Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 35 - Murder, Drugs, Porn, and Pirates: Tales From the Dark Web

Episode Date: May 15, 2017

On Friday, May 25th, 2015, 31 year old Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, was sentenced to life in prison for money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, "drug kingpin" charges, and he narrowly avoided "procurement of murder" charges. All for running the online, dark web marketplace, The Silk Road. What is the "dark web", should we keep it around, and are online marketplaces for vice, like the Silk Road, actually a good idea?  Today's episode is sponsored by Mack Weldon. Go to www.mackweldon.com and use the promo code TIMESUCK at checkout to get 20% off!

On Friday, May 25, 2015, 31-year-old former physics student and nonprofit-used bookstore owner Ross Ulbrich, who led a double life under the online alias of the dread pirate Roberts was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The initial charges against him included money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, even procuring murder. He was found guilty on seven counts including trafficking trafficking fake IDs and a drug kingpin charge that in and of itself carried a mandatory 20-year prison sentence. The jury became convinced that Robert was the architect

and administrator behind the Silk Road, an online marketplace for just about every vice you can think of. The Silk Road was constructed on the dark web. A portion of the internet, unable to be found using traditional search engines and browsers, a place where you can use various crypto currencies to buy and sell just about anything imaginable. From heroin, to guns, to fake passports, counterfeit money, stolen credit cards, or even murder. Did Ross get the sense he deserved for creating a virtual flea market for felonies? Is Ross

even the real person behind the persona, Dread Pirate Roberts, the FBI was chasing. What is the dark web? The deep web? What don't we know about a portion of the web 500 times larger than the one Google allows us to see? What horrors lurk in its shadows? And despite its vices, should we actually fight to keep the dark web anonymous?

Find out on this occasionally disturbing and often eye-opening edition of TimeSack. fight to keep the dark web anonymous. Find out on this occasionally disturbing and often eye-opening edition of TimeSuck. Happy Monday, Suckheads. I'm Dan Cummins and thanks for listening to TimeSuck. Today's TimeSuck is brought to you by Mac Weldon. Mac Weldon uses a smart design, premium fabrics, and a simple shopping experience to kick your underwear and men's clothing game to the next level, to the top level. They have anti-microbial, odor-illiminating technology and performance enhancing designs

so your balls are totally and comfortably protected at all times. And equally important, the rest of you doesn't end up smelling like you're both. They also have a lot of other gear including one of the most comfortable hoodies I've ever worn and I love me a comfy hoodie. I wore my Mac Weldon hoodie all last week in San Francisco. That's a hoodie town if there ever was one. 75 degrees calm and sunny on one block and then somehow 60 degrees cloudy in windy on the next.

And I was comfortable everywhere I was the whole time. Snug secure smelled good. So go to Macwellden.com and get comfy yourself and get 20% off your purchase by using the promo code TimeSuck. One word, no space, it's TimeSuck. That's right, 20% off everything you and your precious ball's desire and deserve at Macwellden.com promo code time suck. Thanks everyone who came to the punchline last week.

May a fun show, such fun shows. Appreciate you time suckers, checking out some of my lives, stand up, had a great time. Some of you even showed up rocking that 300% in Chilla, Lebia, first generation OG time suck tea. I loved it. Love seeing some time suck teas out in the crowd.

That's been happening the last month or so, and it makes me feel good, changes the whole show. Really does. Moment I hit the stage. I'm like, there's at least a few people here who fucking get it. That OG shirt, by the way, still in stock at the time.suck.com store. And now very excited. Second generation T is here. Very excited how it turned out. Just in stock, a black tribella blend, which is the politically correct term for a hundred and sixteen percent pure imported unicorn scrotum, some of the softest material in the universe. Original artwork by Thrasher Magazine, Illustrator

Chris Fairbanks, has a NASA ice guard, ice wall guard, Flat Earth, some of those goddamn space lizards commanding us to keep on sucking. Couldn't be happier with how it came out, man. Chris is an amazing artist. Check out a pick at thetimesuck.com shop or go to Time Sucks social media sites. And I'll be putting up some of you suck heads wearing the new T at Dan Cummins comedy on Instagram as well.

Faster you time suckers, grab it, enjoy that second generation T. The faster the third generation T, which is already designed, is gonna be here as well. And then we'll get the stickers, many of you also been asking about. And then after that, I think I'll just throw it out to you guys and see what you want next.

So thanks so much also for using that Amazon button, time suck podcast.com. Thanks for throwing some bucks at the suck with that PayPal donate button. And for all the new subscriptions and reviews on iTunes this past week, remember, we're getting very close to that JFK assassination conspiracy suck. Only about 25 reviews left to hit 600 for that. Already prepping that one and pumped, but all the juicy shit I'm finding. And now before we suck on the insane world of the dark web, and it is crazy, let's suck on some quick time-sucker updates.

Updates, get your time, sucker, updates. Numerous time suckers, Ashi Biondo, Fran Boman, Alex Terry, David Martinez, Maranio, Adam Neederhofer, and many others wrote in this past week to tell me that H.H. Holmes, 19th century Chicago serial killer, and time suck episode subject from episode 25, is currently having his body exhumed.

That's right. On March 9th, the Delaware County Court granted permission for the exhumation of Holmes Body and tasked the University of Pennsylvania's anthropology department with performing DNA analysis. So Holmes, great-grandchildren, John, and Richard Muggett and Cynthia Muggett Serenio. Remember that Holmes birthday and was a Herman Webster Muget, fucking that's a terrible name. A petition in the Delaware County Court

to exume the body last year. Court documents say that family rumours include stories at Holmes managed to escape his death and that someone else was hanging in his place. Not hung, hanged, see I remember. On May 7th, 1896 in Philadelphia and then buried at the gravesite, supposedly Holmes then fled to South America where I imagine you'd keep fucking killing if that's what happened.

So did the creator of the infamous murder castle in Chicago create the, or pull off the ultimate con and fake his own death, head south, maybe set up a new murder castle and Buenos Aires, some other shit. We should know soon. The body has to be turned to the grave within the next few months. So we'll get an answer one way or the other. Also Timesucker sucker will lumen brought it to my attention that you can also listen to time So come the podcast addict app for Android users Thank you will one more way for some of you to enjoy the suck

And many you pointed out that I incorrectly pronounced the king of the hill character boomhours name last week Well, I fucking I didn't okay. I said it wrong, but because I forgot what his name was I guessed and I got't, okay? I said it wrong, but because I forgot what his name was. I guessed, and I got slightly wrong, so suck it. And since that was all that came in on the pronunciation front from Jonestown, I felt fucking good about that. So yeah, buddy. Finally, Ted Bundy update, subject of episode 11, suck head Mike Fisher wrote in saying, as a current law student at George Washington University Law, I have always found the judges final words to Ted Bundy to be incredibly fascinating and a bit shocking. As a current law student at George Washington University Law, I have always found the judges' final words to Ted Bundy to be incredibly fascinating and a bit shocking. As you know, Bundy represented

himself during his murder trial. Upon his sentencing to death, the judge stated, it is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity. That current may be passed through your body until you are dead. Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely, take care of yourself, please. It is an utter strategy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity as I have experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You have made a good lawyer, and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner.

Take care of yourself. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself. I always thought those words were both haunting and more damning than a lot of things a judge could have said. Is that what this time sucker, Mike is saying? Yeah. He says, I feel like they really highlighted the waste represented in the Bundy case. Not only of the many lives he cruelly took,

but his own potential that he could use for good instead of evil. Well, thanks, Mike. I found those words very interesting as well. Yeah, for H.H. Holmes, really, I could have applied to him as well, what a waste of potential for Bundy. And also today's topic, possibly applicable.

We're talking about another bright young man, Ross Ulbrich, and the extremely promising life. Depending on how you look at it, he either threw away or was taken from him. Alright, let's get out of these updates. Next time, suckers, I need a net. We all did. Alright, so what did Ross Ulbrich do? He supposedly created the now infamous Silk Road.

The original Silk Road was an ancient network of trade routes that were for centuries central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the East and West and stretching from the Korean Peninsula and Japan to the Mediterranean. It was opened by the Chinese Han Dynasty in 130 BC before the common era. And lasted until 1453 CE,

Ross Ulbrich Silk Road was open in February of 2011 and was the first modern marketplace opened on the dark web. It was an online marketplace where anyone could sell or purchase anything anonymously. If you're like me, you might be wondering, how would it even be possible to truly anonymously buy or sell illegal goods on the web? How do they not just trace the goods to the sellers or the buyers IP address? An IP address being a unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies each computer using the internet protocol to communicate over a network. Think of it kind of like your laptops

fingerprint. Well, they can do this because the dark net provides a virtual glove that you can kind of slip on over your computer's hand and hide those fingerprints and surf and shop completely and untraceably, completely anonymously. Confused? Yeah, why was too? Let's take a few minutes to define the dark web. All right, the dark web often gets confused with the deep web. The deep web is the collection of all sites on the web that aren't reachable by a search engine. That's sites that the creators are sites that the creators want you to see. And that's what Google finds. And then there's everything else.

And that's the deep web. Basically, the deep web covers anything and everything that exists somewhere on a server that you can access through Google or any other typical traditional browser. And many estimate the deep web is 500 times bigger than the web that we can see. Kind of like to use an iceberg as an analogy,

the sites you can access with Google are the tip of the iceberg. And the sites you can't access, those unindex sites on the deep web are the giant mass of ice below the water surface. Now a lot of this web info below the water surface, so to speak, isn't really nefarious at all. A lot of boring shit on the deep web. You know, like online banking data, various government databases, patents, trademark info, internal network message boards for various corporations and universities communicate within industrial control boards, et cetera. Just shit that nobody wants you as a random person, noodling around, you know, with for obvious

reasons. There's a great documentary called The Deep Web that explains it all very web. It's on Amazon Prime for free. If you do use that, it's directed and produced by Alex Winter. You can also just watch Alex's corresponding TED Talk on The Deep Web on YouTube. If you don't want to spend an hour and a half, we would rather spend 15 minutes. Random trivia, Alex played Bill in 1989's Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, and The Deep Web is narrated by Hianna Reefs, who played Ted.

I found it hilarious to be watching the guy he used to say, just, how's it going, dudes? And whoa! Now giving a brilliant intellectual Ted talk and putting together an incredibly informative thought-provoking and impeccably produced documentary with the sold, excellent, you know, yelling, balanced, head-body. Those two grew up well.

So that's the Deep Web. A huge collection of largely mundane, unindexed, and unsturchable business data and other data. But then within the deep web, there's the dark web. Now going back to the iceberg analogy, think of the dark web as like a little tiny cluster of black stones, maybe hidden deep inside a crack at the very bottom of that Bigelow iceberg. The Dark Web accounts for less than 0.01% of the total content of the web. Security researcher Nick Subrillic counted less than 10,000 hidden services in a recent crawl of the Dark Web compared to hundreds of millions of regular websites that Google didn't access and you can just imagine how much more in the deep web.

And the dark web isn't nearly as mundane or boring as the rest of the deep web. In addition to my own research, I had the dark web explained to me by one of our very own time suckers. Suck had named Daniel. I don't want to give this last name. Okay, so I don't want to give him trouble with the job, but potentially, he heard the teaser for today's episode at the end of last week's Jim Jones Suck. Reached out to help me with the dark web because he episode at the end of last week's Jim Jones Suck reached out to help me with the dark web because he works in the field of cybersecurity. And Daniel compares the dark web to a fully loaded Craigslist. He says, if you look at the right half of the page, you can find jobs, cars, new surfboards,

homes, more fun, regular stuff like that. But if you look to the left, you can find prostitutes, hitmen, stolen accounts, drugs, various forms of illegality. Daniel Reins that these goods are all traded in alternative forms of currency, which I'll explain in a bit. Alice Winter talks about the dark web being reminiscent of the early days of the regular web in the late 80s. When you could kind of join in private chat rooms with people from all over the world,

you know, very rudimentary kind of graphics, you know, as well before, the big JavaScript and all the fancy flash, you know, videos and all that shit. You know, you just exchange ideas and information with people. It was all about just, you know, communicating. And how do you find all this content on the Wild West Craig list by using a dark web browser called Tor. That's TOR and Tor is the acronym for the Onion Router. And TOR is an open source software program that allows users to protect their privacy and security

against a common form of internet surveillance known as traffic analysis. It's the Dark Web's equivalent of Google. It was TOR, it was actually initially developed by the US Navy in an effort to protect online government communications from foreign surveillance. And then it was released for public use in 2002. And Tor doesn't leave a traceable data trail as you search the dark web sites.

It's somewhat complicated how it does that. But in simple terms, instead of your computer, computer making a direct link to the server of the website, you're accessing and leaving a direct trail that shows your IP address linked to the site that you're viewing, Tor accesses sites in a roundabout way using virtual tunnels. For example, let's say I want to access a site

ran by Nimrod, Lord and ruler of all things in the universe, and I go to Nimrod.com to find out how many Cocker Spaniards, Spaniards, I have to kill that day to prove my allegiance to the one true God Nimrod, the giant space-ass guac, the size of a galaxy, with the head of a chubacabra, who read the black unicorn with flaming suns for eyes. Well, now there's a direct trail going from my laptop to Nimrod's heavenly perfect server.

Well, Tor doesn't take me straight to Nimrod. First, my search heads over to my neighbor's Chuck's computer. Maybe Bounce is from there to Ling and Bay-Jang's computer. Maybe then to the Reverend Dr. John to Williams and Lagos. Maybe then to Tom's cruise is a fucking iPad and clear water, Florida, and from there to a whole bunch of other computers and then to sweet ol' Nimrod. Now there's additional encryption that involved that makes it even more secure, but essentially that's the idea. The trail becomes so convoluted, bounces around too-infrared, so many different private computers, all other tour users, by the way, that traffic monitoring software can't figure out where it originated

and thus your search remains anonymous. And to make things on the dark web even more private, there are additional encrypted search engines built to use it as spelled out by TimeSucker Cybersecurity expert, Daniel, to access a lot of sites on the dark web. It's not as simple as we're going on Google, we're going to an obvious address like Facebook.com. Most of these black sites are just under a domain

with .Union on the end. So it may look like just like four, five, BZS, two, three dash, IFY, seven, eight, BHH, plus three .Union. Now that's very difficult to remember. So the vast majority of people will use searches or sniffers, they're called to find these sites. Duck.Go is a common one. Duck Duck Go is

a search engine that works with torque within Torre's search engine. I think there's also Duck Duck Go in the regular site. So there's two separate ones there. A second layer of searching and Duck Duck Go keeps your search results completely anonymous. Despite all the secrecy, the FBI does find various legal sites on Tor every day and is able to shut them down from time to time. But while they can find the address, they generally can't find the physical source of the address. They can't find the actual server. So the illegal marketplace, they shut down on one address, usually just pops up under a new address. Finally, adding yet another level of secrecy to the dark web and transactions that occur there is the use of Bitcoin. I know many of you have written it about Bitcoin

over the last few months. Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009. Bitcoin offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms and is operated by a decentralized authority unlike government-issued currencies. According to Investio Pedia, today's market cap for all Bitcoin abbreviated BTC,

in circulation exceeds $7 billion. So in layman's terms, there's a shitload of Bitcoin. But there are no physical bitcoins. It's a digital-only currency. There's only balances kept on a public ledger in the cloud that along with all Bitcoin transactions is verified by a massive amount of computing power. Bitcoins are not issued or backed by any banks or governments. They are created in a process referred to as mining, which gets way too economically complex

to explain here without bogging down this whole episode and turn it into some kind of fucking 101 class and economic theory. But let's just say it's not an archic. There is a creation system that keeps the value of bitcoins fairly steady and keeps it from extremely volatile fluctuations. Otherwise, no one would use bitcoins. But the same essentially is any other non-commodity back currency like the Euro or the US dollar. But Bitcoin has actually more value in a way because it's anonymous stable and it's not

intaxible. They're also coded bitcoins are so that you can't copy a bitcoin and spend it twice. So it's fairly protected currency. Currently, a single bitcoin trades for approximately 1,740 bucks. Now, there's also other virtual currencies collectively referred to as altcoins, but bitcoins the main one. And the balances are kept using public and private keys, which are long strings and numbers and letters linked through mathematical encryption algorithms that were used to create in the public key,

comparable to a bank account number, serves as the address, which is published to the world, and to which others may send bitcoins the private key comparable to an ATM pin, is meant to be a guarded secret and only used to authorize Bitcoin transmissions. And then the price of Bitcoin is determined by supply and demand, with demand for Bitcoin's increases,

the price increases when it falls and falls. There was only a limited number of Bitcoins in circulation, new Bitcoins are created at a predictable and decreasing rate. And that's how they keep the price inflation and stuff stable. And while you can buy things using Bitcoins online and be paid in Bitcoins, I was wondering,

I'm like, okay, this is not a fucking great, but I can't go to fucking Safeway. You know, and get me a vitamin water with the fucking bitcoin, which, you know, based on the value I said earlier, would be, would, I, they'd need to give me a lot of change. Like if I bought a $1.50 drink for $1,800, whatever it was. But I was wondering, well, how do you use it? Like, well, good is it for regular life.

If you can't convert it, well, you can convert it. Of course, you know, you can't. Bitcoin's wouldn't be so popular if you couldn't do that. There's a variety of ways you convert Bitcoin to cash. Places like Bitcoin-brokers.org, take your Bitcoins. They'll send you cash via a service like MoneyGram. So it's all very like private. It's against all very secretive.

All off the books, all off the grid, so to speak. Essentially, it's very libertarian. It's very libertarian form of currency. You know, if you choose not to report it, it remains anonymous and thus, untaxable, which of course, when using that way also makes it illegal as a form of unreported income. All right, so let's recap.

A lot of info, a lot of info I'm hitting you with. There's a normal web where you can use an internet explorer or Google Chrome or Yahoo or, or Netscape, if you have a time machine, or a number of other browsers to search on multiple websites that happen indexed by those browsers, so those browsers can, in fact, locate shit. And then we have the deep web.

With 500 times the amount of data as the web, we can see with billions of pages of unindexed mostly mundane database type data. And then finally, within this deep web, we have a teeny tiny corner of the web, teeny tiny creepy corner, with a fucking spiders and pedophiles live. Many other things called the dark web. It's not just that. Most of which can be accessed only with Tor, the onion router. Now, there are a few other Tor derivatives that really aren't worth getting into. They can also act as anonymous browsers,

to smaller kind of parallel spaces, parallel little dark webs basically. But in general, tour is the key that unlocks the dark web. All right, it's the fucking thing, Gollum's chasing. And in this dark web, there are various chat rooms, alternative social media networks, marketplaces and a few other websites. What you're not gonna find is like, you know,

fucking ESPN, something. So it's not the normal, normal web you know, fucking ESPN, something. It's not the normal, normal web. It's very subversive looking. Okay, so who's using the dark web? Well, for one, criminals for sure. All this untraceable activity, ununtraceable currency is of course going to lead to crime.

More on that in a second. But also government agencies that don't want their communication traced or recorded can also use the dark web. Remember, Tor was created by the military, all right? Journalists also use the dark web remember tour was created by the military All right, journalists also use the dark web they can talk to sources, you know, anonymously for example And countries where the government can and does monitor traditional web activity You know if you're a political dissident in Syria or China or North Korea

You know tour can be extremely useful in posting pictures of what is actually going on your country You don't be thrown shit up on Facebook and be like, I look what the fucking government did and then you know, TOR can be extremely useful in posting pictures of what is actually going on your country. You don't want to be thrown shit up on Facebook and be like, yeah, look what the fuck in government did. And then, you know, your Facebook page shut down or your profile pictures replaced by you with a bullet through your head. You know, it can be going back and forth in a chatroom with some journalists, you know, can't be traced, you can peer privacy advocates all use the dark web. People who just don't think the government needs to be privy to everything they do on the web. People who don't want their shopping preferences,

for example, handed over to companies without their fucking expressed permission, and then see pop-up ads for whatever they fucking bought last week, show up and banners on every other website they visit for the next month. Plenty of people use the dark web for totally legal reasons. However, you know, you create an environment, build on secrecy, build on shadows, and again, of course, you're going to attract a variety of nefarious

characters who don't want to be watched because they don't want to go to jail. So I told Daniel my time-sucker guide, my cybersecurity guide of this episode that I wanted to check out the dark web for myself. I felt like I needed to for this episode, and this is what he told me. He said, when using any of the dark web browsers, be careful and protect yourself to the fullest extent. There's always best if you have someone who is handy with technology around. But if you do not trust a link, do not click it. Some links will be filled with viruses, some malware,

some with worms, some with hijack software, and some will skim information and offload your computer's information to someone else's server for dissection. Fucking, that sounds terrible. Also do not use websites like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. On your regular browser, while having Toro open or related browsers because it can get you

in a world of trouble if they catch you. To the inexperienced user, the dark web can be a very scary place. Well, I did go to the dark web, and in about an hour of snooping, this is what I found. I tracked it all down as I was doing it. I did it this past Friday night, May 12th. Well, I guess Friday afternoon, on my top, before my show, it wasn't Friday night.

Friday afternoon, 4.46 PM, Pacific Daylight Time, I download the Tor browser from TorProject.org onto my MacBook Pro, nervously. I've already said all my security settings on my system preferences to high. I close down all of their applications except for pages which I use to document what I'm doing and then tour. 451 I open tour.

Sets off security warnings immediately and I dismiss them which again makes me pretty damn nervous. 452 I choose to connect to the tour browser and within seconds I'm in. I have my iPhone so I can safely kind of browse the normal web from there to figure out where I should go within Tor. I type Silk Road into the Tor search bar. I find it but you have to register to enter and fuck that shit.

Not gonna do that. So for 58, I go to deep.web.com and on my iPhone, trying to find addresses for Tor marketplaces. I get the URL for the outlaw market, type in the unden URL for that, that big code, and find it, and a cap-shut comes up with a warning. If the URL in the cap-shut is not exactly the same URL you see in your browser as a paid URL,

you are on a phishing site, manually copy the URL from the cap-shut, add that onion to it, and use the URL. Well, my cap-shut is the same, the capshia add.onion to it and use the URL. Well, my capshia is the same. So, I feel somewhat secure. I enter the site at very rudimentary. I'm reminded of what Daniel said earlier about the Craigslist thing. That is what it reminds me of.

Like some old website from the early 90s. This is no WordPress site, no Java, enables shit, no Adobe Flash. Simple text, simple pictures. I scroll down and there's a crude list of shops, what they offer and how much their products go for. I'm afraid I'm gonna scroll down and see a picture of some eight year olds winner.

And then minutes later, FBI agents, I'm gonna be pounding on my hotel door. Just looking at Kitty Porn, how about it? No, no, no, no, you don't understand. No, I am doing research for my podcast. Research, huh? Is that what you call it? Make yourself better, you sick fuck.

No, it's time suck. I just, little boy winners for time suck, huh, creep? You're what you call it? Make yourself better, you sick fuck. No, it's time suck. I just little boy winners for time suck, uncreep. You're gonna be sucking soon enough. You're gonna be sucking some so much dick and prison you son of a bitch. Well, thankfully none of that happens. Thankfully that does not happen anywhere outside of my head. The pictures I come across are pictures of illegal drugs.

Which, according to my research, are not illegal to look at just illegal to buy. If there's any government agents listening, that's my understanding. And if it is illegal, those pictures, I didn't do it. There's pictures of marketplace logos, you know, some of their products, and then sale amounts for those products listed in either US dollars, Euros, British pounds, etc. I'm guessing they convert it to bitcoins when you try to buy something. I'm not going to try to buy anything and find out. Not gonna be able to explain off a gram of Coke,

showing up my mailboxes research. Here's what I do, see. I see several weed shops like MicRunk, where you can get 1.1 grams of outdoor strawberry Kush for 10 British Pounds. There's Coke Boy, that's my favorite stores I came across. Coke Boy, where you can buy cocaine, obviously.

One gram for 45 euros, Coke Boy. That was my favorite store as I came across. Coke boy. We can buy Coke cane, obviously. One gram for 45 euros. Coke boy, man, what a silly name for such a serious drug. It makes it seem just so harmless. How could anyone ever overdose? When all they did was order a little bit of Coke and Coke boy. I picture a constantly happy mild manner kind of boy.

Maybe like almost like a leave it to beaver 50s. Like 20 something shown up at your door, neatly little bag of coke just hi Mr. Cummins I got your coke here just like you asked for well thank you very much coke boy no problem with Mr. Cummins I hope you enjoy it and I hope you have a swell old time what kind of coke do you have for me today coke boy oh pure uncut Colombian coke Mr. Cummins just like always well ain't that grand coke boy you be sure to tell your mother hello for me would you I sure Coke Mr. Cummins just like always well ain't that grand co-boy you be sure to tell your mother hello from me Would you sure will mr. Cummins have a great day you two coke boy don't forget your tip. You know I can't accept that mr. Cummins Your friendly face and repeat business is all the tip I need oh

Co-boy what a great kid There's clicking by where you can get LSD 200 UGL high quality stamps for 22.5 euros. That really seems cheap. That's a lot of acid for less than 25 bucks at today's conversion rate. You can get speed, who's still buying speed? You can get quote, strong speed, one gram of strong speed for 10 euros from your dealer's shop. I love this called strong speed. As if they didn't have the strong adjective, you just assume that you're in some weak speed. It's all man.

How about the wrong kind of speed again? I've got a fucking slow speed. It's all that makes me a little tiny bit twitchy. I was hoping to fucking tweak the fuck out. You can get blotter acid, 3X monster, LSD blotter for 40.5 euros from value.luiced. You can buy software to hack cell phones from Professor Dark for a buck.

I gotta say that seems like a steal. If hacking cell phones is your deal, I'm thinking you're not gonna beat Professor Dark's prices. I mean, for a super-shifty dude, Professor Dark seems like he genuinely cares about his customers. So, you know, go to Professor Dark for the very best in online thievery.

Keep one of these places, we'll just take your money and then not give you anything. But I guess they have rating system similar to Yelp. I guess to try and keep people honest in that way. I guess if they ripped off people, the ratings of plummet and known would shop from anymore. Negative ratings from people who feel ripped off from a company that sells a product that's built on ripping people off.

I love the fucking irony with that. Just what the fuck? I didn't listen, I didn't pay a buck. For phone hacking software, to not be able to hack people's cell phones and gain access to their credit card and bank info and not be able to steal shit from them. I cannot believe I got ripped off paying good money

to rip somebody off. You can buy Viagra from Dutch supply shop for 100 milligram pills for seven euros. You can also get ketamine, MDMA, Coke, Mnege, Hayes, marijuana from MDMA. And that's all I found on that marketplace. Coke, LSD, MDMA, Wee, Vagra, you know this. And then if so, 514, 514 PM, I go to Hands of Market by putting this onion router. It asks for a username and password. So I use my social security number for my username

and I use my bank name, username and bank account password for my password. Yeah, right. I make some shit up. It works and I'm able to log in. When I get in there, there's a Craigslist type list of categories that are left just like TimeSucker, CyberExpert Daniels is described again.

There's list of fucking options. This is way more comprehensive on this one. There's drugs, fraud-related, guides and tutorial services, jewelry, digital goods, erotic counterfeits, electronic, security and hosting. I click on drugs. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to shit all over the outlaw market, but I got to say, handsets crushing them. If a hands-out is the Amazon of illegal marketplaces, then the outlaw market is the fucking Radio Shack. Sorry outlaw market. There are 6,235 cannabis sellers,

23 alcohol and tobacco sellers, 523 opioids, 409 steroids, 1342 psychedelics, 1563 prescription, 2780 stimulants, 2781 ecstasy, 68 weight loss. I love that, I love that one, throw it in there. 952 benzos, 37 other, 325 disassociatives, 90 paraphernalia, and 20 lab supply cellars, just under the drug,

holy shit. I can't believe the stuff is real, 521, I click other and again become terrified that it's gonna be videos of just like naked 11-year-olds wearing get masks or some equally horrific shit in the FBI is gonna kick my fucking hotel door in. Thankfully, that does not happen. Under other Adderall and Perkiset show at first

as do a lot of other non-drugs, just random shit like a lifetime premium Spotify account. You could supposedly buy for a buck 75. That seems sketchy to me, lifetime. How can you predict future code changes to Spotify? Yeah right. I'll stick to Professor Dark for my online theft needs. Thank you very much. There's also a bunch of shit I've never heard of like Diasapam and Octavius Diodero Coding. Turns out Diasapam is a form of valium used to help your anxiety. Anxiety that probably is fucking spiking because you're buying it legally on the dark web.

And activists die, die, drug coatings, excuse me, is a pain reliever used to treat pain from sciatic and other kind of bone and nerve pain. So they've got everything. 526, I click opioids. Heroin comes up immediately. You can buy a gram of China white for 66 bucks. I don't know shit about heroin, but that feels reasonable to me. Time sucker Jordan Kasuzik, who's been helping with fact checking and grammar correcting my episodes, tells me

goes for 60 bucks to 100 bucks on the street, which makes me worry about my association with Jordan. Not sure how he knows that. I feel like if I told a heroin user, I just scored a gram of China white, you know, and they'd be like, how much you pay for that. I feel like if I told a hero one user, I just scored a gram of China white, you know, and they'd be like, how much you pay for it? I was like 66 bucks. They'd be like, what the fuck out of here? Dirty Johnny just charged me 90 last week. Well, that's why I don't buy my channel.

I'm like, I'm dirty Johnny. Okay. 529. I clicked Disassociatives. Kettamine crystals come up. So does GHB. You can get 25 grams of GHB for 32 bucks. GHB, by the way,

the date rape drug. That's terrifying. I don't know how much you need to like, you know, knock somebody out, but I feel like you could do an awful lot of raping for $32. Jesus, ketamine has also been used as a date rape drug. I can leave you unable to move, make you sort of have an out of body, disassociative experience, sounds fairly dangerous. Now 530, I click, I fucking wonder if I should, but I do, I click erotica, and the FBI immediately kicks my mother fucking door in. Curiosity killed the cat, and now Curiosity is gonna get me in prison,

it's gonna get a prison penis stuck up my butt. That's the lesser known Curiosity phrase. There's two phrases, it's Curiosity killed the cat is the one you've probably heard. And there's also curiosity gets a prison penis stuck up your bunghole. I'd seen enough, but I'd seen enough of drugs. Basically, you can get any kind of drug you can think of. It's all there.

And I just wonder, what kind of erotic could they have with this marketplace that they don't have on Google? It turns out, in this marketplace, it's not a new kind of porn. It's just theft of porn, which I guess that makes sense. You can get a browsers unlimited account for a buck 67. You can buy a premium account to just any porn site, basically at all on the web for a few bucks. For example, you can gain access to bigdickbitch.com.

Yep, you can get a lifetime account for $5.67. That's a very specific price. And it does seem reasonable. I mean, that's like that's like some professor dark price you can shit right there. All the big dick bitch porn you can handle for the rest of your life. For the price of the venti for appachino. 535 I click on services IDs and passports hacking malware cash out services other ship pops up on sub menus You can get a fake driver's license for any state and a fake passport to any country fucking unreal I click other from within services. You can get a Netflix account for bucks 67 very reasonable

You can also get stuff like Starbucks gift cards for a few bucks That's hilarious to me Can you imagine getting caught and getting sentenced to years in prison for buying discount Netflix subscriptions and fake Starbucks gift cards for a few bucks. That's hilarious to me. Can you imagine getting caught and getting sentenced to years in prison for buying discount Netflix subscriptions and fake Starbucks gift cards? That's when you kill yourself in prison and no one questions it. Why did he kill himself?

Oh, because he got sentenced to 10 years in prison for buying $5,000 with a fake Starbucks gift cards. Oh, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. 539, I click Electronics. You can get an Apple iPhone 7 in theory for $5.68, that's fucking bullshit. There's no way they're giving you a phone

for less than six bucks. I must be missing something. 540, click counterfeits. You can get $300 and fake US $20 bills for $120, real dollars. That still seems kind of expensive to me. Euro notes, British bills, whatever you want. There's also counterfeit items like

Replication L purses. You can get fake bills for tax purposes, like a fake fucking utility bill. That's genius. Right off shit, you never actually paid for. You can buy access to people's paypal accounts, try to take their money by stolen credit card numbers, et cetera, it's just so much theft.

544, I type in crazy dark websites on my iPhone to see where else I should look. No tour sites come up. I Google crazy tour sites and a subreddit comes up with a bunch of addresses. The poster says, I promise no CP, which I assume means and hope means child porn. And I hope you know, bullshitting.

Still nervous about all of this. So that I, but I enter one, you know, again, the curiosity gets the penis, prison penis stuck up your butt. I enter the first one into my tourist search bar and I arrive at a crazy Illuminati Third Eye with a bunch of legs attached to the image and has an enter button.

And I click it because I'm an idiot. I click it because curiosity is completely taken over my mind at this point. Now I'm just making reckless decisions as if there's no potential backlash. And I just all for a few minutes of hopefully interesting podcast content. So now I'm in a place called Changolia with the subtitle, most of the rest of the Wild West. It's just a big series of links. No description at all of what these links are. I am sure my cybersecurity security expert buddy, Daniel,

would be like, get the fuck out of there. But he's not there telling me that, so I just start clicking shit. I enter a bunch of random chat rooms, people discussing everything from politics to trucks, or I guess maybe message board is more accurate than chat room, but just posting. Posting picks of everything from anime images

to sunsets, I have to click it a few, I decide, I don't need to see anything else though. I was clickin a few, it's all kind of just like weird boring stuff and I'm like thank God. I haven't done anything, I accidentally illegal that I know of so far and so I should quit while I'm ahead and I do. I think I understand, yeah, started in funny thing,

even crazy, but no, I'm not gonna, I was gonna do that. I understand what tour is enough now to kind of be able to read about what others have found and have that make sense to me and hopefully to you. So I exit out, I throw Tor on the trash, erase it from my Mac, and if I knew how to use it properly, I might keep it. But since I doubt I figured it was just giving trouble in a digit, so Tor exploratory over.

Okay, so that's what I found. A lot of drugs, a lot of theft, counter-fitting, and I decided to tap out again because I know there's much worse out there on the dark web. My wife, Lindsay, who I talked to about doing research for the dark web this week, she's telling me a mate 10th article from a local paper, Spokesman Review,

and Spoke and Washington, check this out. This is why I was nervous about coming across some crazy shit, and why certain people are pushing for either the abolishment or the regulation of the dark web. The article I read talks about a recent raid and Mabbalacat Philippines, a small city of just over 200,000

in the northern part of that country. On April 20th, a small team of the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation, the NBI, some of their officers raid the home of David Timothy Deacon, a 53 year old former roofing contractor from Peoria, Illinois, suspecting him of child pornography crimes. They knock down his door, find him shirtless, on his bed with his laptop open. I wonder how, if there were weird stats on that, like when you fucking kick a pedophile's door down. How often are they just like shirtless on a bed?

They find him shirtless on the bed with his his laptop open and he has a Google search, what is the MBI? He's been watching the officers approach on security cameras above his front door. They also find children's underwear, fucking motherfucker. Tilder shoes, cameras, bondage cuffs, fetish ropes, meth pipes, stacks of hard drives and photo albums, cluttered and stuffy, two bedroom townhouse, penciled on the wall, someone had scrawled, my mom and dad had to love me and had a broken heart. And they put a bullet in his fucking nut sack right there. No, that's what I wish they would have done. And just fucking poked him with hot needles until he bled out and died.

But they didn't do that because they're police officers. They got to follow regulations. And his computer, they found videos, images of young boys and girls engaged in sex acts. Deacon's arrest on April 20th reveals one of the darkest corners of the internet where pedophiles in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia pay facilitators on the other side of the world people like this Deakin mother fucker to sexually abuse children, even babies, sometimes directing their moves through online live streaming services. That's why I wish someone could come up with some technology.

I don't really, because they could kill innocent people with this too, but in my fantasy brain, I wish there was like a technology that you could just like push a button on your computer and make all the people directing things like that have their computers just kill them, just like explode in their faces and just either main, horribly, and or kill them.

Oh my God, I had fucking, pedophiles and the worst of the worst. The relatively new crime of, excuse me, webcam's text tourism is spreading rapidly with new digital technology sparking with the United Nations calls an alarming growth of new forms of child sexual exploitation online.

The FBI says it's an epidemic, and that at any given moment, 750,000 child predators are online. 750,000 holy shit. And I wish I could lead an execution squad to kill as many of those people as I could fucking child malicious man. Lo is low. Remember studying that stuff back when I was in school and the recidivism rate, you know,

the rate at which people are going to reoffend is just off the charts with pedophiles. Because they have no one ever figured out how to cure it. You know, best case scenario is you can make them, hopefully monitor them heavily enough to have them not act on it. But basically, from what I understand, unless new research has come up that I don't know about and have them able to find,

when you start becoming sexually attracted to kids, you know, you start diddling yourself or jerking off the thought of kids, that's it for you. That's, you can't rewire that. You are sexually attracted to them forever and there's no kind of turning back. And so you're just kind of hoping to monitor them and have them not act on the impulses they can't control.

The only way I have thought that you could cure that again is a bullet or sledgehammer or just some other kind of blow to the brain that obliterates it. So until we figure that out, when these people are like Timothy Deacon are arrested, if someone in power could, I would like to perform a Gallagher-type dark comedy act where instead of smashing watermelons,

I smashed pedophiles heads in front of other people that hate pedophiles. Motherfuckers. Okay, so in addition to child pornography, the dark web is also being used by human traffickers, United Nations recently estimated human trafficking profit is $150 billion a year. Oh man, January 31st, 2017 report by the Polaris Project

noted human trafficking hotline cases jumped by 35%. Just over a third in 2016, Polaris also reported that most survivors of human trafficking were recruited for sex trafficking and labor trafficking. And the dark web has a lot to do with this increase. You know, illicit forms discussing sex trafficking and services for hidden in the dark web, for sure. Because sites are not indexed,

it is very difficult for law enforcement to identify the illegal behavior hidden within the dark web and it gets even worse on the dark web I know this is already so dark There are rumors of dark web chat rooms where people share videos of real people like Just being you know tortured to death Like like a small kind of like a YouTube channel for people who are just pure evil. There's crush porn sites where scantily clad women literally crush small animals to death. Who is jerking off to that? My God! If you look, I don't like to

advocate suicide. However, if you are jerking off to a video of a woman in the bikini crushing like a rabbit or a puppy, fuck seriously kill yourself. No joke. Just get it over with. You are a dark twisted fuck and there's no hope for you. Possibly most disturbing are dark web red rooms, live streams of people being tortured, raped, etc. in front of a virtual audience

who paid a decide what happens to them. It's like the movie, hostile. That's one of the most disturbing movies I ever watched, by the way. I can handle a lot of horror movies, but when people are being tortured, like restrained in tortured, it's like a rape scene to me in a movie.

I cannot, it just makes me sick to my stomach. I really, I don't want to watch that. I hated that movie. I can't find any articles that report a conclusive bust on one of those red rooms, which considers somebody to be an urban legend, but an Australian 53-year-old father of two. Man, this guy named Peter Scully was arrested in 2016. He ran a hurt core, hurt core, pedophile site. On the dark web where videos were made available for pedophiles to watch of young children being tortured, possibly even killed live on camera. The body of an 11 year old girl was found in this mother fucker's house. He ran in the Philippines again.

Man, these fucking guys hide in the Philippines. One video investigators found was called Daisy's Destruction. A video of a baby girl being tied upside down by her feet, sexually assaulted and beaten by a scully and a masked woman. And again, and again, if I could please somehow, if some country would allow me,

recruit me and somehow extradite them. And I'll do a dark comedic show smashing their heads in front of the audience. I am not even joking. It's not like I truly just want to kill somebody. I would rather not probably have that experience in life. I'm sure there would be some nightmares and repercussions for that. However, if given the opportunity to kill those guys after, you'd be like, what I've

just read, absolutely, absolutely would. So this is the kind of shit that exists on the Dark Web. However, the Dark Web wasn't created for these purposes. I'm gonna get into that. It wasn't created for the purpose of fucking evil acts. But it absolutely has created an environment for evil people to get away with committing these acts. So should we get rid of it? You know, should we just get rid of the whole Dark Web?

Maybe not. It's time now to get back to Ross Olbrecht, okay, the dead, the dead dread pirate Roberts, his trial and why keeping the dark web around could possibly still be worth fighting for. I mean, do you think anyone really wants to live, to spine all the horrors I've described? Do you think anyone really wants to live in a world where anonymity isn't an option at all, where the government can watch literally everything you do? In 2008, Ross Oldbreak was a 24-year-old grad student working towards a master's degree in material science and engineering at Penn State. He was studying

crystallography, the science that examines crystals. He was extremely bright young man who had scored a 1460 on his SAT, gotten a scholarship to go to the University of Texas where he got a physics degree. It was an Eagle Scout. Well, likewise, Pierce, handsome dude, from a close, well-adjusted family. He's got the world in the palm of his hand. But he's also disillusioned with the world around him. He's unhappy with the drudgery of lab research. He's got a lot of first world white people problems. And while at Penn State,

he'd become fascinated with both psychedelics and economic theory, an industry in combination that would fuel his desire for the Silk Road. He'd come to see taxation and government as form of coercion enforced by the states monopoly on violence. His thinking was heavily influenced by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, a totem of the modern American libertarian orthodoxy.

According to von Mises, a citizen must have economic freedom to be politically or morally free and Ross wanted to be that kind of free. After Penn State, he moved back to Austin, Texas, and if you've ever been to Austin, you know it is the perfect place for someone who's into both experimental drugs and experimental political ideas. It's a city boiling over with both intellectual curiosity and drug use. It's a big college town where no one leaves after the graduate, you know. Ross tries his hand at day trading, doesn't go well, but he is introduced to the with intellectual curiosity and drug use. It's a big college town where no one leaves after the graduate. Ross tries his hand at day trading, doesn't go well, but he is introduced to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin while he's doing that, which again,

we'll serve him well later. He starts a video game company, doesn't go well, but he begins to learn about computer coding, another piece of the Silk Road puzzle, opens a small business with an Austin neighbor, a business they call Good, Wagon Books, that collects used books and sells them in digital stores like Amazon and Books a million, Ross builds the business website.

And so he understands how to create a marketplace yet another part of his growing skill set that would enable him to create the Silk Road. He's also in love. He moved back to Austin with the girl he fell for at Penn State, but then they break up in 2010 and now Ross is doing a lot of soul searching. He's across roads in his life. He wrote in his journal, I went through a lot over the year in my personal relationships. I had left my promising career as a scientist to be an investment advisor and entrepreneur

and came up empty handed. He pours himself into good wagon books but it doesn't make that much money and doesn't fill him. He's still thinking a lot about economic theory on his LinkedIn page. He writes that he wants to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind. And then he comes up with the idea of the Silk Road. The idea, he wrote in his journal, was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously,

with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them. Like most libertarians, Ross believed that drug use was a personal choice, that it shouldn't be supervised or monitored by a government. He observed that the war on drugs was a complete failure. He starts to question if it was ever designed to reduce the usage of drugs in the first place. He decides that the natural merchandise for his new enterprise should be drugs. I was calling it underground brokers, Ross wrote, but eventually settled on Silk Road. Shortly after writing this to the journal, his book business quite literally falls apart. I think this is hilarious.

He built a warehouse to store all of his good wagon used books, all the inventory, and he built the shelves of this warehouse himself. And apparently he forgot to install literally two very important screws in this system, and one day, the entire warehouse shelving system came crashing down, like a giant game of dominoes. One giant shelf stack slamming into the next and the next until tens of thousands of books that spilled all over the floor of the warehouse, no longer categorized, fucking indexed. And with his heart no longer in the business, and his books all over the floor, he just says fuck it.

Liquidates as inventory closes the business, tells his old neighbor and book business partner, he has a new idea Something really big, he says And then in mid-January, 2011, the Silk Road goes live Initially Ross only sells his own product, some magic mushrooms. He'd grown himself in a very short time He sells ten pounds of silo-cybon mushrooms soon more vendors join his marketplace. Silk Road's fucking grown man. He writes in his journal, I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon,

and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator. I feel like he may have been high on shrooms when he wrote that, very grandiose vision. But he'd be right, you know, he'd be right. So maybe he was sober. Silk Road does become a phenomenon, and within a year, the FBI has taken notice of a new drug site

that's been modeled on Amazon and eBay. And that's what it looked like. I think it kind of like, you know, a craiglist. Excuse me, a well-organized community marketplace complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names, you know, you put in your real address and if anyone asked you to say,

I don't know how the heroin got here. I didn't order it and they can't actually trace the transaction to you. Silk Road sellers guide had helpful instructions on how to vacuum seal or otherwise high drugs to evade electronic sensors and canine olfactory most shipments made it to happy customers. The small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site's trade. A vast pharmacopia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur. You know, kind of like I talked about before, the same kind of marketplace that I went

in. Cocaine, cloning cocaine, afghan number four heroine, strawberry LSD, caramelo hash, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Silk Road's product descriptions and other user ratings mounted to an encyclopedic information source can't feel my face. One user said, one product has a nice shine and provides a rush of euphoria and confidence. Ivery's review of some Crystal MDMA observed that had a nice fizz in a whisp of smoke, smiley face. Refuse and community standards enforced excellent value customer service on Silk Road. It was good. It brought more users, increased its reputation, and until it became the premier destination for digital drug sales. Then by January 2012, the Department of Homeland Security had also taken notice, and a Silk

Road Task Force of 40 agents had been assembled. Operation Marco Polo was launched. One of the people on the task force, former hacker or hacktivist, a member of the computer hacker collective anonymous, and this man and the agent who brought him in had recently launched another operation, one to take on the dark web browser tour, and break through its anonymous usage, Operation Onion Peeler. I can good names these guys came up with. Soon the IRS is also looking for this into the Silk Road, and so is the DEA.

Well meanwhile, Ross sustained one step ahead of all these agencies by teaching himself computer coding and continually further encrypting his site. By 2012, he's making good money off the Bitcoin transaction fees from sales to his dark web marketplace. About 25 grand a month. Tells his friends and families making his money through a Bitcoin exchange business he started,

which I guess is kind of technically true. It's also worth noting this time that Silk Road has a strict code of ethics, no child porn, no stolen goods, no fake degrees. Our basic rules are to treat others as you would wish to be treated and don't do anything to hurt or scam someone else. That's what it says. Also in February, 2012, Ross, who had been working as the administrator of this site, administrator of this site, felt like he needed to have a more vocal role in the new community he'd formed.

He needed to kind of announce himself to his community be their leader and that February He announced himself as the dread pirate Roberts now if you're fan of the 1987 Rob Reiner comedy the princess bride like I am you know that Carrie L. Ways the male lead plays the character Known as the dread pirate Roberts. It's where the name comes from the dude who famously says As you wish. She's falling down the hill. And if you know the movie, you know it's the interesting choice. The Dread Pirate Roberts is a pirate

of near a mythical reputation. The film feared across the seven seas for his ruthlessness and sword fighting prowess known for taking no prisoners. But more importantly, and I think the reason Ross picked this persona is revealed during the course of the story that the reason Ross picked this persona is revealed during the course of the story that the dread pirate Roberts is not one man, but a series of men

who pass the name and reputation to a chosen successor once they are wealthy enough to retire. When the time comes, Roberts and his chosen successor sail into the port and discharge the crew. They hire a new crew, the ex-Robert staying aboard his first mate and referring to his successor as Captain Roberts. Once the crew grows accustomed to the new Roberts, the ex-Robert staying aboard his first mate and referring to his successor as Captain Roberts. Once the crew grows accustomed to the new Roberts, the previous Captain leaves to enjoy his retirement, perfect for the Silk Road. Perfect for a man dedicated to anonymity. The Dread Pirate Roberts is not a man, but an image of a man that can be taken on by any

number of other men. Or a woman. Or a woman. And through the Dread Pirate Roberts posts, one can see that Ross becomes more steadfast and brazen in his libertarian political beliefs. Starts posts and stuff like, stop funding the state with your tax dollars. Direct your productive energies into the black market. DPR continues to become more grandiose over time, writing that every transaction on the Silk Road is a step towards universal freedom.

Well, you know, this strong anti-government stance isn't taken well, not surprisingly, by the US government. In addition to all the AG's agencies I previously mentioned, we're trying to take down the Silk Road, US Senate becomes involved, Senator Chuck Schumer denouncing it in a press conference. Undercover FBI agents are now posing as drug entrepreneurs on the Silk Road, some are able to get Ross's attention and build his trust. And then in late 2012, Ross moves to San Francisco. His friends and family still have no idea.

He's the Dread Pirate Roberts. Neither does his best friend. Nobody knows. Still think he's running some kind of Bitcoin business, which in a way again, he absolutely does. And his marketplace continues to grow. And the Dread Pirate Roberts begins to achieve cult leader status

within this community of tens of thousands now. He's like the Steve Jobs at the Dark Web. He's declared by users to be among the greatest men and women in history. But this growth would backfire because Ross couldn't keep growing his business alone. He needed employees now. And in late 2012, he approaches some of his silk road

user contacts. One of these users is Curtis Clark Green, a 47-year-old married Mormon father of two and grandfather living near Salt Lake City, Utah, who after becoming addicted earlier in life to pain killers after a car accident and herniated several discs had now become an expert in pharmaceuticals and opioids. And now he was the DPR's moderator for drug sale disputes, working out of his home up to 80 hours a week, and to prove his loyalty to DPR, Ross demands that Green send him a scan of his driver's license,

so the dread pirate Roberts would know his identity while the dread pirate Roberts remained anonymous, and Green does this. And then, uh-oh, Green gets busted. The FBI didn't even know who they busted at first, you know? They thought it was just one of the Silk Road's many customers when they caught him getting drug shipped to his home. But then green panicked immediately when they fucking went in his house and he just started

blabbing everything. They didn't ask questions. He just fucking given everything up. He wants to make a plea deal, right? And the FBI searches his computer, they find correspondences, he's had with the Dread Pirate Roberts and now they know they have much more than a customer. They got a major Silk Road player. And then the Dread Pirate Roberts notices that there's new employees and fucking doing

his job for a couple of days. Also notices that $350,000 US dollars worth of bitcoins has been seized. And initially he doesn't know the government's seized those funds. Then he does find out. And then the DPR ironically turns to another Silk Road user he grown to trust. A Silk Road user who's actually an FBI undercover agent who's now in charge of Green's bust, an agent who went by the online name of Force, and Force had let the dread pirate Roberts know previously that he'd worked as an enforcer, Force the enforcer.

And then DPR asked this FBI agent to do some enforcing on behalf of him. He wants Green beat up, wants his bitcoins taken back. Right? And DPR sends a picture of Green's driver's license that he had, you know, had sent to him earlier. So then force gets Green to cooperate with the FBI for a staged beating. They've recorded phony thugs, Duncan Green in the hotel bathroom, threatened to drown him, sent a video to the dread pirate Roberts.

And while he's waiting for this video, though, separate Silk Road user thinks that a beating is enough, right, he shouldn't just be beat for stealing the $350,000 and getting caught by the feds or whatever and ratten, he says, if this is a wild west, and it kind of is, you'd get hung, you know, for stealing a horse. That's what the dread pirate Roberts is. That's a quote, see, even he doesn't know how to say fucking hung, you're stealing a horse. That's what the Dreadpire Roberts. That's a quote. See, even even he doesn't know how to say Buck and Hunk. You could hang. If you had time suckers,

we fucking watching you remove, you'd know that Dreadpire Roberts. Okay. And then the Dreadpire Roberts reaches back out to force. Okay. So you can change the order to execute rather than torture. He was on the inside for a while. And now that he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info. And then the Dred Pirate Roberts negotiates a price to have green killed. Force conspires with his team to stage Green's death, sends the Dred Pirate Roberts photos of Green's fake corpse, and then the Dred Pirate Roberts, he's wired 40,000 to force his account as an advance and then another 40,000 once he thinks the job is done. So I guess the Dred Pirate Roberts guess Ross has rethinking his original code of ethics now.

Maybe rationalized Greens fake death as a small sacrifice needed for the greater good of his overall economic revolution. And like so many political ideals before him Ross accepts that he has to kill for his ideals and he becomes a murderer. Theoretical murderer. Because Greens actually don't have debt. Dreadpire Roberts confides to another Silk Road user in a go at this time that one of his deepest fears was being wildly successful and being corrupted by that power.

So he's aware that he's undergoing some of these changes. Now while this is all happening, the Silk Road continues to grow. Despite allegedly procuring murder, he was never actually charged or convicted formally with this, but it did go kind of on his court case. The FBI isn't anything closer to catch and ross. By June 2013, the site is just growing and growing and growing, it's reaching a million registered accounts and the feds are still nowhere in sight.

And then in early July of 2013, one of the task forces hunting Ross gets a fucking huge break. The break that eventually lead to Ross's arrest and kind of be controversial in his court case later. An IP address pops up on one of their computer screens. It was actually an undercover IRS agent, IRS cyber agent, 6.2.75.246.20, the IP address of the Silk Road server. A cyber agent task force flies to the location of the server,

giant server warehouse in Rightchavik, Iceland, called the Thore Data Center. How they find it when torn the dark web are supposedly completely anonymous, right? It's virtually impossible, right? Well, a chance discovery on a Reddit thread after months and months of searching for online clues is what led them there. A user posted a warning that Silk Road's IP address was quote leaking. Tech term meaning it was becoming visible to other computers. The red pirate Roberts had been alerted to this problem by the user, but ignored the warning, didn't fix whatever code encryption error was causing it. Silk Road success was making emergent. He let his guard down, confidently telling colleagues, you know, on post message

boards around the side that he would never be found. And then cyber agents using advanced hacking techniques and a lot of manpower, find that leak, and eventually trace it to its source, Iceland. Well, Icelandic authorities, they find the correct Silk Road data box inside Thor. God, I love that name for a server warehouse, man. Fuck, North God Thor is protecting all data. And it discovers there's a mirror drive, a duplicate set of contents for it.

They pull the mirror drive or server, return the server box, return it to right-debecback, handed to the FBI agents. And just like that, an FBI agent is holding silk roads data in his hand. Well, the site's elicit business volume is even bigger than the agents suspected. On July 21, 2013, around the time they land in Iceland,

DPR's account had received $3,237 transfers, totaling almost $20,000, which would give DPR an annualized income of more than 7 million bucks. He's making some good money on this right now. The data center also kept system logs for six months. They could see all the other computers who had recently communicated with this machine.

It was an investigative windfall. While using their new contents, the agents are able to get a subpoena and locate the IP address of the last known computer to access the Icelandic server and it led them to the cafe Luna, Sacramento Street, San Francisco. Actually, roughly a mile from where I'm doing research right now after last night show a punchline in the Embarcadero district.

So that's fucking cool. Short time later, Homeland Security agents showed up at Ross Ulbrich's front door. His living with roommates, who knew him as Joshua Terry, a quiet kid from Texas, but they still didn't have quite enough to arrest him. All he had was a package of fake IDs that had been sent to his apartment from the Silk Road, but they couldn't prove that he ordered them. They thought he was the dreadpire Roberts, but they weren't yet completely sure, so they waited and they watched. Now how did they finally get here? Right? Because running the business aside of the Silk Road, the size of the Silk Road had become impractical for Ross to do without a team of capable employees. There were technical

problems, management issues, a quickly changing marketplace, volatility, a Bitcoin, you know, like any other currency. There are scammers on the site, and as Silk Road made more money, the cost to maintain it also rose. Hackers had figured out how to launch denial of service attacks on Silk Road. The Dreadpire Roberts was forced to pay protection money to the tune of $50,000 a week to some other hackers. In May 2013, hackers shut down the site for a week. Many users wondered if it was the work of a competitor. Atlantis, a new tour-based illicit goods bizarre, had just launched with a slick YouTube trailer

and a group chat with reporters, in which it spoke for somebody in Heisenberg, offered the series, Burn, that Atlantis was the Facebook to Silk Road's Myspace. Myspace, man. Can't believe that network still exists. Who is honestly still using Myspace? Any time suckers checking your Myspace inbox every morning,

just rearranging your top friends? Ross was struggling with maintaining his new empire. And on a basic human level, he was struggling with his new life, man. He was super fucking lonely. I have no one to share my thoughts with. DPR posted to the wider Silk Road community at one point. Security does not permit it.

So DPR self-taught programming was catching up with him as well. He's leaving holes and tours and visibility cloak. His morality is shifting. He's been going to procuring some more murders. He's tired of those fucking hackers, making him pay $50,000 a week. So he had to go to some hell's angels members over the price of killing some of these scammers that are blackmailing him. Eventually he settles on $150,000 per murder.

His new social and economic experiment against violence and oppression was framed and I guess he, you know, he did, you know, try to pay people, but it's supposed no one was actually killed again like before. The FBI just made another break in the case then. The name Frosty came up associated with the Icelandic server. And when agents cross reference that name and all the Silk Road data that been collecting over the past few years, they realized that the Silk Road servers had a login system that created one trusted computer for all the

other machines whose encryption keys all ended with Frosty at Frosty. This meant that these computers shared one key friend a single machine they could all talk to. One of those nodes must be Frosty, and whoever sat at that keyboard was bow jangles, one dog, one eye, three legs, and the entirety of the dark webcower in beneath him, awaiting each new command he types with his one remaining front paw, more coke, more heroin, more squeaky toys. No, of course not. They knew they whoever said that single computer would be the dread pirate Roberts. But still because of tours level of encryption, they didn't know exactly where that computer was.

And then the FBI cyberagentist met with some IRS agents who've been working separately on the Silk Road case. You know, and again, of course the IRS is working on it. They don't exactly love it. When someone tries to create a new economic system that excludes taxation, they saw in a chart that the FBI server clues had led them to San Francisco. And then one of the IRS agents remarked, oh, that's funny.

I had lead in San Francisco. I'll look it up. Turns out that months earlier, this IRS agent had figured out that whoever had started Silk Road had tried to drum up interest on regular websites with like-minded audiences during that initial launch phase. It searched for Tor URLs around the time of the site's first appearance and found a mention in shrumory.org, and on one of their forums on January 27th 2011, days after the Silk Road launch. A user named

Altoyd talked up this exciting new service to claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online anonymously. Googling elsewhere for the user name Altoid, revealed a question about database programming posted on Stack Overflow, date of March 6, 2013, saying, how do I connect a tour hidden service using curl and PHP?

Some code questions. The email listed was Ross Ulbrich at gmail.com. Uh oh, a minute later that user changed the aliased to frosty. I'm fucking crazy. That one post that Ross edited a minute later on some random site, one slip up, one little digital clue, little digital needle. And these motherfuckers found it. At the time, the IRS didn't know what that meant. So that's where it ended. But then the info, you know, sat in the file until dumb luck put that IRS agent in contact with the right FBI agent whose wall was a map where all roads led to Frosty, then the FBI ran the name Ross Oldbreak through its federal database and found that Homeland Security

agents had stopped to visit him. Recently, regarding the package of fake IDs, agents who did suspect him of being the dread pirate Roberts. A quick search for his last known address showed that he'd lived half a block from Cafe Luna. The San Francisco note in that chart, member from the Thor server, the site where an administrator had logged into the Silk Road VPN. The Virtual Privacy Network. And a quick tour through Ross's social media presence reveals a digital portrait with an incredible likeness to dread pirate Roberts.

His LinkedIn profile was full of the same Libertorian rhetoric or libertarian on YouTube. He'd favorite videos from the Mises Institute at the political touchstone below to buy a dread pirate Roberts. So they put in a request to have a surveillance team send two agents to San Francisco to get some eyes on Ross. They watch him in a house, he shares

with some other people working late on an encrypted wireless network. Sometimes he'd head out with his laptop, like practically everyone else in San Francisco, They watch him in a house. He shares with some other people working late on an encrypted wireless network Sometimes he'd head out with his laptop like practically everyone else in San Francisco He you know sort of cafe where with coffee at a side working on it These physical surveillance to see if they could line up Ross's internet usage with DPR's activity on the silk road and the activity Match perfectly All right every time Ross turned on his computer DPR logs on to the silk road when he closes it DPR logs out Over a few weeks the pattern was incredibly consistent. Of course it was.

Right, it was House and Cat Fays, and the morning or late evening, Ross and DPR were electronically aligned perfectly. So all this evidence led to bust in, but with cases revolving around encrypted data, they still don't want to rush in. If they kicked in Ross's door, all you have to do, this is crazy to me, all you have to do is shut his laptop,

and then without the password to open it, they wouldn't be able to gather the conclusive hard evidence to prove conclusively for sure beyond the shadow of a doubt he was the dread pirate Roberts. So a large team of agents ends up following Ross, you know, after figuring out his habit, they fall into a library where they knew he would log in as the dread pirate Roberts. And then two agents, this is quite quite a scene they set up here. Two agents pretend to be a deranged homeless couple fighting right next to Ross.

They argue loudly, you know, and then the man acts like he's gonna hit the woman. And it was enough to get Ross to step up real quick, leave his laptop open and intervene. And when he does this, another agent that was sitting behind him, pretending to be some just, you know, a young lady doing some research herself grabs his still open laptop, rips it away, and then yet another agent grabs, slams, rost down and handcuffs him. Then the rest of the team arrives, swap team members, black suburban, sirens, blaring, and then other agents working on online meanwhile, sees all the silk roids bitcoins and replace the marketplace with the welcome page that reads, this hidden site has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

And just like that, Ross's libertarian experiment is over. He'd later be denied bail. And like I said up top, he sentenced to life in prison. His lawyer still hoped for an appeal. It hasn't happened yet. And it looks like the chance that this cyber-waltor white, a normal dude, who slowly morphed into a drug kingpin of sorts, of ever becoming a free man is slim to none. Now, despite the details of the rise and fall of Ross Ulbrich, I just laid out his case

is very controversial. For one thing, the feds, while initially in dieting Ross with procurement for murder charges, never actually charged him with those charges, but it was accused of it in court. They called their murder for higher charges an uncharted crime. So the jury got to hear about that they think he did this, but they didn't have to offer proof that he did it. So that's very strange.

His defense attorney described it as an attempt by the prosecution to poison the atmosphere of the trial. They wanted to present to the jury a person who has no redeeming value. That way the jury doesn't focus on the actual allegations, but focuses instead on the atmosphere that Ross is a ruthless criminal. And as far as anyone knows, none of his requests for murder never actually resulted in anyone being murdered. So technically, technically, he was a nonviolent criminal. So why is a nonviolent criminal getting sentenced to life without the possibility of parole? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, people convicted of homicide are sentenced on average

just over 12 years in prison. And they serve on average just under six years. Now I'm not saying that right. Just under six years for definitely killing someone. According to the April 1995 study I found, which I could find something more recent, but I wasn't able to find anything reputable, but it seems it does crazy that he's given life

with no possibility for parole when he didn't kill anybody. And also investigative journalist, an interview in Alex Winters' deep web documentary, and Ross's parents, they're bothered by not knowing how that Iceland server was actually found. Like, why? We're Ross's fourth amendment rights violated. The fourth amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, sets out requirements for search warrants based on probable cause as determined by a neutral judge or

Magistrate. Did they actually go through that channel to find that initial server that led them to the search warrants? They would later get for everything else. You know, was the government's online snooping legal? I watched a lot of interviews with lawyers who think maybe not. You know, should they be allowed to look around your server without a warrant? You know, they can't do that to your home, you know, they can't come. They can't come in your house and just look for whatever they want. Why should they be able to snoop around online wherever they want? We're setting legal precedents right now in cases like Ross's for how the Fourth Amendment is going to be applied going forward into the digital age. Another question is, was Ross the only dread pirate robber.

That's a big point the documentary brings up. Interviews with others involved with the Silk Road revealed that there may have been three or four different Silk Road administrators using the Dread Pivot Roberts persona. So which crimes, the Ross commit and which crimes did other Dread Pivot Roberts commit? Did the prosecution truly know was the jury manipulated? Now I don't know about that one because I feel like if the sting operation, if they're being honest and his physical behavior matches logins, I don't think so. Dread Pivot Roberts would come up later,

you know, when it popped up after he was taken away to prison, but I think they did get their guy. And then there's, you know, another big debate is, is having the dark web and the silk road around, really such a bad idea. Yes, horrors go on there. I've already described those child porn, torture, murder for hire, lots and lots of drugs.

But all of those things were already going on before the invention of the dark web. The dark web didn't create those crimes. Has the dark web actually increased how much child porn is being produced? I don't know. You know, and what a file sharing site is as encrypted as they may be, actually make it easier for law enforcement to bust child pornography rings through infiltrating their chat rooms and tracking them down. Do we want to push these people into a place even more secretive than the dark web?

And as far as the drug trade grows, grows isn't the Silk Road a far, far less violent option than street-level drug dealers? No one's getting beat up or stabbed or killed in a drug deal gone bad on the Silk Road, or on some other online marketplace gangs aren't fighting for drug turf, you know, they're fighting for it on the streets. Neil Franklin, director of the group law enforcement against prohibition and a former Baltimore police officer has an interesting thoughts on that. He talks about a mother, father and five kids years ago who were killed by a drug killer

one night. And how since then, he thinks of the drug war in terms of violence. He argues that policies towards drug prohibition are counterproductive to public safety. He says, if Baltimore moved from street dealers to online services, do you know how many fewer shootings we would have every year? And it's someone who loves the TV show The Wire. I think there's apparently there's a lot of shootings in Baltimore and have been. So, probably would be a lot safer.

Now, Neil claims that the war on drugs just isn't working. He just says in the gangs and cartels, make over $300 billion annually off the sale of drugs. But now corporate America is also in on the game as well. He states that one private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America, gave $675 million in one year in the former dividends to shareholders. Why are taxpayers giving corporations hundreds of millions of dollars for them to house criminals. And then also they get to make massive corporate profits housing nonviolent offenders. Lot of money is also being spent on law enforcement to fight a war.

Can't win hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment, armored cars, military weapons, et cetera. You know, and now I'm not saying that the drugs themselves don't come with their own set of problems, overdoses, crippling addictions, destruction of the family unit, et cetera. But can we actually stop it? Truly, can we stop drugs? And I don't think so. And if we can, why not provide a much safer and cost-effective means to acquire it?

Just like we can't win the drug war on the streets, we also can't win the drug war on the net. Hackers are always going to figure out how to stay one step ahead of the Fed. It's still grow, got taken down. Well, immediately it comes back up. And a hundred other dark web marketplaces spring up into place. I, you know, I described the ones I found not knowing shit about how this stuff. Why are we wasting so much money on fighting what's inevitable?

Some more or less act as if, you know, once you legalize drugs, society's going to collapse. That's not true. I've been in the red light district, and Amsterdam several times, prostitution's legal. Most drugs, if not totally legal, are just overlooked. I never felt unsafe. You know, my, I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke.

I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke.

I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke.

I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's a joke. I'm saying it's crossed the border from my house, it's legal now. It spoke hand suddenly a fucking den of drug crime. No. You know, is there more violence, more use of other illicit drugs now that we eat as legal? No, there isn't. Coke, heroin, all that. It's just not going away. None of it is ever. Over a trillion dollars has been spent over the last four decades to win the drug war. And guess what?

Hasn't been fucking won. Still a lot of drugs out there. And so much violence. God knows how many people have died. They've been seriously injured during all that time because of drug-related violence and now so many more people in prison. In 1980, the United States had 50,000 people behind bars for drug law violations. Now we have more than half a million. The US is now the world's largest jailer. Drugs remain widely available and treatment resources are scarce. What the fuck are we

doing? Throwing away so much money in so many lives for what? To give some politicians some good sound bites, to give some scared, silly suburban parents, something to feel safe for about, that all the bad guys and all the bad drugs are never gonna affect their lives, even though that's bullshit. You know, the United States has the highest incarceration

rate in the world. The number of Americans incarcerated in 2014 in federal, state, and local prisons in jails with 2,224,400 people, or one in every 111 adults. In 2015, there were 1,488,707 arrests made for drug law violations. 1,249,2584% were for possession only. 643,121 arrests for marijuana law violations. 574,641 arrests were made for marijuana possession. Why are all these people in jail? Why are taxpayers paying an average

of $30,000 per inmate per year to keep these people in jail? More than 51 billion spent annually on the war and drugs. What else can we do with 51 billion a year? I don't know, maybe get some better fucking education, provide people with better economic options so they don't feel like they need to use drugs? I don't know, looking at all these stats, man, it kind of makes me think maybe Ross was on to something. Maybe the Still Crow experiment did have a few noble aspects. You know, what if we could reduce the potential income of street gangs all across

America by taking their business away, putting it online? Why waste so much money pretending to protect society if it sounds like we can't protect it from? Maybe it wasn't so taboo, it would have less appeal. And now it's an interesting argument. While we saw in Ross's case specifically that the Silk Road doesn't necessarily prevent violence, it is not even close to the largest contributor

of violence in this whole episode. What truly makes the Silk Road a morally unacceptable marketplace, from beginning to end, all transactions are voluntary. The customer of their own accord buys drugs. Nothing up to this point is morally unacceptable. Illegal? Yes. Unethical? No. The vendor of the drugs receives the order

and packages the drugs for shipment. Presumably, the drugs or harvester are created either by the vendor or somebody. The vendor had paid and exchanged for the product. All of this is voluntary. And so nothing up to this point now is unethical. Then the package of drugs is shipped to the customer or an arrangement is reached to somehow get the goods

into the hand of the person who paid for it. The only unacceptable moral action up to now is the inevitable attempted intervention of law enforcement who will attempt to intercept and confiscate kind of steal the goods. You know, law enforcement in a way now is committed theft. If you look at it, Libertarian, you know, through that lens, and involuntary action is now entered the picture. In addition to this,

the price of the drugs initially is higher to compensate for the low, for the risk of law enforcement intervention, which indirectly harms both the buyer and the seller. However, let's assume the police did not intercept this package of, let's say, marijuana. Perfect. The buyer will most likely consume these drugs or sell them to other consenting individuals, neither of which is morally unacceptable. Everyone has a right to do with their body with their wish. And for all these people who claim that that's unacceptable because that means a higher insurance bill for the rest of us,

ah, come on, get the fuck out of here. I would ask them whether that's the problem with drug usage or the way the health insurance industry is ran. All right? After the drugs are consumed, the sold transactions complete and the only morally unacceptable action that the whole thing that comes at the hands of the supposed good guys, who in their war on drugs have consumed more resources than almost any other enterprise

in US history, all on a time to stop consenting adults from doing their bodies with their wish. In addition to this countless money, houses, boats, cars, tools, just about everything else in the South has been confiscated from people who have not harmed anyone merely because they were alleged to be connected to the drug trade. Was the whole war created to justify a massive police state? That's kind of what's happened. And if you think, well, how does the Silk Road prevent kids from getting the whole of drugs here? What about the kid angle?

You know, it doesn't. But drug dealers also sell fucking drugs to kids. They're already not being protected. And if the Silk Road was legalized, you could regulate it. Much more effectively than you could as far as out on the streets. You could require someone to show their ID to the package delivery. The person who's receiving the delivery, open the drug shop at the house or business. I don't know the man, this episode really has made me question what the fuck we're doing as a nation

as far as utilization of our police force and prison system and war on drugs. And forget about drugs and legal activity on the dark web for a moment. What about the right just to online privacy? Alex Winter advocates on behalf of the dark web because he thinks corporations have too much access to us already. They know our spending habits, what sites we visit, et cetera. Why should they be allowed to know everything?

Why should they be allowed to track and record or every online move is we move deeper and deeper into the digital age? Why should we be forced to live in some virtual version of George Orwell's 1984 where big brother and the fucking thought police are always watching. They're always listening. Shouldn't it be a place we can visit where nothing we do is tracked?

You know, we have the right to privacy at home for now. Shouldn't we be allowed to have privacy on the web in our virtual home? Well, the government advocates for more control of the web to provide better security, but there's less privacy on the web equate to more security. Alex Winter would say no, it doesn't. Think about how hacker groups like anonymous, infiltrate, secure corporate servers all the time. They got like wiki leaks and all that.

If they know what the regulations are, they know how to break through them. However, if there's an unregulated area of the Wild West, harder for hackers to figure out, to breach it. All right, so that's all I got. That's all I got for my argument. Now, let's hit

the highlights and learn one thing new with some top five takeaways. Time suck, top five takeaways. Number one, you can buy so much drugs on the dark web. Holy shit, can you buy a lot of drugs? So if lots of drugs are your thing and you didn't know about the dark web before, well, you're welcome Number two at any given moment approximately 750,000 child predators are online So make sure you know what your kids are up to online and for what is worth although the law won't agree

If you finally kill one of these predators, I don't think you're murder. I think you're an exterminator Number three, Alex Winter and Count O'Reaves put together one hell of a documentary about all of this called The Deep Web. If you want to watch it, never thought I would end up thanking Bill and Ted for intellectual research. But, you know, excellent. Number four, Ross Obert, aka the dread pirate Roberts will never likely be a free man again for creating the Silk Road, and yet every, murderers, rapists and pedophiles are released back into society.

And the Silk Road reopened several times. After all that fucking money spent on all the whole court case, all that energy to brought it down, there's just a new Dreadpire Roberts popped up in hundreds of new drug marketplaces. So what did the government really accomplish? What the fuck are we doing in this society. And number five, so new info.

Anything you can imagine exists on the dark web according to legend on the real web. Now I didn't research this firsthand because I didn't want to go jail. But apparently, in addition to the horrific shit I've already described, there are also sites dedicated to necrophilia, complete with pictures and videos of course, human experimentation, which is as awful as it sounds, and even science dedicated specifically to cooking and eating women. Recipes and everything. So if you're thinking about downloading tour and doing some exploring yourself, be careful

and have fun sleep until night after all this shit I just told you. Time suck tough drive take away. Well thanks suck heads for listening and if you're enjoying the suck please follow it on social media at time suck podcast on Instagram Twitter backslash time suck podcast on Facebook and check out that second generation unicorn scrotum tea. If you're in the LA area I will be just north of Los Angeles at Levity Live in Oxnard, California May 26 27 28 and I'll be in Orlando, Florida at the improv June 8 through 11th comes a high that includes all you BDM media York media or time podcasts listeners of course And big thanks to you can actually hear the material this time this BDM's big thanks to Jordan to Susik for his help on this one and additional thanks to Time Sucker and Cyber Security agent Daniel as well and next week

This next Monday Jeffrey Dahmer Jeffrey Dahmer's getting sucked The Milwaukee Cannibal. Oh my god. I already started my research on that one. That's this guy killed 17 people and so much creepy shit, sex zombies. He was trying to make those. And just the weirdest stuff. Midway was killing Spree. He was sent to jail for a sex crime and he had a work release situation.

This is the kind of serial killer we're gonna be talking next week. He had a work release. He was able to go to this. He actually worked at a fucking chocolate place. Like a fucking candy manufacturing place.. He had a work release, he was able to go to this, he actually worked at a fucking chocolate place, a fucking candy manufacturing place, and he had a work locker there. And right before I went to jail, he killed us dude,

and he liked to keep trophies, and he would keep the head and the dick. I'm not kidding. And he tried and preserved them in various methods. And so he could kind of visit one of his kills, wallet work, while he's actually in jail, you know, getting released during of visit one of his kills while it worked, while he's actually in jail, you know, getting released during the day for a little work for, for like a year, he had this head and dick in his work locker. That's the kind of guy. That is the kind of guy

we are going to be talking about. Jeffrey Dahmer, maybe the most gruesome of the serial killers, definitely towards the top. It. Just unbelievably deranged, but morbidly captivating. So that's that. And until then, have a great, great week. Stick to surf in the regular web. If you want to have less odds of going to jail, and you keep on sucking.

Thank you.