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Dread Pirate Roberts was a twenty-nine-year-old kid from Austin, Texas, who had no programming
background and who was living in a $1,200-a-month apartment in San Francisco.
Jared wasn’t sold. Tarbell wasn’t, either. And Serrin knew that if they weren’t, he certainly
wasn’t. Jared, after all, had spent the most time with DPR, working for him for months undercover
and chatting with him extensively online. Plus, Jared had an entire office full of fake IDs and people
admitting they had gotten them from the Silk Road, and they certainly weren’t DPR.
But Gary continued to talk.
“And then I found a question posted on Stack Overflow, where a user by the name of Ross
Ulbricht had asked about coding help with Tor. You know?” Gary said. “And then, a minute after he
had posted the question on Stack Overflow, he went in and changed his username from Ross Ulbricht
to Frosty, and then—”
“What did you say?” Tarbell interrupted, sitting up in his bed.
Gary was caught off guard by the question but answered anyway. “Stack Overflow. It’s a site
where you can post programming questions—”
“No, not that,” Tarbell said, his tone coming across as aggressive. “What did you say after that?”
Gary explained that Ross Ulbricht had signed up for an account on Stack Overflow with his real
e-mail as his username, but a minute after asking a question on the site, he had changed the username
to Frosty.
Jared and Serrin listened silently, unsure of what this all meant.
“Frosty?” Tarbell said, now sounding amped. “Are you sure?” He then impatiently spelled out
each letter: “F-R-O-S-T-Y—as in ‘frosty’?”
“Yes! Frosty!” Gary replied, growing annoyed that Tarbell was being so rude. “And he later
changed his e-mail address to frosty@frosty.com. What’s the deal? Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because,” Chris said, taking a deep breath, “when we got the server from Iceland”—he took
another breath—“we saw that the server and the computer that belonged to the Dread Pirate Roberts
were both called ‘Frosty.’”
The phone line was dead silent, just a hush of air as the four men sat contemplating what they had
all just heard.
Finally the speechlessness broke. “Well,” Serrin said. “That’s interesting.”
As this settled in, Jared looked up “Ross Ulbricht” online, and came across his YouTube page,
where, amid a dozen videos about libertarianism, was the title that Ross had given his YouTube
account: “OhYeaRoss.” There it was, the word that DPR used all the time in his chats with Cirrus:
“yea.”
No h at the end, just “yea.”