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Chapter 51
TARBELL FINDS A MISTAKE
Chris Tarbell bolted out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office at 1 Saint Andrews Plaza in New York.
He was walking at a brisk pace toward the FBI headquarters across the street as he reached
into his pocket and grasped a tiny gray thumb drive that could change the world—at least, Chris
Tarbell’s world.
He could barely contain the excitement at the reality that the thumb drive he held possibly
contained the servers for the Silk Road. The drive had arrived in the mail that morning, shipped from
authorities in Iceland. If the server it contained was not encrypted, it could possibly lead the FBI to
the Dread Pirate Roberts.
When the FBI had opened the official investigation into the Silk Road a couple of months earlier,
Tarbell and his small team of federal agents were already a thousand steps ahead of every other
government group working the case. The cybercrime agents had, after all, spent years hunting for and
arresting people on the Dark Web, taking down hackers, pedophiles, identity thieves, and even
terrorists, many of whom had adopted these technologies as silent weapons.
The FBI agents also knew that, more often than not, the malevolent people they hunted made
mistakes. Sometimes small and seemingly innocuous blunders, but mistakes nonetheless. Often all the
agents needed to do to crack open a case was to find one of these.
Which was what Tarbell had recently done.
Given his background in computer forensics, Tarbell could scour technical forums online that
discussed the code that held the Silk Road together and actually understand what people were saying.
Soon after opening his investigation, Tarbell noticed something that other experienced programmers
had seen online: that a recent update to the Silk Road server had left a small but potentially fateful
mistake open on the site’s log-in page. The error appeared to leak the server’s IP address, a series of
numbers that was akin to a home address but, rather than pointing at a house, pointed at a server, even
a hidden one on the Dark Web.
Upon investigation, it turned out the mistake was a real clue, and after a few hours running
software that took advantage of the error, Tarbell was able to pinpoint the IP address that housed the
server that stored the Silk Road, which was, it turned out, in Iceland. (Hours after he found the error,
the Dread Pirate Roberts saw it too and patched the hole.) It was a huge break in the case, but it was