San Francisco.
October 1, 2013.
3:15 in the afternoon.
Diamond Street, quiet, tree-lined, winding through a mostly residential neighborhood, sloping toward a small business district. The Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library, a granite cube with oversize windows. A warm, orange-lit interior. Hardwood floors, paneled ceilings. Up the stairs to the second floor, rear corner, tucked into the science fiction section of the library, a small, brightly lit desk by the window.
A twenty-nine-year-old kid with shaggy hair lowered himself into the seat behind the desk, placing his backpack by his feet. Good-looking in that California way—though he was originally from Texas—relaxed, though a little bleary eyed, the kid retrieved his Samsung 700Z laptop computer from the backpack, placed it on the desk, and opened the screen.
Seconds later, he initiated a Tor connection. An anonymous browser that was originally developed by the U.S. Navy to keep its ships’ communications safe, Tor was now a mostly free service used by people all over the world who wanted to keep their internet activity private. Once the kid’s connection was established, piggybacking over the library’s free Wi-Fi, he opened an encrypted portal to a website that could be found only by those who knew where to look, in the area of the internet known as the dark web, deep beneath the outer layers of the “onion.” Only browsers like Tor, an acronym for the “Onion Router,” could carefully peel it away and find sites like this.
Entering his password, the kid’s sneakers bounced against the hardwood floor beneath the desk. He was tired. He’d spent many late nights working on the website, which was no surprise, considering it was massively successful, with hundreds of thousands of visitors per year. In fact, the kid was, despite his humble appearance, an unlikely mogul; the volume of exchanges that had passed through his website was valued not in the millions, but over a billion. His personal net worth was already close to thirty million. But although the site ran well, in the digital, well-oiled-machine kind of way, nothing about managing a monster like that was easy. It required constant maintenance and oversight, and even though the kid didn’t have an office of his own, his laptop was like a traveling C-suite. Instead of some corporate cube in a tower in the Financial District, or the atmosphere-controlled cabin of a private jet, he had a corner of the public library, or a coffee shop, or a tiny bedroom in his shared apartment just a few blocks away.
He’d left the apartment just twenty-eight minutes before, at 2:47 P.M., planning to spend the afternoon at Bello, perhaps his favorite of the coffee shops with free Wi-Fi that dotted Glen Park like an overwhelming case of chicken pox. But he’d found Bello too crowded with customers for his liking. So instead, as he sometimes did, he’d strolled another ten yards to the library, choosing the solitude of the science fiction section over the elbow-to-elbow mosh pit of the coffee shop.
Now he was ready to work. And almost as soon as he entered his password into the site, that work found him, in the guise of a chat notification from one of his many employees, who operated under the handle “Cirrus.” The kid had never met Cirrus in person, but he’d emailed with the employee many times a month, sometimes even daily, and paid him $1,000 a week to manage many of the site’s forums and answer user requests.
As soon as the kid got the chat window open, Cirrus was there, business in hand.
“Hi, are you there?”
The kid rubbed his eyes, glanced around himself at the empty second floor of the library, then typed:
“Hey.”
“How are you doing?” Cirrus asked.
“I’m okay. You?”
As usual, the chitchat ended there, because how friendly could two people be who had never met face-to-face, and who, out of necessity, would never have a relationship beyond blinking cursors facing each other over a heavily encrypted, anonymous online connection.
“Good, can you check one of the flagged messages for me?” Cirrus wrote back.
It was the sort of uninspiring, admin work that came up almost daily, usually something that could be handled and put to bed in minutes. All he needed to do was use his password to log into the back end of his site, and most likely hit a few keys to fix the tiny, technical issue. Nothing particularly urgent, but when you ran a website that had moved over a billion dollars in product over the few years of its existence, bringing in millions in profit, it was never a good idea to let any problem, no matter how small, fester.
“Sure,” the kid wrote back. “Let me log in.”
As he navigated to the correct page, entered his unique password, and began searching for the flagged message, he was so engrossed with the task at hand that he didn’t notice the two people coming up the stairs from the first floor of the library until they were practically right behind him, and their shadows flashed across his laptop’s screen. The kid glanced back and saw a man and woman, well dressed, obviously affluent, the sort of modern-day yuppies you saw all over San Francisco, especially in neighborhoods like Glen Park. The man was tall and thin, and probably worked at one of the tens of thousands of internet startups that had sprung up all over the city, the farthest outward ring of the hurricane whose epicenter was down in Silicon Valley. The woman was obviously his lover, because as soon as they’d reached the second floor, they’d started bickering in the way that only two people who had seen each other naked could argue: viciously and too loud.
When they reached a spot behind the kid, the woman’s voice hit an entirely new octave of fury, and now their lover’s quarrel was impossible to ignore. Annoyed, the kid actually rose from his chair to see if he needed to get involved—and that was when it happened.
The man leaped forward and grabbed the kid’s laptop with both hands, then slid it across the desk to the woman, who had lunged to the other side. The woman yanked the laptop off the desk—careful to keep it open—and then handed it to a third man, who had suddenly appeared from behind one of the nearby bookshelves.
As the kid watched, his face frozen in shock, the third man jammed a USB memory stick into the laptop. He then retrieved a BlackBerry from his coat pocket and began snapping photos of the open laptop screen. From three feet away, the kid could easily see the screen—the open chat window showing his conversation with Cirrus in one corner, the backdoor page of his website in the center, where he’d been navigating to the flagged message.
But before the kid could say or do anything, the lovers were on either side of him, and the man was yanking the kid’s arms behind his back. Something ice cold and terrifyingly hard touched the skin of his wrists, and then there was an unforgiving metallic click—and suddenly he was handcuffed, arms tight behind his back, his shoulders burning at the pressure. Then the man was leading him through the library down the stairs while the woman was reading him his rights. Just like on the TV shows.
The realization that he was under arrest hit him, followed by a nail in the pit of his stomach as he also realized that his laptop computer—still open, its glow illuminating the face of the third man, who was most likely not some local cop, not even a resident of Glen Park or San Francisco or even California but a trained FBI agent, probably an expert in computer forensics—contained enough information, now completely unencrypted, to have him locked up.
For the rest of his life.