Original subtitles

It's no longer the era of industry.

We're in a technological era, fundamentally.

The fascists, they have the resources.

But we have imagination.

We are making the tools to take back our sovereignty.

When we make a giant "fuck you" to the system, it's breaking that stranglehold

on the tools of power that's used against us.

The fascists always use the narrative of,

"We are the white knights in shining armor protecting against the threats.

We come here and we move out the dark with pure whiteness."

That's a false narrative,

because there is corruption in those castles.

The real base of power lies with us.

We are the darkness.

A trial, which potentially, could have very far-reaching implications

has just started in New York City.

A jury will decide a case that could impact the future of Internet privacy.

Thousands of drugs came through the black website called "Silk Road."

The government overstepped their boundaries to acquire the info they claim they have.

This is not going away.

This is gonna be the biggest takedown of what is currently in existence.

On January 13, 2015,

a criminal trial began for the accused leader of the Silk Road,

a black market in an area of the Internet known as "the deep web."

The deep web is vast,

thousands of times larger than the visible Internet,

what's called the "surface web."

But the deep web is not a place.

It simply accounts for all of the unindexed content online...

banking data, administrative code for governments,

corporations and universities.

It's like looking under the hood of the Internet.

Over time, the deep web became inhabited by people of all types

who wanted to use this terrain for privacy.

This hidden area of the deep web is called the "dark net"

and it's accessible with a software service called "Tor,"

originally developed by the US military and now open source and publicly funded.

And while law enforcement and the media have painted a picture that Tor and the dark net

are nefarious tools for criminals,

it's important to understand that they are largely used for good

by government agencies, journalists and dissidents around the world.

In the summer of 2011,

an ad for the Silk Road appeared on the dark net.

The Silk Road was an underground exchange for any type of goods,

but mostly it was used for drugs.

There have always been drug markets online,

but none with the scale, sophistication and ease of use as the Silk Road.

It would not remain underground for long.

Hundreds of thousands of users use the impossible-to-trace website

which sells drugs, forged documents and even hit men.

It's called the Silk Road.

Just look at some of the 13,000 items offered through that underground site.

Ultra clean cocaine, clean and real LSD,

high grade MDMA, also known as "Molly"...

all with fast and free shipping.

It generated roughly $1.2 billion in sales

with nearly 960,000 users, both buyers and sellers,

in the US and more than a dozen other countries worldwide.

YouTube videos like this one with 15,000 views

tell anyone how to download an untraceable technology known as Tor

that pulls data from thousands of computers worldwide

to create this wide open marketplace.

This hidden Internet is underpinned by a virtual currency called "Bitcoin."

Bitcoins offer anonymized transactions,

which can be almost impossible for the police to trace.

Heroin, opium, cannabis, ecstasy, psychedelics, stimulants...

opioids. And here they are.

So, oxycodone, all of those.

Codeine, black tar heroin. You name it, they have it.

They're all listed in the light of day. It's unbelievable.

The Silk Road's success was largely due to an innovative combination

of Tor and Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a technology that uses cryptographic code to create digital currency.

The sender transmits their Bitcoin code through a ledger called the "block chain"

to arrive at the recipient.

Bitcoin is not perfectly anonymous.

But if used carefully, it facilitates online purchases without revealing identity.

Bitcoin was an ideal currency for the Silk Road,

because it allows for anonymity

and is outside the control of banks and governments.

I really became aware of the Silk Road when Adrian Chen at Gawker,

did his profile.

I think in a way, that story, as much as it documented the Silk Road,

it created the Silk Road, too. I mean... it drove so many people to the site.

I think it probably was an order of magnitude increase in users on the Silk Road.

So from that point on, I felt like I had missed the story

and I wanted the next big story on the Silk Road.

But I was also just fascinated with the community that was...

you know, being created there.

eBay doesn't have that kind of user community.

This was like a really tight-knit movement of people.

It was a fascinating thing just to lurk around in.

It's a certifiable, one-stop shop for illegal drugs

that represents the most brazen attempt

to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen.

It's more brazen than anything else by light-years.

I mean, they had a really big, you know, target on their back.

And they even had been taunting, to some extent, law enforcement

and, you know, the powers that be by doing this in the open.

And that's actually part of what this marketplace is all about.

It's not so much about selling drugs as much as it is to say...

to make a political statement of sorts, right?

"This shouldn't be prohibited. We're free to do what we want

and we have the technology to do it. So there."

The news around the Silk Road came almost entirely

from law enforcement and government officials

with little insight from those who were behind the market itself.

So the core architects and vendors of the Silk Road were sought out

using encryption keys to verify their identities and preserving their anonymity.

This is the first time they have spoken publicly.

[The Silk Road forums were a better community than I've ever seen in real life.]

[There were many threads that had great political and philosophical discussions.]

[Sure there were illegal things going on,]

[but this was a real community of like minded people.]

The Silk Road didn't appear to have a single leader.

There were the regular posts from the systems administrator,

but otherwise the service appeared to be primarily community-run.

Then on February 5, 2012,

after a highly successful first year of business,

the Silk Road administrator made an announcement...

[I need an identity separate from the site,]

[and the enterprise of which I am only a part.]

[I need a name. Drum roll, please...]

[My new name is... Dread Pirate Roberts.]

- You're the Dread Pirate Roberts, admit it. - With pride.

The Dread Pirate Roberts was cribbed from the mythical character

from the novel and film "The Princess Bride," and the choice was no accident.

In the original story by William Goldman, the Dread Pirate Roberts

was a nom de guerre handed down from user to user and passed along eternally.

The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either.

The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and I have been Roberts ever since.

I shall retire and hand the name over to someone else.

This Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR,

would come to spearhead the Silk Road forums

and was generally assumed to be the creator and owner of the site.

The Dread Pirate Roberts to me seemed to be

kind of the most interesting figure in that whole world.

On the Silk Road forums, he was constantly posting these manifestos

and love letters to his users and libertarian philosophical treaties.

And he even had like this... Dread Pirate Roberts book club

where he hosted discussions of Austrian economics

and free market philosophy.

At the same time, nobody knew who he was.

He had never spoken to the press before.

I approached him on the Silk Road forum mid-2012 and...

started kind of just like trying to persuade him to talk,

chipping away at him and just bugging him constantly.

The actual trigger, I think that made him decide to talk

was this competing dark website called "Atlantis."

They were really much more aggressive in their marketing than the Silk Road.

They put out this YouTube video

advertising Atlantis as the new, better dark web drug site.

So when I went back to the Dread Pirate Roberts

and said, "You know, I'm going to do this story.

It can either be about Atlantis or it can be about you,"

I think he realized that, you know, that...

he was a savvy business guy who realized he had to talk at that point.

He did have a kind of political message that he wanted to get out,

and I could see that in what he was posting on the forums.

So I kind of played up to that and I told him like,

"I can be the vessel for you to talk about what the Silk Road really represents,"

and I think that that appealed to him.

So it took eight months, but finally he did agree to an interview.

Of course, he didn't tell me anything about himself...

where he lives, you know, his age, identity,

anything that could be remotely identifying.

"I didn't start the Silk Road. My predecessor did.

"From what I understand it was an original idea to combine Bitcoin and Tor

"to create an anonymous market. Everything was in place.

He just put the pieces together.

"The most I'm willing to reveal is that I am not the first administrator of Silk Road."

He was incredibly secretive, of course,

about the inner workings of the Silk Road and...

you know, his own identity, of course.

I mean he was hunted by every law enforcement agency that you can imagine.

"The management of Silk Road is a collaborative effort.

"It's not just me making sure Silk Road runs smoothly.

"More often than not, the best ideas come from the community itself."

But he did tell me some interesting things about how he viewed himself and...

and the way that the Silk Road works.

"We don't allow the sale of anything that's main purpose is to harm innocent people

"or that it was necessary to harm innocent people to bring to market.

"For example, anything stolen is forbidden.

"Counterfeit money and coupons which are used to defraud people.

"Hit men aren't allowed and neither is child pornography.

No substance on Silk Road falls under those guidelines."

This went beyond just, you know, like legalizing marijuana or even heroin.

He wanted to see a new relationship between individuals and the government,

where the government was... you know, basically hamstrung

and couldn't control what people bought and sold.

"At its core, Silk Road is a way to get around regulation from the state.

"The state tries to control nearly every aspect of our lives. Not just drug use.

"Anywhere they do that, there's an opportunity to live your life as you see fit,

despite their efforts."

I shouldn't generally say this kind of thing, but I really liked the Dread Pirate Roberts

that I interviewed. I thought he was, you know...

a really super-interesting guy with a really coherent philosophy.

He came across to me as this kind of middle-aged, wise man figure, you know?

But not everyone on Silk Road believed in libertarian philosophy.

Bringing an end to the drug war was the agenda that truly united the community.

[A huge reason why DPR put the website up,]

[and allowed the market to begin with, and took the risk]

[was because... needed to be a violence reduction]

[in purchasing drugs. 'Cause it's gonna happen]

[and the reason it's gonna happen is because of the War on Drugs.]

[The violence isn't just from the people buying and selling the drugs...]

[The violence is from the police departments...]

[and the federal agents prosecuting this war.]

[And not to mention the horrendous violence we commit overseas on people.]

[We're the biggest bully on the planet when it comes to drugs.]

[The fact that more than 50% of this country has said to the DEAD...]

[we don't want you prosecuting this war anymore.]

[They need to demonize drugs.]

[The War on Drugs is, you know, all about fear, uncertainty and doubt.]

I could see that the Silk Road wasn't just another cyber-criminal scheme.

This was a guy who saw himself as the leader of a movement.

"One thing I've learned playing Dread Pirate Roberts

is that your actions are sure to please some and infuriate others.

"But we can't stay silent forever. We have an important message.

"And the time is ripe for the world to hear it.

"What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or sticking it to the man.

"It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit

"when we've done no wrong.

"Silk Road is a vehicle for that message.

All else is secondary."

The Silk Road functioned because the Dread Pirate Roberts was trusted.

At any point, he could've shut down the Silk Road and run away with everyone's Bitcoins.

We've seen that happen with a bunch of other dark web businesses.

But he didn't, and I think people believed that he wouldn't

because they felt that he was a true believer in this kind of radically

libertarian, crypto-anarchic philosophy that, you know,

goes back to the cypherpunks of the 1990s.

Twenty-five years ago, in the Bay Area, a burgeoning group of mathematicians,

crypto-anarchists and hackers began to meet in each other's homes.

This tight-knit group came to be casually known as the "cypherpunks."

These original members were not socially motivated,

but more concerned with the hard math of cryptographic technology

and the broader philosophy of anonymity, individual liberty and privacy.

The government has this clear policy of access to all plain text,

meaning whatever you're saying, they want access to.

If it's stored on your hard disk, they want access to it.

If it so goes over the wire, they want access to it.

If you are proxying speech for someone else, they wanna know who it is.

The cypherpunks were instrumental in the growing movement

towards privacy and anonymity online.

And they would pioneer the way into the hidden corners of the Internet.

Maybe the big turning point for the cypherpunks,

I think, was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange

and Jacob Appelbaum's idea of what it means to be a cypherpunk.

You cannot trust a government

to implement the policies that it says that it's implementing.

And so we must provide the underlying tools,

secret cryptographic codes that the government couldn't spy on

to everyone as a sort of use of force.

And a government no matter how hard it tries, if the cyphers are good,

cannot break into your communications directly.

Force of authority is derived from violence.

One must acknowledge with cryptography, no amount of violence

- will ever solve a math problem. - Exactly.

And this is the important key. It doesn't mean you can't be tortured.

It doesn't mean they can't try to bug your house or subvert it in some way,

but it means if they find an encrypted message it doesn't matter if they have

the force of the authority behind everything that they do.

They cannot solve that math problem.

This movement is not about the destruction of law.

This movement is not about the destruction of law.

It is about the construction of law.

These are guys who want to create encryption tools that everybody can use.

It's not just for the elite.

It's trying to shift the way that the Internet works

to provide secrecy and anonymity and privacy to everyone...

you know, so like... it's a much more populist movement.

There is a community of people in the security and cryptography space

who want to live in a world where the government cannot record their emails,

cannot listen to their telephone calls, cannot see who they're spending time with.

And they're trying to build tools.

They're trying to build protocols and services

that can facilitate that kind of anonymous and private exchange of information.

I actually think this all comes down to wanting to live a free life.

And the recognition which really predates all technology,

that an observed life is not a completely free life,

that a zone of privacy is just a core human value.

And the technology to me is just an incarnation

of those basic human values.

And I think that the people who are trying to build

currencies that are free of tracking and government control

and technologies that let you have a private conversation

and those kinds of things are just people who are seeing

that the technology can both enable and disable that space.

There are more cypherpunks than ever before.

They want to entirely cripple the government's ability to enforce law.

They want cryptography to make the rules instead of law enforcement.

Cody Wilson is a crypto-anarchist best known for developing the Liberator,

a 3D printable gun that was downloaded 100,000 times in two days.

When a group of baby boomers are told, okay now 3D printers will print guns,

they can do nothing but say, "Well, it's been nice living in the world I used to know."

We want to question the very foundation, evacuate the very foundation

that this order, moral, ethical, political, is founded on.

To see beyond good and evil and to allow something else to happen.

This is where the figure of DPR is so interesting to me.

Like is he a liberal? Like is he a Misesian like he says he is?

He believes in libertarian market principles,

and you know man against the state and all these these principles of freedom

and axioms of... or is he someone else?

Like who I hope he is or someone like I would try to hope to be,

who's just looking for a way, a mechanism,

to help peek beyond good and evil a little bit. And...

is he more enthusiastic about what he's... what he's allowed to be opened up,

the doors he's opening.

Of course, there will be a dark side to the dark web.

And if we want to enable this... this true crypto-anarchic future,

anyone who's working on that, I think, has to reckon with the fact that...

they're going to be enabling really nasty things

along with this kind of information freedom revolution that they're taking part in.

By August 2012, business was booming.

The Silk Road had become a thriving, anonymous and unregulated black market.

The Internet being used in this way, posed a major threat to the government,

greater perhaps than selling drugs.

Even as a law enforcement officer, I still wouldn't know

where to go and buy crack on the streets or buy heroin,

but I do know how to go online and find it.

It's downloading some software and the next thing you know you're there

and you can purchase a service or drugs very easily.

Since when does a teenager become obsessed with the daily mail delivery?

Fidgeting and pacing made this Fisher's mom suspicious.

So when her family's mail arrived, she grabbed it and found a cartoon DVD box

addressed to her son with something extra, a package of white crystals.

So she confronted her 14-year-old and both their lives changed forever.

I don't think anybody really cared in law enforcement

until Senator Schumer went, "Oh, my God, we've gotta do something about this."

Today I'm calling on the DEA and the Department of Justice

to immediately shut this site down before more damage is done.

Because if you think about what law enforcement at the federal level

has to do to even start a case,

I don't think this case would've been started if it wasn't for some political impetus

by, you know, a senator saying, "We need to look into this."

The FBI today shut down what it's calling the most sophisticated Internet site

in the business of selling hard drugs, including heroin, cocaine and LSD.

Anyone trying to log on to the website today found this notice:

"Shut down by the FBI."

It was a sophisticated electronic smokescreen

and it took federal agents almost two years.

They were able to infiltrate the site, but they made some of these purchases

themselves using undercover identities.

The secretive Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested in the most unlikely of places...

this local public library in this San Francisco neighborhood.

The FBI seized $3.6 million

of Bitcoin's biggest haul in its five-year history.

When the criminal complaint first appeared in October,

it describes this 29-year-old kid named Ross Ulbricht.

Not only do they say that he has run this billion-dollar plus black market conspiracy

and they accuse him of drug trafficking and money laundering

and somehow computer hacking charges, as well,

which is something that I had never associated with the Silk Road.

But then also in this criminal complaint there is outlined

his plot to pay for the murders

of a potential informant and a blackmailer.

It seems at least one Silk Road user

threatened to reveal the identities of thousands of others.

So investigators say Ulbricht tried to execute a Murder-For-Hire on that user,

offering $150,000 to a would-be hit man because...

"This kind of behavior is unforgivable to me.

Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosant.

It threw me for a loop. It was really not

the Dread Pirate Roberts that I had ever imagined.

This connection between Ross Ulbricht,

who plenty of evidence suggests that he was involved in the Silk Road.

They, after all, seized his laptop while he was logged in to the Silk Road.

He was caught red-handed.

But these two personalities, these two personas,

do seem to be almost schizophrenic.

It's so difficult to imagine that they are the same person.

And so the FBI's whole case is based on the idea if they can show

that Dread Pirate Roberts is Ross Ulbricht?

Right. That's the most important part, right?

Because he was trying to hide his identity on the site as well.

So the first thing they're gonna have to do is definitively link him

as the person who runs the site.

Oh, man, it was like it was yesterday, actually.

I was on my computer and... I was on Facebook.

And there's this guy that I know and he's very into like Bitcoin

and cryptocurrencies and stuff like that.

He posted this article and it says, "Ross Ulbricht Arrested."

And I pull up Lyn's... G-chat and I'm like,

"What is going on? Like why is..." And I'm looking at Ross' page...

Picture, you know, about being arrested. What is this?

She says, "We don't even know. We're leaving Costa Rica right now."

I mean, they were on their way, but it blew my mind.

I mean totally blew my mind.

Ross William Ulbricht grew up in a suburb of Austin,

the only son of Kirk and Lyn with an older sister named Callie.

It's a loving, tight-knit, middle-class family.

The Ulbrichts earn their income from properties they built

and rent on the Costa Rican coast.

Ross was an avid outdoorsman, an Eagle Scout like his father,

and displayed an early aptitude for math.

Ross earned a full scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas

studying Physics.

He graduated in 2006 and then won another full scholarship to Penn State

to pursue a Masters in Material Science and Engineering.

It was at Penn State that Ross began a deep interest in libertarianism,

particularly the work of Ludwig Von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics.

Yet by 2009, having completed his Masters,

Ross seemed to be having a change of life plan

telling his mother he no longer had an interest in pursuing a career in science

and instead wanted to become an entrepreneur.

Ross moved back to Austin and opened his own used book company, Good Wagon,

donating a portion of the proceeds to an inner city youth program

and to a prison literacy project.

I remember him saying, when we had coffee, the last time we saw each other,

I remember him saying that he wished he had joined a fraternity in college.

And I remember saying, "Well, that's surprising."

You know, I didn't really understand that perspective,

and I just remember him thinking,

well, he focused a lot on his studies in school

and maybe didn't create the social network

that he was looking for... in... in school.

But as far as where we saw each other going or where we saw ourselves going...

I think we both had a strong desire

to be in control of our destiny.

You know, again like when he started the book company, totally natural.

Not even something that I would've questioned, where there are a lot of people

that would never start their own business. But for Ross, sure, you know, why not?

But the business floundered and Ross eventually shut it down.

And if a post on his Linkedln page was any indication,

Ross had experienced a kind of epiphany on the next way forward.

Ulbricht wrote, "Now my goals have shifted.

"I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion

"and aggression amongst mankind.

"To that end, I am creating an economic simulation

"to give people a first-hand experience

"of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

From this moment, in late 2010, Ross became something of a free spirit,

eventually leaving his parents' home in Austin

to live with his sister Callie in Sydney, Australia

and then returning briefly to Austin.

Throughout this period, as far as his family knew,

Ross' means of employment was working on freelance projects in computer finance.

I am Rene Pinnell, age 29.

Today is December 6, 2012

and we are in the Jewish Contemporary Art Museum...

and relationship to partner is best friend.

So, Ross, how did you come to live in San Francisco?

You twisted my arm until I said,

"Fine, I'll come."

I get a phone call from Rene, "Ross, call me up.

I've got an opportunity for you." I'm like, "Okay."

He's like, "Yeah, I'm doing a startup here in San Francisco.

I want you to be a part of it."

The more I thought about it, and the more he...

laid out the pros and cons...

the more it all just seemed like cosmic and the right thing to do.

So... yeah.

I bought my ticket and two weeks later I showed up at his doorstep.

As Ross Ulbricht was making his way from Australia to Austin,

and eventually to San Francisco,

the Silk Road was online and growing steadily.

So naturally it sparked the attention of federal law enforcement

and specifically the wing of the DHS called Homeland Security Investigations,

housed in the old Customs House in Baltimore, Maryland.

You have postal inspectors in Seattle and Customs and Border Protection...

intercepting mail shipments coming from overseas full of drugs,

full of... full of currency.

And one thing that happens is they all lead back to the Silk Road.

And you have a number of independent investigations

sort of cropping up around the same timeframe

following different leads, but all leading back to the same place.

At the same time, the New York Cyber-Crime Division of the FBI

began their own investigation, headed by Agent Chris Tarbell.

There were people essentially online 24/7

as part of the team that was monitoring, gathering,

even just the little bits of evidence.

Informants were activated.

The site was crawling with law enforcement posing as vendors and buyers

from the very beginning of Silk Road's existence.

In early 2012, HSI partnered with Tarbell's FBI investigators as well as the DEA

to mount an undercover operation called "Marco Polo"

with the intention of penetrating the inner sanctum of the Silk Road.

[I had a package seized from China in January 2012 and thought nothing of it.]

[I kept business as usual, which was a stupid move.]

[Fast forward to June 28th, 2012]

[I was raided by ATF, DEA, Secret Service, local police department]

[and even a postal inspector.]

[I was not detained.]

[Rather, I was held in a van outside for what they call "investigative detention."]

[They kept me out of jail. I was never booked or charged]

[because my seized computers were more useful to them if I was not behind bars.]

[I'm also assuming they did this with a number of Silk Road vendors]

[to get a sort of organized crime ring of their own.]

The operation gained traction

when an undercover agent using the vendor name of "nob"

was allegedly able to establish direct communication with the Dread Pirate Roberts,

which would lead to a shocking turn of events.

Nob complained to DPR about the small-fry nature of most deals on the Silk Road.

"It really isn't worth it to do below 10 kilos," the agent wrote.

DPR offered to help find a buyer for nob

and allegedly turned to one of his most trusted partners known only as "chronicpain"

to put the deal together.

Chronicpain had been one of the core administrators

of the Silk Road from the beginning,

a frequent contributor to the forums who shared the Silk Road vision

for reducing harm in the drug trade, but these halcyon days were about to end.

In order to facilitate this drug deal,

chronicpain gave the informant his home address.

Federal agents immediately apprehended chronicpain at his Salt Lake City home

and were surprised to discover that this 47-year-old family man

named Curtis Clark Green was a dark net criminal.

At some point they're going to catch one of those people.

And what do you do in a typical drug case?

You roll that person over as a cooperating witness.

And in this case, one of them they got really lucky

and he was an administrator on the system.

Green had access to other Silk Road users' accounts and financial records,

including Dread Pirate Roberts.

"I have to assume he will sing," DPR wrote to nob, the undercover agent.

"I'd like him beat up." Then, the next day, he allegedly wrote...

"Can you change the order to execute rather than torture?"

A murder was staged. And a photograph of Green's bloody body was sent to DPR,

who paid for the hit in Bitcoin.

There would be five more alleged Murders-For-Hire,

including ordered hits against a blackmailer, a scammer

and an apparent contract with the Hells Angels.

The names of two of these victims were found to be fictitious.

And authorities have no evidence of any murders being carried out.

The alleged attempted murder of Curtis Green allowed the authorities

to obtain an indictment against Dread Pirate Roberts,

charging him with drug offenses, attempted witness murder and Murder-For-Hire.

Of course, they still had no idea who the Dread Pirate Roberts actually was.

So the embedded agents continued to communicate with DPR,

and DPR continued to respond.

In June of 2013, Ross moved into an apartment that he found on Craigslist.

Allegedly, he did not give his roommates his real name and was known as Joshua Terrey.

At the same time, IRS agent Gary Alford was investigating the Silk Road

and through a simple Google search was able to locate an early email

on the open Internet discussing the launch of the Silk Road marketplace

and connect that email to an account owned by Ross Ulbricht.

One month later, postal inspectors at the Canadian border

seized a package of fake IDs with Ross' image

that were en route to his home address.

Ross was visited at his apartment by several DHS agents.

The agents handed Ross a false California driver's license

that bore his picture, but a different name.

Ulbricht denied ownership or knowledge of the fake IDs,

and the agents simply left.

If you suspect somebody may be involved in a...

large-scale criminal enterprise,

going and knocking on a door with some... you know,

some evidence of fake IDs is important...

because you can see the guy face-to-face.

You may get some useful information out of an interview.

You may or may not want to take him into custody on the spot.

Let's sit back and let's... let's really go after this

in a you know, much more global way, if you will,

because there's a lot more here than just one count of,

you know, fake IDs.

The next big break in the case

would be achieved by FBI agent Tarbell and his cyber-crime team,

who had somehow located the Silk Road servers in Germany and Iceland.

How these hidden servers were found has been a matter of controversy,

but the FBI had their own copy of the Silk Road server,

and now they hoped to finally unmask the Dread Pirate Roberts.

[I decided there was a flaw in this setup somewhere,]

[I couldn't quite put my finger on it.]

[But there was a flaw and I called up my partner and said:]

["There's a flaw, we've got a limited amount of time,]

[We need to make our money and get out.]

Over the course of a year, a Chicago-based agent from the DHS

named Jared Der-Yeghiayan had been embedded in the Silk Road,

now posing as a high-ranking moderator named "cirrus."

With both the evidence connecting Ross to the launch of the Silk Road

and the incident with the fake IDs, Ross became one of the primary suspects.

On October 1st in a coordinated effort between Der-Yeghiayan from the DHS

and Tarbell's FBI squad, a sting operation was launched.

According to Der-Yeghiayan's testimony, he staked out Ross' new residence.

And using his pseudonym of cirrus,

Der-Yeghiayan initiated a conversation on the Silk Road with DPR.

Moments later, Ross went to the Glen Park Library,

apparently to use their Wi-Fi.

And when Der-Yeghiayan saw that DPR was logged back into the Silk Road,

he gave the order for Tarbell and his squad to move in.

It's an excitement that you couldn't even buy off Silk Road.

All the drugs you could buy on the site, you...

It's not the same excitement as catching the guy. It's an adrenaline rush.

Ross was apprehended before he could encrypt his laptop.

He was allegedly logged into a Silk Road administration panel

for customers needing DPR's attention.

He was a dream for drug users, because he was very technically adept

and he was able to hide both the website that he put together

and the actual sales of illegal drugs

that the drug sellers would... make on his website.

The Silk Road was seized and shut down, and charges were announced

against a number of core partners and vendors from the site.

Ross was held for over a month in a jail in Oakland,

awaiting extradition to New York.

Ross's family was able to raise over a million dollars for his bail.

But the prosecution argued that due to the alleged Murders-For-Hire,

Ross was too dangerous to release and so his bail was denied.

I thought it was the wrong decision.

He wouldn't have been a flight risk and he's never been

and is not a danger to anyone.

[For him to say "I'm gonna put a hit out on someone" is ludicrous.]

[I can understand it being one of these other DPR workers...]

[getting all egotistical and crazy and maniacal]

[and doing it, that I could see.]

There was more than one person using the DPR account?

[I believe it was at least 2 other people, if not 3 at one point.]

[It doesn't matter. That's why they're dredging up this hit.]

[Contract baloney.]

[But because of the involvement of a Senator and...]

[all that other shit they're gonna cook him.]

The data seized from the Silk Road servers included all internal private messages,

which revealed that many people collectively ran the site.

One vendor with the user name "Variety Jones"

was active from the beginning of the Silk Road.

Jones gave many of the orders for running the Silk Road,

even instructing the systems administrator to create the Dread Pirate Roberts persona.

But Ross Ulbricht remained the primary focus of the investigation.

Ross has been incarcerated for over a year

in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn awaiting trial.

Six weeks of that time was in solitary confinement.

Ross plead not guilty and denies being the Dread Pirate Roberts.

His trial was set for November 10, 2014 in New York City.

If convicted, Ross faces a minimum sentence of 30 years

with a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Are you taking a video?

- Should we... - He's a hairy fucker.

These big guys are generally not too...

I would let him off somewhere.

Where is he?

You know, it's hard. It's hard on a family.

It really is, especially when you love that person so much

and you believe in them so much

and you have such a daunting Goliath of an opponent.

It's... challenging.

It's kind of like a death, in a way, when you go like, "No, that can't be true,"

and then you're like, "Oh, yeah, it's true."

And you go through that kind of shock.

His dad, my husband...

of course, he's trying to keep our business going so we have a livelihood.

And his sister is in... Australia

and she's been helping, too, from there.

I'm Ross' sister and I can tell you

he has been a man of his word and honor all his life.

I was shocked to hear the news of his arrest, but felt even more dismayed

at what the media was writing about him, not even knowing him.

You know, I read things by people who have not a clue who Ross really is.

He's been tried and convicted in the media.

Nothing has been proven at all.

I don't know what's happened to the presumption of innocence in this country,

but it is a constitutional right here that we are innocent until proven guilty.

Ross sent me this picture of himself about a week ago.

It was taken a couple of weeks ago in prison.

I guess sometimes they go around and take pictures for the families.

He is doing well...

as well as can be expected, of course, under the circumstances.

And finally, after five months of delays,

he has had access to the discovery, the evidence that the prosecution has.

And so he's been working very hard going through that.

We are asking the prosecution,

"How did you find the server," and they're not saying.

We have to know how they found the server

in order to see if Ross' Fourth Amendment rights have been violated.

And how would anyone know if the evidence had been tampered with or anything else

if it's not revealed how they found the server?

There were 14 searches and seizures in this case,

which is a... a fishing expedition

into a person's total property.

Unlimited rummaging through all of their things to see what they can find.

When the criminal complaints first appeared in October,

I think the supporters of the Dread Pirate Roberts

and the Silk Road just scattered.

Because suddenly this thing that had seemed like an idealistic community

built around non-violence and... you know, libertarian free commerce,

suddenly seemed instead like this bloody criminal conspiracy.

And a guy who probably otherwise would have been a kind of...

political cause célèbre,

who would have had all of these supporters calling for his freedom,

instead was treated as a... was an immediate pariah.

He was seen as a criminal.

So there's a lot of... circumstantial...

evidence, if you want to call it that.

There's a lot of technical bits and pieces involved.

It got really crazy in the middle of that.

Sort of one thing is taking down this online drug market.

Another thing is pinning a number of Murders-For-Hires on top of it.

It just seems really, really far-fetched.

The 29-year-old seemingly clean-cut entrepreneur

was living a secret life as a digital drug lord.

They're claiming that he's living in a manner of a head of a cartel.

The distinctions between Ross Ulbricht and the head of a cartel,

you don't have to see too many movies to recognize what the differences are here.

Then when the indictment finally came out,

there were suddenly no charges around these Murder-For-Hire accusations,

only the drug trafficking and money laundering and computer hacking.

They had six charges. They used them against him to deprive him of bail

and yet two and a half months later... the prosecutor didn't indict him.

What they did instead was they called it an "uncharged crime."

Well, if something's a crime, don't you charge someone for it?

And if it's not a crime, why is it there...

Because it's prejudicial to a jury

to have that sitting there unproven just... just smearing him.

The portrayal they want is of someone who they could

present to a jury of not having redeeming value.

It's a way of poisoning the atmosphere

so that the jury doesn't focus on the allegations,

but focuses on this atmospheric that the government has created

that in some sense is a diversion appealing to the emotional aspect of it

so that if the proof is weak, the benefit of the doubt doesn't go to the defendant,

where it belongs, under the presumption of innocence,

but it goes to the government because there are these awful things lurking out there

which aren't part of what we're supposed to find.

The government doesn't have to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt,

but they've injected them in the case

in a way that is toxic to an impartial evaluation

of what the evidence is on the charged crimes.

So people come in with a preconceived notion and that's halfway there to guilt.

Previously, the Murder-For-Hire was in there as a charge and then it was dropped.

But it's not gone away.

It's included as what they call an overt act

in the conspiracy and to sell drugs.

And so they actually made it one of the things to support

the larger drug conspiracy

to either get a trial or get him to plead.

It seemed like this bait and switch that the government had accused him

in this almost informal way of murder

so that when he was charged with these non-violent crimes in the end,

he would still be seen as a violent criminal.

I think that that has really been effective in...

in coloring the portrait of Ross Ulbricht.

Ever since Ross' arrest,

he and his best friend Rene Pinnell have remained in regular contact.

Rene declined to give substantive interviews to the press

for fear they would be used against Ross in court,

but agreed to answer questions via email.

# I'm a little teapot, short and stout #

# Here is my handle here is my spout #

# When I get all steamed up hear me shout #

# Tip me over and pour me out #

Yay!

Because of the severity of the charges,

Ross was not able to grant an interview from prison,

which left only a scattering of his personal photographs and movies.

But from the exhaustive discussions with friends and family

and the public knowledge of Ross's trajectory

from Physics and Engineering major to running a small home-spun book-selling company,

it was difficult to understand how he could possibly have been the sole mastermind

of the Silk Road, a vast and complex Internet service

with over a million users worldwide.

Ross was certainly bright and studious with a deep interest

in libertarian economic theory, which clearly echoed the mandate and philosophy

of many of the posts of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

But he had no experience whatsoever in computer coding

or scaling large Internet companies.

So how did Ross connect to what little is truly known

about the Dread Pirate Roberts?

DPR was motivated by a pacifistic philosophy

and an agenda of creating victimless exchange and reduced harm in the drug trade.

This ethos would be embraced by the chief architects and vendors of the Silk Road

and reverberate through the entire community.

[There were quite a few people that I didn't sell to]

[just because I could tell that they were obviously not mature enough to handle]

[using these drugs, and didn't know enough. It was like "Go read first...]

["go figure it out and then come back to me and I'll sell you something"]

["but I'm not gonna pop your cherry and kill you, potentially."]

[The heroin in particular I was very careful about who I sold it to because...]

[it was not stepped on. It was the best heroin on Silk Road.]

The Silk Road appeared to be a successful experiment

in creating a pacifistic community,

overseen by a figurehead with a deep-rooted ideology.

But these core ideals of the Dread Pirate Roberts

were completely at odds with the Murder-For-Hire allegations.

Did DPR become corrupted

and turn his back on the mandate of non-violence and harm reduction?

Were there other people using the DPR account

who were responsible for these actions?

Or was there some other truth

behind these alleged murder hits that produced no victims?

We don't know the first piece of evidence

that lead the feds down this chain of investigation

to the San Francisco library where Ross Ulbricht was arrested.

All we know is that at some point they located the Silk Road servers

in a data center in Iceland and imaged them.

They copied all the data off of them, and seized them...

but we don't know how they found those servers.

The whole idea of the Silk Road was that it ran as a Tor-hidden service,

which means that Tor protected its physical location

and made it very difficult to locate the computers that ran it.

So the mystery of how the FBI, or the DEA, or possibly the NSA,

located those servers is still unsolved

and, in fact, hasn't been mentioned in any of the legal documents

surrounding Ross Ulbricht's trial.

I think his defense has seized on this as...

something that the government doesn't want to talk about.

And if that's the case, then it does raise these Fourth Amendment issues

of can the government use essentially hacking techniques

to dig up evidence on a criminal suspect?

And if so, what kinds of warrant do they need?

If in fact there was some kind of violation of the Fourth Amendment,

in that initial part of the investigation,

that really was the first clue that lead them down this entire chain

to the arrest of Ross Ulbricht,

it could be a giant problem for the prosecution

that then taints every other piece of evidence that they found subsequently.

The government has prosecuted other people for doing

essentially what the government did here, which is...

trying to get underneath the public face of a website.

And they have alleged that getting that information

that's not supposed to be publicly accessible

by sophisticated computer, inquiries or activities,

that that is a violation of federal law.

So here's... and that's why they always say, we didn't do anything wrong,

we didn't do anything in violation, but they really know what's at stake here,

because they've actually prosecuted people for the same thing.

And the government's affidavit, the affidavit from Agent Tarbell

about how they got to the Silk Road servers

has been met with incredulousness by the Internet community.

The Tarbell declaration, to put it politely,

seems vaguely disconnected from the truth.

If you, depending on which security expert you ask,

you will get it's vaguely disconnected to the truth to something filled with...

it is a massive pile of bovine excrement.

What Tarbell's story was is he was typing away at his computer,

visiting the Silk Road website and the CAPTCHA was transmitted in the clear,

and he somehow saw the IP packets go directly to the server.

And so he then connects to that server and gets the CAPTCHA.

Game over, they found the backend server.

Unfortunately, this was playing fast and loose with the truth.

Because the logs provided to the defense

show that what Tarbell found was not the CAPTCHA image,

but instead a php MyAdmin page.

The server was running some stuff over the clear, but not the CAPTCHA.

So Tarbell's story doesn't mesh with the FBI's own evidence.

They hacked the servers and with that access could essentially do whatever they wanted.

Given just the institutional pressure to take this thing down,

it's naive to think that they didn't.

Of course, it's on the table that this is how they discovered him.

He was dealing with Tor. He was dealing with all these technologies

which we know are the subject of NSA investigations,

as revealed by Edward Snowden.

It's at least reasonable to assume that there's been this kind

of parallel construction or interference or like not playing by the rules

that the state deals out for you to play with.

But then again, we all know that it deals the cards.

It runs the game anyway. It's not even...

It's naive to think that this wasn't an available option.

The issue is whether the agent could have done what he said he did.

The theory that's been brought forward in a testimony

by the individual agents that did it,

they were able to manipulate part of the server

to cough up an address that shouldn't have been given up

and that address came back to Iceland.

And that server there was hosting the Silk Road hidden service.

I think we're not gonna know till we go to trial

and we may never know for sure.

There's always this balance of...

trying to be forward leaning in your investigative techniques

and making sure that you don't trample on rights at the same time.

You wanna stay well within the bounds of your legal authority,

because if you step over the line, the evidence is gonna be tossed.

It's not gonna be admissible in court and you may wind up

jeopardizing the outcome of an entire investigation.

And so I think what agencies will try and do is...

they'll want to step right up to the line,

and maybe get a little bit of chalk on their toes, but don't step over it.

Ross' lawyer made a motion to dismiss the case based on the disputed seizure

of the Silk Road servers, arguing that admitting this material

not only violates his client's Fourth Amendment rights,

but would set a dangerous precedent for the rights to privacy of all citizens.

The judge, Katherine Forest, sided with the prosecution

stating that the Tarbell declaration was acceptable.

And the motion was denied.

Search and seizure law in the digital age is really...

doesn't have the limitations on it that...

it does in the physical space.

And we see it not only in the search and seizure laws,

like what is the standard upon which they can come and grab your computer?

What kind of searches can they do on your computer once they have it?

Do they just get everything? We see this at the border.

Or we see this at searches into arrests.

People now carry around smart phones that have their whole lives in them.

And if they get stopped, law enforcement is certainly right now

in a lot of places taking the position that absolutely anything that's connected,

that's on that device, including logging into your accounts

that you can log into from that device, is fair game.

If the prosecution gets away with this warrantless seizure

of Americans' data as well as all these other foreigners,

it could have a lasting precedent

for how the Fourth Amendment works in the digital age.

I think that that, in fact, may be the most lasting effect of the Silk Road.

Generally, what happens in the criminal law field

is that there's some case of major proportion

that is used as a means of changing rules,

or expanding exceptions to constitutional protections,

and once it's there, once the precedent is set,

it then trickles down very quickly and very easily

into all sorts of ordinary cases where, you know, the ends justify the means.

Then all of a sudden, it's now spread.

The average citizen may say, "Well, why is this important to me? Why do I care?

"I'm not buying drugs on the network. Nobody I know is buying drugs on the network,"

but it's not just about that.

We're a democracy and informed citizens...

understand they have a right to privacy

and that the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Information has to be encrypted.

And that goes from a large corporation down to an individual.

And so for those who are arguing that information should not be encrypted,

certainly that makes it easier for law enforcement to... combat,

but it also makes it easier for the cyber criminals to attack.

It makes total sense that criminals are among the early wave,

along with the sort of paranoid people, of these new tools and services.

But that doesn't mean that they're the only people using these services.

There are a hell of a lot of journalists that I know

and regularly communicate with now over Tor.

But you know, for the people who oppose this technology,

who see it as a threat, the fact that criminals use it

is a great way to demonize it.

I definitely do believe that there are people in the US

that don't think that the government is doing anything wrong.

It's not necessarily something that you're concerned with or that you care too much about

or that you're really passionate about until you're standing right in the middle of it.

And it's something more dangerous than any website could ever be

is what our government has become and how they operate.

This goes back to that question of the government kind of trying to treat the Internet

differently without following the same kind of judicial processes.

Well, the Supreme Court has proven that they do not agree.

You know, recently with Riley vs California with an illegal search of a cell phone.

Precedent can be set that will limit their ability to infringe on our rights.

Someone asked how her political views have shifted.

Because suddenly she's standing right in the middle of Tor,

Bitcoin, the war on drugs, online anonymity, encryption.

And she's had a... she's had to learn a lot of different things,

and also not only just the whole legal system but...

everything around the technology and the case.

After over a year in prison, Ross delayed the trial two months,

stating that important discovery evidence he needed to examine

had only just been delivered to him by the prosecution.

The FBI shut down what it calls the most sophisticated

and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet,

but it may be finding new life.

The arrest of Ross Ulbricht and closure of the Silk Road

did nothing to hamper drug sales on the dark net.

Many new markets immediately appeared,

including a re-launch of the Silk Road itself,

also run by someone calling themselves the Dread Pirate Roberts.

And like its predecessor, the second Silk Road also claimed a mandate

of reducing violence and harm in drug transactions.

The Dread Pirate tweets, "Silk Road while under my watch will never harm a soul.

If we did, then we are no better than the thugs on the street."

The new Dread Pirate Roberts told me that he knows he can't be around forever,

and when he's gone, someone else...

he's confident someone else will step up and fill the void.

You can take down the man, but you can't take down the idea.

By this time, statistics appeared claiming the first Silk Road had succeeded

in its mission of reducing violence in the drug trade.

While I was with the Baltimore Police Department in the early 2000s,

I had two city officers in uniform killed by drug dealers on the street.

And there was a family of seven, the Dawson family on Preston Street,

they were killed by one drug dealer in one night, mother, father and five kids.

And so as the years in the early 2000s start moving along,

I'm continuing to think about this from a place of violence

and beginning to realize that our policies of drug prohibition

were actually counterproductive to public safety.

The one thing that I signed on for to improve,

to better public safety in our neighborhoods, was making it worse.

And... I found

a large number of police officers and judges and criminal prosecutors and...

DEA agents and FBI who think the same way.

If Baltimore moved from street corners to online services,

oh, my God, do you know how many shootings,

how many fewer shootings we would have every year, which equate to fewer homicides?

Number one, it removes the... the buyer...

from the back alleys and from the street corners

and from those dangerous places of dealing with the seller.

Buying it over the Internet where it's delivered to you,

removes you from that scenario.

One of the interesting things that having an online market does

is that it makes sellers much more accountable to buyers.

And one of the really interesting innovations is the whole review system,

where buyers can review the sellers and the items

that they bought from these on these market places.

And what that does is it makes sellers more accountable and it lets buyers...

it gives buyers a way to assess both the quality,

the purity and the potency of the drugs they're getting.

It makes these transactions much more safe for the buyers.

But we're shutting them down, attempting to shut them down,

because we will never shut them down.

We've been at this drug war now for over four decades,

and what has happened since then?

At the beginning, it was just the cartels and organized crime making a ton of money.

Today, they make globally $322 billion off this industry.

Corporate America's also now in the game.

Private prisons, okay? Corrections Corporation of America.

About a year ago they gave out $675 million in dividends to the shareholders.

Drug testing companies. It's now become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

And who gets tested?

Those who are in prison or under the control of our criminal justice programs...

on parole and probation.

So corporate America's making a lot of money.

What about law enforcement? Law enforcement's making a ton of money.

The government's 1033 Program, you know,

where we get armored vehicles and machine guns

and whatever we want of the surplus military equipment...

that's because of the drug war.

Over the years we've seen these...

these huge bureaucracies build up around the drug war,

around prosecuting the drug war. You've got the Drug Enforcement Agency.

You've got the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

So a lot of the opposition is just rooted in self interest

among places like the FBI and the DEA,

where if you're telling somebody who's been in the FBI for 30 years

that drugs are no longer a priority, that's an existential threat to them.

That kind of takes away their whole reason for existence.

You really have to think about the danger of some of these drugs,

the severe danger of addiction,

the havoc that it, you know, that it reaps on families

and, you know, and children, and... careers.

And so to say that, you know, we need to step back and liberalize,

well, but you... that's one approach you can take,

but then you've got to look at a cause and effect.

If we do this, what are the second and third order effects?

The FBI, our federal government, they're gonna go in

and they're shutting these places down. But you know what? New ones just open up.

'Cause there's so much money to be made.

They'll continue to open up, and it's just a dog chasing its tail.

We're a team, and we've been working on this thing together right from the start.

The way it's affected me is in some ways very much the same as it affects Lyn,

but I don't have to go out there and talk to reporters.

And we've... we've kind of set it up that way.

It's hard enough having your... your loved one in prison,

but then the whole media thing is, it definitely adds pressure.

I've known for a long time that the media

wasn't reporting the whole story, that it was skewed.

I see what Lyn and I are doing as a... as a pushback to that.

Ross has been in there a year and he's avoided all violence,

even though it's been around him.

That has matured him for sure.

The fact that he's come out of this unscathed so far, speaks volumes.

He seems serious. You know, there's a lot at stake.

He's... feeling good that we got the extension.

He had this mountain of stuff to go through

and I felt like he was running out the clock.

And now they have that extra two months has made...

has been "essential" is the word he used.

And so I think he feels that, you know,

he's much more prepared and ready.

Yeah, he says he's ready for trial. He's ready to go in there and win.

I have also matured in this last year.

Matured in my thinking about ethics, politics.

When I became more and more aware of what the drug war was doing,

the tragedy.

So many people have been victimized by the drug war.

It's a giant mess and it's a story that needs telling.

And we've got a pulpit, in a way, to tell it from.

It's so weird to be doing all this and it's...

distracting and it's challenging

and you wanna do the right thing, and then it's all about Ross.

And then we go and we see him and hug him and talk to him

and hold his hand and it's just like Ross, you know?

It's such a disconnect, and... it's just so hard to see him in there.

Being in the prison, visiting, it's a very emotional experience,

because there are all these families there

and they get to see their loved one one hour a week.

And so they're soaking each other up.

And you're in a room of 150 people,

sitting side-by-side, tight-packed.

And... there's just all this emotion

saturating the atmosphere.

The prisoners have segregated themselves.

But as loved ones coming to visit...

there's no sense of, segregation... race at all.

We're just 150 people whose hearts are breaking.

Of all the Snowden disclosures that have come out to date,

the one that will have the greatest long-term impact

is the revelation that the NSA has been subverting

cryptographic standards and making the Internet less secure.

That disclosure, those articles,

have radicalized a new generation of cryptographers,

a new generation of computer scientists

who are now intent upon building tools and services

that can withstand pervasive government surveillance.

Did you see our wireless from Barclay's Bank?

They like Bitcoin, so they're supporting our work.

They're providing us with free Wi-Fi from the bank.

In the fall of 2014,

as Ross was preparing for his trial,

a group of hackers, programmers and activists

met in a squat in the center of London.

This gathering represented the next wave of the dark net,

developing new and evolved cryptographic tools

that would not be so easily shut down.

Open source is incredibly powerful.

Open source is responsible for WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, Linux,

which runs all of our infrastructure, for Firefox, for Bit Torrent,

for Bitcoin, for all of these... for encryption,

for all of these real uses of tech... not the yuppie...

Angry Birds or silly apps that...

these people, make, you know?

Open source is also an example of how we can organize economically,

an example for the future, to build the products we need

without needing proprietary industry,

without needing the points of control,

without needing masters and slaves and babysitters.

It's not enough to build privacy-preserving tools.

It's not enough to write revolutionary research papers

and design amazing cryptographic primitives.

You have to get them into the hands of the users.

And I think in the future what you'll find is that...

tools like Tor, tools like OTR, like PGP, like Bitcoin

will be built into the services and applications that you use

and you won't know they're there.

We want to empower the individual, protect the small guy.

We have a mistrust of central authority.

We believe in freedom of information.

First of all, we have the centralized drug marketplace, Silk Road.

Governments went in and shut that down.

And then up sprouted dozens of different,

centralized drug markets.

And in a game of whack a mole, they shut down one and now there's dozens.

And now we're entering the realm of decentralized drug markets,

with no central operator, no central point of control.

What are they gonna do?

They're gonna continue to do these kinds of things,

and even if it's a distributed network,

peer-to-peer is worked continuously by

the... state and local law enforcement agencies.

And they arrest people every week.

On November 6, 2014,

law enforcement agencies around the world

launched a coordinated effort called "Operation Onymous,"

seizing hundreds of dark net sites, including the re-launch of the Silk Road.

Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer, once said to me,

"You know, in this cat and mouse game, the mice will win in the end,

but the cats will be well fed." I think that that's the way to see it.

This game is going to continue forever.

[They're always reacting to us...]

[which is fine.]

[But once they're reacted and they've shored up]

[and they've figured out "this is the new defenses, you're not getting past this one."]

[We're just gonna sit there and pick at it and get around it again]

[We're always gonna win. We're always gonna win.]

There's a reason the Silk Road was so powerful.

And I know the cryptos now are writing the kind of automatic Silk Road,

and Amir helped do this.

This is now the peer-to-peer model where there's no one individual administrator.

And seeing that as the weak point, technically speaking, this is all correct.

But there's something kind of...

I don't want to make him a hero, like a...

I don't want to say that he's a hero. But you know...

DPR recognized what was at stake

and he was willing to do the things that most of the libertarians weren't willing to do,

because he was serious about...

I think what the Silk Road meant.

Three weeks before the trial,

the issue of the Murders-For-Hire suddenly resurfaced.

The prosecution announced that due to these allegations,

they would not allow Ross's defense to know the identities of their witnesses.

The defense responded that using these uncharged crimes

in these manner was prejudicial.

A hearing was called to resolve the matter.

The judge ruled that some of the witnesses won't be made available to the defense

until right before the trial.

It's based on her saying that Ross might intimidate

or even murder people... from jail.

When all this first happened, I said, well, it would still have been necessary

to say that, well, this man's a murderer and he was only out for his own gain.

You know, he had... what do you call it, a callous disregard for human life.

It's necessary to paint a figure that way rather than to make him...

you know, a martyr of the war on drugs. I think that's just good planning.

I think it's gonna be difficult... to have a fair trial.

If you are innocent until proven guilty, then with all the evidence

and all the stories that have been written, I think it's gonna be really difficult to...

to find people who are not influenced by any of this at all going into it.

The day before the trial, Ross provided a written statement.

It was the closest anyone would ever get to an actual interview.

[Throughout my adult life I've tried to stay positive...]

[and it's even more important to do that now.]

[I'm up against a very powerful adversary.]

[You know, it's all too easy to think...]

[that things are hopeless and to give up.]

[But they're not.]

[They're not hopeless.]

[I'll never give up hope...]

[of being free again.]

Ross Ulbricht went on trial today. A jury will decide a case that could impact

- the future of Internet privacy. - Good evening to you.

Opening arguments taking place today, and the first witness took the stand

and actually just got off a few minutes ago...

A Homeland Security investigation special agent

who testified saying... "Thousands of envelopes of drugs..."

I think everyone was surprised that Ross Ulbricht and his lawyers

took this to trial in the first place instead of just taking a plea deal

like pretty much everyone expected. And today, we saw why,

which is that they've actually got a pretty compelling alternate narrative

of how this whole case has played out.

The story that Dratel is telling that Ross did create the Silk Road,

which is an amazing admission to begin with,

and that the real operator of the Silk Road, the Dread Pirate Roberts, framed him.

It's a kind of theory that I never heard posed before,

that instead of Ross being the Dread Pirate Roberts, he was framed by him.

But in many ways, you know, it's something I should've expected

because it's what the Dread Pirate Roberts told me when I interviewed him

in July of 2013 that he didn't create the Silk Road,

that he had inherited it from its creator, kind of like a business acquisition.

The FBI has told me that that was Ross Ulbricht lying to me.

If it is a lie, it would require just a lot of foresight and planning,

kind of like the... you know, an amazing game of chess or something.

In the first days of the trial, the prosecution presented evidence

that Ross kept a journal on his laptop describing his involvement in the Silk Road

and that the Bitcoins seized from his laptop came directly from the site.

While the defense would argue that Ross abandoned the Silk Road

after creating it and that the journal and the Bitcoin were planted on his laptop.

Andy, you interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts.

What's the evidence connecting Dread Pirate Roberts to Ulbricht directly?

In the first couple of weeks of this trial, which is ongoing now,

we've seen that the prosecution has a very strong case.

Once they seized his laptop, they found that he had kept a journal.

If this is, in fact, Ulbricht's journal. His defense claims it's not.

He documented the administration of this site for years.

He has a log book of daily activities.

So this is a really tight case that's gonna be very difficult

for Ulbricht to squeeze out of it.

Underneath, in the deep web,

we have an area where this young man, according to the government,

has made a decision that he's going to run

an illegal drug empire and we need to stop you,

swift and certain prosecution, and ultimate certain punishment.

As the trial continued, Dratel planned to reveal the government's own evidence

showed they suspected multiple people of running the Silk Road.

During his cross examination of DHS agent Der-Yeghiayan,

Dratel was able to expose that the agent had long suspected another person

to be the Dread Pirate Roberts,

going so far as to seek a warrant for this suspect.

The protection protested this entire line of questioning

on the grounds that it was hearsay.

The judge sided with the prosecution and Dratel was no longer allowed

to question government witnesses about alternate suspects

that came from the government's own evidence.

When the time came for Dratel to begin his defense,

he intended to use expert witnesses

to explain that the complex technology behind encryption and cryptocurrency

made it difficult to prove that the journal and the Bitcoin belonged to Ross.

The prosecution objected to these witnesses,

claiming they should have been made known earlier in the trial

and they were not necessary for the jury's understanding of the case.

Once again, the judge sided with the prosecution,

stating that this case did not require specialized knowledge.

Without expert witnesses and unable to pursue

the government's own evidence of an alternate DPR,

Dratel's entire defense was effectively blocked.

The trial ended abruptly the next day.

The trial of Ross Ulbricht raised more questions than it answered.

Did we really know the full truth of the Silk Road case?

Would this case set a precedent for the warrantless search

of Americans' digital property?

Whatever the ultimate outcome, it was clear that the fall of the Silk Road

was not the end of a chapter, but the beginning.

And the movement to create tools and services for online privacy

is stronger than ever.

The trial of Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht

concluded when a jury found him guilty on seven different counts

that included three drug charges as well as computer hacking, money laundering

and even a kingpin charge of continuing a criminal enterprise.

Ulbricht faces a minimum of 30 years behind bars,

but his defense plans to appeal this decision.

Anyone here, all of us,

are going to be judged by things for which there is no attribution in real life.

There's only attribution on the Internet

for things to be created, codified, edited, moved, hacked.

- Was it a fair trial? - No, I don't think so.

As the actual verdict was read, the word "guilty" was said seven times.

Ross was just staring straight ahead. I don't know what was on his face.

But afterwards he turned back to look at his family

and he had this really heartbreaking kind of stoic smile.

And he was just... he wasn't crying, but he was just blinking...

like blinking hard.

And...

then as he was led away, his mom said, "This is not the end."

You know, that was it.

The evidence against Ulbricht was so powerful

and Dratel's strategy had been to try to cross examine every government witness

and to pull out his alternative story through that cross examination.

And when the judge essentially shut that down and said

you have to limit your cross examination to the scope of the government's...

initial questioning, that really prevented him from telling any other story.

We have a much more informed perspective than the rest of the world.

We have meetings that we've had with Josh through the last year and three months...

regular meetings.

We know about how he felt like he might win the case, in cross examination.

We know that the government, that his witnesses were blocked from testifying.

We were in the courtroom and we saw what happened and the...

the travesty, the... appalling,

obstruction of justice that happened.

There was 5,000 pages of government evidence to do with one witness alone,

Jarod Der-Yeghiayan. None of that was allowed.

5,000 pages, and it was dumped on the defense 10 days before trial.

Another 2,500 pages for other witnesses was dumped on the defense a week before trial.

And it was full of exculpatory evidence favorable to Ross

that was not permitted to be used.

All this great, huge field of evidence

that came out in the 3,500 material, a week before trial, that was...

that would help prove Ross's innocence

was excluded from being brought out in the courtroom.

It would have been a whole different case. This was the trial that didn't happen.

- The trial that didn't happen. - It just didn't happen because it was...

only the prosecution's narrative that we heard.

So then what about the hacking of the Silk Road servers?

What about the precedent issue of the case?

We didn't get that far. We didn't get to even have that kind of public hearing

where the FBI has to say how they did it

and then we get to decide whether that was legal or illegal.

That's maybe the most frustrating thing about this case from a legal point of view

is that American law enforcement hacked a foreign server, I believe,

and they didn't have a warrant

and they completely got away with it and nobody's even...

nobody even gets to ask any questions about it.

- How is Ross through all of this? - He's an amazing guy.

You know, he's handling this so much better than I would've.

I don't know how I could've taken what he's put up with

and been subjected to in this last year and three months.

And we pray that...

his spirit won't be crushed by this.

It seems that Ross conceived of the Silk Road,

that he ran it for its entire existence online.

I actually accept that the government has proven that.

But Ross Ulbricht... is a fascinating character.

He invented this brilliant thing.

He had principles. He wasn't just a cyber-criminal.

He wasn't just a drug lord or a kingpin as he's described in these charges.

He was also an idealistic guy.

And I'm gonna be conflicted about both the...

kind of virtue of the Silk Road and of Ross Ulbricht as a person,

I think, for the rest of my life.

I'm not gonna be able to come to a conclusion about this.

[On March 25th, 2015, a criminal complaint was filed...]

[against two former federal agents who led the Silk Road task force in Baltimore.]

[Among other charges, these agents allegedly stole over a million dollars in Bitcoin...]

[from the Silk Road and transferred them to personal accounts.]

[The government did not allow Ulbricht's defense...]

[to address this criminal investigation during the trial.]

[On May 29th, 2015, Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison...]

[without the possibility of parole.]

I don't know. Got any more questions or should we wrap it up?

Yes. What are you going to do over the next five years?

In one sentence.

I'm going to do a few things, so one sentence isn't enough.

But, I wanna... I'm pretty sure I wanna start a family in the next five years.

Nice. Okay.

And...

and... yeah, make more friends

and close people I love.

Yeah. Focus on...

being more connected to people.

And... 20 years?

20 years.

I wanna have had a...

substantial, positive impact on the future of humanity by that time.

Do you think you're gonna live forever?

I think it's a possibility.

I honestly do. I think I might live forever in some form

by that time with technologies changing so fast.

Cool. I hope I'm going there.

Sweet.

[Someday, we could be a shining beacon of hope for the oppressed people of the world]

[just as so many oppressed and violated souls have found refuge here already.]

[Will it happen overnight? No.]

[Will it happen in a life time? I don't know.]

[Is it worth fighting for until my last breath? Of course.]

[Once you've seen what's possible, how can you do otherwise?]