Silk Road: Drugs, Death and the Dark Web

This programme contains some strong language.

My name is Jared Der-Yeghiayan.

I'm a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations Division.

I'm assigned to Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

We have canines that run past the mail and smell for drugs.

The officers noticed an unusual amount of drugs

coming in letter-class mail.

It was ecstasy pills, MDMA in powder form,

cocaine, LSD, heroin.

A few seizures became 50 seizures per month.

And then became 100 seizures per month.

And then a few hundred seizures per month.

I conducted my first interview of a recipient...

..and he told me immediately that it was from a website called Silk Road.

It has been 40 years since President Nixon

declared a war on drugs.

Now, a high-profile panel says that war is unwinnable and that...

The Silk Road was a new kind of black market

that the internet had never seen before.

..opiates up 34.5%.

Cocaine use up 27%.

And marijuana use up 8.5%.

That's according to...

Silk Road was the first big "fuck you" to the war on drugs.

The website sells illegal drugs

to anyone who is willing to pay.

As our team investigator Michael George uncovered,

people who run the site stand by what they're doing.

Silk Road had 20,000 new users every single month.

Afghani heroin, ketamine, steroids,

Xanax, Klonopin, Valium...

you could pretty much buy anything.

And you wouldn't have to even leave the comfort of your home

to obtain it.

It was clear there was one person

at the helm of this organisation.

He was more than a drug dealer.

He was a genius, in my opinion.

The alleged mastermind goes by the nickname Dread Pirate Roberts.

Dread Pirate Roberts. Dread Pirate Roberts.

Every transaction was meant to be a blow

against the whole idea of government.

He made Silk Road.

From that day, you have a target on your back.

I am the head of the organisation of distributors

that manufactured drugs and ran on Silk Road.

The first time I had ever heard about Silk Road,

one of my friends came up to me and he was like,

"Hey, man, there's this website where you can buy drugs on

"and you can sell drugs on it." And I was like, "What?!"

There was the menu on the left,

which shows all the drugs that you could purchase by category,

whether it be a dissociative, an upper, a downer.

It was all there.

And it was like going on Amazon or on eBay

and seeing your top recently-looked-at items,

except that this was cocaine and DMT

and all the other elusive drugs,

that you could never have before in your life,

just right in front of you.

All you had to do was click twice

and it'd show up at your doorstep a couple of days later.

It's like...perfect.

To become a vendor was very simple.

All you have to do is click on "become a vendor"

in the bottom right-hand corner

and it would easily make you a vendor.

Marketing and customer service were number one.

Everything was shot in a studio with professional lighting

and you got a product that matched that.

In order to sell LSD,

you'd get some kind of lawyering papers, doctor papers,

any kind of paperwork that,

when somebody sees a lot of, they want to avoid.

And then it would just be a matter of figuring out a way

to conceal it in the envelope in a way that they won't see.

We would get a product, such as Dove chocolates,

open it up, put it into the Dove chocolate packaging,

close it up and then we had shrink-wrap sealers,

so the product looks like it's been factory closed and never opened.

I just don't know what ended up in law enforcement's hands,

how much of it, when.

You can't worry about things like that.

This whole business is built on who's got the balls

to disregard that information and make the money.

I remember the day I got the call.

In late February 2013...

PHONE BUZZES ..my boss told me that Silk Road

was a website that operated on this dark net

that made it hard to locate where the site was

or track any of the customers.

PHONE BUZZES

That it was the Amazon of drugs.

That you could buy any drug you wanted.

And the scale was worldwide.

In cases like this,

IRS Criminal Investigation are a lot of times brought in

because we're financial experts at tracking money

and most crimes are about the money.

I had studied accounting when I was at college.

I worked as an auditor

and then I became a special agent.

I hadn't, up to this point,

done any kind of work in the drug-trafficking field.

My first day on the investigation,

the first thing was introducing myself to say,

"Hey, I'm the new agent and what do you know about this Silk Road?"

For the most part, to a man, they hated the case.

I get the undercover laptop,

we power up the site and I am dumbfounded.

I had heard about it, people had told me about it,

but until you actually got to the site

and just saw how professionally it was done

and how easy it was to get to the site, it really was amazing.

For a normal person to purchase on Silk Road,

they were first required to download a special browser,

which would allow them access onto the dark web.

The Silk Road really offered two distinct protections to users.

One was Tor, and that's a tool that anyone can download.

It triple encrypts your traffic as you're browsing the web

and then bounces it through three different servers

all around the globe.

So you couldn't locate

if you were using it or administering the site.

But that does no good if you have to buy the drugs with a credit card.

Because it wouldn't be too hard for an investigator, like myself,

to track down who made this purchase.

So the site specifically only authorised bitcoin transactions.

The second protection was bitcoin, of course.

Bitcoin is a digital currency.

It's independent of any bank or government,

unlike any currency that otherwise exists in the physical world.

It works like cash on the internet.

You can move it, but it doesn't have to be associated with any name,

so it was used to make sure that people couldn't trace the money.

What made the Silk Road unique

was that it had combined Tor with bitcoin,

and I think that that's often how real innovation works.

That combination, I think,

was really the spark that changed the whole game.

Even though there were numerous vendors...

..there was an overriding force that controlled the site.

That's the person that we want to target.

He would call himself the Captain of the ship.

He originally was just called Silk Road or Silk Road Admin.

But, at that time, he took on a new alias or new name

and it was Dread Pirate Roberts.

I know who you are! Your cruelty reveals everything!

You're the Dread Pirate Roberts, admit it!

That name has significance because it comes from this film and a novel

called The Princess Bride

and the Dread Pirate Roberts is a title that's passed down

from one kind of noble criminal to the next.

You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.

You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die.

Begin.

You may be shocked to find listings here

that are outlawed in your jurisdiction.

That doesn't mean Silk Road is lawless.

Our basic rules are to treat others as you would wish to be treated.

Mind your own business

and don't do anything to hurt or scam anyone else.

There are some things you will never find here.

They include child pornography, stolen goods and assassinations.

As a community...

..if we are going to survive,

we need to adopt a long-term vision.

It is my sincere hope that,

by making drugs available in a secure and predictable way...

..we will eliminate the violence of obtaining drugs

through traditional methods.

Silk Road users just loved it.

They called DPR a Che Guevara figure,

changing the liberties of man.

DPR really believed, and I think his users did, too,

that they were ushering in this new era of human freedom.

I searched long and hard

for the truth about what is right and wrong.

About what is good for humanity.

All of a sudden, it was so clear.

Every action you take outside the scope of government control

strengthens the market and weakens the state.

I saw how quickly the state would crumble

if it didn't have its tax revenues.

No soldiers if you can't pay them.

DPR COMPUTER VOICE CONTINUES:

We are like a little seed in a big jungle

that has just broken the surface of the forest floor.

It's a big, scary jungle with lots of dangerous creatures...

..each honed, by evolution,

to survive in the hostile environment known as human society.

There's two ways to see the Silk Road.

You can see it as just a vast criminal conspiracy,

as it's described by the FBI,

or you can see it as grand experiments

in granting people an almost dangerous level of freedom.

A kind of new anarchy on the internet,

where people can act with impunity from laws.

PHONE RINGS

The first thing you want to know in an investigation