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00:00.
00:01.
00:11ODal 24 de pouca de 2019 na Nova Nova Nova Nova,
00:14Neste ouARD cheguei um сигigne calendário
00:16para um caso de traf workload.
00:18Por qualquer一 modo sobre este caso...
00:21Neste jovempector divergcei não com 1 vida móis
00:23mas só dois sentidos
00:25...nãozinho mesmo dinheiro Джaratti
00:27É isso que eles tentam fazer,
00:30é bair ele ao vivo
00:31para o resto da vida
00:32para algo que ele fez
00:33quando ele era 26 anos.
00:36Nenhum dos chargers,
00:37eles são todos não-violence.
00:39E é incrível.
00:43É uma sentença
00:44para um jovem com um futuro
00:45com um futuro.
00:47Ross Ulbricht é de Texas,
00:496'3", com um rosto de brilho,
00:51e ele teve um jovem feliz.
00:53Ele é um boy scout,
00:54grew up em um tipo de suburbano
00:57e foi um homem,
00:57foi para o colégio,
00:58foi um educado.
01:00Ele é muito bem,
01:01um, muito bom,
01:03um cara,
01:05que não é um cara,
01:06mas não tem um barato em um corpo,
01:10mas ele queriam ser algo
01:11e fazer algo com isso com a sua vida.
01:12O motivo daquele arrago
01:14era que Ross Ulbricht
01:15criou, assim, em frente à sua computação,
01:18o último dream de qualquer trafíca,
01:20um online de vendas
01:21de serviços completamente anonyms,
01:23um e-bê por drogas
01:25com mais de 13,000 tipos de psicoatras,
01:27de cannabis a heroin
01:29there was this anonymous dark
01:31market for drugs that no one could stop
01:33that where you could get away
01:35with buying and selling
01:37absolutely and there was nothing
01:39that the government could do about it
01:41from 2011 to 2013
01:43ross was public enemy
01:45number one
01:47every federal agency in the country
01:49was after him
01:51it was estimated that his website
01:53silk road had made over
01:55180 million dollars in just two
01:57years
01:59i think part of it was
02:01the money but i think a big
02:03part of it was also the promise
02:05of doing something really
02:07grand and something that would really
02:09change the world he believed in free
02:11trade and he believed in
02:13really just personal freedoms
02:15and he really wanted people to be able to
02:17choose for themselves
02:19was he aware
02:21at the time
02:23that he was really walking
02:25a tight road
02:27from the suburbs of austin to silicon
02:29valley we've heard from his mother
02:31his girlfriend but also
02:33his lawyer and journalists who
02:35covered the case
02:37it was this incredibly dramatic thing
02:39and as a story it sort of had all
02:41the elements you want you had drugs you had
02:43scandal you had secrecy you had someone making a lot
02:45of money doing something they probably shouldn't
02:47have been doing
02:49with previously unseen
02:51family images we'll follow the trail
02:53of a young man whose life flipped
02:55between geek culture
02:57militancy
02:59and criminality
03:01the
03:03so
03:07the
03:09and
03:11the
03:13and
03:15these
03:17have many
03:19better
03:21you
03:23A CIDADE NO BRASIL
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05:39Os pais são muito, muito caro, muito caro, empreendedor.
05:47O pai é um arquiteto e designer, então ele designou e construiu houses.
05:53Ele construiu houses em Costa Rica.
05:55Então ele sempre tinha uma vida muito boa.
05:59Agora vamos para a walk para Casa Bamboo.
06:03Isso é dois-storys, exclusivamente a Robinson House, três bedrooms,
06:09um quarto da sala da sala da sala da sala da sala da sala da sala da sala.
06:12Ross's parents own some land in Costa Rica.
06:16They built these eco-lodges, which they rent to tourists.
06:20This was where Kirk and Lynn Ulbricht,
06:23and their two children, spent the summer.
06:26You know, we have the place in Costa Rica,
06:30so, you know, that's very outdoorsy,
06:33and surfing and being out in nature, it's in the jungle.
06:36And, um, so, yeah, he, you know, liked being outside,
06:41and his friends and he would go camping and that sort of thing.
06:45Yeah.
06:47Ross's teenage years weren't typical of a future criminal.
06:51Surfing, football, basketball.
06:56He played all the sports that are part of American culture.
07:00Cover of World Magazine right here.
07:03Hey, shut up, please.
07:04For ten years, Ross also attended the Austin Scouts Troupe every weekend.
07:11At the age of 17, he'd even reached the highest rank, Eagle Scout.
07:16Eagle Scout is, like, the highest level Boy Scout that you can be,
07:21and you have to do a lot of work to get there,
07:23and not that many people stay in the Boy Scouts till adulthood,
07:29and it's, um, I don't know, kind of this emblem of being, like,
07:34a good kid and working really hard to get this thing.
07:37Oh, he's going inside!
07:39Oh, come here, come here!
07:40Come here!
07:41As he grew up, Ross became a handsome young man of six foot three.
07:45He could have been the star of a TV show.
07:48Just a fascinating character.
07:51He just had such promise.
07:53Um, he, he, he excelled in everything he did.
07:58You know, he was academically successful.
08:00He was socially successful.
08:02Ross was a brilliant student who easily gained a university scholarship.
08:07At the age of 22, he left the sunshine of his native Texas to go to one of the best universities in the country, Penn State.
08:18There were 85,000 students on the campus in Pennsylvania in the north of the United States.
08:23This austere university would be a turning point in the young Texans' life.
08:31Having been top of his class in physics since high school, Ross enrolled for a master's in materials science and engineering.
08:37He specialized in the study of crystals, aiming to get a doctorate.
08:49It was here at Penn State that he met his girlfriend, Julia.
08:52She was studying photography.
08:55It was love at first sight.
08:57He bought me like this, like silver ring and then he attached like this crystal that he had cut in the shape of diamond.
09:07And it was really sweet and he had just like glued it on.
09:10So it wasn't like perfect or anything, but it was really cute.
09:13And I was like, that's so awesome, like using science as art, you know, and yeah, it was a cool gift.
09:23For two years, Ross worked on his materials science thesis.
09:27But in his free time, he was developing a definite passion for a different discipline, American politics.
09:34Well, I think it's very common, especially when you're young, to seek out new political ideas.
09:51In many ways, this is very common in university.
09:53You read something and you get turned on to an idea and you want to explore that with people your age who are going through a similar realization.
10:04For Ross, politics was much more than just a fad.
10:07In his student dorm, as he read more widely, his ideas were becoming more and more radical.
10:15He found his niche when he discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist and theorist,
10:21on a movement that was particularly influential in the United States, libertarianism.
10:28It's a political philosophy that borrows from anarchism, but mainly from ultra-capitalism.
10:33Libertarians believe that government restricts individual liberties and the state is their number one enemy.
10:39He thought that the government should not be involved in people's lives.
10:44But he was a sort of interesting type of libertarian.
10:48And most libertarians in the United States are kind of, you know, guns and beer.
10:55And Ross had actually come from a sort of hippie family, you know, a 1960s hippie family.
11:01And, you know, he was passionate about this idea of freedom in the way that I think hippies were.
11:10During 2009, Ross started to express his unorthodox ideas publicly.
11:16For him and I, we had differed in so many ways.
11:21Like, I was definitely raised a Democrat.
11:23So, to kind of go from, well, I really feel like the government should be taking care of human rights,
11:29like healthcare and all these things, to, oh, no, the government needs to not exist,
11:33like, to me was kind of, like, crazy and unheard of.
11:40Totally unexpectedly, Ross gave up physics and left the university.
11:47He wanted to devote all his time to politics.
11:56At the time, I wish, I was like, why are you doing this?
12:00You know, but, you know, as I said, my husband and I are entrepreneurs.
12:05And I think he was feeling constrained by graduate school and he had all these ideas.
12:11And he, you know, I think was feeling like it wasn't interesting.
12:15What he, you know, he said to me, it's just not passionate for me.
12:18It's just not interesting for me anymore.
12:22At that time, he spent a lot of time with Donny Palmetry,
12:25a former student in Pennsylvania who'd become a good friend.
12:28You kind of grew up in college.
12:33I think you both grew up, and he did specifically,
12:36realizing that he didn't want to be a physics professor
12:39or work for a company and just work behind a desk,
12:42being a physics guy until he was 65 and retired.
12:47At the age of 24, Ross, the polite and helpful Boy Scout,
12:51had changed into a passionate, idealistic libertarian militant.
12:55He went back to Austin with a single idea in mind, to change the world.
13:06Ross hung out in his hometown's alternative circles
13:08and became close to an anarchist and anti-government groups.
13:11He was trying to look for, you know, just look for what he wanted to do.
13:21I know he wanted to do something big.
13:23I mean, he wanted to try to be, that's the thing about Ross,
13:26he wanted to be somebody, you know, not in a bad way.
13:29He just wanted to be, you know, chain, chain,
13:32do something in the world to make a difference.
13:34And he was an entrepreneur, too. He wanted to make money.
13:39That was the paradox of Ross Ulbricht.
13:42For him, political activism went hand in hand with financial success.
13:46It was like wanting to be Che Guevara and Steve Jobs at the same time.
13:50Still dreaming of greatness in January 2010,
13:57he moved into this small apartment in Austin.
14:03His girlfriend of two years, Julia V, soon moved in with him.
14:07They argued a lot, but Ross was madly in love.
14:11For months, Ross moved from one job to another.
14:16So he wanted to make a video game, basically.
14:20And he got some funding for it, but then it kind of flopped.
14:24So that was really his only plan.
14:26And then he also was into trading.
14:28So he did that for a while.
14:29And then he sold insurance for like a month or two.
14:32Then he did like editing.
14:33So no, he didn't really know what he wanted to do, I guess.
14:39These failures undermined his confidence.
14:41Ross hated this period, especially as he was sure
14:44he had a great future ahead of him.
14:52It was around this time he started keeping a diary in which he wrote.
14:56This was extremely discouraging.
14:59There I was with nothing.
15:01My investment company came to nothing.
15:03My game company came to nothing.
15:05I went through a lot over the past year.
15:07In my personal relationships as well.
15:09I had mostly shut myself off from people
15:11because I feel ashamed of where my life was.
15:13I had left my promising career as a scientist
15:16to be an investment advisor and entrepreneur
15:19and came up empty handed.
15:21He seemed to be an idealist.
15:24Very much an idealist.
15:26Very, maybe very arrogant.
15:29Okay, so you try one, it doesn't work.
15:32Try another, it doesn't work.
15:34Pretty soon this whole idea of yourself is kind of on the line.
15:39Um, and it can be a desperate moment.
15:47His friend, Donny Palmetry, suggested they work together.
15:52Donny had set up Good Wagon,
15:54a start-up which collected second-hand books
15:56and sold them online.
15:59Ross was given the job of creating the website.
16:02He hadn't built a website before us.
16:04I'm going to build this Good Wagon Books website.
16:05I was like, I'll do it.
16:06He didn't know how to build a website.
16:07He just went and did it.
16:08I mean, just, he could go figure it out.
16:10And that's why we clicked so well,
16:11because we both had that, like,
16:12we will figure out some way to do it if we have to do it.
16:15Um, so that's what, he was, it was good,
16:18because he was like that.
16:19He couldn't, he wasn't afraid of anything.
16:24In early January 2011,
16:26Donny had to go to Dallas on business.
16:28He left Ross in charge.
16:30His task was to complete the inventory of 50,000 second-hand books
16:37in this warehouse.
16:39It was a big job.
16:42But whenever he had a moment,
16:44Ross would sit at his computer
16:46and work on his own for hours and hours every day,
16:51neglecting Donny's business.
16:55In January, he called me up one night and said,
16:58Donny, I feel really bad.
17:00I haven't been spending as much time as I would have liked.
17:03He didn't, he wasn't clear.
17:05He just said, I have a very big idea that I've been working on.
17:08That's part of the reason why I haven't been doing good wagon very much.
17:13This big idea was the epiphany Ross had been waiting for since he left university.
17:20The revolutionary idea that would change his life.
17:23That day he wrote in his diary.
17:26The idea is to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously,
17:33with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them.
17:36I've been studying the technology for a while,
17:39but I need a business model and a strategy.
17:46A website where you could buy anything,
17:50without anyone knowing.
17:53An online sales platform to circumvent the law,
17:57which he considered illegitimate.
17:59He believed fundamentally that the government did not have a right
18:07to prevent people from buying these substances and using them.
18:11And it just wasn't the government's business at all.
18:14And so, if he could develop a way to do that,
18:19and a way to let people do that,
18:21without the government being able to hold them accountable,
18:24that would be a social good.
18:26He felt like people should be able to consume what they want to consume.
18:31If someone wants to smoke weed, they should be able to do it.
18:34So that was his idea with the website.
18:37In all good businesses, the choice of the name is crucial.
18:41I was calling it Underground Brokers,
18:45but eventually settled on Silk Road.
18:48The name was taken from the merchant routes
18:51which existed between Europe and Asia 2,000 years ago,
18:53and completely transformed trading relations across the world.
18:59The reference was just like Ross.
19:02Hugely ambitious.
19:04Julia was the only person Ross confided in.
19:08I just remember him showing me the little logo
19:11and being like,
19:13oh, look, which logo do you like best?
19:15You know, and it was just like, kind of like a business idea.
19:18Like, just one of Ross's other ideas, really.
19:24Silk Road wasn't just another idea.
19:27But there was still a significant challenge.
19:31How to remain anonymous on the internet.
19:34If you go to buy something on Amazon,
19:39there are two ways that they will be able to find you.
19:42You're going to the website, so it has your IP address,
19:47which is basically the home base of your computer,
19:50and is connected to your name in various ways.
19:52And they'll say, oh, okay, someone from this IP address came and visited Amazon.com,
19:56and you want to buy a bunch of socks.
19:58And then how are you going to pay for those socks that you're buying on Amazon?
20:01Well, you have to give them your credit card number,
20:02and then you're in the payment system,
20:04which is connected to law enforcement and visible in various ways.
20:07For Silk Road to work, Ross had to solve these two technological challenges of IP addresses and online payments.
20:17Silk Road attacked that in two ways.
20:20One is it said you're only going to be able to get here through Tor,
20:23which is a very well-vetted system for hiding your identity on the internet.
20:29By using Tor, you cannot be traced.
20:35It appears as though you are accessing a website from an entirely different internet protocol address than you actually are.
20:44So, for instance, if I use the Tor browser to visit someone else's website,
20:48it appears as though I'm visiting from, say, Germany or France or Czechoslovakia instead of San Francisco or the United States.
20:56Since 2009, it's been possible to download Tor freely.
21:02Used by both human rights supporters and criminal organizations,
21:06this browser, symbolized by an onion, allows people to circumvent monitoring by changing IP address,
21:13rather like a geographical location.
21:14So, what about payment?
21:15Well, you're only going to be able to pay in Bitcoin, which at the time was a fairly new digital currency that you could have an anonymous wallet.
21:33Bitcoin is a virtual currency which allows transactions to be anonymous.
21:38The young Texan had already been interested in it for a few months.
21:45The really important thing about it is that there's no authority, you know, central company running it who can stop payments or who collects information about the people using the system.
22:00Anybody can use it. You don't have to give any personal information.
22:04And so that made these sort of anonymous payments being sent around the world possible.
22:10With anonymous payments in Bitcoin and the disguising of IP addresses using Tor, the basics were in place.
22:18On the 15th of January 2011, the Silk Road website went live.
22:29He showed me all the kind of technologies involved, and at that point he obviously didn't have anything on the website.
22:37So, to me, I just thought, cool.
22:41I had no idea that it was going to become what it became, obviously.
22:45Then Ross, this brilliant 27-year-old, upon whom Fortune had always smiled, made a deliberate decision to break the law.
22:58He crossed a line.
23:00And this turned out to be, you know, a lot of people crossed lines, but the line he crossed turned out to be a little bit more profound or a little bit more entrenched.
23:08Ross had a plan.
23:12He asked a friend to lend him this unoccupied little country house on the outskirts of Austin.
23:20For three weeks, the former physicist locked himself away from prying eyes to grow psychedelic mushrooms.
23:26He grew mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, and he was actually selling them through the website Silk Road, so he was trying to get it jump-started by dealing through his own website.
23:44Ross was very determined to make Silk Road into a huge success.
23:51In a few days, he sold five kilograms of his mushrooms on the site.
23:58Around that time, Nicholas Christin, a researcher and specialist in computer security, discovered Silk Road.
24:09He quickly started a study for Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
24:16It was a live test to show that it was possible to use Bitcoin to pay.
24:21It was possible to receive the goods you'd ordered.
24:23And the first comments we saw were,
24:26Wow, I can't believe it works!
24:28It's great!
24:30And on certain specialist forums, it was all people were talking about.
24:34Within weeks, many consumers had started using this new eBay that was 100% anonymous.
24:50More and more dealers were also offering a wide variety of drugs.
25:08There were psychedelic drugs, there were things like heroin, cocaine, there was a fair bit of marijuana.
25:14And it was just all going through the United States mail.
25:23Key to its success was home delivery, usually via the postal service.
25:30If you wanted to get drugs delivered, there was no more need to use false names and addresses.
25:35Nothing could be easier.
25:36And buyers were even protected by a law in America.
25:45There's an interesting thing in the United States.
25:50If you get something delivered to your home, as long as you don't sign for it,
25:54you can always say, I didn't order it, someone sent it to me.
26:02So you have plausible denial in the case where you get caught receiving illegal goods by post.
26:10On all these sales, Ross received a generous commission of 7% for each transaction.
26:19The success of Silk Road was given an extra boost on the 1st of June 2011,
26:24when an article appeared on Gawker, a widely read blog in the United States.
26:28As a result, the user base of the Silk Road boomed, maybe tenfold even.
26:38You see just a huge spike in usage of the Silk Road.
26:42From then on, sales on Silk Road were in the thousands of dollars.
26:46Almost a million accounts were set up over a few days.
26:53Its success was so remarkable that a few days after publication of the article on Gawker,
26:57Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat, called for federal authorities to close down the site.
27:05It was such an extraordinary challenge to governmental authority that it had to be shut down.
27:12On the Senate floor, they're talking about this website is threatening our youth.
27:20I don't think we realized at the time that that was setting in motion the sort of wheels that were going to destroy all of this.
27:31It wasn't just talk. Once they said that on the Senate, the FBI started paying attention, other people started paying attention, and he was kind of a marked man after that.
27:40From his small apartment in Austin, Ross, this gentle dreamer alone in front of his computer, became public enemy number one in the United States in less than six months.
27:52The US government, my main enemy, is aware of me, and some of its members are calling for my destruction.
28:03This is the biggest force-wielding organization on the planet. I am mentally taxed, and now I feel extremely vulnerable and scared.
28:10As Ross faltered, a manhunt was being organized in Washington. The largest police and federal security agencies in the country started working together.
28:27The Silk Road operation brought together the FBI and the Secret Services, but also Customs, Homeland Security, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
28:35In all, about 30 federal agents were assigned to find the person who'd been defying their authority for months.
28:52It was very big. They, they put, it meant a lot. They were really, um, they really wanted to get who was, like, the guy who was behind the Silk Road.
29:02At the same time, Ross was under attack on another front.
29:09He was having trouble maintaining the security of his website.
29:17A hacker found some major flaws in my code. He came back with basically, this is amateur shit. I knew it too.
29:24From the start, the Texan had run the site on his own. He used very basic software to constantly code and recode his platform.
29:33The website was very poorly designed. Uh, he wasn't very good at coding. Um, he sort of had to patch things together as he went.
29:42And actually, you can see this over the course of the trial. You see, um, stuff in his diary and in chat logs about, uh, basically piecing things together as he goes.
29:52Basically, pan, going from one panic to the next.
29:58Ross spent all his time on it. Silk Road quickly became the center of his life.
30:05Between answering messages, processing transactions, and updating the code base to fix the constant security holes, I have very little time left in the day for my girlfriend.
30:16He was acting shifty and kind of, like, weird, if that makes sense. Like, his personality would kind of change time to time. And I really just think it's stress. I mean, after a certain point, you know, when you have so much stress in your body, it's poisoning your body. Like, it's actually changing your mental outlooks.
30:37In late 2011, Julia and Ross split up for good.
30:42For many years, I thought Ross was it. Like, he was the coolest guy I could ever imagine being with. And he was so, you know, fun and, and handsome and smart and all the things I wanted. So it was like, how could you not want this?
30:58I remember I actually had been photographed in a wedding dress. And I had this whole romantic notion, all this stuff. And he just totally shot it down. And I remember crying, like, why wouldn't you want to do this? And he's like, I have more important things I need to worry about.
31:14There was now nothing to keep Ross in Austin. He went westwards to try his luck. In early 2012, he moved to San Francisco, the city of the gold rush, and where everything's possible on the west coast of America.
31:34All the great internet companies were born here. A multitude of startups maintain the myth of the self-made man.
31:44Well, there's this very, especially in the tech world, there's this myth of success. I mean, and not just in the tech world, where bright young kid has a good idea, has the tools he needs to make it happen. And he makes it happen. And then five years later, he's running the world.
32:08He came to California, it seems, based on his diary, because he wanted to make a lot of money. He wanted basically to be the next Steve Jobs.
32:23Seeming to sometimes forget that his business was totally illegal, Ross imagined himself as a tycoon of Silicon Valley. His website was then making nearly $100 million of sales per year.
32:38A month after he arrived, Ross recorded this video with a friend who didn't know the real nature of Ross's business.
32:47The crazy thing about San Francisco is it feels like home already.
32:55Yeah.
32:56It's like, just like you said, I've got to get out of here. Just come. Just come. There's no reason not to.
33:03Ross lived here in the Glen Park neighborhood, a haven of peace in the center of San Francisco.
33:17It's a quiet area where he kept a low profile.
33:20He was living very simply. He wasn't, you know, he didn't need a lot of money. He never has been one to spend, need a lot of money or care about material things very much.
33:34He was living with roommates, you know, he didn't have his own apartment. He had his, you know, little bedroom in the back of apartment with other kids.
33:44From his bedroom, he continued to manage Silk Road without telling his roommates.
33:48On the site, everyone knew that one person was keeping it running without knowing exactly who it was.
33:55Sellers and buyers were in contact with admin for administrator.
34:01But Ross seemed to be looking for recognition. He was to find a way to exist and be admired by his disciples, the users of this site.
34:11There was one day that you could see the chat logs where Variety Jones said you need a moniker that isn't just admin, you need something, a name that you can pass on to other people so it's not just you.
34:22I need a name. Drum roll, please. My new name is Dread Pirate Roberts.
34:32Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR. Ross took this pseudonym from the 1987 film The Princess Bride because the hero, a good pirate, is a cult character in geek culture.
34:43And it's this, part of what's interesting about it is, it's this idea of this pirate where he does terrible things.
34:53Like, the Dread Pirate Roberts kills people and kidnaps people and does all this stuff, but he's still sort of this swashbuckling figure and you still end up rooting for him.
35:04And the whole enterprise of, like, I'm going to be this terrible, terrible pirate is kind of redeemed by his good intentions.
35:16It was a clever choice, which fitted perfectly with Ross's fantasies.
35:21From the start, this whole thing was a very ideological project. And so there was sort of this cult of personality that grew around him.
35:30He'd talk about sort of the grand mission of the website. It was very grandiose words.
35:39But once he turned his computer off, Ross couldn't get used to his life in the shadows, to this virtual fame that he could never celebrate.
35:50On the 29th of December, 2012, when he returned home after a date with a girl, he wrote,
35:55Clearly, Ross couldn't carry on alone. But it was hard for him to find trustworthy employees.
36:18He wasn't sleeping and was becoming paranoid.
36:27Exhausted, he again confided in a friend while remaining vague about his work.
36:32I think it's, uh, I imagine that there's some, some silver lining, though, to that experience.
36:41And also to, like, pushing yourself to the limit like that.
36:44Yeah.
36:45And I mean, like, I think people who haven't done, done that, and I, I've had similar experiences with my work, where it's like, that becomes everything more important than anything.
36:58With the site's success, the scams multiplied.
37:02In early 2013, over $300,000 were being traded every day.
37:08The hackers were on the alert, and bad dealers weren't paying their commission.
37:14He got, um, he got a fair number of death threats. He got blackmailed many times.
37:21Um, hackers would take down his website, and then he would pay them ransoms.
37:26Uh, this was actually a very regular occurrence. He was just bleeding up money constantly from hacking attacks.
37:344th of February, 2013. Got death threat from someone. Death from above.
37:425th of February, 2013. Attacks continued.
37:47You don't know these people. They're very angry at you. They're somewhere on the internet. How much of a threat to you do they really pose?
38:00That can be really hard to gauge, because again, you don't know anything about them. So, I mean, anyone would have trouble sleeping.
38:08He can't really talk to his friends about what's going on, right? Like, he can't talk to any of his real-life friends about what's going on.
38:16He's talking to these anonymous strangers on the internet instead about his problems.
38:21Um, you can kind of see what his state of mind would be at this point.
38:26Um, it's, this isn't a way for, like, a normal person to live.
38:29And so, eventually, you start thinking that you're like a mafia don.
38:36In his small bedroom in San Francisco, Ross was wary of everyone.
38:40But one user gradually managed to win his confidence.
38:43He spent a lot of time chatting online with someone calling himself Knob.
38:50He claimed to be a big shot in the Mexican mafia.
38:54Ross was worried. He suspected a seller of stealing bitcoins from him. He asked for Knob's help.
39:01Then, a few days later, Ross changed his mind and contacted Knob.
39:26The murder was never committed.
39:40Unknowingly, Ross had ordered a hit not from a member of the mafia, but an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
39:47Knob was one of the many agents who had infiltrated Silk Road months before to try to catch the young man.
39:58Being in this world in which he wasn't interacting with other real people.
40:03He was just interacting with, you know, screen names and online avatars.
40:06And I think he sort of became detached from the humanity of the people he was dealing with.
40:13And I think you can see in his journals and his diaries that evolution of Ross as he became more callous and, you know, eventually reached the point where he was willing to order hits on people, you know, to order people killed.
40:30You really viewed this as this project that was more important than any one person.
40:36And, you know, you're reminded of so many other sort of revolutionaries who ultimately reached a point where they were willing to kill for their idea.
40:46And he became, you know, the kind of dictator in this world that he had invented to sort of get rid of dictators and authority.
40:55Ross had committed a fatal error.
41:01He'd crossed the red line.
41:04But for the moment, nothing linked him to his avatar, the dread pirate Roberts.
41:15At the time, there were already, you know, probably ten different agencies in different cities in America working on the Silk Road case.
41:22And, you know, they'd been working on it for two years.
41:25And it was, it was a sort of embarrassment that none of them had really made much progress.
41:31They still had no idea who the dread pirate Roberts was.
41:35It was one of the smallest agencies involved in the investigation, the IRS, the American Tax Police, which made the biggest breakthrough in summer 2013.
41:44An agent, an agent who wasn't named at the time, had basically come across Ross's email address through Google searches.
42:00And it wasn't at all clear at the time how this played into the various other elements of the investigation, but it seemed like Ross's name the first time it had surfaced was not through, you know, some sophisticated hacking technique.
42:18It just was a Google search.
42:24Two years earlier, when he'd launched Silk Road, Ross had promoted his site on a few forums.
42:30He'd then deleted these messages, but he made one small error.
42:34As they combed through thousands of webpages, the federal agents came across a message linked to Silk Road that was signed with an email address.
42:47Ross Ulbricht at gmail.com.
42:51You know, there were 200 things to think of and you thought of 199 of them, but you didn't think of that one.
42:56And that's how they got it.
42:59Then a second phase of the investigation began, using social media.
43:06The IRS agents simply analyzed Ross's public profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.
43:11He became the main suspect, who happened to share the same libertarian opinions as the Dread Pirate of Silk Road.
43:17Oh, Ross Ulbricht, this matches up very closely with the profile of the Dread Pirate Roberts that you can see through the Dread Pirate Roberts right.
43:29What they had going for them was that they had the name of Ross Ulbricht.
43:34They had an email address.
43:36They strongly suspected that he was DPR, but to be able to prove it with as much certainty as possible,
43:42they had to show a correlation between the moment Ross Ulbricht went online and the appearance of DPR.
43:52In order to do that, in September 2013 in San Francisco, physical surveillance of Ross was organized.
44:01In all, about 10 federal agents crisscrossed the quiet neighborhood of Glen Park daily.
44:06They were following the young entrepreneur's comings and goings, watching his habits.
44:22On the 1st of October 2013, the agents followed the Texan.
44:26As usual, Ross went out looking for an internet connection and a quiet place to work.
44:31He was in a public library, using the internet. They knew that he went there because he could use the internet there and they wouldn't be able to trace it back to him.
44:52Ross sat down on the second floor with his computer in the library's science fiction area.
44:57At 3.14 p.m., the Dread Pirate Roberts connected to the Silk Road website.
45:00At 3.14 p.m., the Dread Pirate Roberts connected to the Silk Road website.
45:04Ross was chatting as DPR on the computer and he had this admin page of Silk Road open called Mastermind.
45:11And so he had the admin page open, he was talking to another admin.
45:16Two FBI agents are working behind him and the two FBI agents, a man and a woman, pretend to have a fight.
45:23And Ross turns around.
45:25And in the moment he turns around, the female agent grabs the laptop.
45:32Let's go!
45:33Get your bitch down.
45:34Bitch, let's go!
45:35Let's go!
45:36I do something on him!
45:37I'm so a bitch!
45:39I'm so a bitch.
45:40You didn't know.
45:41рен P.m.
45:42He's a kid.
45:43You're a bad man.
45:44Two FBI agents are working behind him.
45:45Two FBI agents are working behind him and the two FBI agents, a man and a woman, pretend to have a fight.
45:47And Ross turns around.
45:49E no momento ele turns around, a female agent grabs a laptop.
45:55Let's go!
45:57Bitch, let's go!
46:02They were holding a laptop open, because as soon as it closed, it would be worthless.
46:06And so they had to keep it from falling asleep, keep it open, keep it from dying.
46:10And that's how they got a lot of the evidence.
46:13The investigators managed to prevent Ross deleting any compromising files when he was arrested.
46:19At the time, he not only has the chat window open, where he's talking to the moderator,
46:24he also has the Silk Road website open, logged into the admin page.
46:28And then beyond that, they have his diary, they have the accounting spreadsheets,
46:32they have all the chat logs that he logged on his own computer.
46:38At the age of 29, on the 1st of October 2013, Ross was arrested and charged with drug trafficking,
46:45computer hacking, and money laundering.
46:49On his computer, they found 144,000 bitcoins, nearly $86 million at the time.
46:56I got a call from, it was because she was kind of like an old friend,
47:03and I hadn't seen her in years, and I was like, why is she calling me?
47:06And she's like, Julia, Julia!
47:08I'm like, what?
47:09She's like, Google Ross Ulbricht.
47:11And I was like, and then it was Ross Ulbricht arrested.
47:16And I remember falling, like, my phone dropped.
47:19I remember falling on the floor, just bawling my eyes out.
47:22Because I knew he was gone for life.
47:24I just knew at that moment when he had been arrested, I was swailing.
47:29I was like, it's over.
47:30His life's over.
47:30My life's never been the same since that day.
47:34And we were desperate.
47:37You know, we didn't know what to do.
47:39We were getting advice from all these people.
47:41We, you know, it was just really hard.
47:44And meanwhile, Ross wasn't able to call us.
47:47And he finally did.
47:48But, and that was so, I mean, the whole thing was just a nightmare.
47:53It really was.
47:53Ross was transferred to New York and placed in detention pending trial at 150 Park Row, the federal prison.
48:08His request for bail was refused.
48:14A year and a half later, on the 13th of January 2015,
48:18one of the most important trials in cybercriminality started at the federal court in South Manhattan.
48:32With experience in defending different clients,
48:35such as one of the accomplices of the 9-11 terrorists,
48:38Joshua Draytel was Ross's lawyer.
48:40I think it was the first case that brought together several elements of the computer age.
48:52One is the cyber aspect of it, just totally a website.
48:56Second is Tor, the underground nature of the website.
49:01Third is Bitcoin.
49:03And that was the first criminal case, I think, that existed where Bitcoin was an element of the case.
49:08So you brought all those together, and you have a very, very different type of case.
49:16On the 13th of January 2013, in the pouring rain of New York,
49:20the cameras of the world were watching the trial of the creator of the dark web's biggest online sales platform.
49:26Silk Road attracts a lot of libertarian, anarchist, activists,
49:38people who really believe in what Silk Road was doing.
49:42And so there was a weird mix of, like, hippie, anarchist Bitcoin supporters,
49:47and then federal agents coming, and a lot of journalists.
49:51And so the courtroom was, like, a mix of a lot of different things.
49:55Ross pleaded not guilty to the seven charges against him.
50:00You swear or affirm to tell the truth.
50:03Okay, you may put down your hand and listen to my whole question.
50:06Please raise your hand if you've got any...
50:07The first surprise was that the young man admitted creating the Silk Road website.
50:12Our defense was that he had, he had, it was his creation,
50:17but that very early on, before it mushroomed into what it became,
50:22that he had divested himself of his interest in it.
50:25Our position also was that there were multiple DPRs,
50:28the Dread Pirate Robertses, throughout the course of the website.
50:31I learned at trial that he had created it,
50:35but it also made sense to me that he got out of it,
50:38because he's not a criminal.
50:39He doesn't have a criminal mind.
50:40He doesn't have that kind of ambition.
50:44Ross's defense was based on the testimony of his family,
50:48his appearance, his history.
50:51How could this gentle boy have become a drug baron?
51:00One of the amazing things, I think, during the trial
51:02was the degree to which Ross had sort of cleaned up his appearance
51:07to look like this kind of bland, sweet, suburban boy.
51:11He didn't have any of the kind of hippie wildness
51:15that you see in the pictures from while he was running the Silk Road,
51:18and I think that was in part to kind of convince the jury
51:22that he was this sweet Boy Scout
51:24who, you know, didn't really match up with the Dread Pirate Roberts.
51:30He, yeah, seemed pretty neutral and kind of calm throughout the trial
51:35and soft-spoken and very polite to the judge.
51:37And he kept turning around in his seat and, like, talking to his family
51:44and kind of saying, like, it's okay
51:45and trying to comfort his family members.
51:47He was just, like, you know, trying to comfort us.
51:53And that's just so him, you know?
51:56And that image of him like that has just been, you know, haunted me.
52:04Federal Judge Catherine Forrest presided over the trial.
52:07She said just because you don't look like a typical criminal
52:15doesn't make what you did any better.
52:17She said, in fact, it makes it worse.
52:19She was saying the fact that you have a good upbringing
52:22and you're well-off and your family's well-off
52:25doesn't make you any better than the drug dealer
52:28I sentenced from the Bronx last week.
52:30Like, you guys are the same, you've done the same thing.
52:32In fact, what you've done is worse because you had all this privilege
52:35and you could have had such a better life
52:36and you threw it away doing this.
52:40On the 4th of February 2015,
52:43Ross Ulbricht was found guilty of all seven charges against him
52:46by unanimous decision of the jury.
52:50If any of you have any trouble hearing at any time...
52:54Three months later, at the federal court in New York,
52:57the sentence was handed down.
52:59At the age of 32, he was given two life sentences
53:02without possibility of parole, an exemplary sentence.
53:06He was definitely upset when he was being sentenced.
53:14I don't know if it's because he was going to jail forever
53:16or because he actually felt remorse,
53:18but he did, like, cry when he was...
53:20He apologized to the families that their kids died.
53:24And so I think at some point he did kind of realize what he'd done
53:27and that it wasn't just a little libertarian experiment.
53:31It was heartbreaking and it literally broke my heart.
53:34I got... I ended up in the hospital a few months later.
53:38I don't have heart disease, but I almost died.
53:42And they say it's broken heart syndrome.
53:44Since May 2015, Ross Ulbricht has been incarcerated
53:50at the Metropolitan Detention Center in South Manhattan.
53:53The detention center here is a very, very, very difficult environment.
54:06It's overcrowded. It's understaffed.
54:08It's medical attention.
54:10Psychiatric attention is almost non-existent
54:12from what you would get on the outside.
54:17At the start of 2016, Joshua Dreidel appealed the conviction.
54:21Of course, the closure of Silk Road hasn't stopped the trading.
54:28Online selling sites for drugs are now four times more numerous.
54:32As for Ross Ulbricht, he may not have changed the world as he dreamed,
54:36but he is now a symbol for libertarian activists all over the world.
54:51But he doesn't know what he's doing.
54:54I'm not sure he's doing anything.
54:56The city is that the city is currently doubtful and the wingman who is the only one that is there.
54:59I've probably more than heard from him.
55:02The city is a symbol for at work.
55:04The city is now a symbol for MUSIC big,
55:06and the city is now a symbol for its name.
55:09He has been some of the place every day,
55:10and the city is now a symbol for its name.
55:13The city is now a symbol for its motto.
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