Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road | Lex Fridman Podcast #340

You could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could host things, drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff, hacking tools. You could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire.

The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cybercrime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Albrecht, the leader of Silk Road, the billion dollar drug marketplace. And he tracked down and arrested Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous, which are some of the most influential hacker groups in history. He is co founder of Naxo, a complex cybercrime investigation firm, and is a co host of a podcast called the Hacker and the Fed. This conversation gives the perspective of the FBI cybercrime investigator, both the technical and the human story. I would also like to interview people on the other side. The cybercriminals who have been caught and perhaps the cybercriminals who have not been caught and are still out there. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Tarbell. You are one of the most successful cybersecurity law enforcement agents of all time. You tracked and brought down Russ Albrecht, AKA Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, and Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous, who was one of the most influential hackers in the world. So first, can you tell me the story of tracking down Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road? Let's start from the very beginning and maybe let's start by explaining what is the Silk Road.

It was really the first dark market website. You literally could buy anything there. Well, take that back.

You could.

There's two things you couldn't buy there. You couldn't buy guns because that was a different website. And you couldn't buy fake degrees. So no one could become a doctor. But you could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could host things, drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff, hacking tools. You could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire if you wanted someone killed now. So when I was an FBI agent, I had to kind of sell some of these cases. And this was a big drug case, you know, that's the way people saw Silk Road. So internally to the FBI, how I had to sell it. I had to find the worst thing on there that I could possibly find. And I think one time I saw a posting for baby parts. So let's say that you had a young child and that needed a liver. You could literally go on there and ask for a six Month old liver if you wanted to for like surgical.

Operations versus something darker.

Yeah, I never saw anything that dark as far as people wanted to eat body parts. I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI. That's another crazy story, but that one actually weirded me out.

Sorry. I just watched Jeffrey Dahmer documentary on Netflix and it just changed the way I see human beings because it's a portrayal of a normal looking person doing really dark things and doing so not out of a place of insanity seemingly, but just because he has almost like a fetish for that kind of thing. It's disturbing that people like that are out there. So people like that would then be using Silk Road? Not like that necessarily, but people of different walks of life would be using Silk Road to primarily. What was the primary thing? Drugs.

It was primarily drugs. And that's where it started. It started off with Ross Ulbricht growing mushrooms out in the wilderness of California and selling them. But really his was more of a libertarian viewpoint. I mean, it was like you choose what you want to do for yourself and do it. And the way Silk Road kind of had the anonymity is it used what's called Tor, the onion router, which is an anonymizing function on the deep web. It was actually invented by the US Navy back in the mid-90s or so, but it also used cryptocurrency. So it was the first time we saw this birth on the Internet of mixing cryptocurrency and an IP blocking software. So, you know, in cybercrime you go after one, the IP address and trace it through the network. Or two, you go after the cache. And this one kind of blocked both.

Cache, meaning the flow of money, physical or digital. And then IP is some kind of identifying thing of the computer.

It's your telephone number for on your computer. So, yeah, all computers have, you know, a unique four octet numbers, you know, so 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1st, 2, 3, 1, two, three. And you know, the computer uses DNS or domain name services to render that name. So if you were looking for CNN.com, your computer then translates that to that IP address or that telephone number where it can find that information.

Didn't Silk Road used to have guns in the beginning? Or was that considered to have guns? Or did it naturally emerge? And then Rust realized, this is not good.

It went back and forth. I think there were guns on there. And he tried to police it. He told himself, the captain of the boat. So you had to follow his Rul. So, you know, I think he took off those posts eventually and moved guns elsewhere.

What was the system of censorship that he used of selecting what is okay and not okay? I mean, him alone.

He's the captain of the boat.

Do you know, by chance if there was a lot of debates and criticisms internally amongst the criminals of what is and isn't allowed? I mean, it's interesting to see a totally different moral code emerge that's outside the legal code of society.

We did get the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that happened. I mean, all the records were there. I don't remember big debates. I mean, there was a clear leadership, and that was the final decision. That was the CEO of Silk Road.

And so primarily it was drugs, and primarily out of an ideology of freedom, which is, if you want to use drugs, you should be able to use drugs.

You should put in your body what you want to put in your body.

And when you were presenting a case of why this should be investigated, you're trying to find, as you mentioned, the worst possible things on there. Is that what you were saying?

So we had arrested a guy named Jeremy Hammond, and he hid himself. He was a hacker. And when we arrested him, it was the second time he had been arrested for hacking. He used Tor. And so that kind of brought us to a point. The FBI has a computer system where you look up things. You look up anything. I could look up your name or whatever, if you're associated with my case. And we were finding at the time a lot of things in. You look it up. A case would end. Be like, oh, this is Tor. It just stopped. We couldn't get any further. So we had just had this big arrest of Sabu and took down Anonymous. And sometimes in the FBI, the way it used to, the old school FBI, when you had a big case and you're working seven days a week and 14 hours, 15 hours a day, you sort of take a break. The boss kind of said, yeah, I'll see you in a few months.

Go.

Go get to know your family a little bit, you know, and come back. But the group of guys I was with was like, let's find the next big challenge. And that's when we were finding, you know, case closed. It was Tor. Case closed. It was Tor. So said, let's take a look at Tor and let's see what we can do. Maybe we'll take a different approach. And Silk Road was being looked at by other law enforcement, but it was taking, like, a drug approach where I'm going find a drug buyer who got drugs sent to them in the mail. And let's arrest up. Let's go up the chain. But the buyers didn't know their dealers. They never met them.

And so you were taking a cyber security approach?

Yeah, we said let's try to look at this from a cyber approach and see if we can gleam anything out of it.

So I'm actually indirectly connected to. I'm sure I'm not admitting anything that's not already on my FBI file.

Oh, I can already tell you what you're going to tell me though.

What's that?

That when you were at college, you wrote a paper and you're connected to the person that started.

Son of a bitch. You clever son of a. I'm an.

FBI agent or a former FBA agent. How would I not have known?

But I could have told you other stuff.

No, what you were about to tell me.

I was looking up his name because I forgot it. So. One of my advisors for my PhD was Rachel Greenstadt, and she is married to Roger Dingle Dine, which is the co founder of the Tor Project. And I actually reached out to him last night to do a podcast together. I don't know. Is. No, it was a good. It was a good party trek. I mean, it's cool that you know this and the timing of it, it was just like beautiful. But just to linger on the. On the Tor Project. So we understand. So Tor is this black box that people disappear in. In terms of like the. When you were tracking people, can you paint a picture of what Tors used in general? Other. It's like when you talk about Bitcoin, for example, cryptocurrency, especially Today, much more people use it for legal activity versus illegal activity. What about torture?