Another search showed that Ross Ulbricht was a white male from the suburbs of Texas in his late twenties. But there was something missing from the profile of this new suspect: Ross Ulbricht had no computer science background.
Of course, being the first person to ever post about the Silk Road online by no means meant that this was the man who had created the Amazon of drugs. For all Gary knew, dozens or even hundreds of people might have already been discussing the site in private chats, or on unsearchable areas of the Internet, before “Altoid” wrote about it on those forums. But it was enough to add Ross Ulbricht’s name to a handful of other suspects Gary had been collecting, all people who might be, in some way or another, involved with the Silk Road.
While he didn’t know it at the time, Gary had just discovered the equivalent of a parking ticket on the Son of Sam’s car. Except this one was on an obscure post left on a forum on the Internet.
Chapter 51
TARBELL FINDS A MISTAKE
Chris Tarbell bolted out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office at 1 Saint Andrews Plaza in New York. He was walking at a brisk pace toward the FBI headquarters across the street as he reached into his pocket and grasped a tiny gray thumb drive that could change the world—at least, Chris Tarbell’s world.
He could barely contain the excitement at the reality that the thumb drive he held possibly contained the servers for the Silk Road. The drive had arrived in the mail that morning, shipped from authorities in Iceland. If the server it contained was not encrypted, it could possibly lead the FBI to the Dread Pirate Roberts.
When the FBI had opened the official investigation into the Silk Road a couple of months earlier, Tarbell and his small team of federal agents were already a thousand steps ahead of every other government group working the case. The cybercrime agents had, after all, spent years hunting for and arresting people on the Dark Web, taking down hackers, pedophiles, identity thieves, and even terrorists, many of whom had adopted these technologies as silent weapons.
The FBI agents also knew that, more often than not, the malevolent people they hunted made mistakes. Sometimes small and seemingly innocuous blunders, but mistakes nonetheless. Often all the agents needed to do to crack open a case was to find one of these.
Which was what Tarbell had recently done.
Given his background in computer forensics, Tarbell could scour technical forums online that discussed the code that held the Silk Road together and actually understand what people were saying. Soon after opening his investigation, Tarbell noticed something that other experienced programmers had seen online: that a recent update to the Silk Road server had left a small but potentially fateful mistake open on the site’s log-in page. The error appeared to leak the server’s IP address, a series of numbers that was akin to a home address but, rather than pointing at a house, pointed at a server, even a hidden one on the Dark Web.
Upon investigation, it turned out the mistake was a real clue, and after a few hours running software that took advantage of the error, Tarbell was able to pinpoint the IP address that housed the server that stored the Silk Road, which was, it turned out, in Iceland. (Hours after he found the error, the Dread Pirate Roberts saw it too and patched the hole.) It was a huge break in the case, but it was unclear what, if anything, was on that machine. In one scenario the server could tell the FBI the who, what, when, and where about the people who ran the site. But if the server was encrypted, which it likely was, or even deleted by the time they reached it, the clue could amount to absolutely nothing.
It had taken several weeks, a quick trip overseas, some legal wrangling, and a few beers with some Icelandic cops to get Iceland to hand over all of the information on the server. And then in mid-June a copy had arrived by mail at the U.S. Attorney’s Office on a gray thumb drive (likely swimming alongside some drugs that had been purchased on the Silk Road).
Tarbell, now holding that drive in his hand, swept past the security guards at the FBI building. He clicked his key card and charged toward the twenty-third floor, looking for Thom Kiernan, the computer scientist he worked with in the cybercrime group.
“I got it,” Tarbell said gleefully when he found Thom in lab 1A.
The computer station in the lab was a long bench with monitors, keyboards, and hard drives in every direction. The two men pulled up chairs in front of one of the machines as Tarbell handed Thom the drive, watching with rapt anticipation as he placed it in the computer. Thom’s fingers started rapidly dancing on the keyboard, opening the folders and delving into its content. The two men were anxiously excited at the possibility of what it might hold. And then Thom’s expression crumpled. He turned to Tarbell despondently and said the last two words on earth that either of them wanted to hear: “It’s encrypted.”
On the screen in front of them was an endless string of random characters, numbers, and letters that looked like complete gobbledygook. Thousands of lines of unintelligible garbage.
Tarbell was deflated as he picked up the phone and called Serrin Turner at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the man who had just handed him the drive, leaving a voice mail that said to “call me back as soon as possible; there’s a big problem.”
“Fuck!” Tarbell blurted out as he slammed the phone down. “It’s game over.”
After a few pointless attempts at unlocking the folders (which was akin to trying to break into Fort Knox with a paperclip) Tarbell reluctantly wandered back to his desk, dejected. In the afternoon Serrin called him back.
“What are we going to do now?” Serrin asked.
“I honestly have no idea,” Tarbell replied. “I’m not sure there is anything we can do.” As far as they were concerned, it really was game over. He hung up, crushed.
A couple of days went by, and Tarbell called Serrin again to discuss something else. At the end of the call, Serrin asked if they had made any headway on the Silk Road server.
“Nothing,” Tarbell said.
“And the pass code didn’t work?”
“What pass code?”
“The Iceland guys sent a pass code along with the thumb drive,” Serrin explained.
“You never gave me the pass code!” Tarbell responded, shocked that this was the first he was hearing about this, as the excitement from days earlier returned.
“I’m pretty sure I did? Here, let me get it,” Serrin said, rustling some papers on his desk. “It’s ‘try to crack this NSA’ with no spaces.” It was a jab at the NSA from the Icelandic authorities after Edward Snowden had leaked a slew of top secret information to the press a few months earlier. When Thom typed the password into the files on the gray thumb drive, they opened like magic, and there, in front of Tarbell’s eyes, was the entire Silk Road server, unencrypted and as plain as day.
“Holy shit!” Tarbell yelled.
“Holy shit is right.”
“It’s open. It’s wide open,” Tarbell said to Serrin over the phone.