Along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, there are dozens of museums that tell the story of the history of America. Some of the relics in these buildings go back hundreds of years, like the tattered flag that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the pistol that was used to kill President Lincoln. And then there are some objects that are more recent but will remain infamous for hundreds of years to come. Some of these newer artifacts sit on the Hubbard Concourse in the contemporary Newseum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks away from the White House.
The relics at this museum hail from some of the biggest criminal cases in American history. In one corner of the exhibit there is an old wooden cabin, barely big enough for a man, that belonged to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Nearby a pair of thick black sneakers sit, their bases torn open; they were worn by the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, when he tried to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001. And then, farther along in the exhibit, a glass box contains exhibit number 2015.6008.43a, which is a silver Samsung laptop.
“He called himself Dread Pirate Roberts after a character in The Princess Bride,” the text next to the laptop reads. And then it explains that the computer belonged to Ross Ulbricht, “who ran a $1.2 billion marketplace called the Silk Road.” The text does not, however, tell the story of how that laptop ended up in that glass case or what is still hidden inside its hard drive.
In the weeks after Ross’s arrest, Tarbell, Thom, and Jared rummaged through the laptop for forensic evidence about the Silk Road. While the FBI forensics team was successful in getting into the side of the computer that Ross used when he was the Dread Pirate Roberts—the side that contained those millions of words of chat logs between DPR and his employees on the Web site and the hackers, hit men, and gun and drug dealers he engaged with—those same FBI agents were unable to get into the other side of the computer, the side of the computer that Ross logged in to when he wanted to be Ross Ulbricht, to message friends, to talk to his family, to live his other life.
The agents have tried to crack the passwords to that side of the machine, but it would take a computer more than one hundred years to guess the correct pass code. Instead that side of the computer, the Ross side, is locked away forever.
So is the man who owned that laptop.
Ross’s days now often begin before the sun rises, with the sounds of keys and the door to each prison cell unlocking. His cell is only a few feet deep and half as wide. The walls of the prison, which are mostly thick orange concrete blocks, are a brooding and formidable sight. Ross wakes up, slips on his prison clothes, and walks out into the general population. The days are tediously regimented, with an hour allocated for breakfast, thirty minutes for lunch, and the same for supper. Meals are served on plastic trays, with divots on the sides for plastic forks or spoons, plastic cups, and pats of margarine. The commissary at the prison sells snacks, drinks, and clothing. Ross, using the money his mother has placed into his account, can sometimes buy candy and sodas or a new pair of sneakers or sweatpants.
Inmates like Ross, who are well behaved inside, are given an hour outside to walk in circles on the roof of the prison, where a cage encloses the air. In the evening Ross is ushered back into his cell, and the bolts on the doors slam tight. The concrete room is thrust into darkness.
After Ross was arrested, the Silk Road Web site was promptly shut down. But it took only a few weeks before a new Silk Road 2.0 opened for business, with a new Dread Pirate Roberts at the helm of the ship. When that was subsequently shut down by the Feds, another Silk Road appeared, along with hundreds of other Web sites that anonymously sell drugs online. The people who run these Web sites see themselves as part of a movement, and some believe what they are doing is making the world a safer place. Maybe it’s just a justification; or maybe it’s not.
In 2015, the year that Ross was sentenced to life in prison, a group of university researchers concluded a 67,000-hour study that involved interviewing 100,000 people around the world about their drug use. One of the questions in the survey asked people how they got their drugs. With that data the researchers noted that the year after the Silk Road opened for business, as many as 20 percent of respondents started to purchase drugs online. When the researchers asked these people why they chose to buy drugs on the Internet and not on the street, the users explained that they were nearly six times more likely to be physically harmed on the street. Clearly Ross had fulfilled the goal that had led him to start the Silk Road, and tens of thousands of people feel safer being able to buy drugs online.
But as with all technologies, there is a good side and a bad. Also in 2015, another study was released. This one was by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said that for the first time in recent history, more people had died from heroin- and opioid-related drug overdoses in America than from gun deaths. As news reports noted, sometimes accompanied by chilling videos taken from smartphones, in hundreds of incidents of overdoses, children are left orphaned. One of the reasons for the rise in deaths was due to the ease with which people could now gain access to synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, that are made in labs in China. These drugs are fifty to one hundred times stronger than traditional heroin and users often misjudge how much to inject, which inevitably leads to a fatal overdose. The charts the CDC released along with its report, illustrating the number of people who had died from these synthetic opioids, were not too dissimilar to those showing the profits and revenues from the Silk Road, with an abrupt line pointing upward and off to the right.
Often when news articles are written about studies related to online drug-buying, the stories mention Ross Ulbricht as the pioneer at the forefront of this new world. The links from the stories will eventually lead readers to an obscure video online that was recorded a few years earlier at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. In the video Ross is talking to his old friend from high school, René, about their future outlook on life. The video is slightly out of focus, and while the two friends seem to be in the same conversation, it appears that Ross is talking about someone else.
“Do you think you’re going to live forever?” René asks.
There’s a brief contemplative pause, then Ross Ulbricht looks at the camera and answers, “I think it’s a possibility. I honestly do. I think I might live forever in some form.”