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

Chris Tarbell 0:00 ... you could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could post things-

Lex Fridman 0:04 Drugs.

Chris Tarbell 0:04 Drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff. Uh, hacking tools, you could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire.

Lex Fridman 0:13 The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cyber crime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Ulbricht, 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 cyber crime investigation firm, and is a co-host of a podcast called The Hacker & the Fed. This conversation gives the perspective of the FBI cyber crime investigator, both the technical and the human story. I would also like to interview people on the other side, the cyber criminals who have been caught and perhaps the cyber criminals who have not been caught and are still out there. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Chris Tarbell.

Lex Fridman 1:16 You are one of the most successful cyber security law enforcement agents of all time. You tracked and brought down Russ Ulbricht, AKA Dread Pirate Roberts who ran Silk Road and, uh, 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 Russ Ulbricht and Silk Road? Let's start from the very beginning. And maybe let's start by explaining what is the Silk Road.

Chris Tarbell 1:45 It was really the first, uh, dark market website. Um, you literally could buy anything there. Uh, I'll take that back. You couldn't... there's two things you couldn't buy there. You couldn't buy guns because that was a different website. Uh, and you couldn't buy fake degrees, so no one could become a doctor, um, but you could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could post things-

Lex Fridman 2:07 Drugs.

Chris Tarbell 2:07 Drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff. Uh, 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 kinda sell some of these cases and this was a, 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, uh, and I think one time I saw a posting for, uh, baby parts. So let's say that you, you know, had a young child and that needed a liver, you could literally go on there and ask for a six-month-old liver, uh, if you wanted to.

Lex Fridman 2:43 For, like, surgical operations versus something darker?

Chris Tarbell 2:46 Yeah, I never saw anything that dark as far as people, like, wanting to eat body parts.

Lex Fridman 2:50 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 2:50 Um, I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI. That's another crazy story but, uh, but that, that one actually weirded me out.

Lex Fridman 2:57 So I just watched, uh, Jeffrey Dahmer, uh, documentary on Netflix and it just changed-

Chris Tarbell 3:02 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 3:02 ... the way I see human beings because it's, uh, it's a por- it's a portrayal of a normal looking person doing, uh, 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 prim- primary thing? Drugs?

Chris Tarbell 3:34 It was primarily drugs and that's where it started, it started off with Russ Ulbricht growing mushrooms out in the wilderness of California and selling 'em 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 a anonymizing function on, uh, on the deep web. It was actually invented by the US Navy back in the mid 90s or so, um, but it also used cryptocurrency so it was the first time, like, we saw this birth on the internet of mixing cryptocurrency, uh, and a, an IP blocking software so, you know, in cyber crime you go after one, the IP address and trace it through the network or two, you go after the cash and this one kind of blocked both.

Lex Fridman 4:21 Cash meaning the flow of money?

Chris Tarbell 4:23 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 4:23 Physical or digital and then, um, IP is the, some kind of identifying thing of the computer.

Chris Tarbell 4:31 It's your telephone number for, on your computer, so yeah, all, all computers have, you know, a unique four octet numbers, you know, so 123.123.123.123 and it, you know, the computer uses DNS or domain name services to, to render that name so if you were looking for, you know, cnn.com, your computer then translates that to that IP address or that telephone number where it can find that information.

Lex Fridman 4:56 Didn't Silk Road used to have guns in the beginning? Or was that considered to have guns or was... did it naturally emerge and then Russ realized, like, "This is not good."

Chris Tarbell 5:07 It went back and forth, uh, I think there were guns on there and he tried to police it, um, you know, he, uh, he called himself th- the captain of the boat so you had to follow his rules so, you know, I think he took off those posts eventually and he moved guns elsewhere.

Lex Fridman 5:21 What was the system of censorship that he used? Like of selecting what is okay and not okay? I mean, it's-

Chris Tarbell 5:28 Him alone, he's the captain of the boat.

Lex Fridman 5:30 Do you know by chance if there was, uh, 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.

Chris Tarbell 5:46 We did get the, the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that, what, that happened.

Lex Fridman 5:50 Okay.

Chris Tarbell 5:50 I mean all the records were there. Um, I don't remember big debates, I mean there was a clear leadership.

Lex Fridman 5:56 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 5:56 Uh, and that was the final decision, that was the, the CEO of Silk Road.

Lex Fridman 6:00 And so primarily it was drugs and primarily out of an ideology of freedom which is, um-If you want to use drugs, you should be able to use drugs.

Chris Tarbell 6:12 You should put in your body what you wanna put in your body.

Lex Fridman 6:15 And when you were presenting the case of why this should be investigated, uh, you were trying to find, as you mentioned, the worst possible things on there. Is that what you were saying?

Chris Tarbell 6:24 So we had arrested a guy named Jeremy Hammond, and he hid himself. He was a hacker, and hi- this w- when we arrested him, it's the second time he had been arrested for, for hacking. Uh, he used Tor. Um, and so that kind of brought us to a point, um... The FBI has a computer system where you look up things, uh, you know, you look up anything. I could look up your name or, (laughs) or whatever, if you're associated with my case. And we were finding at the time a lot of things in... You know, when you look it up, it- the c- a case would end, be like, "Oh, this is Tor." And just stopped.

Lex Fridman 6:54 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 6:54 Like, we- you couldn't get any further.

Lex Fridman 6:55 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 6:55 So, you know, we had just had this big arrest of, uh, Sabo and took down Anonymous and... And sometimes in the FBI, um, eh, the way it used... 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 says, "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, um, but it was taking like a drug approach, where I'm going to find a drug buyer who got, you know, drugs sent to them in the mail and let's arrest up, let's go up the chain. But the buyers didn't know they were dealers. They never met 'em.

Lex Fridman 7:45 And so you were taking a cybersecurity approach.

Chris Tarbell 7:48 Yeah. We said, "Let's try to look at this, uh, from a cyber approach and see if we can, uh, gleam anything out of it."

Lex Fridman 7:54 So I'm actually indirectly connected...

Chris Tarbell 7:57 Uh-oh.

Lex Fridman 7:58 ... to... I'm- I'm- I'm sure I'm not admitting anything that's not already on my FBI file.

Chris Tarbell 8:03 Oh, I can already tell you what you're gonna tell me though.

Lex Fridman 8:05 What's that?

Chris Tarbell 8:06 That when you were at college you wrote a paper and you're connected to the person that started using Tor.

Lex Fridman 8:11 Son of a bitch. You clever son of a bitch.

Chris Tarbell 8:13 I'm an FBI agent (laughs) or a former FBI agent.

Lex Fridman 8:15 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 8:15 Well, how would I not have known that?

Lex Fridman 8:16 No, but how... I could have told you other stuff.

Chris Tarbell 8:18 No, that's-

Lex Fridman 8:19 I could have told you other stuff.

Chris Tarbell 8:19 ... exactly what you were about to tell me.

Lex Fridman 8:20 I was looking up his name 'cause I forgot it. So one of my advisors for my PhD was Rachel Greenstadt and she is married to Roger Dingledine, which is the co-founder of the Tor Project. And I actually reached out to him last night to do a talk- podcast together. I don't know. He's (laughs) ... No, the... it was, it was a good, it was a good party trick. I mean, it was just cool that you know this and the timing of it, it was just, like, beautiful. But, um, just to linger on the, on the Tor Project so we understand. So Tor is this, um, black box that people disappear in, uh, in terms of like the- when you were tracking people. Can you paint a picture of what Tor is used in general? Are there... it's like, uh, when you talk about Bitcoin, for example, or cryptocurrency, especially today, much more people use it for legal activity versus illegal activity. What about Tor?

Chris Tarbell 9:21 Tor was originally invented by the US Navy so that like spies inside countries could talk to spies and no one could find 'em. Um, there was no way of tracing them. And then they released that information free to the world. So Tor has two different versions of... not versions, two different ways it can be utilized. Uh, there's .onion sites, which is like a normal website, a dotcom, but it's only found within the Tor browser. You can only get there if you know the whole address and get there. The other way Tor is used is to go through the internet and then come out the other side if you want a different IP address, if you're trying to hide your identity. So if you were doing like say cyber crime, I would have the victim get a computer and I would trace it back out to a Tor relay, and then because you don't have an active connection or what's called a circuit at the time, I wouldn't be able to trace it back. But even if you had an active circuit, I would have to go to each machine physically, live, and try to rebuild that, which is literally impossible.

Lex Fridman 10:15 So what do you feel about Tor ethically, philosophically, as a human being on this world that, uh, spent quite a few years of your life and still trying to protect people?

Chris Tarbell 10:27 So part of my time in the FBI was working on child exploitation, chi- kiddie porn as they call it. Um, that really changed my life in a way. And so anything that helps facilitate the exploitation of children fucking pisses me off. And I- I- I- I... a- and that sort of jaded my opinion towards, towards Tor because that, because it- it helps facilitate those sites.

Lex Fridman 10:49 So this ideal of freedom that Russell Albrich, for example, uh, tried to embody is something that you, um, don't connect with anymore because of what you've seen that ideal being used for?

Chris Tarbell 11:06 I mean, the child exploitation is a specific example for it, you know? And it- I can- it's easy for me to sit here and say child exploit- child porn, 'cause no one listening to this is ever gonna say that I'm wrong and that we should allow child porn. Um, should... because some people utilize it in a bad way, should it go away? Um, no. I mean, I- I'm a technologist. I- I want technology to move forward. Um, you know, people are gonna do bad things and they're going to use technology to help them do bad things.

Lex Fridman 11:35 Well, let me ask you then, uh, we'll jump around a little bit, but

Lex Fridman 11:39 the things you were able to do in tracking down information, and we'll get to it, there is some suspicion that this was only possible with, uh, mass surveillance, like with NSA, for example. Uh, first of all, is there any truth to that? And second of all, what do you feel are the pros and cons of mass surveillance?

Chris Tarbell 12:02 There is no truth to that. Uh, and then my feelings on mass surveillance-

Lex Fridman 12:07 If, if there was, would you tell me?

Chris Tarbell 12:08 Probably not, but... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 12:10 Yeah. (laughs) I love this conversation so much. (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 12:13 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 12:13 But what do you feel about...... the, given that you said child porn-

Chris Tarbell 12:18 Sure.

Lex Fridman 12:19 ... what are the pros and cons of surveillance at a society level?

Chris Tarbell 12:24 I mean, nobody wants to give up their privacy. I say that. I say no one wants to give up their privacy, but I mean, I used to have to get a search warrant to look inside your house.

Lex Fridman 12:31 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 12:31 Or I can just log onto your Facebook and you've got pictures of all inside your house and what's going on. I mean, it's not... You know, so people like the idea of not giving up their privacy, um, but they do it anyways. They- they're giving away their freedoms all the time. They're- they're- they're carrying watches that gives out their heartbeat to a wave of companies that are storing that. I mean, what's more personal than your heartbeat?

Lex Fridman 12:52 So I- I think people en masse really want to protect their privacy, and I would say most people don't really need to protect their privacy, but the case against mass surveillance is that if you want to criticize the government in a very difficult time, you should be able to do it. So when- when you need the freedom, you should have it. So when you wake up one day and realize, "There's something going wrong, wrong with the country I love, I wanna be able to, uh, to help." And that- the- one of the great things about, uh, the United States of America is there's that individual revolutionary spirit, like, so that the- the government doesn't become too powerful, that you can always protest. There's always... The best of the ideal of freedom of speech, you can always say, "Fuck you," to the man. And I think there's a concern of direct or indirect suppression of that through mass surveillance. You might not... Th- is that- that little subtle fear that grows with time, that, uh, why, you know, why bother criticizing the government? "Ah, it's gonna be a headache. I'm gonna get a ticket every time I say something bad," that kind of thing. So it gets out- it can get out of hand. The bureaucracy grows and, uh, the freedoms slip away, is that's the, that's the criticism, right?

Chris Tarbell 14:12 I completely see your point, and I agree with it. I mean, uh, but, I mean, on the other side, people criticize the government of these freedoms, but, I mean, tech companies are... Talk about destroying your privacy and controlling what you can say. I realize they're private platforms a- and you- they can decide what's on their platform. Um, but, you know, they're taking away your freedoms of what you can say, and, you know, we've heard certain- some things where maybe government officials were in line with, uh, with tech companies to take away some of that freedom, and that's... I- I agree with you. That gets scary.

Lex Fridman 14:40 Yeah, there's something about government that feels, maybe because of the history of human civilization, maybe because tech companies are a new thing, but just knowing the history of abuses of government, it, there's something about government that enables the corrupting nature of power to take hold at scale more than tech companies, at least what we've seen so far.

Chris Tarbell 15:05 You... Yeah. I- I agree. I agree. But, I mean, we haven't had a voice like we've had until recently. I mean, w- anyone that has a Twitter account now can speak and become a- a news article, um, you know. My- my parents didn't have that, didn't have that voice. If they wanted to speak out against the government or do something, they had to go to a protest, or organize a protest, or, you know, do something along those lines. So, you know, we have more of a place to put our voice out now.

Lex Fridman 15:30 Yeah, it's incredible, but that's why it hurts, and that's why you notice it when certain voices get removed. The President of the United States of America was removed from one such, or all such, platforms, and that hurts.

Chris Tarbell 15:45 Yeah, that's crazy to me. That's insane. That's insane that we- we- we took that away, but...

Lex Fridman 15:51 Let's return to (laughs) to Silk Road and Mossad break. So how did your path with this very difficult, very fascinating case, uh, cross?

Chris Tarbell 16:02 We were looking to open a case against Tor because it was a problem. All the cases were closing, uh, because Tor, so we went on Tor and we- we came up with 26 web different Onion, .onions that we targeted. We were looking for nexuses to hacking 'cause I was on a squad called CY2 and we were, like, the premier, um, squad in New York that was working, uh, uh, criminal cyber intrusions. And so, you know, any website that was offering hackers for hire or, um, hacking tools for free, you know, or- or paid- paid services, uh, you know, like, now we're seeing ransomware as a paid service and phishing as a paid service. Um, anything that offered that, so we opened this case on- on, uh, I think we called it... So you have to name cases. One of the fun thing in the FBI is when you start a case, you get to name it, and you- you would not believe how much time is spent in coming up with the name.

Lex Fridman 16:57 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 16:57 Um, you know, case goes by. I think we called this Onion Peeler because of the-

Lex Fridman 17:01 Nice.

Chris Tarbell 17:01 ... yeah.

Lex Fridman 17:02 So a little bit of humor, a little bit of wit, and some profundity to the language. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Tarbell 17:08 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 17:08 'Cause you're gonna have to work with this one for quite a lot, so.

Chris Tarbell 17:11 Yeah, this one had the potential of being a big one, you know, because I think- I think Silk Road was, like, the sixth on the list, uh, uh, for that case, but we all knew that was sort of the golden ring. If you could make the splash that that Onion site was going down, then it would probably get some publicity. A- and that's part of, you know, law enforcement, is getting some publicity out of it that, you know, that makes others think not to do it.

Lex Fridman 17:33 And we should say that Tor is the name of the project, the browser. What is the Onion technology behind Tor?

Chris Tarbell 17:40 Let's say you wanna go to a .onion site. You'll w- you'll put in the .onion you wanna go to and your computer will build, uh, communications with a Tor relay, uh, which are all publicly available out there. Um, but you'll encrypt it. You'll put a package around, uh, your data, and so it's- it's encrypted, and so n- can't read it. It goes to that- that first relay. That first relay knows about you and then knows about the next relay down the chain. And so it takes your d- data and then encrypts that on the outside and sends it to relay number two. Now, relay number two only knows about relay number one. It doesn't know who you are asking for this, and it goes through there adding those layers on top, layers of encryption till it gets to where it is. That, and then even the Onion server doesn't know, except for the- the relay it came from, who it's talking to. And so it peels back that, gives the information, puts another layer back on. And so it's- it's layers like you're peeling an onion back of, uh, the different relays, and that encryption protects, uh, who the sender is and what information they're sending.

Lex Fridman 18:41 The more layers there are, the more exponentially difficult it is to decrypt it.

Chris Tarbell 18:47 ... I mean, you get to a place where you don't have to have so many layers because e- e- it doesn't matter anymore, it's mathematically impossible to- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 18:53 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 18:53 ... decrypt it, but yeah, um, you know, i- uh, the more relays you have, the slower it is. I mean, that's the one of the big drawbacks o- o- on Tor, is- is how slow it operates.

Lex Fridman 19:03 So how do you peel the onion? So what- what are the different methodologies for trying to get some information from a cybersecurity perspective on these operations like Silk Road?

Chris Tarbell 19:15 It's very (laughs) difficult. Um, people have come up with different techniques. There, um, there- there's been techniques to put out in the- in the news media a- about how they do it, um, running, like, massive amounts of relays and- and you're controlling those relays, I think. I think somebody tried that once.

Lex Fridman 19:30 So there's a technical solution. And- and what about social engineering? What about trying to infiltrate the actual humans that are using the- the Silk Road and trying to get in that way?

Chris Tarbell 19:45 Yeah, I mean, I- I definitely could see the- the way of doing that, and in- in this case, uh, in- in our take down, we used that. Um, there was one of my partners, uh, Jared Darig, and he was an HSI investigator, and he had worked his way up to be a system admin on the site. Um, so that did glean quite a bit of information because he was- he was inside and- and talking to, uh, you know, at that time, all we really know it as DPR or Dread Pirate Roberts. Uh, we didn't know who- who that was yet, but- but we had that open communication. Um, you know, and one of the things, you know, the technical aspects on that is there was a Jabber server that was, uh, that's a communication- type of communication server, um, that was being used, and we knew that Ross wi- had his Jabber set to, uh, Pacific time. So we had a pretty good idea what- what part of the- the- we- w- what part of the country he was in.

Lex Fridman 20:38 I mean, isn't that from- from- from DPR's perspective, from Ross's perspective, isn't that clumsy?

Chris Tarbell 20:45 He wasn't a- a- a- he wasn't a big computer guy.

Lex Fridman 20:47 Do you notice that aspect of, like, the technical savvy of some of these guys doesn't seem to be quite... why- why weren't they good at this?

Chris Tarbell 20:55 Well, the- the- the real techy savvy ones we don't arrest. We don't get to 'em. We don't find 'em.

Lex Fridman 20:58 You don't get to them.

Chris Tarbell 21:01 (laughs) (exhales)

Lex Fridman 21:02 Shout out to the techy, uh, criminals. They're probably watching

Lex Fridman 21:06 this.

Chris Tarbell 21:06 I mean, yeah, I mean, you were getting the low hanging fruit. I mean, we were getting the ones that can be caught. I mean, th- they, you know- well, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but the Anonymous case, there was a guy named AVUNIT. He's still- I lose sleep over him 'cause I- we didn't catch him. We caught everybody else. We didn't catch him. (laughs) He's good though. (laughs) He pops up too once in a while on the internet and it pisses me off.

Lex Fridman 21:25 Yeah. What's his name again?

Chris Tarbell 21:26 AVUNIT. Uh, it- uh, that's all I know is it's AVUNIT.

Lex Fridman 21:29 AVUNIT?

Chris Tarbell 21:30 Yeah, I got a funny story about- about him and what- who people think he is.

Lex Fridman 21:34 Can I ask you... can we go on that brief tangent?

Chris Tarbell 21:36 Sure. I- I love tangents.

Lex Fridman 21:38 (laughs) Well, let me ask you, um, since he's probably he or she... do we know it's a he?

Chris Tarbell 21:44 We- we have no idea.

Lex Fridman 21:46 Okay.

Chris Tarbell 21:46 And that's another funny story about hackers, the he/she issue.

Lex Fridman 21:50 What's the funny story there?

Chris Tarbell 21:51 Well, one of the guys in LulzSec was a- was a she, was a 17-year-old girl.

Lex Fridman 21:55 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 21:55 Uh, and, uh, my source in the case, the ha- the guy Sabu that I- I arrested in part of an- you know, we sat side by side for nine months and l- then took down, you know, the case and all that, he was convinced she was a girl and we said, you know, and he- he was in love with her almost at s- at one point, and turns out to be a 35-year-old guy th- living in England.

Lex Fridman 22:16 Oh, so he was convinced as a- a- a- (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 22:19 Yes, he was absolutely convinced.

Lex Fridman 22:20 Based on what exactly? By linguistic, like, human-based linguistic analysis or what?

Chris Tarbell 22:25 She- she, he, uh, whatever, uh, you know, Kayla is what we went- which ended up being like a- a modification of his sister's name, the- where- the real guy's sister's name-

Lex Fridman 22:34 Got it.

Chris Tarbell 22:34 ... was so good at building the backstory. All these guys, and they're- and it's funny, like, these guys are part of a hacking crew. They social engineer the shit out of each other-

Lex Fridman 22:42 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 22:43 ... just to build if one of 'em ever gets caught. They'll convince the everybody else that, you know, they're a Brazilian, uh, you know, ISP owner or something like that, and that's how I'm so powerful.

Lex Fridman 22:53 Well, yeah, that social engineering aspect is part of living a life of cyber crime or cyber security on the offensive or defensive. So AVUNIT... can I ask you a- also just a- a tangent of a tangent first?

Chris Tarbell 23:05 That's my favorite tangent.

Lex Fridman 23:07 Okay. Um, is it possible for me to have a podcast conversation with somebody who hasn't been caught yet? And because they have the conversation they still won't be caught? And is that a good idea? Meaning, is there a safe way for a criminal to talk to me on a podcast?

Chris Tarbell 23:29 I would think so. I would think they- that- that someone could... I mean, someone who has been living a double life for- for long enough where you think they're not a criminal, um, I-

Lex Fridman 23:40 No, no, no, they would have to admit that they- they would say, "I am AVUNIT."

Chris Tarbell 23:45 Oh. Oh, you would wanna have a conversation with AVUNIT?

Lex Fridman 23:47 Yes.

Chris Tarbell 23:49 (sighs) Um...

Lex Fridman 23:49 Is there a way?

Chris Tarbell 23:50 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 23:50 I'm just speaking from an FBI perspective, technically speaking, 'cause I- I... so l- let me explain my motivation.

Chris Tarbell 23:56 Sure.

Lex Fridman 23:57 I think... I would like to be able to talk to people from all walks of life, and understanding criminals, understanding their mind, I think is very important. And I think there's fundamentally something different between a criminal who's still active versus one that's been caught. The mind, just from observing it, changes completely once you're caught. You- you have a- a big shift in your under- understanding of the world. Um, I mean, the- I do have a question about the ethics of having such conversations, but first, technically... (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 24:34 All right.

Lex Fridman 24:34 Uh, is- is that... is it possible?

Chris Tarbell 24:37 If I was technically advising you, I would say first off, don't advertise it, don't... the fewer people th- that you're gonna tell that you're having this conversation with, the better. Um, and yeah, you could-... you doing it in person or are you doing it in-

Lex Fridman 24:50 In person would be amazing, yeah. But they would- their face would not be shown.

Chris Tarbell 24:54 Face would not be shown. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't publish the show for a while. They'd have to put a lot of trust in you that you are not going to ... You're gonna have to alter those tapes.

Lex Fridman 25:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Tarbell 25:03 Uh, I say tapes 'cause it's old school. The ulti- (laughs) you know.

Lex Fridman 25:07 It's a tape.

Chris Tarbell 25:08 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 25:08 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 25:08 I'm sure a lot of people just said that like, "Oh shit, this old guy just said tape."

Lex Fridman 25:11 I heard of V- VHS was in the 1800s, I think.

Chris Tarbell 25:14 (laughs) Oh.

Lex Fridman 25:15 Um ...

Chris Tarbell 25:16 But yeah. Uh, yeah, you could do it. They'd, they'd have to have complete faith and trust in you that you'd destroy the originals after you've altered it.

Lex Fridman 25:24 What about if they don't have faith? Is there a way for them to attain security? Um, so, uh, like, for me to go through some kind of process where I meet them somewhere where ...

Chris Tarbell 25:36 I mean, you're not gonna do it without a bag over your head. I don't know if that's the life you wanna live. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 25:40 I'm fine, I'm fine with a bag over my head. That's gonna take- get taken out of context.

Chris Tarbell 25:44 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 25:44 But I just ... I think it's a worthy effort. It's a worth- it's worthy to go through the hardship of that to understand the mind of somebody. I think, fundamentally, conversations are a different thing than the operation of law enforcement. Understanding the mind of a criminal, I think, is really important.

Chris Tarbell 26:01 I don't know if you're gonna have the honest conversation that you're looking for. I mean, it may sound honest, but it may not be the truth. I found most times when I was talking to criminals, it's lies mixed with half-truths. Uh, and you, you kinda ... It's ... If they're good, they can keep that story going for long enough. Uh, if they're not, you know, you kind of see the relief in them when you finally break that wall down.

Lex Fridman 26:24 That's the job of an interviewer. If the interviewer is good, then, uh, perhaps not directly, but through the gaps seeps out the truth of the human being. So not necessarily the details of how they do the operations and so on, but just who they are as a human being. What their motivations are, what their ethics are, how they see the world. What is good, what is evil? Do they see themself as good? What do they see their motivation as? Do they have resentment? What do they think about love for the people within their small community? Do they have resentment for the government or for other nations or for other people? Do they have childhood issues that led to, to a different view of the world than others perhaps have? Do they have certain fetishes, like sexual and otherwise, that led to their construction of the world? Uh, they might be able to reveal some deep flaws to the cybersecurity infrastructure of our world. Not in detail, but, like, philosophically speaking. They might have ... I, I know you might say it's just a narrative, but they might have a kind of ethical concern for the wellbeing of the world th- that they're essentially attacking the weakness of the cybersecurity infrastructure because they believe ultimately that would lead to a safer world. So, the attacks will reveal the weaknesses and if they're stealing a bunch of money, that's okay because that's gonna enforce you to invest a lot more money in defending ... Um, yeah, defending things that actually matter. You know, nuclear warheads and all those kinds of things. I mean, I could, I could see it ... You know, it's fascinating to explore the mind of a human being like that because, um, I think it will help people understand. Now, of course, (breathes deeply) um, it's still a person that's creating a lot of suffering in the world, which is a problem. So do you think, ethically, it's a good thing to do?

Chris Tarbell 28:24 I don't ... I mean, I, (sighs) I feel like I have a fairly high ethical bar that I have to put myself on, and I don't think I have a problem with it. I would love to listen to it.

Lex Fridman 28:34 Okay, great. I didn't- (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 28:36 (laughs) I mean, not that I'm your ethical coacher here-

Lex Fridman 28:38 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 28:38 : or anything, but, uh-

Lex Fridman 28:39 Well, that's interesting.

Chris Tarbell 28:39 But-

Lex Fridman 28:39 I mean be- so 'cause I thought you would have become jaded and exhausted by the criminal, um, mind.

Chris Tarbell 28:51 It's funny. Um, you know, I, I'm, I'm, you know ... Fast-forward in our story, uh, I'm very good friends with, with Hector Monsegur, with Sabu, the guy I arrested. Um, and he tells stories of what he did in his past and I'm like, "Oh, that Hector," you know? (laughs) You know, but then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson-

Lex Fridman 29:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Tarbell 29:11 ... and I was like, "Ugh, this guy is stealing money from, from the US government and-"

Lex Fridman 29:16 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 29:16 ... welfare fraud and all that sort of things." It just pissed me off. And I don't know why I have that differentiation in my head. I don't know why I think one's just, "Oh, Hector will be Hector," and then this guy just pissed me off.

Lex Fridman 29:30 Well, you didn't feel that way about Hector until you probably met him.

Chris Tarbell 29:33 Well, I didn't know Hector, I knew Sabu. So I hunted down Sabu and I learned about Hector over those nine months.

Lex Fridman 29:41 We'll, we'll talk about it later.

Chris Tarbell 29:42 Sure.

Lex Fridman 29:42 Let's finish with-

Chris Tarbell 29:43 Yeah, yeah. Sorry.

Lex Fridman 29:43 Let's return tangent to, back to the tangent. Oh, one tangent up. Who's AVUNIT?

Chris Tarbell 29:50 I don't know.

Lex Fridman 29:50 That's interesting. So he's at the core of Anonymous. He's one of the critical people Anonymous. Th- what is known about him?

Chris Tarbell 29:58 There's what's known in public and what was known because I sat with Hector and, um, he was sort of, like, the, the set things up guy. Um, so LulzSec had, like, their hackers, which was Sabu and Kayla, and they had their, uh, their, their media guy, this guy Topiary, up ... He lived up in the northern end of England. And, uh, they had a few other guys, but, but AVUNIT was the guy that set up infrastructure. So if you need a VPN in Brazil or something like that to pop through. Um, one of the first things Hector told me after we arrested him is that AVUNIT was a Secret Service agent and I was like, "Oh, shit." (laughs)

Lex Fridman 30:35 Hmm, yeah.

Chris Tarbell 30:35 Um, just because he kinda lived that lifestyle. He'd be around for a bunch of days and then all of a sudden gone for three weeks. Um, and I, I tried to get more out of Hector but, but that early on in that relationship, um, you know, I'm sure he was a little bit guarded. Uh, may- tried to social engineer me. Maybe he wanted that, uh, that "Oh, shit. There's law enforcement involved in this." Um, and, and not to say, I mean ... (sighs) I th-... I was in over my head with that case, just the amount of work that was going on. Um, so to track them all down, um, plus the 350 hacks that came in about just military institutions, um, you know, uh, i- i- it was swimming in the deep end. Um, so it was just at the end of the case, I looked back and I was like, "Oh, fuck, A.B. Unit, I could have had them all." Uh, you know, (laughs) maybe that's the perfectionist in me.

Lex Fridman 31:21 Oh, man. Well, reach out somehow.

Chris Tarbell 31:24 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 31:24 I can't, I won't say how, right? We'll have to figure it out.

Chris Tarbell 31:27 Wha- would you have him on?

Lex Fridman 31:28 Yeah. Of course.

Chris Tarbell 31:28 Oh my God, if- if- y- just let me know. Just let me know the day before.

Lex Fridman 31:31 And just talk shit about you the whole time.

Chris Tarbell 31:32 That, that's perfect. Uh, he probably doesn't even care about me, but...

Lex Fridman 31:34 Well, now he will-

Chris Tarbell 31:35 Oh, yeah.

Lex Fridman 31:36 ... because there's a certain pleasure of a guy who's extremely good at his job not catching another guy who's extremely good at his job.

Chris Tarbell 31:44 Obviously better, he got away.

Lex Fridman 31:46 Better, there you go. He's still eating at you, I love it.

Chris Tarbell 31:48 Yeah. So, I...

Lex Fridman 31:49 He or she.

Chris Tarbell 31:50 If I can meet that guy one day that, or h- he or she, that'd be great. I mean, I have no power.

Lex Fridman 31:55 So yes,

Lex Fridman 31:56 Silk Road, can you speak to the scale of this thing? What, what, uh, just for people who are not familiar, uh, how big was it, um, and w- any other interesting things you understand about its operation when it was active?

Chris Tarbell 32:11 So it was, uh, w- when we finally got looking through the books and (sighs) you know, the- the numbers came out as about $1.2 billion in sales. It's kinda hard with the fluctuation value of bitcoin at the time to come up with a real number, so you kind of pick a daily average, you know, and go across, so...

Lex Fridman 32:27 Most of the operation was done in, in bitcoin?

Chris Tarbell 32:29 It was all done in bitcoin. You, you couldn't, you had escrow accounts on, you know, you came in and you put money in an escrow account and, you know, it, the transaction wasn't done until the client got the, the drugs or whatever they had bought, um, and then the drug dealers had, had sent it in. There was some talk at the time that, that the cartel was starting to sell on there, um, so that started getting a little hairy there at the end.

Lex Fridman 32:53 What was your understanding of the relationship between organized crime, like the cartels, and this kind of more ad hoc, new age, uh, market that is the Silk Road?

Chris Tarbell 33:06 I mean, it was all just chatter. It was just, uh, you know, 'cause, like I said, Jared was in the inside, so we saw some of it from the admin sides, and Ross had a lot of private conversations with the different people that he had advised him, um, but no one knew each other. And I mean, the only thing, the only thing that, that they knew were the admins had to send an ID to Ross, had to send a picture of their driver's license or passport, which I always found very strange. Because if you are an admin on a site that sells fake IDs-

Lex Fridman 33:35 Mm-hmm.

Chris Tarbell 33:36 ... why would you send your real ID? And then why would the guy running the site, who profits from selling fake IDs, believe that it was? But fast-forward-

Lex Fridman 33:46 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 33:46 ... tangent, they were all real IDs. All the IDs that we found on Ross' computer as the admins were the real people's IDs.

Lex Fridman 33:52 What do you make of that?

Chris Tarbell 33:53 Because I don't-

Lex Fridman 33:53 Just other clumsiness?

Chris Tarbell 33:55 (laughs) Yeah, low-hanging fruit, I guess. I guess that's what it is. I mean, I mean, I would've bought, I mean, even Ross bought fake IDs off the site. He had federal agents knock on his door, um, you know, and then he got a little cocky about it.

Lex Fridman 34:08 The landscape, the dynamics of trust is fascinating here. So you trust certain ideas or, like, who do you trust in that kind of market? What was y- your understanding of the network of trust?

Chris Tarbell 34:19 I have no idea, anyone trust anybody, you know. I mean, I think Ross had his advisors of trust, but outside of that, I mean, he required people to send their ID for their trust. He, you know, people stole from him, uh, there was, there's open cases of that. Um, it's a criminal world, you can't trust anybody.

Lex Fridman 34:38 What was his life like, you think?

Chris Tarbell 34:41 Lonely. Can you imagine being trapped in something like that where you're, the, your whole world focused on that and you can't tell people what you do all day?

Lex Fridman 34:50 Could he have walked away?

Chris Tarbell 34:53 Like, someone else take over or the site just shut down?

Lex Fridman 34:56 Either one. Just you, put- putting yourself in his shoes, the loneliness, the, the anxiety, the, just the growing immensity of it, so walk away with some kind of financial stability.

Chris Tarbell 35:08 I couldn't have made it past two days. I- I'm not, I'm no- I don't like loneliness, you know. I mean, my, I, if my wife's away, I probably call her 10, 12 times a day.

Lex Fridman 35:18 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 35:18 We just talk about things, you know, I just, you know, "Oh, something crossed my mind, I wanna talk about it." And I'm sure she... Before-

Lex Fridman 35:23 And you like to talk to her, like, honestly about everything? So if you were running Silk Road, (laughs) you w- you wouldn't be able to, like, uh...

Chris Tarbell 35:31 Hopefully, I'd have a little protection. I'd only mention to her when we were in bed, um, to have that marital, uh, connection, but, (laughs) but who knows? I mean, she's gonna question why the Ferrari is outside and...

Lex Fridman 35:41 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 35:41 And things like that.

Lex Fridman 35:43 Yeah. (laughs) Well, I'm sure you can come up with something. Why didn't he walk away? That's another question of why don't criminals walk away in these situations?

Chris Tarbell 35:52 Well, I, I mean, I don't know every criminal mind, and some do. I mean, A.B. Unit walked away. I mean, d- not to go back...

Lex Fridman 35:57 That's

Narrator 35:57 ... to New York.

Chris Tarbell 35:57 ... to that son of a bitch, but... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:59 (laughs) There's a theme to this.

Chris Tarbell 36:00 But, you know, uh, Ross started counting his dollars. I mean, he really kept track of how much money he was making and, and it started, you know, getting exponentially growth. I mean, he, I mean, if he would've stayed at it, he would've probably been one of the richest people in the world.

Lex Fridman 36:15 And do you think he liked the actual money or the fact of the number growing?

Chris Tarbell 36:20 I mean, have you ever held a bitcoin?

Lex Fridman 36:22 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 36:22 Oh, you have? Well, he never did.

Lex Fridman 36:23 What do you mean, held a bitcoin?

Chris Tarbell 36:24 You can't hold it, it's not real.

Lex Fridman 36:25 Oh. Oh, okay.

Chris Tarbell 36:26 It's that, it's not kinda like I can give you a briefcase...

Lex Fridman 36:28 No.

Chris Tarbell 36:28 ... of bitcoin, like, you know, or something like that.

Lex Fridman 36:30 Right, right. Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 36:31 Like, he liked the idea of it growing. He liked the idea, I mean, I think it started off as sharing this idea, but then he really did turn to, like, "I am the captain of this ship and that's what goes," and he was making a lot of money. And again, my interactions with Ross was about maybe five or six hours over a, over a two-day period. Um, I knew DPR 'cause I read his words and all that. I didn't really know Ross. Um, there was a journal found on his computer, and so it sort of kinda gave me a little inside. Um, th- so I don't like to do a playbook for criminals, but I'll tell you right now-... don't write things down. Um, there was a big fad about people, like, remember kids going around and shooting people with paintballs and filming it?

Lex Fridman 37:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Tarbell 37:15 I don't know why you would do that. Why would you videotape yourself committing crime and then publish it? Like, if there's one thing I've taught my children, don't record yourself doing bad things. It never goes b- goes well, so...

Lex Fridman 37:25 And you actually give advice in the other end of, uh, logs being very useful for the defense perspective, uh, for, you know, i- i- information is useful for being able to figure out what the attacks were all about.

Chris Tarbell 37:39 Logs are the only reason I found Hector Monsegur. I mean, the, the one time his, uh, VPN dropped during a, a Fox hack, and I, he says he d- it wasn't even hacking, he just was sent a link and he clicked on it. And in 10 million lines of, uh, of logs, there was one IP address that stuck out.

Lex Fridman 37:55 This is fascinating. We'll, we'll explore several angles of that. So, um, w, uh, what was the process of bringing down Ross and, uh, the Silk Road?

Chris Tarbell 38:06 All right, so that's a long story. You want the whole thing or you wanna break it up?

Lex Fridman 38:09 Let's start at the beginning.

Chris Tarbell 38:11 Once we had the information of the chat logs and all that from the server, we found-

Lex Fridman 38:18 What's the server? What's the chat log?

Chris Tarbell 38:20 So the .onion was, uh, running the, the website, the Silk Road, was running on a server in Iceland.

Lex Fridman 38:27 How did you figure that out? That was one of the, uh, claims that the NSA.

Chris Tarbell 38:31 Yeah, that's, that's, that's the one that, that we said that, that yeah, I wouldn't tell you if it was.

Lex Fridman 38:35 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 38:35 It's on the internet. I mean, the internet has their conspiracy theories and all that, so...

Lex Fridman 38:39 Yeah. But you figure out, that's the part of the thing you do, you, it's puzzle pieces and you have to put them together.

Chris Tarbell 38:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 38:44 And look for different pieces of information and figure out, okay, so you figure out the server is in Iceland.

Chris Tarbell 38:48 We get a copy of it, and so we start getting clues off of that, and we s-

Lex Fridman 38:51 Was it physical copy of the server?

Chris Tarbell 38:53 Yeah, we flew o- you, you fly over there. So you, you go ... If you've been to Iceland, if you, if you've never been, you should definitely go to Iceland.

Lex Fridman 38:58 Uh, is it beautiful, or...

Chris Tarbell 39:00 I love it. I love it. It was what ... So I'll tell you this. So sorry, tangents, I, you know... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 39:03 Yeah, I love this, yeah.

Chris Tarbell 39:05 So I went to Iceland for the Anonymous case, then I went to Iceland for the Silk Road case, and I was like, "Oh shit, all cyber crime goes through Iceland." Um, it was just my sort of thing. And I was over there for like the third time, and I said, "If I ever can bring my family here." Like, so there's a place called Thingvellir, and I'm sure I'm fucking up the name, the Icelandics are pissed right now. But it's where the, the North American continental plate and the European continental plate are pulling apart, and it's being filled in with, uh, volcanic, uh, material in the, in the middle. And it's so cool.

Lex Fridman 39:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Tarbell 39:36 Like j- I was like, "One day I'll be able to afford to bring my family here." Um, and, and once I left...

Lex Fridman 39:42 It's just like the humbling and the beauty of nature.

Chris Tarbell 39:45 Just everything, man. It was a different world. It was, it was, it was insane how great Iceland is. And so we went back and we, we rented a van and we took friends and, um, we drove around the entire country. Uh, absolutely, uh, like a, a beautiful place. Like Reykjavík's nice, but get out of Reykjavík as quick as you can and see the countryside.

Lex Fridman 40:06 How's this place even real?

Chris Tarbell 40:07 Well, it's so new. I mean, that's ... So, you know, our rivers have been going through here for millions of years and flattened everything out and all that. The- these are, these are new, this is new land being carved by these rivers. You can walk behind a waterfall in one place. Um, it's, it's, it's the most beautiful place I've ever been.

Lex Fridman 40:23 You understand why this is a place where a lot of hacking is being done?

Chris Tarbell 40:26 Because the energy is free and it's c- it's cool, so you have a lot of servers going on there. Server farms, you know, their, their, the energies come up ou- fr- out of the ground, geothermal, um, and so, and then it keeps all the servers nice and cool. So why not keep your computers there at a cheap rate? Tangent. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 40:43 Uh, I'll def- I'll definitely visit for several reasons, including to, uh, talk to AV-UNIT.

Chris Tarbell 40:48 Yeah, he'll get you there.

Lex Fridman 40:49 (laughs) Well, the servers are there, but they don't probably live there. I mean, that's interesting. I mean, the Pacific, uh, the PST, the time zones, s- s- it's pre- there's so many fascinating things to explore here.

Chris Tarbell 41:00 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 41:00 Well-

Chris Tarbell 41:00 But, so you got-

Lex Fridman 41:01 Sorry, just to add to that.

Chris Tarbell 41:02 Yes.

Lex Fridman 41:02 The U- I mean, the European internet cable goes through there, so ac- you know, across to Greenland and down through Canada and all that. So they have backbone access with cheap energy and, uh, free cold weather, you know, so.

Chris Tarbell 41:13 And beautiful.

Lex Fridman 41:14 Oh, and beautiful, yes.

Chris Tarbell 41:16 (sighs)

Lex Fridman 41:16 So chat logs on that server, what did, what did the, what di- what was in the chat logs?

Chris Tarbell 41:22 Everything. He kept 'em all. That's another issue. If you're ke- running a criminal enterprise, please don't keep all ... again, I'm not making a guidebook of how to commit the perfect crime, uh, but, you know, he, every chat he ever had and everyone's chat, it was, it was like going into Facebook of criminal activity.

Lex Fridman 41:38 Yeah. Uh, just looking at texts with Elon Musk being part of the conversations, uh, I don't know if you're familiar, but they've been made public for the court case he's going through, was going through, is going through, was going through with Twitter.

Chris Tarbell 41:53 I don't know where it is.

Lex Fridman 41:54 Um, but it made me realize that, oh, okay, um, I'm generally, that's my philosophy on life is like anything I text or email or say publicly or privately, I should be proud of. So I try to kinda do that because you basically, you say don't keep chat logs, but it's very difficult to erase chat logs from this world. Be like, I guess if you're a criminal, that should be, um, like you have to be exceptionally competent at that kind of thing. To erase your footprints is very, very difficult.

Chris Tarbell 42:27 Can't make one mistake. All it takes is one mistake of keeping it. But, but yeah, I mean, not only do you have to be ... whatever you put in a chat log or whatever you put in an email, it has to hold up and you have s- be a- stand behind it publicly when it comes out, but it has ... if it comes out 10 years from now, you have to stand behind it. I mean, we're seeing that now in today's society.

Lex Fridman 42:45 Yeah. But that's a responsibility you have to take v- really, really seriously. If like, if I was a parent and advising teens, like you kinda have to teach 'em that. I, I, I know there's a sense like, no, we'll become more accustomed to that kind of thing, but in reality, nope. Y- I think in the future we'll still be held responsible-

Chris Tarbell 43:03 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:03 ... for the weird shit we do.

Chris Tarbell 43:05 Yeah. A friend of mine, his daughter got kicked out of college because of something she posted in high school. And-... the shittiest thing for him, but great for my kids. Great lesson. Look over there, and you don't want that to happen to you.

Lex Fridman 43:16 Yeah. Okay. So in the chat logs was, uh, useful information, like, uh, cr- uh, breadcrumbs of what? Of information-

Chris Tarbell 43:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:25 ...that you can then pull at?

Chris Tarbell 43:26 Yeah. Great evidence and stuff, you know. I mean, obviously-

Lex Fridman 43:28 Evidence too.

Chris Tarbell 43:29 Yeah. A lot of evidence, I mean, you Here's a sale of this much heroin, because, you know, Ross ended up getting charged with czar status on certain things, and that's, there's this, it's a certain weight in each, each type of drug that you had, like, I think it was, it's four or five employees of your empire, and that you made more than $10 million. And so it's, it's, it's, you know, it's just like the narco traffickers get charged with, or, you know, uh, anybody out of Columbia, you know? So...

Lex Fridman 43:56 And that was primarily what he was charged with doing when he was arrested, is the drug?

Chris Tarbell 44:03 Yeah. And he got charged with some of the hacking tools too.

Lex Fridman 44:05 Okay. Like, because he's in prison, what, for life?

Chris Tarbell 44:09 Two life sentences, plus 40 years.

Lex Fridman 44:11 And no possibility of parole?

Chris Tarbell 44:13 In the federal system, there's no possibility of parole when you have life. The only way you get out is if the president pardons you.

Lex Fridman 44:22 There's always a chance.

Chris Tarbell 44:24 There, there is. I think it was close. Uh, I heard, I heard rumors that it was close, uh, with the last one.

Lex Fridman 44:29 Well, right, so it depends. Given, it's fascinating, but given the political, the ideological ideas that he represented and espoused,

Lex Fridman 44:39 it's, it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Chris Tarbell 44:42 Yeah. I mean, I've been asked before, who, you know, who... Does he get out of prison first or does Snowden come back into America and... I, I don't know. I have no idea.

Lex Fridman 44:49 Snowden just became a Russian citizen.

Chris Tarbell 44:50 I saw that, and that's, yeah. I've heard a lot of good, weird theories about that one.

Lex Fridman 44:54 Well, actually, uh, on another tangent, let me ask you, do you think Snowden is, um, a good or a bad person?

Chris Tarbell 45:03 A bad person.

Lex Fridman 45:05 Can you make the case that he's a bad person?

Chris Tarbell 45:08 There's ways of being a whistleblower, and, and there, there's, there's rules set up on how to do that. Um, he, he didn't follow those rules. I mean, they, they... You know, I'm red, white, and blue, so I'm pretty, you know, as a federal government-

Lex Fridman 45:22 So you think his actions were anti-American?

Chris Tarbell 45:24 I think the results of his actions were anti-American. I don't know if his actions were anti-American.

Lex Fridman 45:29 Do you think he could have anticipated the, the negative consequences of that, his action?

Chris Tarbell 45:33 Yes.

Lex Fridman 45:33 Should we judge him by the consequences or the ideals of the intent of his actions?

Chris Tarbell 45:39 I think we all get to judge him by, based on our own beliefs, but I believe what he did was wrong.

Lex Fridman 45:44 Can you steel man the case that he's actually, uh, a good person and good for this country, for the United States of America, uh, as a flag bearer for the whistleblowers, the check on the power of government?

Chris Tarbell 46:00 Yeah. I mean, I'm not big government type guy, you know. So, uh, even, that sounds weird coming from a government guy for so many years. Um, but there's rules in place for a reason. I mean, he put, you know, some of our best capabilities, um, he made them publicly available. Um, it really kind of set us back in the, and this isn't my world at all, but the offensive side of cyber security.

Lex Fridman 46:25 Right. So he revealed stuff that he didn't need to reveal in order to make the point.

Chris Tarbell 46:29 Correct.

Lex Fridman 46:30 The... So, so you, if you can imagine a world where he leaked stuff that revealed the mass surveillance efforts and not reveal other stuff.

Chris Tarbell 46:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 46:44 Like is the, is the mass surveillance... I mean, that's the thing that, uh... Of course there's, in the interpretation of that, there's fear mongering, but at the core, that was a real shock to people, that, um, it's possible for a government to collect data at scale.

Chris Tarbell 47:03 It's surprising to me that people are that shocked by it. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 47:06 Well, there's conspiracies, and then there's like actual, uh, evidence that that is happening.

Chris Tarbell 47:13 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 47:14 I mean, it's a, it's a real-... There's a lot of reality that people ignore. But when it hits you in the face, you realize, holy shit, we're living in a new world. This is, this is the new reality, and we have to deal with that reality. Just like you work in cyber security, I think it really hasn't hit most people how fucked we all are in terms of cyber security. Okay, let me rephrase that.

Chris Tarbell 47:38 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 47:38 How many dangers there are in a digital world, how much under attack we all are, and how more intense the attacks are getting, and how difficult the defense is, and how important it is, and how much we should value it, and all the different things we should do it at the small and large scale to defend. Like most people really haven't woken up. They think about privacy from tech companies. They don't think about attacks, cy- cyber attacks.

Chris Tarbell 48:03 People don't think they're a target, and it's a, that message has, definitely has to get out there. I mean, you know, if you have a voice, you're a target. If the place you work, you might be a target, you know. Your husband might work at some place, you know, and they, because now people are working from home, so they're gonna target, you know, target you to get access to his network in order to get in.

Lex Fridman 48:21 Well, in that same way, the idea that the US government or any government could be doing mass surveillance on its citizens is, um, is one that was a wake-up call. Because you could imagine the ways in which that could, um, be a, like you could abuse the power of that to control us as a, for political reasons and purposes.

Chris Tarbell 48:46 Absolutely. You know, you could abuse it. I, I think during the part of the Snowden leak, we saw the two NSA guys were, uh, monitoring like their girlfriends.

Lex Fridman 48:55 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 48:55 And there's rules in place for that. Those people should be punished for abusing that. But how else are we going to hear about, you know, terrorists that are in the country talking about birthday cakes? Uh, and you know, that was a case where that, that was the trip word that, that, you know, we're gonna go bomb New York City's subway.

Lex Fridman 49:12 Yeah. It's complicated, but it just feels like there should be some balance of transparency. There should be a check on that power. 'Cause like you, you know, in the name of the war on terror-You, you can sort of, uh, sacrifice... There is a trade-off between security and freedom, uh, but it just feels like there's a giant slippery slope on the sacrificing of freedom in the name of security.

Chris Tarbell 49:35 It's, I, I hear you. And, and, (sighs) you know, we, we live in a world where... Well, I live in a world where I had to tell you exactly how... When I arrested someone, I had to write a, a 50-page document of how I arrested you, uh, and all the probable cause I have against you and all that. Well, you know, bad guys are reading that. They're reading how I caught you and they're changing the way they're doing things. They're changing their MO. Um, you know, they're doing it to be more secure. If, you know, we tell people how we're monitoring, you know, how, what we're surveilling, we're gonna lose that. I mean, the, the, the terrorists are just gonna go a different way. And, and I'm not trying to... I, again, I'm not big government. I'm not trying to say that, you know, it's cool that, that, that we're monitoring, the US government's monitoring everything. Um, you know, big tech's monitoring everything. They're, they're just monetizing it versus, uh, possibly using it against you.

Lex Fridman 50:21 But there is a balance, and those 50 pages, they have a lot of value. Um, and they make your job harder, but they prevent you from abusing the power of the job.

Chris Tarbell 50:33 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:34 There's a balance.

Chris Tarbell 50:34 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:35 That's a tricky balance. So the chat logs in Iceland gave you evidence, uh, of the heroin and all the, the large-scale tsar-level, uh, drug trading. Uh, what else did it give you in terms of the, how to catch...

Chris Tarbell 50:55 It gave us infrastructure. So the Onion name was actually running on a server in France. So if you, like... And it only communicated through a, a back channel, a VPN, um, to connect to the Iceland server. Um, there was a, um, Bitcoin, like, in a vault server that was also in Iceland, and I think that was so that the admins couldn't get into the Bitcoins, the other admins that were hired to work on the site. So you could get into the site, but you couldn't touch the money. Only Ross had access to that. And then, you know, another, another big mistake on Ross's part is he had the backups for everything at a data center in Philadelphia. Don't put your infrastructure in the United States. (laughs) I mean, again, let's not make a playbook, but, you know...

Lex Fridman 51:41 Well, I think these are low-hanging fruit that people of competence would know already. Uh-

Chris Tarbell 51:46 Yeah, I, I agree.

Lex Fridman 51:46 ... but it's interesting that he wasn't competent enough to make... So he was incompetent in certain ways.

Chris Tarbell 51:53 Yeah, I don't, I don't think he was a mastermind of setting up an, an infrastructure that would protect his, uh, his, his online business because, you know, keeping chat logs, keeping a diary, putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be, um, bad decisions.

Lex Fridman 52:13 How did you figure out that he's in San Francisco?

Chris Tarbell 52:17 (inhales deeply) So we had that part with Jared, that he was on the West Coast, and then-

Lex Fridman 52:20 Who, again, is Jared?

Chris Tarbell 52:22 Jared Dehughian was a, he was a partner, um, in, uh... He, he was a DHS agent, um, worked for HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, in Chicago. Uh, he started his Silk Road investigation because he was working at O'Hare and a weird package came in. Um, come to find out, he traced it back to Silk Road. So he, he, he started working a Silk Road investigation long before I started my case, and he made his way up undercover all the way to be an admin on Silk Road. Um, so he... I was talking to Ross on a Jabber server, the, a private Jabber server, private chat communication server, and, uh, we noticed that Ross's, um, time zone on that Jabber server was set to the West Coast. So we, we had Pacific Time on there, so we had a, a region, one twenty-fourth of the world was covered, uh, of where we thought he might be.

Lex Fridman 53:11 (laughs) And from there, how do you get to San Francisco?

Chris Tarbell 53:14 There was another guy, an IRS agent, that was part of the team, and he used a powerful tool, um, to find, uh, his clue. Um, he used the world of Google. Uh, he simply just went back and googled around for, uh, Silk Road at the time it was coming up, and found some posts on, like, some help forums that this guy was starting an Onion website and wanted some cryptocurrency help, and, uh, "If you could help him, please reach out to ross.albrick@gmail.com." Um, in my world, uh, that, that's a clue. So...

Lex Fridman 53:50 Okay, so that, that's as simple as that.

Chris Tarbell 53:53 Yeah. And the, the name he used on that post was Frosty.

Lex Fridman 53:56 Yeah. So s- you had to connect Frosty and other uses in Frosty and here's a Gmail, and the Gmail has the name.

Chris Tarbell 54:05 The Gmail posted that, that "I need help" under the name Frosty on this forum.

Lex Fridman 54:09 So what's the connection of Frosty elsewhere?

Chris Tarbell 54:12 The person logging into the Philadelphia backup server, the name of the computer was Frosty.

Lex Fridman 54:17 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 54:19 Another clue in my world. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 54:21 And that's it? The name is there, the connection to the Philadelphia server and then to Iceland is there, and so the rest is small details in terms of, uh... Or is there interesting details?

Chris Tarbell 54:33 No, I mean, there's some electronic surveillance that, that find Ross Ulbricht living in a house, and is there, you know, is a computer at his house attaching to, uh, uh, you know... Does it have Tor traffic at the same time that DPR is on? Um, another big clue. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 54:49 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 54:49 Matching up time frames.

Lex Fridman 54:52 Again, just putting your email out there, putting your name out there like that, like what I see from that, just at the scale of that market, what, what I s- what... It just makes me wonder how many criminals are out there that are not making these low-hanging fruit mistakes and are still successfully operating. It... To me, it seems like you could be a criminal much... It's much easier to be a criminal on the internet. What else to you is interesting to understand about that case, uh, o- of Ross and-And Silk Road and just the history of it, f- from your own, uh, relationship with it from a cybersecurity perspective, from an ethical perspective, all that kind of stuff. Like, when you look back, w- what's interesting to you about that case?

Chris Tarbell 55:39 I think my views on the case have changed over time. I mean, it was my job back then. Um, so I just looked at it as of, you know, "I'm going after this." I sort of made a name for myself in the bureau for the Anonymous case, and then this one was just... I mean, this was a bigger deal. I mean, uh, they flew me down to DC to meet with the director about this case. Um, the president of the United States was gonna announce this case, the arrest. Unfortunately, the government shut down two days before. Um, so it was just us. And that's really the only reason I had any publicity out of it, is because the government shut down, and the only thing that went public was that affidavit with my signature at the end. Um, otherwise, it would have just been the, the attorney general and the president announcing the rest of this, this big thing. And you wouldn't have seen me.

Lex Fridman 56:24 Did you understand that this was a big case?

Chris Tarbell 56:26 Yeah. I knew at the m- yeah, I knew at the time.

Lex Fridman 56:28 Was it because of the scale of it or what it stood for?

Chris Tarbell 56:33 (inhales deeply) I just knew that the public was gonna rea- going to react in a big way, like the media was... Now, did I think that it was gonna be on the front page of every newspaper in... the day after the arrest? No. But I could sense it. Like, I went like three or four days without sleep. Um, when I was out in San Francisco to arrest Ross, I had sent three guys to Iceland to, um... So, it was a three-prong approach for the takedown. It was get Ross, get the Bitcoins, and seize the site. Like, we didn't want someone else taking control of the site, and we wanted that big splash of that banner. Like, "Look, look, the government found this site." Like, "You might not wanna think about doing this again." So-

Lex Fridman 57:08 And you were able to pull off all three?

Chris Tarbell 57:10 Maybe that's my superpower. I'm really good about putting smarter people on, th- than I am-

Lex Fridman 57:14 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 57:14 ... uh, together and on the right things. Um, you know, I've, I've done-

Lex Fridman 57:17 It's the only way to do it.

Chris Tarbell 57:18 In the business I formed, that's what I did. I hired only smarter people than me. And I, you know, I'm not that smart, but, you know, uh, smart enough to know who the smart people are.

Lex Fridman 57:26 The team was able to do all three.

Chris Tarbell 57:28 Yeah. We were able to get all three done. Um, yeah, and the one guy, one of the guy, the main guys I sent to Iceland, man, he was so smart. Like, I sent another guy from the FBI to, um, to France to get that part, and he couldn't do it. So the guy in Iceland did it from, from Iceland (laughs) . They had to pull some stuff out of memory on a computer. Um, you know, i- i- it's live process stuff, I'm sure you've done that before. But...

Lex Fridman 57:53 (laughs) I'm sure you did. Look, look what you're doing. You're, this is, this is like a, a multilayer interrogation going on. Uh, uh, w- was there a concern that somebody else would step in and control the site?

Chris Tarbell 58:06 Absolutely. We, we, we didn't have insight on who exactly had control.

Lex Fridman 58:10 So, it turns out that Ross had, uh, like dictatorial control. So, he... it wasn't easy to delegate to somebody else?

Chris Tarbell 58:17 He hadn't. I think he had some sort of ideas. I mean, i- his diary talked about walking away and giving it to somebody else, but he didn't, uh, he couldn't give up that control on anybody apparently.

Lex Fridman 58:27 (inhales deeply) Which makes you think that power corrupts, and his ideals were not as strong as he espoused about. Because if, if it was about the f- the freedom of being able to buy drugs if you want to, then he surely should've found ways to delegate that power.

Chris Tarbell 58:45 Well, he changed over time. You could see it in his writings, um, that he changed. Like, so

Chris Tarbell 58:52 people will argue back and forth that there was never murders on Silk Road. When we were doing the investigation, to us, there were six murders. Um, so there, there was... The way we see him, saw him at the time was Ross ordered people to be murdered. Um, you know, somebody's... people stole from him and all that. It was sort of an evolution from, "Oh, man, I can't deal with this. I can't do it. It's too much," to the last one was like the guy said, uh, "Well, he's got three roommates." Uh, and it's like, "Oh, we'll kill them too."

Lex Fridman 59:23 Was that ever proven in court?

Chris Tarbell 59:24 No.

Lex Fridman 59:25 Just part of murder?

Chris Tarbell 59:26 And it's... The, the murders never went forward because there was some, uh, some, some stuff, problems in that case. So, there was a separate case in Baltimore, uh, that they had been working on for a lot longer. And so, you know, during the investigation, that caused a bunch of problems because now we have multiple federal agencies case against the same thing.

Lex Fridman 59:43 How do you decide not to push forward the, the, the, the murder investigations?

Chris Tarbell 59:48 So, there was a de-confliction meeting that happened in DC. Um, I didn't happen to go to that meeting, but Jared went. This is before I ever knew Jared. And, um, we have like, um, televisions where we can just sit in a room and s- sit in on the meeting, um, but it's all, you know, secured network and all that so we can talk openly about, uh, secure things. Um, and we sat in on the meeting, and people just kept saying the term "sweat equity." "I've got sweat equity," meaning that they had worked on the case for so long that they deserve to take him down. Um, and th- by this time, you know, no one knew about us, but we told them at the meeting that, well, we had found the server and we have a copy of it and we have the infrastructure. Um, and, and these guys had just had communications, undercovers. Um, they didn't really know what was going on. And this wasn't my first de-confliction meeting. We had a huge de-confliction meeting during, um, during the Anonymous case.

Lex Fridman 1:00:46 What's a de-confliction meeting?

Chris Tarbell 1:00:47 Agents within your agency or other, other federal agencies have an open, uh, investigation that if you expose your case or took down your case would hurt their case or the other way.

Lex Fridman 1:00:58 Oh, so you kinda have a... It's, it's like the rival gangs meet at the table in a smoke-filled room and, uh-

Chris Tarbell 1:01:05 Less bullets at the end, but yes (laughs) .

Lex Fridman 1:01:08 Yes (laughs) . Oh, boy, with the sweat equity.

Chris Tarbell 1:01:10 Yeah. So-

Lex Fridman 1:01:10 I mean, there's c- careers at stake, right?

Chris Tarbell 1:01:13 I hate s-

Lex Fridman 1:01:14 Yeah. You hate that idea?

Chris Tarbell 1:01:15 Yeah. I mean, why would you... why is that at stake? Just because you've worked on it long enough, longer than I have, that means you get... you, you, you did better?

Lex Fridman 1:01:23 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 1:01:23 That's, that's insane to me, the, the... that's rewarding bad behavior.

Lex Fridman 1:01:28 And so, that one of... the part of the sweat equity discussion was about murder and this was, "Here's a chance to actually bust them, be... given the data you have from Iceland," and all that kind of stuff. So why...

Chris Tarbell 1:01:38 Well, they wanted us just to turn the data over to them.

Lex Fridman 1:01:41 To them?

Chris Tarbell 1:01:41 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:01:41 So that-

Chris Tarbell 1:01:42 Thanks, thanks for getting this this far. Here it is. I mean, it came to the point where they sent us like, they, they had a picture of what they thought Ross was and it was an internet meme.... it really was a meme. It was a, it was a photo that we could look up. Like, it- it was insane.

Lex Fridman 1:01:58 All right, so there's, uh, different degrees of competence all across the world between different people. Yes. Okay. Uh, does part of you regret, because you pushed forward the- the heroin and the drug trade, but never got to the murder discussion?

Chris Tarbell 1:02:15 I mean, the only regretting is that- that the internet doesn't seem to understand. Like, they- they- they just kind of blow that part off, that- that he literally paid people to have people murdered. It didn't result in a murder, and I thank God no one resulted in a murder.

Lex Fridman 1:02:27 But that's where his mind was.

Chris Tarbell 1:02:29 His mind and where he wrote in his diary was that, "I had people killed and here's the money." He paid it. He- he paid a large amount of bitcoins, uh, to- for that murder. So- those murders-

Lex Fridman 1:02:39 So he didn't just even think about it, he actually took action, but the murders never happened. He took action by paying the money.

Chris Tarbell 1:02:45 Correct, and- and- and the people came back with results. He thought they were murdered.

Lex Fridman 1:02:50 That said, can you understand and steel me on the case for the drug trade on Silk Road? Like making, can you make the case that it's a net positive for society?

Chris Tarbell 1:03:01 So there was a time period of when we found out the infrastructure and when we built the case against Ross. Hmm, I don't remember exact- six weeks, a month, two months, I don't know, somewhere in there. Um, but then at Ross's sentencing, there was a father that stood up and talked about his son dying, and I went back and kind of did the math and it was between those time periods of when we knew we could shut it down, we could have pulled the plug on the server and gone, and when Ross was arrested. Uh, his son died from buying drugs on Silk Road, and I still think about that father a lot.

Lex Fridman 1:03:37 But if you look at scale, at the war on drugs, let's just even outside of Silk Road, do you think the war on drugs by the United States has caused- has alleviated more suffering or caused more suffering in the world?

Chris Tarbell 1:03:55 That might be above my pay scale. I mean, I understand the other side of the argument. I mean, people have said that I don't have to go down to the corner to buy drugs, I'm not gonna get shot on the corner buying drugs or something, I can just have them sent to my house, people are gonna do drugs anyways. I understand that argument. Um, from my personal standpoint, if I made it more difficult for my children to get drugs, then I'm satisfied.

Lex Fridman 1:04:17 So your personal philosophy is that if we legalize all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, that that would not make for a better world?

Chris Tarbell 1:04:28 I don't, no, personally I don't believe legalizing-

Lex Fridman 1:04:30 Do you think it's-

Chris Tarbell 1:04:30 ... all drugs would make- make for a better world.

Lex Fridman 1:04:32 Can you imagine that it would?

Chris Tarbell 1:04:36 Well-

Lex Fridman 1:04:36 Do you understand that argument?

Chris Tarbell 1:04:38 Sure, yeah. I mean, as I've gotten older, I've starting to, I like to see both sides of an argument and when I can't see the other side, I, that's when I like really like to dive into it. And I can see the other side, I can see the why people would say that. Um, but I don't want to be a, my gr- raise children in a world where- where drugs are just free for- for use.

Lex Fridman 1:04:57 Well, and then the other side of it is, well Silk Road did, uh, you know, taking down Silk Road, did that increase or decrease the number of, uh, dr- drug trading criminals in the world? It's unclear.

Chris Tarbell 1:05:12 Online, I think it increased. I think, uh, you know, that- that's one of the things I think about a lot with Silk Road was that no one really knew. I mean, there- there was, uh, you know, thousands of users, but then after that it was on the front page of the paper and there was millions of people that knew about Tor and- and Onion sites. We- it was an advertisement. Um, you know, I would've thought, I thought crypto was gonna crash right after that, like, I don't know, like, well people now see that ba- bad people are doing bad things with crypto. That'll crash them all. I'm obviously wrong on that one. Uh, and I thought, uh, you know, Ross was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years. No one's gonna start up these... Dark markets exploded after that.

Lex Fridman 1:05:50 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 1:05:50 Uh, you know, some of them started as, you know, opportunistic, "I'm gonna, you know, take those escrow accounts and I'm gonna steal all the m- all the money that came in." You know, they were for that, but, you know, but there were a lot of dark markets that popped up after that. Now we- we put the playbook out there.

Lex Fridman 1:06:05 Yeah. Yeah, but and also there's a case for, uh, do you ever think about not taking down, if you've not taken down Silk Road, you could use it because it's a market. It itself is not necessarily the primary criminal organization. It's a market for criminals, so it could be used to track down criminals in the physical world. So if you don't take it down, given that it was, you know, the central, how centralized it was, it could be used as a place to find criminals, right, as opposed to-

Chris Tarbell 1:06:40 So the dealers, the drug deal-

Lex Fridman 1:06:41 The de- the dealers, yeah.

Chris Tarbell 1:06:43 ... taking down the drug dealers?

Lex Fridman 1:06:43 So if you have the car- get the cartels start get involved, you- you go after the dealers.

Chris Tarbell 1:06:48 It would have been very difficult.

Lex Fridman 1:06:50 Because of Tor and all that.

Chris Tarbell 1:06:51 Because of all the protections, anonymity. Decloaking all that would have been p- drastically more difficult. And a lot of people in upper management of the FBI didn't have the appetite of running something like that. That would have been the FBI running a drug market. How many, how many kids, how many fathers would had to come in and said, "My kid bought while the FBI was running a site, a drug site. My kid died." So I didn't know anybody in the FBI management that would have the appetite to let us run what was happening on Silk Road. Um, you know, because a- remember at that time we're still believing six people are dead. We're still investigating, you know, where the hell are these bodies, um, you know? That's pretty much why we took down Ross when we did. I mean, we- we had to jump on it fast.

Lex Fridman 1:07:37 What else can you say about this complicated world that has grown of the dark web?

Chris Tarbell 1:07:44 ... I don't understand it. I- I- like, it would have been a, a, something for me. I- I thought, I thought it was gonna collapse, but, I mean, i- it's just gotten bigger in what's going on out there. Now, I'm really surprised in- in, that it hasn't grown into other networks, or people haven't developed other networks, but, but Tor is.

Lex Fridman 1:07:58 You mean like instead of Tor?

Chris Tarbell 1:08:00 Yeah. Yeah. Tor's still the main one out there. I mean, there's some, there's a few others, and I'm not gonna put an advertisement out for them-

Lex Fridman 1:08:06 Yes.

Chris Tarbell 1:08:06 ... but, uh, but, you know, uh, I thought that market would have grown.

Lex Fridman 1:08:10 Yeah, my sense was, when I interacted with Tor, it was that there's huge usability issues. But that's for, like, legal activity.

Chris Tarbell 1:08:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:08:17 'Cause like if you care about privacy, it's just not as good of a browser. Like, uh, it's to- to- to- to look at stuff.

Chris Tarbell 1:08:25 No, it's way too slow.

Lex Fridman 1:08:26 It's way too slow.

Chris Tarbell 1:08:27 It's way too slow. But I mean, you can't even, like... I know some people use it to, like, view movies. Like Netflix, you can only view certain movies in certain countries. You can use it for that, but it's- it's too slow even for that, so.

Lex Fridman 1:08:37 Were you ever able to hold in your mind the landscape of the dark web? Like, what- what's going on out there? It's just, like, to me as a human being, it's just difficult to understand the digital world. Like, these anonymous usernames, like doing anonymous activity, it's just, it's hard to, um... What am I trying to say? It's hard to visualize it in the way I can visualize, like I've been reading a lot about Hitler. I can visualize meetings between people, military strategy, uh, deciding on, uh, certain evil atrocities, all that kind of stuff. I can visualize the people. There's agreements, hands- handshakes, p- stuff signed, groups built. Like, in the digital space, like with bots, with anonymity, any one human can be multiple people. Uh, it just-

Chris Tarbell 1:09:29 Yeah, it's all lies. It's all lies.

Lex Fridman 1:09:31 Like, yeah, it feels like I can't trust anything.

Chris Tarbell 1:09:33 No, you can't. You honestly can't. And, like, you can talk to two different people and it's the same person. Like- like, there's so many different... You know, Hector had so many different identities online, that, you know, uh, of things that- that, you know, the- the lies to each other. He lied to people inside his group, uh, just to use another name to spy on, make sure what they, you know, weren't talking shit behind his back, or weren't doing anything. Um, it's all lies. And- and people that can keep all those lies straight, it's unbelievable to me.

Lex Fridman 1:10:00 Ross Ulbricht represents the very early days of that. That's why the- the competence wasn't there. Just imagine how good the people are now, the kids that grow up.

Chris Tarbell 1:10:10 Oh, they've learned from his- his mistakes.

Lex Fridman 1:10:14 Just the extreme competence. Did you see how good people are at video games? Like, the level of, uh, play, in terms of video games. Like, I- I used to think I sucked.

Chris Tarbell 1:10:24 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:10:25 And now I'm not even, like, I'm not even in-in the, like, consideration of calling myself shitty at video games. I'm not even, I'm like nonexistent. I'm like, uh, the mold.

Chris Tarbell 1:10:37 Yeah, I stopped playing because it's so embarrassing.

Lex Fridman 1:10:39 It's embarrassing.

Chris Tarbell 1:10:40 It's like wrestling with your kid and he finally beats you.

Lex Fridman 1:10:42 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 1:10:42 He's like, "Well, fuck that, I'm not wrestling my kid any- ever again."

Lex Fridman 1:10:45 And in some sense, hacking, uh, at its best and its worst, is a kind of game. And you can get exceptionally good at that kinda game.

Chris Tarbell 1:10:53 And you get the accolations, uh, of it. I mean, there- there's, you know, there's power that comes along if you have success. Uh, look at the kid that- that was hacking into Uber in Rockstar Games. He put it out there that he was doing it. I mean, he used the name, um, whatever hacked into Uber was his, uh, screen name.

Lex Fridman 1:11:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Tarbell 1:11:09 He was very proud of it. I mean, one, building evidence against himself, uh, but, you know, th- like, he wanted that slap on the back, like, "Look at what a great hacker you are."

Lex Fridman 1:11:18 Yeah. What do you think is in the mind of that guy? What do you think is in the mind of- of Russ? Do you think they see themselves as good people?

Chris Tarbell 1:11:27 Uh...

Lex Fridman 1:11:27 Do they, do- do you think they acknowledge the bad they're doing onto the world?

Chris Tarbell 1:11:33 So- so that Uber hacker, I think that's just youth, I mean, not realizing what consequences are, I mean, based on his actions.

Chris Tarbell 1:11:39 Russ was a little bit older. Um, I think, I'm- Russ truly is a libertarian. He was l- truly had his beliefs that- that he could provide the gateway for other people to live that libertarian lifestyle, and put in their body what they want. Uh, I- I don't think that was a- a front or a lie.

Lex Fridman 1:11:58 What- what's the difference between, uh, DPR and Russ? You said, like, "I have never met Russ until... I only had those two, uh, t- two days of worth of interaction."

Chris Tarbell 1:12:07 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:07 It's just, it's just interesting, given how long you've chased him, and then having met him. What was the difference to you as a human being?

Chris Tarbell 1:12:14 He- he was a human being. He was, he was, you know, he was an actual person. He was nervous when I- when we arrested him. Um, so one of the things that- that I- I learned through my law enforcement career is, if I'm gonna be the case agent, I'm gonna be the one in charge of, you know, dealing with this person, I'm not putting handcuffs on him. Someone else is gonna do that. Like, I'm gonna be there to help him. Uh, you know, I'm your conduit to help. And so, you know, right after someone's arrested, you obviously you have to pat them down for weapons to make sure for everybody's safety, but then I just put my hand on their chest. Just feel their heart, feel their breathing. You're gonna... It- it's, I'm sure it's the scariest day.

Lex Fridman 1:12:47 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 1:12:48 But then to have that human contact kind of settles people down, and you can kinda like, "Let's start thinking about this. I'm gonna tell you, you know, I'm gonna be open and honest with you." You know, there's a lot of cops out there, and federal agents cops, that just go to the hard ass tactic. You don't get very far with that. You don't get very far being a mean asshole to somebody, you know. Be compassionate, be human, uh, and it's gonna go a lot further.

Lex Fridman 1:13:13 So given everything he's done, you were still able to have compassion for him?

Chris Tarbell 1:13:17 Yeah. We took him to the jail, and we- we... So, he- it was after hours, so he didn't get to see a judge that day, so he stuck, we stuck him in the San Francisco jail. Um, I hadn't slept for about four days because I was dealing with the people in Iceland, bosses in DC, bosses in New York. So, I, and I was in San Francisco, so timeframe, like- like the Iceland people were calling me when I was supposed to be sleeping. It was insane. But...... I still went out that night while Ross sat in jail and bought him breakfast. I said, "What do you want for breakfast? I'll have a nice breakfast for you." 'Cause we picked him up in the morning and took him over to the FBI to do the, the FBI booking, the fingerprints and all that. And, and I got him breakfast. I mean, and he don't get paid back for that sort of thing. I'm not looking, but like, for that, out of my own-

Lex Fridman 1:14:00 D- did he make special requests for breakfast?

Chris Tarbell 1:14:02 Yeah. He asked for c- certain things.

Lex Fridman 1:14:04 What, can you m- mention? Or is that top secret FBI?

Chris Tarbell 1:14:06 Uh, that's not top secret. I, I, I think he wanted some granola bars. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:14:10 (laughs)

Chris Tarbell 1:14:10 Like, and, and, and, you know, but, but-

Lex Fridman 1:14:12 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 1:14:12 ... I mean, he already had lawyered up. So, we, you know, which is his right. He can do that. So, I, I knew we weren't gonna work together, you know, like I did with Hector. Um, but, I mean, this was this guy's-

Lex Fridman 1:14:22 So most of the conves-

Chris Tarbell 1:14:22 ... last day.

Lex Fridman 1:14:23 ... most of the conversations have to be done with lawyers?

Chris Tarbell 1:14:26 From that point on, I can't question him-

Lex Fridman 1:14:28 Yeah.

Chris Tarbell 1:14:28 ... when he asks for a lawyer. Um, or if I did, it wouldn't be used against him.