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than traditional morphine—not to mention a slew of explosives and other highly dangerous goods. So
it was time to bolster his defenses and strengthen his security. He wasn’t going to take any chances.
To begin, he put Variety Jones in charge of looking into any possibility that law enforcement, or
LE, as they abbreviated it, might be lurking on the site. Next Ross got to work securing other
vulnerable areas of his life, including his own laptop.
First and foremost, he made sure his Samsung 700Z was properly encrypted. He had talked to VJ
about this before, days after they read the news about someone being arrested for leaking information
to WikiLeaks. The news reports about the bust noted that the man had used exactly the same password
to log in to his computer and for his encryption software and that the FBI cracked it in no time at all.
“What a macaroon,” VJ had written.
“Weak,” Ross agreed.
“If he had a good password, they’d have nothing,” VJ said, referring to the “Feebs,” the
nickname they used for the FBI. He then added that the man who had been arrested was an “idiot” for
not taking security more seriously.
With this ominous lesson, Variety Jones offered some advice to DPR: You should set up your
computer to automatically shut down if it hasn’t been used for a certain period of time. More
important, you need to install a kill switch, where you can press a random key on your laptop that
kills the machine instantly. This way, if the Feebs approach you in public, you press the key and your
computer is locked forever.
Dread replied that he would do just that.
Now Ross had another question for VJ, asking if he should store his files in the cloud so his
laptop was completely clear of anything related to the Silk Road. This way, if the man behind the
mask were ever grabbed with his hands on the keyboard, there would be nothing that could link him to
the site. “Would be nice,” DPR wrote, “to think that my laptop has nothing critical or incriminating on
it.” After some back-and-forth on the pros and cons of each (the negative being that storing everything
in the cloud would make working on the site painfully slow), Variety Jones suggested that Dread keep
all his Silk Road files on his computer but that he encrypt them, so if his computer was grabbed by the
Feebs, they would never be able to get inside.
Great idea!
“Ok, just needed to talk that through,” DPR said. “Thanks!”
As another backup plan—the most-wanted man on the Internet could never have too many—Ross
decided to partition the hard drive on his laptop into two different sections. (This was like cutting an
earthworm in half so that it regenerated and became two new worms.) His computer essentially now
became two computers with two different accounts, with one side of the machine strictly allocated to
the Dread Pirate Roberts and used only for all things Silk Road. The other side of the computer was
assigned to Ross and was where he would e-mail his friends and family, log in to Facebook, and flirt
with girls on dating Web sites.
This was when Ross created a very strict rule, perhaps the most important of all his new security
enhancements. Anything that could be linked to Ross Ulbricht online (personal e-mails or social
media) would never be done on the DPR side of the computer. On the flip side, anything that linked to
the Dread Pirate Roberts (logging in to the Silk Road, chatting with VJ, uploading new code to the
servers) would never happen on Ross’s side of the computer. This was imperative to ensure that the
two identities did not leave a trail back to each other online.