For more than 5 years, Ross (Ross Ulbricht) has stirred up waves in the encryption world and has never subsided.

Ross is the founder of the dark web "Silk Road", an online world created in the United States that hides a large number of criminal clues such as drug dealing, sex slavery, child pornography and assassination. The reason why it has attracted the attention of the encryption world is that in order to evade banking and government supervision, transactions on it have only accepted Bitcoin.

In October 2013, Ross was jointly arrested by the US FBI, Homeland Security Investigations (HIS), and the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2015, Ross was sentenced to life imprisonment by the court.

After Ross was arrested, on the one hand, the transactions on the "Silk Road" were still going on; on the other hand, a large number of people supporting Ross appeared around the world. They believed that Ross just founded a website and was not directly involved in crimes.

Litecoin founder Li Qiwei also participated in the petition. He claimed that he learned about Bitcoin through the "Silk Road" and called on everyone to join the petition demanding the release of Ross.

In addition, some people believe that the FBI and HIS have the ranks of trapping Ross, and that the arrest method itself is illegal.

In this process, the more surprising details are that the police involved in the anti-narcotics used Bitcoin to collect money on the "Silk Road", from "heroes" to prisoners.

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"Thanks Jared, the arrest was successful!"

On the morning of October 2, 2013, Ross Ulbricht (the founder of the underground trading market "Silk Road")'s last day as a free man was ordinary.

He wakes up in his apartment on Monterey Avenue in the morning, puts on blue jeans and a red long-sleeved T-shirt, turns on his computer and starts working. Little did he know that at 3:16 that afternoon, he would be sitting in handcuffs in the back of a police car.

At 12:15 p.m., a large SUV with darkened windows passed in front of the house on Monterey Avenue at regular intervals. Even if someone noticed an SUV spinning around the block that morning, no one would have guessed what might be inside.

At 2:42 p.m., FBI agent Talbe was pacing in front of a coffee shop near the Monterey Avenue block, staring at his BlackBerry as he tried to talk the SWAT team out of the raid. Because he needs to obtain Ross's criminal evidence first, that is, the Samsung computer in his hand. Homeland Security Investigations Agent (HSI) Jared, who has been investigating the case, is checking his computer battery power because he is pretending to be a member of the "Silk Road" community and chatting with Ross. Get a message from Ross so they won't be able to get evidence.

Thom and Brophy, the cybersecurity experts, are also at the ready.

The air in San Francisco was unseasonably warm that day, but the breeze was slightly chilly. Ross grabbed the laptop, stuffed it into a backpack, and walked out of the house. He stays in his room all day and wants to get out and find a place with WiFi.

At this point, Tarbell yelled at Jared, "Our friend is walking down the street!"

His voice was gruff and serious. Jared looks up at him, then grabs his coffee and laptop, rushes outside, runs across the street and sits on a park bench, trying to look like a passerby.

Ross walked into a nearby public library. "I bet he's looking for Wi-Fi," Jared whispers to Thom.

Tarbell realized that the local FBI SWAT team was likely to raid at this time. He arranges for Thom to come into the library: "Go get a spot in the library, do nothing, say nothing, just blend in."

At 3:06 p.m., Ross finds a seat against the wall in the library and gets to work.

At this point Jared also looks at his laptop, the battery indicator is now at 20%, but his chat partner DPR (Dread Pirate Roberts, the online name of the operator of "Silk Road", Dread Pirate Roberts) is still not online.

He needed to lure DPR into the Silk Road website, making sure that when he was arrested, the computer interface was exactly where he was logging into Silk Road.

Jared and DPR's chat window is finally moving. Jared typed on the computer, "Can you check a flagged email for me?"

Jared knows that asking this will land DPR in the admin area of ​​the Silk Road website, and if the person sitting in the library right now is really DPR, he will log in to the admin area, proving that Ross is DPR, The person who has been running the "Silk Road" for a long time.

Therefore, Tarbell reminded everyone more than once, "take this laptop out of his hands, and then arrest him."

At 3:14 p.m., Jared's computer beeped and DPR's reply appeared on the screen: "Of course."

This is the moment. Jared looked up at Tarbell, waving his fingers in the air like directing a helicopter. "Go! Go!"

When Tarbell got Jared's message, he told the others on his phone: "He's logged in," "PULL LAPTOP-GO." Then he crawled across the street and into the library.

The library was quiet when suddenly a woman yelled "fuck!" to the man standing next to her.

Everyone looked up in shock to see what happened. The man who was being scolded seemed to be waving at the woman, and Rose, who was frightened, turned around from his chair. At this moment, the woman suddenly sat on the table opposite Rose and quickly took the laptop away.

Ross turned and tried to get the computer back, but someone grabbed his arm from behind.

Thom held his laptop, still open, showing that the computer interface that had been snatched from Ross was a website that only DPR and Ross Ulbricht could access.

"Thanks Jared," he said, looking up. The arrest was successful.

Rose was handcuffed and taken to a police car. Inside the library, patrons began yelling at Brophy and others who were holding Ross down: "What did that kid do?!" and "Let him go!" computer to do business.

USA

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Secret Service Investigation

The Silk Road investigation was conducted by a total of 4 different research teams, but they were in competition rather than cooperation.

The investigation initially begins with a white square envelope.

On October 5, 2011, Customs and Border Services Commissioner Mike made a routine inspection as usual. After 30 minutes of rummaging through it, a white square envelope with what appeared to be a noticeable little bump caught his eye.

The address on it looked fake, and there was the sound of plastic wrap inside the wrapping paper... Intuitively, Mike felt that this was not an ordinary envelope.

When he told Jared, an HIS agent in Chicago, about this, he began collecting the odd-looking envelopes.

A month later, Jared found more than thirty similar envelopes and reported to the HIS director that these envelopes contained drugs, and they were mainly traded through the "Silk Road".

Jared asked the director of HIS to investigate "Silk Road", but the director refused to file the case because of "too little medicine".

Jared was tired of bogging down every investigation with red tape and various bureaucratic details, so he tried to go it alone with the case he needed to turn his career around.

In order to trace the "Silk Road", Jared first traced back to some dealers by buying drugs on the Silk Road. After capturing them, Jared took over the accounts of these dealers. This went on for so long that Jared got a handle on the inner workings of Silk Road, but he still didn't have access to the site's leader, DPR.

He read all the online posts of the Silk Road founder, looking for similarities in the author's language. He saw that as the site grew, the statements made by DPR became more arrogant. At first, his idea was to legalize drugs, but he wrote more and more about how horrible the American government was and how it abused its power.

Jared started to build a DPR profile based on everything this guy said: he might be well educated, young, not rich but not poor, and while he's wrecking the American legal system, he's doing it for the money, as he said in the post Zhong directly said: "Money is an important motivating factor..."

Trying to find what others couldn't see, Jared began analyzing DPR's speech patterns. For one thing, DPR's frequent use of the word "epic" suggests he may be younger.

He uses emoji smileys in his writing, writes them :) instead of old fashioned :-).

Also, he often writes "yes" as "yea" instead of "yes" or "yeah" in his posts.

Although these efforts did not bring Jared close to DPR immediately, they provided puzzle material for subsequent arrests.

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The Crazy Plan of the Narcotics Cops

The Carl that Jared said was also thrown into the investigation to bring glory to his own career. As a DEA agent, Carl has decades of experience dealing with drug dealers. But he's in the middle of his career and tired.

For more than ten years, he has been eating and drinking in the DEA. In the early days, he also liked the thrill of solving crimes. He liked to get up at 4 in the morning, put on a bulletproof vest, check the gun, and then kicked the door open, shouting at the drug dealer "No! Move, squat on the floor!". But as time went on, one dealer went in and another came out, and kicking the door became less exciting. Until one day in late January 2012, young Carl returned.

His supervisor, Nike, asked him if he wanted to help HIS agents in Baltimore investigate the Silk Road case. He said: "Of course". But what Karl didn't expect was that he would enter a dark and greedy underground world and lose everything he had.

Carl adopted the screen name "Nob" for his Silk Road account. But when he found out that his investigative plan was no different from that of Chicago agent Jared, he chose another, more radical path. .

He first disguised himself as a drug smuggler and wrote a letter to DPR. "I adore your work so much, I've been in drugs for over twenty years and most importantly I want to buy this site." Carl sent the click and waited for a response.

"I think the offer for the whole operation needs to be nine figures for me to consider." Carr gasped a bit when he received a reply from DPR, a valuation that was far more than he had expected. Everyone thought it was just a small site, probably worth a few million dollars, but nine figures? Hundreds of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Carl's supervisor, Nike, keeps warning Carl: "Whatever you talk to DPR has to go through the upper floors."

But Karl hated authority, especially that of someone younger than him. So his conversation with DPR continued as usual.

"I can pay nine figures, but I'm not sure if 'Silk Road' is worth it," Carl replied. Then he made a suggestion: "I become the main distributor of 'Silk Road', which can facilitate the transaction of hundreds of kilograms or even tons of medicines."

As an anti-narcotics policeman, Carl knows drug smuggling routes around the world. He also later provided DPR with a $2 million capital injection, taking 20 percent ownership of the new initiative.

When he told his supervisor what he had done, Nike threw a fit, responding to Karl with “fuck you,” “fuck this,” and “fuck that.”

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FBI and IRS Involved

As the "Silk Road" business is getting bigger and bigger, the media is paying more and more attention. In addition to Chicago's HSI and Balmore's task force investigating "Silk Road", the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service ( IRS) also began to join and gradually lead the case.

Special Agent Captain Chris Tarbell sent by the FBI is an experienced cyber security policeman. Months later, they learned that Silk Road's server IP address was in Iceland.

The IRS was sent by Gary Alford, who likes to study the posts of the Silk Road creator. As a man growing up in the ghetto, he saw an early post saying, "Buy drugs from the street and others may beat you up, buy from 'Silk Road' will be safe..." A black man who has a slight aversion to the word "others".

He took it to mean that DPR didn't grow up with "others" and that if he had grown up with them, he wouldn't be called "others" but "us". So Gary concluded that DPR was white, probably from the suburbs.

He also found that the URL suffix for Silk Road was ".onion" instead of ".com," which is the domain used on the Tor web browser.

He then Googled "Silk Road.onion" and filtered by date to find some articles from 2011. These articles are all on a forum called Shroomery. The name of the person who wrote the article is Altoid.

He Googled "Silk Road.onion" and "Altoid" again, and a few more links came up.

Gary then contacted those forums and, using his government profile, asked for the name and email address associated with the "Altoid" account. He found someone with the email address "frosty@frosty.com," which he eventually discovered belonged to "RossUlbricht@gmail.com."

The search results show that Ross Ulbricht (Ross) is a white male from suburban Texas in his twenties.

After a meeting, several investigative teams began to act together.

After Jared's persistent pursuit of dealers and taking over their accounts, he finally had an account to connect with the Silk Road leader. He started impersonating this person as a Silk Road volunteer.

Gary saw the findings of other groups and became more convinced that the person he had found was the founder of Silk Road.

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fallen hero

But DEA agent Carl went further and further on his way to impersonate a drug dealer.

He chats with DPR about family, health, music, and life tips. Carl thinks the man on the other side of the screen is lonely, and he wants to use that to befriend him.

Carl, for instance, would say goodnight to him, remind him to stay safe, compliment him on being the funniest person in the world, and even joke "I love you," to which DPR responded, "You make me blush."

As their relationship developed, Carl even told DPR that you can move to another country to escape the police, he also told him how international drug smuggling routes work, how dealers generally hide drugs, and advised him that it would be best to hire a lawyer.

There is pretense and truth in this.

As an anti-drug police officer who has been mediating with drug dealers for more than ten years, Carl agrees with some of DPR's views, such as "legalizing drugs." He even blurs the line between a DEA agent and the drug dealer he's posing as.

He even started to make money from it through the "Silk Road".

One afternoon in the summer of 2012, he wrote to DPR that a government official named Kevin was willing to sell DPR information they had obtained. In reality Kevin was his fake identity.

"Kevin came to me and told me about the government's investigation of me, and I gave him some money. He said he would give it to you too," Carr told DPR.

Realizing that their chats could be seen by their superiors, they switched to an encrypted private chat system. Over the next few months, Carl earned a cumulative $755,000 from DPR using Kevin and various false identities.

In addition to Carl, his colleague Sean also embarked on a path of corruption. Once, they captured Gree, a core member of the "Silk Road". After taking over Gree's account, Sean stole $350,000 in bitcoin from Gree's account.

Both Carl and Sean thought that, like Bitcoin is anonymous, their actions would go undetected, but they were proven wrong.

Carl was even very confident. After the case ended, he tried to contact book publishers and Hollywood film producers, hoping to sell his story and convey the image of a drug hero to the public. Before the FBI found him, Carl was indeed considered a DEA hero, quietly selling some bitcoins to pay off his home loan.

But in the face of countless evidence, he had to choose to surrender and pleaded guilty to charges of theft of government property/wire fraud/money laundering and benefit transfer. He was eventually sentenced to 78 months in prison.

His original intention of getting the title of "hero" finally came to naught.

Sean was arrested on the way to escape and was sentenced to 71 months in prison.

In addition, when Carl was posing as a drug dealer and mediating with DPR, he was hired to murder Green, the core member of the arrested "Silk Road". Of course the murder was faked, and Green didn't die in the end.

Ross then received a photo of Green, lifeless, with a thick jaw hanging to one side and some vomit hanging from his mouth. He knew that Green had been waterboarded by Karl. Then $40,000 in bitcoin was sent to Carl's account.

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trial

In court, the data charts shown by the prosecution clearly showed the huge growth of "Silk Road": hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, and 80 million dollars in profits.

As Roth's defense attorney, Dratel, explained to the jury how bitcoin and blockchain work and why encryption is so important, the jury's eyes seemed blank.

Ross was charged with seven felony counts. 1. Narcotics trafficking may be sentenced to 10 years. 2. Distributing narcotics through the Internet may be sentenced to 10 years in prison. 3. Drug trafficking planning. 4. Responsible for operating a company that continues to commit crimes may be sentenced to 20 years in prison. In this crime, if the business operator murders someone, it will be upgraded to the death penalty. The last five to seven charges included hacking, money laundering, and trafficking in fake IDs and false documents.

Ross pleaded not guilty to the charges. His defense attorney, Dratel, defended him.

"Ross is not DPR, he is not one person, probably a dozen people," Dratel defended. He acknowledged that Ross did create Silk Road a few years ago, but before the website operator's moniker became "DPR." As the site spiraled out of control, Ross was stressed out and ended up selling him to someone else.

To prove this, the attorney called on Ross's college classmates and roommates to testify. The roommate said that he provided Ross with computer technology in the early days, but gradually quit because he was worried about breaking the law. Later, Ross told him that the website had nothing to do with him and he transferred it to someone else. Prosecutors believe that this is likely to be a lie told by Ross to reassure his roommate.

"His actions were reckless and he knew exactly what he was doing," prosecutors said. "All the data on his computer could explain it all."

"No!" said the defense attorney. "In this case, one of the basic principles is that DPR and Mr. Ross are not the same person. Keeping these chat records on their own computers, does that sound like something DPR would do?" He pointed out that DPR would not make such stupid mistakes. .

Evidence found on the laptop had been placed there by others, the lawyer said.

"Ross was framed by the real DPR," he said, arguing that when Ross downloaded TV shows to his laptop at the library, the real DPR took the opportunity to put the data on his computer. Lawyers claim that Rose's biggest mistake was setting up the site.

The prosecution and defense were deadlocked, and the trial dragged on for three weeks.

During the proceedings, the courtroom was packed every day, including reporters, bloggers, Ross supporters from all over the country. Proponents argue that Ross just made a website, and if that was a crime, the CEOs of eBay and Amazon should also be tried for selling illegal goods on those sites.

Rose's mother, Lynn, was on the jury box every time. She wears a delicate black scarf over her thick black coat and has a sad expression on her face. She didn't believe it all, she thought her son was kind, smart, passed his postgraduate exams to become a molecular physicist last year, and now he was on trial, she couldn't believe it.

After three weeks of trial, the day of sentencing came.

Judge Forrester began by noting that the defense said Silk Road could make medicines better used in society by encouraging the sale of better quality, safer medicines while also reducing violence. Forrest protests this notion: "Just because you're selling drugs from behind a computer, is that different from other drug dealers?"

"No drug dealer has ever brought this type of argument to the court," Judge Forrester said. "It's a privilege argument. You're no better than other drug dealers, and your education doesn't make you special (in criminal justice) in the judicial system)!"

The judge also refuted another point of view of Ross. Ross thought the drug use was cocooned and harming no one, but the judge didn't think so. People were often harmed by dangerous substances sold on Silk Road, the judge said. For example, the death of drug addicts will cause social costs. For example, drug addicts lose the ability to take care of their children, which will harm the growth of the next generation. This will cause a vicious circle, such as assassination through the "Silk Road"...

Therefore, on the afternoon of May 29, 2015, the final result of the court trial was: Ross was sentenced to life imprisonment for 40 years without the right to parole.

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petition

"My son, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to 40 years to life without the possibility of parole. For building a website when he was 26 and for being passionate about the free market and privacy." Sentence After it went into effect, Rose's mother launched a petition to release Rose.

For 5 years, people have been joining the ranks of the petition.

It's largely believed that Ross, who ran a website for other people rather than dealing drugs himself, was a far harsher sentence than many murderers, pedophiles and other violent crimes receive.

Additionally, Ross's investigation and trial were rife with abuse, including corruption by federal investigators and prosecutorial misconduct, constitutional violations, and reliance on unsubstantiated evidence at trial.

"Ross' trial was unfair." People think.

Petitions for Ross' release topped 100,000 last November. Among them are well-known entrepreneurs, lawyers, judges, journalists and congressmen. So far, they have written more than 70 letters to the judge, raising $1 million to help Ross get out of prison.

Ross tweeted about it. "Pinch me!" he said, expressing disbelief that so many people were pleading for his release.

The latest data is that the number of people participating in the petition has exceeded 120,000, 121,932

As Carla Gericke, a candidate for the US Senate from New Hampshire, said, this case is not about Silk Road, but about freedom, autonomy and privacy in the digital world. In addition to the sensational plot, this story also has the contradiction between the original law and the digital world, the choice of human nature at the edge of the law, and the complexity and inefficiency of the huge government system. This is the first trial of a digital financial crime, but it is still in progress.

(Note: The details of this article are mainly from the book "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the silk Road".)