In the corner of a smoggy industrial park in South Korea, as the sun peeks through the morning dew, thousands of men and women wake up and move toward several enormous factories. They all wear the same uniform—a flamingo-pink jumpsuit and matching rose cap. The workers never pause, going day and night, trading out their positions like cogs being swapped out of a clock that is incapable of stopping. For hours upon hours, day after day, they will assemble computers for Samsung Electronics Limited.
Thousands of times a minute a Samsung laptop is built by those workers. The LCD screen is connected to the chassis; the SSD hard drive encased in its aluminum housing; chips soldered to green circuit boards. Robotic arms ensure the hinges of the laptop open and close properly. Then these things that moments earlier were just scraps of metal and silicon and plastic come to life. The glowing computers are loaded with software, placed into boxes, and wheeled away through the building, entering the vast logistical arteries of the worldwide shipping systems.
In April 2012 one of those Samsung laptops was purchased online for $1,149. It traveled 6,989 miles away from that factory in Korea to a quaint home in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. No one but Ross Ulbricht and the Dread Pirate Roberts ever touched that Samsung 700Z, that is, until the afternoon of October 1, 2013. While Ross was whisked away to the nearby jail with Tarbell, the silver Samsung laptop was carefully carried by Thom Kiernan of the FBI down the stairs of the library, out onto the street, and into the back of Brophy’s unmarked police car.
Thom walked carefully with the machine, as if he were transporting an egg resting in the bowl of a spoon. There, with Jared in the backseat next to him, Thom nervously moved his finger back and forth along the mouse to ensure the laptop stayed alive as they made their way a few blocks to Ross Ulbricht’s house, where a mobile computer forensics lab waited outside.
The forensics truck was a large white beast the length of a small yacht. There were no windows in the back. Inside, a long gray desk stretched from the front of the van to the rear, with computer equipment everywhere. Screens flashed amid a snake pit of wires, and a long row of power outlets stood at the ready, with a computer forensics expert from the local FBI office waiting to receive the laptop.
Thom and the other agent started checking the computer for booby traps, probing to ensure that the machine wouldn’t die if they plugged it into an external drive that they would use to siphon out all of the files. It was then that Thom saw a “scripts” folder. In it there was code that Ross had written to protect the computer in case of this very scenario.
A few feet away FBI agents swarmed Ross’s house, looking for evidence and clues that would tie him to the Silk Road. In the garbage can they found a handwritten note that was scribbled on a piece of crumpled paper, outlining a new file system he was building for the site. On Ross’s bedside table two thumb drives sat, though the Feds didn’t know yet what those drives contained.
Over the next ten hours the Samsung computer was copied half a dozen different ways. Backups were made of backups. Agents came and went. They ate McDonald’s as they worked. The streetlights flickered on and the forensics van was moved to an FBI safe house nearby. When Tarbell arrived after dropping Ross off at central booking, Thom and his forensics colleague were trying to go deeper and deeper into the computer, with the hope that they could pluck Ross’s passwords out of the laptop’s memory, possibly to enter the other side of the laptop. The Ross Ulbricht side. But at around 2:00 a.m., as they tried to break into the other side of the machine, it died.
They had the backups of the computer, but it would be days before they found out exactly what kind of evidence they had retrieved.
A couple of miles away, in a stone jailhouse on Seventh Street in San Francisco, Ross sat staring at a concrete wall, frightened by where he found himself but unfazed by how long he might be in jail. He had played through this scenario a thousand times before. Sure, they had caught him with his fingers on the laptop while he was logged in to the Silk Road as DPR. But that didn’t mean that he was the DPR who ran the Silk Road. There could be more than one Dread Pirate Roberts, like the old tale in The Princess Bride.
Ross was sure that they would never be able to figure out his passwords on the computer, either. All the most important files had been encrypted and locked under his secure code word, “purpleorangebeach.” No one, not even the FBI, would be able to figure that out. The most they could prove, he was sure, was that he was logged in to the site when they arrested him. And that didn’t mean anything. In a worst-case scenario he knew he could admit that, sure, he had once been involved in the Silk Road, but he had handed the site off to someone else years ago. If the FBI asked whom Ross had given the site away to, he could simply say, “I don’t know who it was. All I know is that they called themselves the Dread Pirate Roberts.”