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Chapter 72
THE MUSEUM
Along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, there are dozens of museums that tell the story
of the history of America. Some of the relics in these buildings go back hundreds of years,
like the tattered flag that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the pistol that was used to kill
President Lincoln. And then there are some objects that are more recent but will remain infamous for
hundreds of years to come. Some of these newer artifacts sit on the Hubbard Concourse in the
contemporary Newseum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks away from the White House.
The relics at this museum hail from some of the biggest criminal cases in American history. In
one corner of the exhibit there is an old wooden cabin, barely big enough for a man, that belonged to
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Nearby a pair of thick black sneakers sit, their bases torn open; they
were worn by the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, when he tried to blow up an American Airlines flight
in 2001. And then, farther along in the exhibit, a glass box contains exhibit number 2015.6008.43a,
which is a silver Samsung laptop.
“He called himself Dread Pirate Roberts after a character in The Princess Bride,” the text next
to the laptop reads. And then it explains that the computer belonged to Ross Ulbricht, “who ran a $1.2
billion marketplace called the Silk Road.” The text does not, however, tell the story of how that
laptop ended up in that glass case or what is still hidden inside its hard drive.
In the weeks after Ross’s arrest, Tarbell, Thom, and Jared rummaged through the laptop for
forensic evidence about the Silk Road. While the FBI forensics team was successful in getting into the
side of the computer that Ross used when he was the Dread Pirate Roberts—the side that contained
those millions of words of chat logs between DPR and his employees on the Web site and the hackers,
hit men, and gun and drug dealers he engaged with—those same FBI agents were unable to get into the
other side of the computer, the side of the computer that Ross logged in to when he wanted to be Ross
Ulbricht, to message friends, to talk to his family, to live his other life.
The agents have tried to crack the passwords to that side of the machine, but it would take a
computer more than one hundred years to guess the correct pass code. Instead that side of the
computer, the Ross side, is locked away forever.
So is the man who owned that laptop.