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Thom and the other agent started checking the computer for booby traps, probing to ensure that
the machine wouldn’t die if they plugged it into an external drive that they would use to siphon out all
of the files. It was then that Thom saw a “scripts” folder. In it there was code that Ross had written to
protect the computer in case of this very scenario.
A few feet away FBI agents swarmed Ross’s house, looking for evidence and clues that would
tie him to the Silk Road. In the garbage can they found a handwritten note that was scribbled on a
piece of crumpled paper, outlining a new file system he was building for the site. On Ross’s bedside
table two thumb drives sat, though the Feds didn’t know yet what those drives contained.
Over the next ten hours the Samsung computer was copied half a dozen different ways. Backups
were made of backups. Agents came and went. They ate McDonald’s as they worked. The streetlights
flickered on and the forensics van was moved to an FBI safe house nearby. When Tarbell arrived
after dropping Ross off at central booking, Thom and his forensics colleague were trying to go deeper
and deeper into the computer, with the hope that they could pluck Ross’s passwords out of the
laptop’s memory, possibly to enter the other side of the laptop. The Ross Ulbricht side. But at around
2:00 a.m., as they tried to break into the other side of the machine, it died.
They had the backups of the computer, but it would be days before they found out exactly what
kind of evidence they had retrieved.
A couple of miles away, in a stone jailhouse on Seventh Street in San Francisco, Ross sat staring
at a concrete wall, frightened by where he found himself but unfazed by how long he might be in jail.
He had played through this scenario a thousand times before. Sure, they had caught him with his
fingers on the laptop while he was logged in to the Silk Road as DPR. But that didn’t mean that he
was the DPR who ran the Silk Road. There could be more than one Dread Pirate Roberts, like the old
tale in The Princess Bride.
Ross was sure that they would never be able to figure out his passwords on the computer, either.
All the most important files had been encrypted and locked under his secure code word,
“purpleorangebeach.” No one, not even the FBI, would be able to figure that out. The most they could
prove, he was sure, was that he was logged in to the site when they arrested him. And that didn’t
mean anything. In a worst-case scenario he knew he could admit that, sure, he had once been involved
in the Silk Road, but he had handed the site off to someone else years ago. If the FBI asked whom
Ross had given the site away to, he could simply say, “I don’t know who it was. All I know is that
they called themselves the Dread Pirate Roberts.”