But Ross had no interest in parity. In the current version of the site, it was Ross’s world, and he got to decide what went and what didn’t. He dictated who got a raise and who didn’t. People who worked hard were rewarded, as he had recently done with some focused employees, giving some of them an extra few hundred dollars in Bitcoin when they excelled. When Ross wanted to reward Smedley, the chief programmer, he did it on his terms. “You’ve really stepped up to the plate here already. Your base pay is still $900 of course, but I’ll throw [in] a bonus.” And when Inigo, another lieutenant, needed help finishing a renovation project on his house, Dread gave him an extra $500 to pass along to his handyman. Those kinds of decisions were up to Ross the Boss to decide, not VJ.
What would have happened if he had to run these things past his lieutenant? No, thank you. Plus, how would Ross exert power and control on the site? He was already having a difficult time getting people to show up to work on time, or fill out the correct reports that he wanted to see at the end of their shift. He even enjoyed disciplining employees, telling them (still in Ross’s hokey banter) that they had “fudged up” when they needed a good scolding.
Ross had worked too hard to simply hand anything to anyone. And shortly after this conversation with VJ, Ross simply stopped talking to him for a few days. Instead he retreated into the real world. Into San Francisco.
As Ross stood up from the grassy knoll at Alamo Square and reached for his brown laptop bag to head back to his apartment, there was no question about it: This was the place he was supposed to be. This was the city where Ross would make the Silk Road into the greatest start-up the world had ever seen. And yet, as he walked back along Sacramento Street, past those beautiful painted lady Victorian homes and the modern glass skyscrapers, Ross didn’t know that he would soon face challenges that no other start-up in the city would have to deal with. That in a matter of months he would find himself dealing with dirty cops and rogue employees, and Ross Ulbricht would have to decide if he wanted to have people tortured and killed in order to protect his growing enterprise.
Chapter 34
CHRIS IN THE PIT
It had been a few months since the FBI had taken down the LulzSec hackers, and the hangovers from the subsequent celebrations at the Whiskey Tavern had since worn off. Yet there was one aspect of that case that Chris Tarbell couldn’t get out of his mind.
He was sitting in an area known as “the Pit” at the New York FBI offices, talking with other FBI agents—Ilhwan Yum and Thom Kiernan—weighing if the cybercrimes division of the FBI should get involved in the Silk Road case or go after a different target instead.
The Pit, where they sat, looked like a sunken living room and was big enough for a handful of desks and chairs. This enclave had been around for decades and was considered the top spot in the New York City headquarters. Years earlier, before Tarbell and the nerdy computer agents started occupying the desks there, the Pit was home to organized-crime agents. Back then they went after mobsters who stayed as far away from technology as possible, fearing that something as inconsequential as a pay phone could be used to track their location. Now the men in the Pit went after mobsters who had adopted technology as a way to hide their whereabouts.
But the old guys and the new did share one thing in common: both generations of FBI agents were practical jokers. Some days Tarbell and his colleagues would rub leftover deli meat on another agent’s desk phone earpiece, then call from another room to watch the agent smear roast beef and mayonnaise on his or her ear. Tarbell had once played a joke using another agent’s car, hooking the car’s horn up to its brake pedal so every time the agent tried to slow down on his drive home, his horn blared at the cars in front of him. And then Tarbell was always ready with a “would you rather” question.
Tarbell’s desk was covered in papers and paraphernalia from previous cases. In the center of this mess were his three computers, the two classified machines that were used only for internal work and the one unclassified computer that couldn’t be traced back to the FBI, where on the screen the Silk Road Web site currently sat looking back at the agents.
As they spoke about the site, Tarbell thought to himself that if they did go after the Silk Road, he was going to do everything he could to avoid the unthinkable mistake the Bureau had made in the recent LulzSec case.
There were two main aspects of the LulzSec arrests the Feds needed to pull off for the takedown to work properly. First, it was imperative that they capture every suspect at the exact same time, even though they were all in different states and countries. They had to ensure that the hackers didn’t alert anyone else about their arrests, or the entire operation would fall apart. The FBI had pulled this part off seamlessly. But it was the second detail, which was equally important, where they had failed dismally: It was crucial to capture each suspect on his or her laptop with the computer open. If the hackers closed their computers and those computers were encrypted, the data inside would be locked away forever. Even with the fastest and most advanced FBI computers, it could take more than a thousand years to figure out the password of a properly encrypted machine.
One of the most important LulzSec targets that the FBI planned to arrest was also allegedly the most dangerous member of the group. His name was Jeremy Hammond, and he was a political activist and computer hacker who had been arrested more than half a dozen times for protests against both Nazis and Republicans, for breaking into private servers around the world, and for releasing information to WikiLeaks.
Fast-forward to the night of the LulzSec takedown. The plan was as follows: Tarbell would go to Ireland to oversee the arrest of one of the LulzSec team’s youngest hackers, a spritely nineteen-year-old. An FBI team in Chicago would be stationed, ready to pounce on Hammond. Senior agents in New York would watch live video feeds of the other arrests. Given Hammond’s ties to political advocacy groups, and his several previous arrests, there was a chance that the hideout he was in would also be full of other activists, some with violent records. So at the last minute a higher-up at the FBI decided to send in a fully armed SWAT team to get Hammond on his computer. It would be the first time the FBI would use a SWAT team to arrest someone on a laptop.
It was early evening when the FBI trucks tore into the Bridgeport area of Chicago and a dozen men in bulletproof vests with machine guns descended on the single-story brick house where Hammond was hiding. The wooden front door flew off its hinges, and the agents stormed inside, throwing a flashbang grenade into the kitchen on the left and then scurrying into the other rooms with weapons drawn, screaming, “FBI! FBI! FBI!” But in the few seconds it took the SWAT team to reach the rear of the house, where Hammond sat, the dreadlocked hacker had calmly pushed the lid of his laptop closed, and there he sat at his desk, his hands in the air and a locked computer in front of him. It was the equivalent of doing a massive drug bust and the suspect flushing the drugs down the toilet before the cops made it into the bathroom.
While all the agents were upset about the laptop incident, Tarbell was particularly tormented by it. He didn’t make mistakes. Ever.