Each and every day, as we navigate the real world, we leave a billion little fingerprints in our wake. The door handles we touch, the screens we press, and the people we interact with all capture a trace of our being there. The same is true on the Internet. We share pictures and videos on social networks, leave comments on news articles. We e-mail, text, and chat with hundreds of people throughout the day.
If there is anyone who left more of those digital fingerprints lying around the Internet than most people, it was Ross Ulbricht. He spent years living on his computer and interacting with people, good and bad, through that machine.
Over the course of my research for this book, I was able to gain access to more than two million words of chat logs and messages between the Dread Pirate Roberts and dozens of his employees. These logs were excruciatingly in-depth conversations about every moment and every decision that went into creating and managing the Silk Road. They showed startling details about decisions to sell drugs, guns, body organs, and poisons and showed how every aspect of the site was managed. I also gained access to dozens of pages of Ross’s personal diary entries and thousands of photos and videos of Ross, both from his friends and from his own computer and cell phone.
Working with a researcher, Nicole Blank, I scoured the Web for anything Ross had touched over the past decade, which resulted in an endless trove of social media content from Twitter, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, as well as articles and social content he had interacted with and commented on. The photos that I obtained of Ross, through friends and others, told more of a story than just the pictures; the background data of the images (known as EXIF data) showed when they were captured and in many instances, with GPS data, where they were taken.
Then there was the three weeks of testimony and the hundreds of pieces of evidence that the prosecution and defense presented during Ross’s trial.
Using an Excel database, my researcher and I were able to put all of this information into one place and cross-reference every moment from 2006 to 2013—in many instances down to the second. And with that, everything matched up neatly. For example, when the Dread Pirate Roberts talked to his lieutenants on the Silk Road about taking a weekend off for a short trip, on that same weekend Ross Ulbricht and his friends posted pictures of him camping. When Ross booked flights to Dominica, the Dread Pirate Roberts was unavailable at the exact moment the flight took off and returned online, in a different time zone, when Ross landed. These overlaps showed up hundreds of times in our database.
In as many instances as I could, I visited the exact places Ross worked, sitting in the same chair in the Glen Park library, eating at the same sushi restaurant, and lying on the same patch of grass where he snapped a photo in Alamo Square. I spoke to hundreds of people from all stages of his life, from elementary school to college; prom dates and best friends; ex-lovers and one-night stands. Through a translator in Thailand, I was able to gain more information about the man alleged to be Variety Jones.
For the law enforcement side of the story, I spent more than 250 hours with the federal agents who were involved in the hunt for the Dread Pirate Roberts, including the FBI, HSI, IRS, CBP, and DOJ. I visited their bureaus and offices, the airports they work out of, and the mail facilities where drugs were discovered. (I even met one of the drug-sniffing dogs, though he didn’t have much to say.) In addition, Joshua Bearman and Joshua Davis, who spent an additional fifty hours with the DEA and dozens of hours with one of the site’s employees for a feature in Wired on the Silk Road, contributed reporting to this book.
For the most minute details I used online weather almanacs to determine the temperature and wind on particular days, surf reports to understand the height of the waves, flight details to learn if there was turbulence on a plane, and old Craigslist ads, phone records, travel logs, and several other digital tools to tell this story as a narrative nonfiction tale.
From the day of Ross’s arrest I was able to gain access to security camera footage of the front of the Glen Park library. Footage that captures Ross’s last moments as a free man.
While so many people spoke to me for the book, through his family and lawyers, Ross Ulbricht declined to be interviewed.