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Notes on Reporting
Each and every day, as we navigate the real world, we leave a billion little fingerprints in our
wake. The door handles we touch, the screens we press, and the people we interact with all
capture a trace of our being there. The same is true on the Internet. We share pictures and videos on
social networks, leave comments on news articles. We e-mail, text, and chat with hundreds of people
throughout the day.
If there is anyone who left more of those digital fingerprints lying around the Internet than most
people, it was Ross Ulbricht. He spent years living on his computer and interacting with people, good
and bad, through that machine.
Over the course of my research for this book, I was able to gain access to more than two million
words of chat logs and messages between the Dread Pirate Roberts and dozens of his employees.
These logs were excruciatingly in-depth conversations about every moment and every decision that
went into creating and managing the Silk Road. They showed startling details about decisions to sell
drugs, guns, body organs, and poisons and showed how every aspect of the site was managed. I also
gained access to dozens of pages of Ross’s personal diary entries and thousands of photos and videos
of Ross, both from his friends and from his own computer and cell phone.
Working with a researcher, Nicole Blank, I scoured the Web for anything Ross had touched over
the past decade, which resulted in an endless trove of social media content from Twitter, Google,
Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, as well as articles and social content he had interacted with and
commented on. The photos that I obtained of Ross, through friends and others, told more of a story
than just the pictures; the background data of the images (known as EXIF data) showed when they
were captured and in many instances, with GPS data, where they were taken.
Then there was the three weeks of testimony and the hundreds of pieces of evidence that the
prosecution and defense presented during Ross’s trial.
Using an Excel database, my researcher and I were able to put all of this information into one
place and cross-reference every moment from 2006 to 2013—in many instances down to the second.
And with that, everything matched up neatly. For example, when the Dread Pirate Roberts talked to
his lieutenants on the Silk Road about taking a weekend off for a short trip, on that same weekend
Ross Ulbricht and his friends posted pictures of him camping. When Ross booked flights to
Dominica, the Dread Pirate Roberts was unavailable at the exact moment the flight took off and
returned online, in a different time zone, when Ross landed. These overlaps showed up hundreds of
times in our database.