The naive drug lord
Ross Ulbricht, victim of the biggest psyop of the internet era.
So Donald Trump shocked everyone by pardoning Ross Ulbricht.
You may remember Ross from the Obama era. He was a huge deal. As the proprietor of the biggest online drug marketplace, Silk Road, he showed that you could use technology to run a massively illegal business right under the nose of the most powerful security services on the planet. He was a poster child for a techno utopianism…he embodied the individualist liberatory potential of computers and networks. Well, at least for a time he did. The tech he was using wasn’t as secure as he thought. In fact, it was full of holes. He got caught. And sentenced to two life terms.
And now Trump released him… Why did a guy promising to wage a war against drug cartels release an internet drug kingpin? Apparently, Trump promised to pardon Ross to get the votes of the Libertarian Party, which has been championing Ross’s cause for years. That’s at least the superficial story. Maybe that’s the only story.
I’m glad Ross is out and I’m happy for his family. I met his mom, and she waged a tireless campaign to try to free her son.
I wrote quite a bit about Ross in my book Surveillance Valley. In the big picture, I saw Ross as a little guy — a naive kid who trusted too much, flew too high, and who got too greedy…greedy enough to apparently order a hit on a former employee, not knowing that the hitman was a fed and that the employee had already been nabbed by cops.
Ultimately, Ross was caught, too, betrayed by the very technologies that were supposed to protect him. In a way, he became a victim of a crypto utopian ideology pushed by the same U.S. spy agencies that he tried to protect himself from.
Little did Ross know, but the tools he was using to hide himself from the feds were funded by these very same feds — the Pentagon, the State Department, and privatized cyber war outfits spun off from the CIA. But Ross believed the hype. So, yeah, he was a very high-profile victim…a victim of a victim of the biggest psyop of the internet era. Waged by American spies and various crypto activists and anarchists on their payroll, this psyop successfully convinced the world that it can be safe from oppression by using security tools funded by the American state.
Might sound dumb now to stake your life on an app, but not so long ago, everyone believed apps had this sort of power — a power that could take on the most powerful security apparatus in the world. Ross is an extreme case but he represents the simple internet utopianism that reigned back in the Obama Era. People really believed in the redemptive power of the network.
—Yasha Levine
PS: Here’s an excerpt from Surveillance Valley where I unroll the start of the Ross Ulbricht tale:
End of Government
In 2011, a mysterious store appeared on the Internet. Called Silk Road, it was an online store like any other, complete with customer reviews and a merchant rating system. But there was also something unique about this marketplace: it sold illegal drugs and was only accessible through a network called Tor, a novel Internet system that supposedly made the store and its users impervious to the law by moving all transactions onto a parallel anonymous network that sat atop the real Internet. Tor is what’s now known as the “dark web.”
“Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road,” wrote Adrian Chen, the reporter who broke the story for Gawker. “Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.”
Built and operated by a mysterious figure who went by the name of Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road had two components that allowed “ it to operate in total anonymity. One, all purchases were processed using a new digital crypto-currency called Bitcoin, which was “created by the mysterious pseudonymous cryptographer Satoshi Nakamoto. Two, to use Silk Road, both buyers and sellers first had to download a program called Tor and use a specialized browser to access a specialized store URL—http://silkroad6ownowfk.onion—that took them off the Internet and into the Tor cloud, a.k.a. the dark web.
Tor was a cutting-edge anonymity tool made by Tor Project, a nonprofit set up in 2004 by a plump and ponytailed cryptographer named Roger Dingledine, who at the time ran it out of a cluttered office above a YMCA in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It had about a $2 million annual budget, a half dozen full-time employees, and a small group of dedicated volunteer coders around the world who helped develop, test, and release its product: a free cloaking app that worked on the basis of a technique called “onion routing.” Users downloaded and launched a specialized Tor Internet browser that redirected their traffic onto a parallel volunteer peer-to-peer network, bouncing it around randomly before sending it off to its final destination. This trick disconnected the origin and destination of a person’s Internet browsing stream and theoretically made it impossible for cops, spies, hackers, or anyone else monitoring Internet traffic to observe where users were coming from and where they were going. In lay terms, onion routing is like a street hustler playing a shell game with network traffic: people can see it go under one of the shells, but they never know where it ends up. Tor powered the bulk of the dark web. Tor pretty much was the dark web.
Thanks to Tor, Silk Road ran without a hitch. It developed a mass following and built a booming drug dealer community, like eBay did for amateur collectors. Former small-time drug dealers moved their operations online and expanded their client bases, which were no longer limited to personal connections and neighborhoods. Meanwhile, cops logged into Silk Road through Tor like anyone else and clicked through offerings of PCP, LSD, MDMA, cocaine, crystal meth, and ketamine and read customer reviews, but they didn’t have a clue about the real-world identity of the people selling and buying the drugs; nor could they know where to serve their arrest warrants or which datacenters to raid. Everyone was anonymous and was trading anonymous cash. And Silk Road itself ran as a Tor “hidden service,” which meant that it could be hosted in San Francisco or across the globe in Moscow. The only thing not anonymous was that the drugs had to be shipped, so drug sellers developed routines where they would drive for hours to neighboring cities to ship the goods; they never shipped from one location two times in a row.
The FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency watched as kids bought and sold drugs in plain sight, while the Dread Pirate Roberts raked in an estimated $32 million a year in commissions, but they couldn’t do anything to stop it.