7 ms·

The Untold Story of Silk Road (2015)

90 points by miki123211 8y ago

dmix 8y ago
The Silk Road was written in PHP wasn’t it? Did Ross write it himself or did he hire someone or use some 3rd party e-commerce platform and customized it? The story mentions him writing an Amazon web scraping script then managing the bookstores e-commerce website but not much else prior. He just doesn’t sound like a full blown programmer by 2011. Not to mention running a Tor hidden service, managing the servers, managing his anonymity, Bitcoin tumbling, security, etc. He must have had to learn a ton on the fly, yet he figured it all out pretty fast it seems. I haven’t read the whole story yet though, so maybe he was more technically inclined initially than it appears.
- Phlarp 8y ago
  One of the major bits of evidence that the FBI used to establish a link between DPR and Ross was that very early on he used an account on stackoverflow that still had links to his true identity to ask a question about configuring servers for a TOR hidden service.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    Not only that, but he used the same or a very similar username to spread the news about the Silk Road market on a different website. (Of course he did this in a plausibly deniable way, but if it turns out that the same guy has been asking for help with making that kind of site on SO, it doesn't take much to put two and two together...) Not to mention the other mistakes he most likely made while running the site, which (when brought to light after the investigation) proved to everyone just how far that dark market was from the "libertarian utopia" DPR liked to talk about. Of course there's a pretty big selection effect here; we would expect the people involved in something like SR to be quite overconfident and perhaps overly motivated by greed, and thus to be more likely to do some of these things.
    - Phlarp 8y ago
      Well, the "violence" that took place was perhaps provoked by and certainly facilitated through law enforcement. I use quotes because it appears he primarily got extorted. Those same federal agents also sought to enrich themselves at various points throughout the case. Mr. Ulbricht did illegal things and paid a price for it, but the whole case reeks and the agents that played in the dirt should be made an example of just the same as he was.
      - dwd 8y ago
        Agent Carl Force went to jail... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/corrupt-silk-road-agent-carl-force-sentenced-to-78-months/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/corrupt-silk-roa...
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
  Ross certainly seems precocious but there is also an established theory that he had help from at least one heavily involved mentor who may have even shared the DPR handle and access.
  - companyhen 8y ago
    Check these articles out, he had at least one mentor https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgajmv/these-are-the-two-forgotten-architects-of-the-silk-road https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgajmv/these-are-... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43e7y/fbi-says-suspected-silk-road-architect-variety-jones-has-been-arrested https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43e7y/fbi-says-s...
    - zipwitch 8y ago
      So, he really wasn't the original Dread Pirate Roberts?
      - bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
        Unless the parallel reconstructionism is really that good, the evidence that he was the "original" DPR in the Silk Road context is pretty strong. Whether he was the DPR that ordered the hits or someone else had taken over by/for that point is what is more fuzzy. The 2013 Wired DPR interview was officially with DPR the Second, according to DPR the Second. [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-interview-with-a-digital-drug-lord-the-silk-roads-dread-pirate-roberts-qa/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-int...
  - caymanjim 8y ago
    Someone serving life in prison with no chance of parole isn't going to lie to protect anyone. If there were anyone at all to rat out, he'd have done it.
- smnplk 8y ago
  https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/silk-road-s-dread-pirate-ross-ulbricht-asked-stack-overflow-question-under-real-name.html?via=gdpr-consent https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/silk-road-s-dread-pirat... Here is the famous SO question, he later changed his username to frosty, but originally he logged in using FB. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a-tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne... edit: Add link to actual question.
  - fabiandesimone 8y ago
    Funny how it says that last time active was 4 months ago.
    - smnplk 8y ago
      That probably means someone was active on this question page by commenting or answering. His profile was last active on Jun 15 '13 at 2:33
- amyjess 8y ago
  He had help from Variety Jones and Richard Bates. I don't know anything about VJ, but Richard was a software engineer (I knew him personally: we went to college together, he was a CS major, and he had a job developing software professionally while he was still in college).
  - 3131s 8y ago
    The person who ran Open Vendor Database also did provided some security assistance / pentesting to Silk Road, as far as I could tell this person was quite competent.
- shiado 8y ago
  It was written in PHP with CodeIgniter I believe. Some of his journal entries detailed how hopeless he was at developing it and how he had to hire people who were better programmers. https://codeigniter.com/ https://codeigniter.com/
randycupertino 8y ago
Anyone who enjoys this article should check out American Kingpin written by Nick Bilton. I finished the audiobook recently and loved it! Very well researched, great story, nonfiction that reads like a fiction thriller, and great narration. Loved it.
- tunnuz 8y ago
  Second that. The article linked was an excerpt from the work in progress version. Good page turner.
- acomjean 8y ago
  Don't forget "part two" of the article linked at the bottom. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/ "His roommates thought that the guy named Josh, who had answered their Craigslist ad, was a currency trader. They did think it was weird that he had no cell phone, paid in cash, and was always on his computer." Its an ongoing saga. There were some "hitmen" he hired on the site. They ended up being scammers but they arrested one just 6 months ago.. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleged-hitman-redandwhite-arrested-in-vancouver/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...
- shkkmo 8y ago
  This article is poorly reported drivel that serves only to promote the prosecutor's narrative without asking any of the difficult questions involved in this case.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    You are referring to which questions?
    - shkkmo 8y ago
      Questions about parallel reconstruction and warrants. Questions about how much responsibility platform providers bear for the content they facilitate and who gets to call themselves a platform provider. Questions about provenance and chain of custody of digital evidence and question about the admissibility of digital evidence when investigators make major forensic mistakes. Questions about unequal ability to call experts and prosecutorial tricks to suppress evidence and disadvantage the defense. Questions about jurisdiction overlap, competition between agencies and localities as they relate to political pressure in high profile investigations. There are so many interesting and highly relevant questions brought up by this case and this article pretty much ignores them.
teh_infallible 8y ago
Actually, I think this is the real “untold story of Silk Road”: https://freeross.org/railroaded/ https://freeross.org/railroaded/
- digianarchist 8y ago
  I honestly don’t know how people can hand-waive away the murder for hire charges like this site does.
  - teh_infallible 8y ago
    Maybe because the whole thing was fabricated by corrupt law enforcement agents?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      > Maybe because the whole thing was fabricated by corrupt law enforcement agents? That conspiracy theory isn't compatible with the arrest of one of the alledged hitmen that was posted a few comments bellow.
      - A2017U1 8y ago
        > That conspiracy theory Aren't two agents heavily involved in the case now in jail as a result of it? Hardly a stretch to make, not to mention the case got thrown out and never even made it to trial. It's certainly in the realm of plausibility.
  - wickedlogic 8y ago
    https://coingeek.com/us-attorney-wants-ross-ulbrichts-murder-hire-charges-dropped/ https://coingeek.com/us-attorney-wants-ross-ulbrichts-murder... "hand-waive" seems inaccurate here, a lot of Ross's supporters flat out disagree with these charges in particular.
derekp7 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, is it actually legal for the FBI to send someone a package, then use that package as pretense to arrest them? I thought there were all sorts of rules against that.
- wmf 8y ago
  One way to look at it is that law enforcement people are trained in what evidence is admissible and what isn't, so they understand and have an incentive to follow proper procedures. But this can become self-fulfilling if people give law enforcement unlimited benefit of the doubt, allowing abuses to happen unchecked.
- LiquidSky 8y ago
  If you're referring to the arrest of Green in the beginning, the authorities had built up a case that Green was a major player in the Silk Road and the package delivery was the final confirmation. You seem to be talking about entrapment, but entrapment is when law enforcement induces someone to commit a crime they would otherwise not have committed. Here they had evidence that Green routinely arranged and received drug shipments, and that this final shipment made by an undercover officer was part of that routine.
n00bdude 8y ago
I remember reading this back around when it was written - and haven't read a WIRED article I've enjoyed since. Know this is slightly off-topic, but does anyone have another WIRED article they enjoyed reading? Maybe of this Longform Style?
- ahartman00 8y ago
  Here is a very long article by Neal Stephenson about how the internet is connected around the world. He travels along the actual wire. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
  - n00bdude 8y ago
    This article is great! Thanks for sharing
mindslight 8y ago
So much conflict and waste caused by the desire to restrict how other people may alter their own consciousness.
mito88 8y ago
murderous kingpin? :)

90 points by miki123211 8y ago

dmix 8y ago

The Silk Road was written in PHP wasn’t it? Did Ross write it himself or did he hire someone or use some 3rd party e-commerce platform and customized it? The story mentions him writing an Amazon web scraping script then managing the bookstores e-commerce website but not much else prior. He just doesn’t sound like a full blown programmer by 2011. Not to mention running a Tor hidden service, managing the servers, managing his anonymity, Bitcoin tumbling, security, etc. He must have had to learn a ton on the fly, yet he figured it all out pretty fast it seems. I haven’t read the whole story yet though, so maybe he was more technically inclined initially than it appears.

Phlarp 8y ago
One of the major bits of evidence that the FBI used to establish a link between DPR and Ross was that very early on he used an account on stackoverflow that still had links to his true identity to ask a question about configuring servers for a TOR hidden service.
- 0815test 8y ago
  Not only that, but he used the same or a very similar username to spread the news about the Silk Road market on a different website. (Of course he did this in a plausibly deniable way, but if it turns out that the same guy has been asking for help with making that kind of site on SO, it doesn't take much to put two and two together...) Not to mention the other mistakes he most likely made while running the site, which (when brought to light after the investigation) proved to everyone just how far that dark market was from the "libertarian utopia" DPR liked to talk about. Of course there's a pretty big selection effect here; we would expect the people involved in something like SR to be quite overconfident and perhaps overly motivated by greed, and thus to be more likely to do some of these things.
  - Phlarp 8y ago
    Well, the "violence" that took place was perhaps provoked by and certainly facilitated through law enforcement. I use quotes because it appears he primarily got extorted. Those same federal agents also sought to enrich themselves at various points throughout the case. Mr. Ulbricht did illegal things and paid a price for it, but the whole case reeks and the agents that played in the dirt should be made an example of just the same as he was.
    - dwd 8y ago
      Agent Carl Force went to jail... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/corrupt-silk-road-agent-carl-force-sentenced-to-78-months/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/corrupt-silk-roa...
bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
Ross certainly seems precocious but there is also an established theory that he had help from at least one heavily involved mentor who may have even shared the DPR handle and access.
- companyhen 8y ago
  Check these articles out, he had at least one mentor https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgajmv/these-are-the-two-forgotten-architects-of-the-silk-road https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgajmv/these-are-... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43e7y/fbi-says-suspected-silk-road-architect-variety-jones-has-been-arrested https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43e7y/fbi-says-s...
  - zipwitch 8y ago
    So, he really wasn't the original Dread Pirate Roberts?
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
      Unless the parallel reconstructionism is really that good, the evidence that he was the "original" DPR in the Silk Road context is pretty strong. Whether he was the DPR that ordered the hits or someone else had taken over by/for that point is what is more fuzzy. The 2013 Wired DPR interview was officially with DPR the Second, according to DPR the Second. [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-interview-with-a-digital-drug-lord-the-silk-roads-dread-pirate-roberts-qa/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-int...
- caymanjim 8y ago
  Someone serving life in prison with no chance of parole isn't going to lie to protect anyone. If there were anyone at all to rat out, he'd have done it.
smnplk 8y ago
https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/silk-road-s-dread-pirate-ross-ulbricht-asked-stack-overflow-question-under-real-name.html?via=gdpr-consent https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/silk-road-s-dread-pirat... Here is the famous SO question, he later changed his username to frosty, but originally he logged in using FB. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a-tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne... edit: Add link to actual question.
- fabiandesimone 8y ago
  Funny how it says that last time active was 4 months ago.
  - smnplk 8y ago
    That probably means someone was active on this question page by commenting or answering. His profile was last active on Jun 15 '13 at 2:33
amyjess 8y ago
He had help from Variety Jones and Richard Bates. I don't know anything about VJ, but Richard was a software engineer (I knew him personally: we went to college together, he was a CS major, and he had a job developing software professionally while he was still in college).
- 3131s 8y ago
  The person who ran Open Vendor Database also did provided some security assistance / pentesting to Silk Road, as far as I could tell this person was quite competent.
shiado 8y ago
It was written in PHP with CodeIgniter I believe. Some of his journal entries detailed how hopeless he was at developing it and how he had to hire people who were better programmers. https://codeigniter.com/ https://codeigniter.com/

randycupertino 8y ago

Anyone who enjoys this article should check out American Kingpin written by Nick Bilton. I finished the audiobook recently and loved it! Very well researched, great story, nonfiction that reads like a fiction thriller, and great narration. Loved it.

tunnuz 8y ago
Second that. The article linked was an excerpt from the work in progress version. Good page turner.
acomjean 8y ago
Don't forget "part two" of the article linked at the bottom. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/ "His roommates thought that the guy named Josh, who had answered their Craigslist ad, was a currency trader. They did think it was weird that he had no cell phone, paid in cash, and was always on his computer." Its an ongoing saga. There were some "hitmen" he hired on the site. They ended up being scammers but they arrested one just 6 months ago.. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleged-hitman-redandwhite-arrested-in-vancouver/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...
shkkmo 8y ago
This article is poorly reported drivel that serves only to promote the prosecutor's narrative without asking any of the difficult questions involved in this case.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  You are referring to which questions?
  - shkkmo 8y ago
    Questions about parallel reconstruction and warrants. Questions about how much responsibility platform providers bear for the content they facilitate and who gets to call themselves a platform provider. Questions about provenance and chain of custody of digital evidence and question about the admissibility of digital evidence when investigators make major forensic mistakes. Questions about unequal ability to call experts and prosecutorial tricks to suppress evidence and disadvantage the defense. Questions about jurisdiction overlap, competition between agencies and localities as they relate to political pressure in high profile investigations. There are so many interesting and highly relevant questions brought up by this case and this article pretty much ignores them.

teh_infallible 8y ago

Actually, I think this is the real “untold story of Silk Road”: https://freeross.org/railroaded/ https://freeross.org/railroaded/

digianarchist 8y ago
I honestly don’t know how people can hand-waive away the murder for hire charges like this site does.
- teh_infallible 8y ago
  Maybe because the whole thing was fabricated by corrupt law enforcement agents?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    > Maybe because the whole thing was fabricated by corrupt law enforcement agents? That conspiracy theory isn't compatible with the arrest of one of the alledged hitmen that was posted a few comments bellow.
    - A2017U1 8y ago
      > That conspiracy theory Aren't two agents heavily involved in the case now in jail as a result of it? Hardly a stretch to make, not to mention the case got thrown out and never even made it to trial. It's certainly in the realm of plausibility.
- wickedlogic 8y ago
  https://coingeek.com/us-attorney-wants-ross-ulbrichts-murder-hire-charges-dropped/ https://coingeek.com/us-attorney-wants-ross-ulbrichts-murder... "hand-waive" seems inaccurate here, a lot of Ross's supporters flat out disagree with these charges in particular.

derekp7 8y ago

Just out of curiosity, is it actually legal for the FBI to send someone a package, then use that package as pretense to arrest them? I thought there were all sorts of rules against that.

wmf 8y ago
One way to look at it is that law enforcement people are trained in what evidence is admissible and what isn't, so they understand and have an incentive to follow proper procedures. But this can become self-fulfilling if people give law enforcement unlimited benefit of the doubt, allowing abuses to happen unchecked.
LiquidSky 8y ago
If you're referring to the arrest of Green in the beginning, the authorities had built up a case that Green was a major player in the Silk Road and the package delivery was the final confirmation. You seem to be talking about entrapment, but entrapment is when law enforcement induces someone to commit a crime they would otherwise not have committed. Here they had evidence that Green routinely arranged and received drug shipments, and that this final shipment made by an undercover officer was part of that routine.

n00bdude 8y ago

I remember reading this back around when it was written - and haven't read a WIRED article I've enjoyed since. Know this is slightly off-topic, but does anyone have another WIRED article they enjoyed reading? Maybe of this Longform Style?

ahartman00 8y ago
Here is a very long article by Neal Stephenson about how the internet is connected around the world. He travels along the actual wire. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- n00bdude 8y ago
  This article is great! Thanks for sharing

mindslight 8y ago

So much conflict and waste caused by the desire to restrict how other people may alter their own consciousness.

mito88 8y ago

murderous kingpin? :)