplaces to buy all of your favourite narcotics. Although, it has to be said, the idea of not selling anything designed to harm or defraud, which of course was one of the central tenets of Silk Road in the beginning, has totally gone out of the window now. Most of these dark web marketplaces are filled to the brim with stolen credit cards cards passports and counterfeit cash

yeah so there's that and also again i'm not going to pretend that drugs don't cause harm of course they do like let's make that very very clear i think here it's just this idea of these things were happening anyway and this guy or these people who set this up were trying to set up a website in which the user could be safer because if they were going to buy it anyway, they don't have to go into a shady back alley and buy drugs from a random person who might end up murdering them. They can buy it from the safety of their own home and trust in the quality of the product that they were buying. Whether you choose to do it or not, it's not a good thing. It's not good for you. But if that's the ethos of Silk Road, which it very much seems like it was, then sure.

Yeah, so there you go. There you go. Silk Road, Dread Pirate Roberts and poor old Ross Albrecht. Done. Tick. Check it out. Red-handed goes digital. So yeah, that is it, guys. And we hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back next time for some other things. Hooray! Bye!

So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive.

She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh, yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals.

They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes.

And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today.