the gipster: 05/04/15

Monday, May 4, 2015

By Kevin Loria

(Courtesy of Theranos)Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos.Faster, cheaper, better. An innovation that accomplishes those three things has the potential to disrupt an industry. But such innovations are rare.
Theranos, a company founded by Stanford sophomore Elizabeth Holmes in the fall of 2003 (she dropped out a few months later) has generated a lot of buzz for developing a revolutionary approach to the blood test. Theranos' innovation theoretically does clinical lab testing faster, cheaper, and, in some ways, better. Because of that, Theranos could upend the branch of medicine that provides the data used in roughly 70% of medical decisions.
That disruptive potential has already made Theranos famous and Holmes the youngest female billionaire in the US. But the more buzz Theranos gets, the more questions people seem to have.
When Holmes landed on the Forbes billionaire list in 2014, Theranos had raised $400 million, and the company had a valuation of $9 billion. Holmes owns about half of Theranos, with her worth estimated at more than $4.5 billion.
Holmes assembled a board of directors for Theranos that last year was described by Fortune magazine as "what may be, in terms of public service, the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history." Among those board members are a retired Navy admiral, a retired Marine Corps general, former US Sens. Sam Nunn and Bill Frist, former CDC director William Foege, former Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich, and two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger.
The caliber of the board suggests that Theranos must have developed a transformative innovation, but other than Frist, who has not practiced medicine in many years, only Foege is a medical professional. The technical details about Theranos' seemingly revolutionary tests are hard to come by, and the company is known for its secrecy about its founder's invention.
There's one fundamental question, one that in some ways is unanswerable without revealing information that Theranos wants to keep confidential: How, exactly, does what Holmes invented work?
"It's impossible to comment on how good this is going to be — it may be wonderful and it may bomb, but I really can't be more definitive because there's nothing to really look at, to read, to react to," says Dr. David Koch, president of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry and a professor at Emory University.
We know enough to say that there is something promising about Theranos. People who have seen the company's data are convinced of that. Holmes has teamed up with Walgreens to put Theranos labs inside its pharmacies (Theranos is in 41 of more than 8,000 Walgreens so far); Theranos has been conducting tests for GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer and several hospital systems; it recently set up a partnership with Cleveland Clinic; and it earns revenue from the work it does for the US military, though Holmes has previously declined to elaborate on that, beyond saying that it's an important area with the potential to save lives. Each lab is certified, and it can operate officially in a clinical capacity.
But Theranos hasn't published peer-reviewed studies comparing its tests to traditional ones, and the company hasn't allowed independent experts to publicly assess its labs, citing the need to protect its intellectual property.
The lack of peer-reviewed studies, the sort of evidence that scientists traditionally rely upon when looking at a development in their field, has generated skepticism from experts.
"They completely bypassed the traditional process of peer review or publishing in peer-reviewed journals or having peer labs evaluate their product," says Dr. Jerry Yeo, a professor and director of Clinical Chemistry Laboratories at the University of Chicago.

They completely bypassed the traditional process of peer review.

Yeo says it's normal for companies when they launch a new medical product to publish their results and allow experts to analyze their tests, especially as they become major players in the field.
"Why haven't they shown us that information, why haven't they been willing to publish it, and why haven't they shown comparisons with existing technology?" Yeo says.
Theranos says it wants to protect the details of its unique product from its competitors, just as any company would protect an innovation. It also says it wants the Food and Drug Administration to evaluate its product to show that it works.
A representative for Theranos provided this statement to Business Insider:

The FDA, which is the ultimate arbiter of safety and efficacy — of high quality tests that are proven to work — is the gold standard, and Theranos wants its tests to be the best and safest for its patients. We have called for an unprecedented level of review with the FDA, something we are not obligated to do. We've been submitting all of our tests to them and are committed to continuing to do so.

Business Insider wanted to see what we could figure out about the science behind Theranos, even though it's impossible to say definitively what the company's technology is or how well it works without published data. However, we can study what Holmes has said about Theranos and look at the latest developments in related scientific fields. We spoke to experts in the fields of clinical pathology and laboratory medicine, biomedical engineering, and healthcare investing, all to see if Theranos really could have an approach to blood testing that's faster, cheaper, and better.

This investigation raised as many new questions as answers.

(Steve Jennings/Getty Images)Holmes and writer Jonathan Shieber at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

The clues we have so far

Many of the headlines about Theranos talk about how Elizabeth Holmes reinvented the blood test:

Wired: "This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood"
The New Yorker: "Blood, Simpler: One woman's drive to upend medical testing"
Business Insider: "This Woman's Revolutionary Idea Made Her A Billionaire — And Could Change Medicine "

But the details of Theranos' technology aren't what Holmes usually focuses on when she talks about the company.

The details of Theranos' technology aren't what Holmes usually focuses on.

When Holmes talks about transforming medicine, she talks about the idea that her system could eventually make it possible for people to more easily access data about their health by going and getting a cheap blood test on their own. Instead of just measuring our weight, we could also check our glucose levels.

We don't know that having access to all that information is helpful yet, but many think that if we get better at interpreting the data, it could have huge effects on our health and help us catch disease sooner.

Still, whether or not easier access to blood tests could transform our health, such conversations don't tell us anything about how Theranos' technology works. Most of the time, Holmes says little about it. The New Yorker's Ken Auletta described her explanation of what Theranos does as "comically vague."

She told him:

"A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel." She added that, thanks to "miniaturization and automation, we are able to handle these tiny samples."

More useful is something Holmes said in an interview with Fortune in June 2014.
As Roger Parloff wrote then:

Precisely how Theranos accomplishes all these amazing feats is a trade secret. Holmes will only say–and this is more than she has ever said before–that her company uses "the same fundamental chemical methods" as existing labs do. Its advances relate to "optimizing the chemistry" and "leveraging software" to permit those conventional methods to work with tiny sample volumes.

In other interviews she makes it sound more like she's improving and streamlining processes while incorporating new but maybe not unheard-of technology.

She's saying, essentially, that she's come up with a way to optimize blood tests using chemistry, automation, software, and the latest in biomedical engineering.

An early academic interest might be the key

(Screenshot/Theranos.com)Thanks to new technology, a lot of complicated science can be achieved with a tiny amount of liquid — in this case, blood.As an ambitious undergraduate (she worked in a Ph.D. lab her freshman year), Holmes expressed a lot of interest in what Auletta describes as "lab-on-a-chip technology, which allows multiple measurements to be taken from tiny amounts of liquid on a single microchip."

This type of technology, microfluidics, has the potential to transform biomedical research by allowing people to glean meaningful data from minuscule amounts of liquid — in this case blood.

The basic definition of microfluidics is "fluid flow in a channel that's got a dimension of less than one millimeter," according to Ben Moga, president and cofounder of a company called Tasso Inc. His company is working on a device that collects blood samples from people at home who hold the collection vessel against their skin. The ease-of-use factor, lack of big needles, and tiny amounts of blood involved mean the company definitely has something in common with Theranos — Tasso uses microfluidics to work with minimal quantities of blood.

It wouldn't be possible to revolutionize the blood test and get away from big needles if you couldn't use these tiny quantities of liquid.

Holmes' first patent, filed before she started Theranos in 2003 and approved in November 2007, was for a technique to do multiple tests on a drop of blood. The term "microfluidics" appears in nine of the 31 patents that appear when searching the US Patent Office for "Theranos," and she's the co-inventor on more than 270 global patent applications.
Holmes may have the most ambitious ideas about how to use microfluidics technology, but she's not the only one working in that field.

Others have developed quick blood tests using microfluidics before, including an IBM lab in Switzerland. Experts said that not only were these tests becoming more used in general, but that this sounds like exactly what Holmes and Theranos are doing, as it's what she studied and what would make her blood tests possible.

In other words, the core technology behind the Theranos blood test might not be mysterious or even particularly new after all. But there are still some crucial missing pieces, especially since Theranos' version sounds more powerful than anything else out there.

"The technology is emerging," says the University of Chicago's Yeo, and "some version of it is already out there." But his question is whether Theranos could have really developed a way to run as many tests as it offers (more than 200 so far, with more to come) on the large scale needed at hospitals and in major labs without relying on already existing machines to automate processing.

Experts we spoke with said it seemed that running more than 20 or 30 tests from a drop of blood would be an impressive feat. Theranos is the first company to start using blood tests that primarily rely on microfluidics, and it says it gets unparalleled results.
"We can perform hundreds of tests, from standard to sophisticated, from a pinprick and tiny sample of blood, and we have performed more than 70 tests from a single tiny sample," a representative for the company told Business Insider.
Moga's company, Tasso, spun out of leading microfluidics expert Dave Beebe's lab at the University of Wisconsin. More than a decade ago Beebe wrote that "microfluidics has the potential to significantly change the way modern biology is performed."
Last year, in a review published in the journal Nature, Beebe and coauthors wrote that hematology, the study of blood, was one of the leading areas of use for microfluidic technology, though "a 'killer application' that propels microfluidics into the mainstream has yet to emerge." Still, he wrote in that review that using this technology it was possible to use "microliters of blood from a finger prick" instead of "milliliters of blood from a [vein]" and process those samples in a few minutes instead of an hour.
This is cutting-edge technology, but it's not exclusive to Theranos.

This is cutting-edge technology, but it's not exclusive to Theranos.

Others are working in the same area, even if no one else has launched a similar commercial effort. If Theranos is the company that has finally come up with Beebe's "killer application" for microfluidics, that may explain its reluctance to show the patented details that make its technology unique, even though that rubs researchers the wrong way.
If, as Yeo says, a version of the technology is "already out there," Theranos' innovation may be that Holmes is the first to come up with a lab that implements a new form of that technology in an elegant and efficient way, putting it into action on a commercial scale for the first time in history.
Doing that successfully is a big thing. But while experts say that the company's story is plausible, they want to know for sure that it works.

(Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)Here's one of the already operating Theranos centers, in Palo Alto, California.

Does it work?

For Theranos to take lab-testing business from the two major lab companies used by doctors, Quest and LabCorp, and to partner to run tests for more hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies, it has to show it can get it right at every stage, from the preparation before it pricks someone's finger to the accurate processing of hundreds of thousands of samples.

Theranos' labs have been evaluated and deemed acceptable by drug companies, hospitals that work with them, Walgreens, and others. There's even a tiny study coauthored by Holmes and published in an online journal that compares Theranos test results with traditional tests favorably, though it looks only at results for one characteristic of blood among six people. Yet none of these evaluations are a substitute for the extensive and thorough publicly available peer-reviewed studies researchers want to see when faced with something new.

Theranos is obviously not doing things in the usual way that pure research works; it's also selling a service, which it says it wants to protect. This might explain why it says that FDA approval is a more important way of showing its tests work. And a nontraditional way of doing things may be guaranteed to draw skepticism from researchers who want to see the traditional scientific processes followed, even if that new method works.

A nontraditional way of doing things may be guaranteed to draw skepticism.

Still, since labs are the biggest source of objective data that most doctors have to base decisions on, they need to trust new tests before deciding they are going to start using them. It could be a matter of life or death, which is why people in the medical profession want to see studies that show how accurate Theranos tests are compared to traditional ones.
"Scientists by nature are skeptical people, but we are driven by data," says Yeo. "If data shows your test is fast and accurate and cheap, more power to you." He adds: "Maybe they are really good, and if they are, I wish they would subject themselves to some peer review."
Even if the tests work, which experts we spoke to think is perfectly plausible, Theranos still has to execute them well enough to take over existing business.
"Every lab test, no matter how innovative, has limitations," says Yeo. Even the finger prick presents challenges.
The finger prick doesn't open a vein and let blood flow out; instead, it draws capillary blood from tiny vessels just below the skin.
Yeo explained that you need to prepare someone's finger for this process to make sure blood is flowing, but if you end up squeezing the finger too hard or have to prick it too many times, that may damage and break down cells. Cellular damage could change various test results.

Moga, of Tasso Inc., says there are ways to expect and compensate for this damage. Still, he says he understands that the medical community wants to see that any new company can do a new test accurately on a large scale.

Theranos knows it needs to execute these finger-stick tests perfectly. Holmes told Auletta: "We have data that show you can get a perfect correlation between a finger stick and a venipuncture for every test that we run." And another of its patents is for a finger warmer, which may help prepare the finger for the blood draw. Still, it's an area where, if the phlebotomist operating the machine is improperly trained, there could be problems no matter how small the amount of blood drawn.

Journalists and doctors who have tried the test called it painless, but a look at Yelp reviews of one Theranos location, at a Walgreens in Palo Alto, shows that at least one person claims their finger was bruised. Another said they still had to have their tests done with traditional blood draws (something Theranos is equipped to do, so this could have been a test that required that), and a third wrote that their results — which indicated serious problems — turned out to be wrong. Yelp reviews aren't verified, aren't guaranteed to be accurate, and are often written by the people who think they've had the most negative experience. There's also always the potential that operator error caused a specific problem. But they are an indication that the system may still have kinks to work out.

Auletta reported in The New Yorker that in 2016 Theranos plans on doing 1 million tests, while Quest will do 600 million. If the company is going to grow and be a real option for clinical use, it needs to show its system can work accurately and handle every step from the individual finger prick to the processing of hundreds of thousands of samples every day.

Potential roadblocks

Some think Theranos will be forced to reveal more data about exactly how its product works as it expands. Holding information close to the vest has worked as it has gained big partnerships, says Ambar Bhattacharyya, a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners, who has handled investments in a number of other healthcare companies (they are not investors in Theranos). But he thinks it'll need to open up more to the scientific community to "win the trust of folks that would be deciding whether to refer [patients] to Theranos versus LabCorp or Quest."

He says that from a business perspective, that's the most important thing, but it's not the only thing.

Theranos is already offering tests at prices that are a fraction of what hospitals charge.

Theranos is already offering tests at prices that are cheaper than what Quest and LabCorp charge and a fraction of what hospitals charge — and unlike its competitors, it lists its prices clearly on its website. Yet to conduct tests all over the country it will need to build labs and machines to help process all those samples. It will need to train staff to collect samples and operate every stage of a complex pipeline.

Theranos needs to show it's a profitable, sustainable enterprise that will be able to scale its business as it grows, and "that's a huge risk" with a lot for them to prove and challenges to overcome, Bhattacharyya says.
There's also the question of whether regulatory hurdles could slow the company down. As Theranos has noted, it wants its tests approved by the FDA, even though it isn't required to get that approval right now.

A company that designs tests that it uses only in its own labs, as Theranos does, doesn't need to get them approved, but the FDA is considering changing its policy. Theranos says it supports that change and, by having already submitted its tests to the FDA, it has gone further than its competitors to gain approval. (It's not clear that the FDA will officially approve its tests unless that policy change is made.) But all that legwork doesn't mean the regulatory process couldn't slow Theranos down — it could yield the validation it is looking for or end up throwing a wrench into its plans.

Bhattacharyya says he wouldn't be surprised if competing labs, feeling threatened by this ascendant newcomer, try to support legislation that would impede Theranos' growth by adding additional regulatory questions for new tests. Quest has already said it doesn't believe tests that rely on capillary blood can be accurate.

Theranos' board, stacked with Washington insiders, "knows DC as well as anyone else," Bhattacharyya says, which would probably help in navigating that sort of fight.
Aware of the challenges, Bhattacharyya says he's still optimistic about Theranos' future. It has thousands of Walgreens locations it can open and thousands more potential hospitals and research projects it could become involved with, provided Theranos and Holmes find a way to handle the hurdles of clinical acceptance, regulatory red tape, and rapid growth.

Holmes' way of streamlining systems "could actually be the tried and true statement of better, faster, and cheaper," Bhattacharyya says.

(Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

The future of medicine

Modern medicine is still a young science. We've figured out some drugs that usually work, but as we learn more about the human body and our genetic code — the things we have in common but also the things that make us unique — we may come up with a new sort of medicine, tailored for each person.

This concept, sometimes called personalized medicine, could transform the way we understand and treat disease.

While most people associate that idea with genome sequencing, any measure of a person's health data could help develop personalized medicine for them. Analyzing someone's blood test could theoretically show changes in certain characteristics that indicate an illness or a bad response to certain types of drugs.

Researchers are talking about tracking blood tests to measure the appearance of cancer-related DNA molecules. Traditional lab companies like Quest have also started talking about using blood tests for a personalized medicine approach to the early detection of diseases.

Theranos would be able to do all of those things.

"We believe every individual has a basic human right to access actionable healthcare information when they need it the most — at a time when they have an opportunity to change outcomes and live better lives. Individual engagement with lab testing will improve early detection and prevention of disease," a Theranos representative told Business Insider.

Not everyone is convinced that people should order their own medical tests, and some think that doing so could create chaos. But many believe it will be central to the future — Theranos' competitors are now pivoting in that direction — and the idea that a person should be able to order tests to get their medical data is core to Theranos' mission.

A company representative put it this way:

Right now, our healthcare model is set up so that insurance will only cover a test (and therefore a physician will only order a test) when a patient becomes symptomatic for a given condition. Based on the concept that the test is then 'needed,' testing only once someone is already sick results in costly outcomes and limits individuals from fully taking ownership of their own health, in a world in which so much of our healthcare costs and outcomes are driven by lifestyle related decisions. Our work is to change that.

Even though we may not be ready yet to process the vast amount of information that would come from more frequent blood tests, there are many people who think this could be a life-saving innovation. If that turns out to be true, Theranos could be the first company helping people get there.

And that's the key. By positioning itself where it has, Theranos may have taken the latest existing technology and tweaked and refined it into a unified system that's more streamlined and more elegant than any existing system, creating a disruptive lab business. It may have positioned itself into a place that's anticipated the future, setting itself up to be a leader in the personalized medicine field for years to come.

Theranos' story reminds a lot of people of Apple.

Theranos' story reminds a lot of people of Apple. The company has a brilliant leader with a penchant for wearing the same color turtleneck every day. That leader theoretically came up with an elegant system that can leverage the most advanced technology and sell it to the world, though Holmes lacks the mercurial nature of Jobs. Theranos controls every aspect of its technology, just like Apple.

There's a reason Holmes has generated the buzz that she has.

But here's where we also have to remember the key difference between healthcare and other consumer technology.

"I'm all for innovation and for revolution — that's what we need," says Yeo. "But it's very difficult to judge a lab that's very secretive … and unlike the Apple products, this is a product that affects people's lives. If an iPhone is faulty, we go buy something else." But if a blood test is wrong, it could endanger someone's life.

Holmes is aware of the questions people have. "Every time you create something new, there should be questions," she told CBS News. "To me that's a sign that you've actually done something that is transformative."

A health innovation has the potential to change people's lives and be transformative in a way that a phone never could, and that's precisely why, as excited as they are, scientists are still skeptical.

NOW WATCH: Doctors Show Why 3D Printing Holds 'Limitless' Potential For Medicine

“I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.”—home/frosty/documents/journal/2012/q1/january/week1

The postman only rang once. Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white, he was startled to hear someone at the door. It was 11 am, and surprise visits were uncommon at his modest house in Spanish Fork, Utah, a high-desert hamlet in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. Green ambled over, adjusting his camouflage fanny pack. At 47 his body was already failing him: He was overweight, with four herniated discs, a bum knee, and gleaming white dental implants. To get around he sometimes borrowed his wife’s pink cane. Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following attentively.

He peeked through the front window and caught a glimpse of the postman hurrying off. The guy was wearing a US Postal Service jacket, but with sneakers and jeans. Weird, Green thought. Also odd was a van Green noticed across the street, one he’d never seen before: white, with no logos or rear windows.
Green opened the door. It was winter, a day of high clouds and low sun. A pale haze washed out the white-tipped Spanish Fork Peak rising above the valley. Green looked down. On the porch sat a Priority box—about Bible-sized. His little dogs watched him pick up the mystery package. It was heavy, had no return address, and bore a postmark from Maryland.
Green considered the package and then took it into his kitchen, where he tore it open with scissors, sending up a plume of white powder that covered his face and numbed his tongue. Just then the front door burst open, knocked off its hinges by a SWAT team wielding a battering ram. Quickly the house was flooded by cops in riot gear and black masks, weapons at the ready. There was Green, covered in cocaine and flanked by two Chihuahuas. “On the floor!” someone yelled. Green dropped the package where he stood. When he tried to comfort his pups, a dozen guns took aim: “Keep your hands where we can see them!”
Officers cuffed Green on the floor while fending off Max, the older Chihuahua, who bared his tiny fangs and bit at their shoelaces. Splayed out on the carpet, Green was eye level with dozens of boots: A large tactical team—SWAT and DEA agents—fanned out through the house. He could hear things crashing, some officers yelling, others whispering to each other. He looked at the busted door and thought, Man, that thing was unlocked. On the living room wall hung family photos—his wife, Tonya, their two daughters, and a grandson—smiling brightly above Green, lying amid $27,000 worth of premium flake. (The package was stamped with a red dragon, the symbol for high-quality Peruvian.) Over the whole scene was a needlepoint that said: if i had known you were coming, i would have cleaned up! Excited by the company, little Max stopped shaking just long enough to crap right in the living room.
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The fact was, Green wasn’t just your average Mormon grandpa. Over the past few months he had been handling customer service for the massive online enterprise called Silk Road. It was like a clandestine eBay, a digital marketplace for illicit trade, mostly drugs. Green, under the handle Chronicpain, had parlayed his extensive personal narcotics knowledge—he’d been on pain meds for years—into a paying gig working for the site. Silk Road was hidden in the so-called dark web, a part of the Internet that’s invisible to search engines like Google. To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software. Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, the site allowed thousands of drug dealers and nearly 1 million eager worldwide customers to find each other—and their drugs of choice—in the familiar realm of ecommerce. For a brief time, from 2011 to 2013, it was a wild success. In that relatively short span, Silk Road managed to rack up (depending on how you count) more than $1 billion in sales.
Which is why Green found himself surrounded by an interagency task force. He had been hired by Dread Pirate Roberts, the mysterious figure at the center of Silk Road. DPR, as he was often called, was the proprietor of the site and the visionary leader of its growing community. His relatively frictionless drug market was a serious challenge to law enforcement, who still had no idea who he or she was—or even if DPR was a single person at all. For over a year, agents from the DEA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the IRS, the Secret Service, and US Postal Inspection had been trying to infiltrate the organization’s inner circle. This bust of Green and his Chihuahuas in the frozen Utah desert was their first notable success.
The Feds got Green on his feet. They had a lot of questions, starting with why he had $23,000 cash in his fanny pack and who was on the other end of the encrypted chat dialogs on his computer. Green said, improbably, that the money was his tax return. He also asked for his pain medication. Instead they escorted him to the door and into a squad car, informing him that he’d be booked for possession of 1,092 grams of cocaine with intent to distribute.
“Don’t take me to jail,” Green pleaded. “He knows everything about me.”
Later, under interrogation, Green told the skeptical agents that to charge him and make his name public was a potential death sentence. Dread Pirate Roberts was dangerous, he said: “This guy’s got millions. He could have me killed.”

Ross Ulbricht was deep into his regular drum circle when he spotted her. As Ross slapped the hide on his djembe, a West African drum, Julia Vie sat across the circle. She had a head full of curls, light brown skin, and dark brown eyes. The drum circle was assembled on a lawn at Penn State, where in 2008 Ross was working toward a master’s degree in materials science and engineering. Julia was 18, a free-spirited freshman, and when she noticed Ross she felt a powerful attraction. Not long after, Julia visited Ross’ campus office, where they couldn’t help but kiss and fall into a carnal heap on the floor.

Both were smitten. Ross studied crystallography, working on thin-film growth. One day he made a large, flat blue crystal, affixed it to a ring, and gave it to Julia. She had no idea how her boyfriend could make a crystal, but she knew she was in love.
Ross had grown up in Austin, Texas, and had always been smart and charming. He’d been the kind of kid who was an Eagle Scout—and let his friends give him a mohawk on a whim. He was raised in a tight family. They’d spend summers in Costa Rica; Ross’ parents had built a series of rustic, solar-powered bamboo houses there, near an isolated point break where Ross learned to surf. In high school, “Rossman,” as friends called him, drove an old Volvo, smoked plenty of pot, and still got a 1460 on his SATs. To friends, Ross was carefree but also caring.
Ross earned a scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas and majored in physics. From there he landed a graduate scholarship at Penn State, where he excelled as usual. But he wasn’t happy with the drudgery of lab research. Since college he’d been exploring psychedelics and reading Eastern philosophy. At Penn State, Ross talked openly about switching fields. He posted online about his disenchantment with science—and his new interest in economics.
He’d come to see taxation and government as a form of coercion, enforced by the state’s 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 free.
When he finished his master’s in 2009, he moved back to Austin and bought Julia a plane ticket to join him. She left school, and they got a cheap apartment together. It was cramped, but they were young and dreamy. Both imagined they might get married.
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Ross tried day trading, but it didn’t go well. He started a videogame company. That failed too. The setbacks were devastating. He didn’t want to be trying; he wanted to be doing. During this time, his downstairs neighbor, Donny Palmertree, invited Ross to work with him on Good Wagon Books, a business that collected used books and sold them in digital storefronts like Amazon and Books-A-Million. Ross built Good Wagon’s website, learned inventory management, and wrote a custom script that determined a book’s price based on its Amazon ranking.
In his spare time Ross read, hiked, improved his yoga, and, as Julia fondly recalls, had “lots and lots of great sex.” But they also argued, about politics (she was a Democrat), money (what he called “frugal,” she called “cheap”), and their social life (she partied more than he did). Their relationship turned stormy, with frequent breakups. In the summer of 2010, they split up yet again. He was heartbroken, later telling a woman he met on OkCupid how he’d recently been in love and was trying to get over it.
Silk Road went live in mid-January 2011. A few days later came the first sale. Then more. Ross eventually sold all 10 pounds of his mushrooms, but other vendors started joining. He was handling all the transactions by hand, which was time-consuming but exhilarating. It wasn’t long before enough vendors and users made it a functioning, growing marketplace.
Just before the launch, facing a new year and a blank slate, Ross had resolved to change his life. “In 2011,” he wrote to himself, “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.”
Ross was adrift. “I went through a lot over the year in my personal relationships,” he wrote in a journal on his computer, a kind of self-assessment of life goals. “I had left my promising career as a scientist to be an investment adviser and entrepreneur and came up empty-handed.” Ross felt ashamed, but not long afterward Palmertree got a job in Dallas, leaving Good Wagon to Ross. For years, all he’d wanted was to be in charge of something. Now he was.
In the Good Wagon warehouse, Ross oversaw five part-time college students sorting, logging, and organizing the 50,000 books on shelves he built himself. That December was Good Wagon’s best month, clearing 10 grand.
But by the end of 2010, the new CEO of Good Wagon was looking beyond the book business. During his forays into trading, Ross had discovered bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency. The value of bitcoin—based only on market factors, unattached to any central bank—aligned with his advancing libertarian philosophy. On his LinkedIn page, Ross wrote that he wanted to “use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind.”

To that end Ross had a flash of insight. “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.” He wrote that he’d “been studying the technology for a while but needed a business model and strategy.”
Like most libertarians, Ross believed that drug use was a personal choice. And like all people paying attention, he observed that the war on drugs was a complete failure. The natural merchandise for his new enterprise would be drugs. “I was calling it Underground Brokers,” Ross wrote, “but eventually settled on Silk Road.”
Ever the capable scientist, Ross decided to cultivate his own psilocybin mushrooms as a starter product. He was spending time with Julia again, while struggling with programming his site and still running Good Wagon.
Then, one night in early 2011, Good Wagon collapsed. In the literal sense. Ross was working late, alone in the warehouse, when he heard an enormous crash—the sound of the library falling apart. He’d carefully designed the entire system but had somehow forgotten two vital screws, the ones that held it all together; the shelves came down, every single one, like dominoes.
When Ross broke the news to Palmertree, he also admitted that his heart wasn’t in Good Wagon anymore. They agreed to close the company, with no hard feelings. He told Palmertree that he already had a new business idea—“something really big.”

Special agent Carl Mark Force IV was half-asleep when the postal inspector started talking about something weird in the parcel sorters. “Just wanna let everybody know about this,” the inspector said, delivering his brief to a conference room full of bored law enforcement personnel. “We are having problems with drugs coming through the mail.”

Force was a Baltimore-based DEA agent, and he was at a regional interagency meeting, a periodic intel show-and-tell with analysts from the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, and Homeland Security. “It’s coming from an underground drug site,” the inspector said, “called Silk Road.”
Force sat up. This was the kind of thing he was looking for. He had burned out on the grind of arresting street dealers. At 6 feet and 200 pounds, Force was an athletic guy, and coming up through the agency he’d loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest, clearing some broke-down row house on some broke-down block and catching some dealer in the bathroom, cuffing the guy before he could wipe his ass. But after countless raids, the adrenaline had worn off. And in the grand scheme of things, who cared about confiscating a few grams? He was pushing 50 and still on the federal payroll in a regional office. That’s when you want to find a big case and get out. And so he went looking for leads in meetings like this, which were mostly yawners—until now.
By the time Force heard about Silk Road, it had been around nearly a year. The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: 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 put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin!
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Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash, Mercury’s Famous uncut cocaine flakes, Mario Invincibility Star XTC, white Mitsubishi MDMA, a black tar heroin called the Devil’s Licorice.
Then there were the prescription meds, everything from Oxycontin and Xanax to Fentanyl and Dilaudid. Silk Road’s product descriptions and user ratings amounted to an encyclopedic information source. Cantfeelmyface said one product “has a nice shine” and provides “a rush of euphoria and confidence.” Ivory’s review of some crystal MDMA observed that it had “a nice fizz and wisp of smoke =].” The reviews and community standards enforced excellent value and customer service on Silk Road, which brought more users, increasing its reputation further—until Silk Road became the premier destination for digital drug sales.
Law enforcement was caught with its tactical pants down. Various agencies had sniffed around Silk Road in the summer of 2011 but gotten nowhere. Force saw potential but didn’t even know where to begin.
Months later, in January 2012, he got some good news from his supervisor. Homeland Security was assembling a task force for a full-on Silk Road case. “You want in?” his boss asked.
Before he knew it, Force was at a Silk Road summit, where he and 40 other agents picked through doughnut boxes and watched PowerPoint presentations filled with technical information about nodes and TCP/IP layers. Most of the agents’ eyes glazed over, but, yes, Force wanted in.
The task force that formed to take on Silk Road—Operation Marco Polo—was based out of the Baltimore Homeland Security Investigations office. Another agent showed Force how to navigate Silk Road. He quickly saw that it had a vocal mastermind, the revered figure known as Dread Pirate Roberts. It was a clever touch, borrowing the name from The Princess Bride, in which the pirate was a mythical character, inhabited by the wearer of the mask. The idea of a malleable but enduring identity only added to Silk Road’s enigmatic appeal. Force was intrigued. Whoever wore this digital mask sat atop a burgeoning empire. Force told his boss that Silk Road was a “target of opportunity.” But he was unskilled at computers, and he didn’t know anything about bitcoin. So he decided to learn.

Hector Xavier Monsegur was an unusual visitor to the New York FBI office. Then again, Monsegur was not really a visitor. It was past 1 am one night in the spring of 2011, and he was being led to the back of the empty bullpen by Chris Tarbell, a young agent who had arrested Monsegur earlier that night in the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side. Monsegur was an enormous Puerto Rican, ears studded with diamonds, who grew up in the projects. He was also Sabu, a cofounder of LulzSec, the elite group of hackers responsible for electronically attacking dozens of corporate and government targets like News Corp. and the CIA. Sabu was the most high-profile member of Anonymous, the “hacktivist” political collective. Tarbell had managed to follow a blind lead from the FBI’s public hotline to Sabu and reel him into the FBI as an informant. It was a remarkable score for Tarbell, especially since he was still a rookie.

Tarbell had always had the cop in him, even when his parents thought he was going to be a doctor. In college he was a powerlifter, an unusual sight at James Madison University, a preppy school in the Shenandoah Valley. He already looked like a cop: big, with a short coif on top of that baby face. By the time Tarbell finished college, he sensed where policing was headed and got a master’s in computer science. He didn’t understand programming at first. But he did understand that this was the future, so he paced himself, stuck with it, and came out the other side as a computer forensics expert, working as a civilian for the FBI.
Tarbell spent four years traveling the world with global forensics, tracking down terrorists, child pornographers, and botnets. He showed a talent for uncovering digital trails. He thought about how the virtual realm seemed like magic, a secret world, poorly understood; and like all magical realms, it was full of charlatans and practitioners of dark arts. Few could decipher those secrets, and Tarbell liked being one of them.

After a few years in forensics, Tarbell told his wife, Sabrina, he wanted to officially join the Bureau. Sabrina, eight months pregnant, approved, even though it meant uprooting their lives. After Quantico, Tarbell was assigned to the New York office, home to the FBI’s nascent cybercrime division. By this time he was 31, a little old to be the new guy.
But catching the elusive Sabu made Tarbell’s name at the Bureau. Online, Sabu’s credibility among hackers was unassailable. The FBI set him up with a new laptop in their office, where he gathered evidence against his LulzSec friends. Nine months later dozens of arrests were made, severely disabling two of the world’s biggest hacker groups.
After LulzSec, Tarbell looked for a new big case. He took an interest in Tor, the encryption software that allowed users to visit sites such as Silk Road. Tor’s protocol is a kind of digital invisibility cloak, hiding users and the sites they visit. Tor stands for “the Onion Router” and was launched by the Navy in 2002. It has since become a tool for all manner of clandestine communications, licit and illicit, from circumventing censorship in countries like China to powering contraband sites like Silk Road. Tor’s encryption is so layered, agents thought it was unbreakable. When cybercrime investigations hit a Tor IP, they would give up. The supposed impossibility only attracted Tarbell. I’m gonna take on Tor, he thought.

Tarbell briefed his supervisor, who briefed his supervisor, and so on, until they wound up in the office of the SAC, or special agent in charge. Above the SAC is the assistant director in charge—yes, an endless source of amusement when complaining about red tape in the FBI is to talk about how the SAC is just below ADIC. It took a couple of sales pitches to soften up the SAC, but in February 2013, Tarbell opened the FBI’s first Tor case: Operation Onion Peeler.
By now Silk Road was a juicy target. Many agencies were working on it, but with no success. Homeland Security Investigations had a case open. The IRS had looked into it. There was Force’s DEA case in Baltimore. And the New York DEA, which asked Tarbell for technical advice. They were using traditional drug investigation techniques, but Tarbell knew this wasn’t an operation where you could flip people up the chain, because there was no chain. You had to go straight to the top.

Ross was paddling through the break, lining up for a set. The beach at Bondi, just south of Sydney, sloped down to a gorgeous waterline. For Ross, the waves were among the many advantages of leaving Austin in late 2011 to spend some time in Australia with his older sister, Cally. He quickly made friends there, a lively group that went out drinking, invited him to warehouse parties, and met up to go surfing.

Ross had worked that morning but was in the water by afternoon. It was nice, the portable life. And it was made possible by his flourishing online drug bazaar. Silk Road’s usage had exploded in June of that year, after a story on Gawker brought the site mainstream attention. After that, traffic grew so fast that Ross needed technical support to maintain the site, deal with transactions, and add features like automatic payments and a better feedback system.
He’d been doing it all himself, learning on the fly, programming automated transactions and using CodeIgniter to write and rewrite the site after a benevolent hacker alerted him to some major flaws. (“This is amateur shit,” the hacker had said.) His homespun efforts worked (miraculously), but Ross lost sleep over it. To outsiders he seemed his normal genial self, but in his digital domain he was frazzled, trying to keep Silk Road running. All the while he recorded in his journal the pitfalls of running a seat-of-the-pants startup:
And yeah, that was yet another learning curve, configuring and running a LAMP server, oh joy! … But I was loving it. Sure it was a little crude, but it worked! Rewriting the site was the most stressful couple of months I’ve ever experienced.
Early on, Ross had turned to Richard Bates, a college friend who was now a software engineer in Austin. Bates helped Ross with basic programming and tended to crises like the site’s first major outage. When Silk Road took off, Ross tried to hire Bates, but Bates already had a programming job. “Have you ever thought about doing something legitimate,” Bates asked Ross, “something legal?”
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Ross wasn’t really interested. Driven by the failure of his previous businesses, he was determined to make Silk Road succeed. He disappeared into his work and started professionalizing his organization. He and Julia broke up again that summer. With Silk Road in his computer, there was little to keep Ross in Austin.
By the time he got to Australia, he had banked $100,000 and was earning $25,000 a month in commissions. “It was time to bring in some hired guns,” he wrote, “to … take the site to the next level.”
Part of the problem was that Ross was grappling with what hackers call operational security, or opsec. To completely seal his two identities from one another, Ross realized, would require a kind of ruthless and elaborate secrecy. He appealed to Bates to stay quiet. Later, Ross told his friend that he’d sold Silk Road to a mysterious buyer.
He also struggled with learning how to lie. Just before New Year’s he went on a date with a woman named Jessica; he told her, like everyone else, that he was working on a bitcoin exchange. This alone constituted a security leak. I’m so stupid, he thought. But Ross got “deep” with Jessica and felt an urge to reveal himself. He lamented this feeling, the divide between intimacy and deceit. The Eagle Scout in him agonized over telling half-truths. Sitting across from Jessica, he wished he could be honest; he also wished he’d started with a better lie. But Ross did divulge the most important truth. He told her: “I have secrets.”

When Silk Road started, its leader was something of a cipher. Users and vendors only knew that there was a system administrator who’d established the site’s conceptual framework as both a drug marketplace and libertarian experiment. ¶ There was a basic ethics for that experiment. Some of Silk Road’s users were purists who advocated for full transactional autonomy—if heroin, why not howitzers and human hearts?—but the administrator pronounced “a strict code of conduct.” No child porn, stolen goods, or fake degrees. He summed it up like so: “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.”

As time went on, the administrator became an important voice, the site’s theorist and advocate for individual liberty. But ideas need a true leader. This role, Ross decided, was too important to go unnamed. “Who is Silk Road?” posted the administrator in February 2012 to the community. “I am Silk Road, the market, the person, the enterprise, everything … I need a name.”
“Drum roll please … ,” came the dramatic announcement. “My new name is Dread Pirate Roberts.”
Everyone loves The Princess Bride, and the reference was clear immediately. (Force and Tarbell, who had both seen the movie many times, got the implication as well: plausible deniability.) The mask, worn by successive generations of pirates, obfuscates the relationship between the name and the man. The christening of DPR was emblematic of Silk Road’s secrecy. It also ignited a true cult of personality. DPR was thoughtful and at times eloquent. For believers, Silk Road was more than a black market; it was a sanctuary. For DPR, the site was a political polemic in practice. “Stop funding the state with your tax dollars,” DPR wrote, “and direct your productive energies into the black market.” DPR got more grandiose over time, writing that every transaction on Silk Road was a step toward universal freedom.
In a way, Silk Road was the logical extension of the libertarian view that animates much of the Internet (not to mention the rising political tide in Washington). It was Silicon Valley in extremis, a disruptive technology wrapped in political rhetoric. DPR was its philosopher-king, envisioning a post-state digital economy, with Silk Road as the first step toward a libertarian paradise. Not only was Silk Road a slap in the face to law enforcement, it was a direct challenge, as DPR wrote, to the very structure of power.
All the more reason, of course, why the government wanted to shut it down. Ross had been flattered by the sudden media attention in June 2011, but when US senator Charles Schumer called a press conference to denounce Silk Road, he was alarmed. “The US govt, my main enemy,” he wrote, “was aware of me and … calling for my destruction.”

April 2012

nob business proposal

Mr. Silk Road,

I am a great admirer of your work. Brilliant, utterly brilliant! I will keep this short and to the point. I want to buy the site. I’ve been in the business for over 20 years. SILK ROAD is the future of trafficking.

Sincerely,

Force wrote this message from one of two government laptops he was issued for his undercover mission on Silk Road. They were Dells, silver and clunky with shitty batteries, so the DEA agent had to keep them plugged in, usually in the seclusion of the guest room of his house in the Baltimore suburbs. That was also the favorite room of Pablo, Force’s cat, who would sit on the bed watching him, in his chair and ottoman, as he took to the keys posing as a high-rolling international drug smuggler.

He had constructed an elaborate identity: Eladio Guzman, a cartel operative based in the Dominican Republic whose bread and butter was moving midsize shipments of heroin and cocaine. For Guzman’s Silk Road screen name, Force chose Nob, after the biblical city where David obtains the sword of Goliath. Oh, and the Guzman character was blind in one eye. So Force put on a hoodie and an eye patch and had his 10-year-old daughter take his profile picture. In the photo, Force, aka Guzman, aka Nob, held up a sign: all hail nob.
Force knew how to put together a backstory from his years in undercover. As a young agent, he’d been on the front lines of the drug war. He grew out his hair, put bronze hoops in his ear, and inked a huge tribal piece on his back. He said he worked in construction while looking for leads in down-and-out bars, like the Purple Pig Pub in Alamosa, Colorado, the “gateway to the great sand dunes”—and also the gateway to the Rocky Mountain route for Mexican meth.
Putting himself in the mindset of a smuggler, Force saw Silk Road’s strength as communications and distribution. Hence his big opening gambit: For Guzman, Silk Road offered the opportunity for covert vertical integration from wholesale to retail. Force hoped he’d get a quick response, and he did. The day after Nob’s proposal, Dread Pirate Roberts wrote, “I’m open to the idea. What did you have in mind?”

Tarbell was at work, on the 23rd floor of the New York FBI office, early as usual. He was the kind of guy who wanted to be first in the office. Always had been, ever since college, when he started organizing his whole life on spreadsheets. Tarbell and Sabrina’s first date is still on an Excel worksheet somewhere, as is everything that’s happened since: calendar, bills, weight goals, daily run. Tarbell’s father-in-law, a longtime marine, thought Tarbell was the most regimented person he’d ever met. Tarbell set his alarm for 4:30 am, hit the gym by 5, and was showered and seated at his desk by 7 am sharp.

Tarbell and his fellow cybercops occupied a couple of dozen spots toward the back of the bullpen, fanned out around a core group of desks called the Pit. This was prime real estate, where the cool kids among the FBI’s computer clique sat. When Tarbell started he was sitting two desks and an aisle away, way over by the windows. But during the LulzSec investigation, a coveted desk opened up and he leapfrogged right into the center of the Pit.
Tarbell liked his new colleagues, especially Ilwhan Yum. As a kid, Yum moved from Korea to Long Island, where he got into videogames and later learned about networking and packets from playing competitively in college. Yum would become vital to the Silk Road case because he was the squad’s bitcoin specialist. He’d gone to the first bitcoin conference, in August 2011 in New York. From a law enforcement perspective, bitcoin screamed money laundering. But technologically, Yum thought the protocol “was, simply, beautiful.”
Across from Yum was Tom Kiernan. He’d been in the Pit the longest, 17 years, nearly since the DOS era, when he started at the Bureau as a civilian tech support guy, responding when agents’ printers stopped working. Kiernan just understood machines, backward and forward, and became the spine of the cybersquad. He’d seen every case and knew all, like the Pit’s very own oracle—just the guy Tarbell needed to help probe Silk Road’s defenses. Tor was a vexing problem. Tarbell thought it had benefits, but he also believed that all technologies could have their purposes corrupted. In a criminal context, as with Silk Road, Tor made classic law enforcement—knocking on doors, interviewing witnesses, making deals—nearly useless. Sure, you might start to piece together the network or get closer to DPR, but you’d still have only usernames. This was not a people case, Tarbell thought. This was a computer case. The path to DPR was through his server.
Finding it was a fearsome technical challenge. Out of 1.5 billion computers in the world, Tarbell started to think about just one machine, day after day. It could be anywhere. He was looking for a nanowire in a haystack.

Back in Baltimore, Force was fluffing pillows. This was his habit in the evening, a way to clear his mind before getting on Silk Road as Nob. For the first couple of weeks, Nob pushed his big Silk Road investment scheme. But DPR declined, saying essentially: This operation is bigger than you think. ¶ And it was, because Silk Road worked extremely well. DPR’s robust stewardship was paying off. To protect against scammers he created a Silk Road escrow, where all transactions would be held until settled. DPR wanted to create what he called a “center of trust,” and it was this centralized payment structure that enabled Silk Road to really take off.

So when Nob offered to buy the operation, DPR countered with quite a price: $1 billion. Nob scoffed. But in fact, DPR’s number might have been low; the scale of Silk Road commissions over the next year would in fact qualify DPR as one of the biggest entrepreneurs of the second Internet boom. Besides, he told Nob, “this is more than a business to me. It’s a revolution and is becoming my life’s work.” In essence, DPR faced a classic founder’s dilemma. “It would not be easy to pass the baton without hurting the enterprise,” he messaged Nob. “And right now that is more important to me than the money.”
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Force kept communication with DPR alive by talking about creating a parallel site for cartels, a pro version called Masters of Silk Road. He spent many nights in his guest room, Pablo purring by his side, forging a camaraderie with DPR through the intimacy of late-night TorChat. At times they sounded like college kids getting to know each other in the freshman dorm. “The food pyramid is bullshit,” DPR said, encouraging Nob to go paleo. Nob advised DPR against seeing the latest Batman, invited him to LA for tacos, and talked about how much Latinos like the Smiths.
DPR had never heard of the Smiths. But otherwise, Force’s mysterious new pen pal was appropriately cagey. He didn’t want to meet up for tacos. For some reason, Force always imagined DPR as a skinny white kid, probably on the West Coast based on his active hours. Force liked him, this kid he had in mind as DPR. He enjoyed getting deep into the culture of Silk Road. It reminded him of his undercover days. He thought about DPR, living a double life, and the allure—and danger—of taking on a new identity.
Force had seen it firsthand in his years in undercover. He came to love being that criminal operator big shot. But a new self comes with a price. The more Force pretended and partied, the easier it was to inhabit the part. At home he was the clean-cut, churchgoing dad. But when he was at some nightclub hunting for drug deals, liquor flowing, surrounded by girls, it was hard to believe just how comfortable he felt.
Eventually Force stopped drinking and recommitted himself to church. He’d been a hot undercover agent, but he left behind the double life that nearly destroyed him. That’s how he wound up in the Baltimore office, living in a suburban two-story with a big, solid oak tree in the backyard. But now here he was, within sight of that oak, his family in the next room, venturing again into the drug world as someone else.
Force recognized it was all a dangerous game. He knew how you could change. He could see it in DPR already. The thing about taking on a new identity is that it is fundamentally a lie. To the world at first. And then to yourself.

“The world is in flux,” Ross tells the camera. He sits across from his friend René Pinnell, recording for StoryCorps, a nonprofit that invites anyone to share their life experiences. Ross and René thought the world should know more about them, so they entered the StoryCorps booth, closed the door, and spent half an hour with each other and the camera.

In this recording, Ross is contemplative. He lives in San Francisco now. It has been a revelation. He is awed by the beauty and the entrepreneurial energy. He came at the invitation of René, whom he’d known since seventh grade. René had been an aspiring filmmaker who instead wound up in technology in San Francisco, and one day he phoned Ross, intoning the great American clarion call of opportunity out West. Two weeks later, Ross showed up on his friend’s doorstep.
In the video, they get nostalgic about childhood. There was the time the two of them tried to steal extra Tater Tots in the lunch room at West Ridge Middle School. The way Ross would eat his peanut butter chocolate wafers, precisely, by nibbling down the layers. How uncool it was when Ross had a sleepover and some bad kids stole a year’s worth of change he’d saved.

Of course, they talk about love, as young men do. Ross reminisces about Ashley, his first, and her great tits. The first time they’d hung out, they did psychedelics, something called AMT. They got it from his neighbor Brandon, a “super-brilliant physics student who was into all of these research chemicals.” Ross was still a teenager then, lying on the floor, expanding his mind next to a beautiful girl for eight hours.
Life is a fluctuating value, René says, like currency. René thinks his friend is a trader. René talks about how Austin is “the meh of startups,” whereas San Francisco is “the Mecca.” It’s late 2012, a time of fever dreams in the Bay Area, full of people wanting to “change the world” and make a lot of money in the process. René may not know it, but he is sitting next to someone doing just that.
Ross and René wonder: What will happen in 200 years? “I want to have a substantial positive impact on the future of humanity by the time I die,” Ross says. René asks Ross if he thinks he’ll live forever. Ross looks up, breaks into a tiny smile. “Yes,” he says. “I think I might.”

As Silk Road became a true global market, DPR reveled in his role as leader and libertarian evangelist. He created a book club, where users could polish their dogma from the sacred texts of von Mises himself. He talked more about a near future when our current governments would seem like ancient history, along with “the pharaohs” and their “armies of slaves.” He extolled the Silk Road faithful for being on the front lines of revolution. “Thank you,” DPR said, “for your trust, faith, camaraderie and love.” He offered them “hugs not drugs,” then amended it: “wait, hugs AND drugs!”

The community responded in kind, likening DPR to Che Guevara, calling him a “job creator” and declaring that his name would live on “among the greatest men and women in history.” Silk Road had become a brand cult, with tens of thousands of fanatical users. And DPR was their very own Steve Jobs. Force sensed DPR’s swelling confidence. He’d been talking to him for a year, taking in DPR’s personality and passion. Force could appreciate the appeal. It must be intoxicating, bringing an idea to life, projecting your will into the world through encrypted code and transactions. Sometimes DPR said that he sensed the scale of this achievement and would hear the theme to Tron playing in his head. This was the new spirit of DPR: a self-created beacon in the darkness, spreading the good word through libertarian jubilee, holding aloft his lantern of truth. It was a lonely outpost, however. DPR said so to Nob. He called himself a person “who hides behind computers.” At times DPR wished they could meet. Instead they shared a mix of truth and fiction about their lives.

NOB: you doing good?

DREAD: yes sir, today is a good day.

NOB: so that black cloud that was over your head has gone?

DREAD: the new look rolled out with minimal issues, woke up next to a beautiful woman, and I’m listening to one of my favorite bands/songs … and eating fresh strawberries.

They talked shop: site fixes, the odd “holiday slump” in drug sales, the human resources problems of a clandestine telecommuting workplace. This was a big problem. To grow, DPR said, he had to build a strong workforce. A leader needs support so he can focus on the future.

“I just want to let you know that your work hasn’t gone unnoticed,” DPR wrote to Chronicpain, aka Curtis Green, the Mormon grandpa in Spanish Fork, Utah. “I’d like to offer you a position.”

Green had been on Silk Road for some time, and he’d chosen that screen name because of his own chronic pain, caused by a back injury he’d sustained while working as an EMT. On disability, Green had become an amateur pharmacologist, learning the ins and outs of opiates. Green had always been the hobbyist type, ever since his high school obsession with ham radios, which he used to talk to strangers all over the world, including astronauts on the International Space Station. Silk Road fulfilled his yearning for community and technical intricacy, combining computers with his interest in “safe drug use.” With DPR’s approval, Green started Silk Road’s Health and Wellness forum, where he advised people on how to snort ephedrine, cautioned against Fentanyl for the uninitiated, and explained to someone that it’s not a good idea to inject peanut butter or shoot heroin into your eyeball.
When Green’s diligent forum-moderating turned into a job offer from DPR, he was thrilled. DPR sent a job description, which included customer service and resetting passwords. Green (taking on a new admin handle, Flush) worked 80 hours a week, mediating drug sale disputes from his lounger, Fox News running in the background.

DPR was a complicated boss. He could be a hard taskmaster, haranguing Green for being even one minute late to an appointed time on TorChat. Green was chagrined when he got no Christmas greeting. But other times DPR was full of generosity, staking Green in a poker tournament (and being unfazed when Green lost it all). Like a digital-era don, he could be affectionate and magnanimous in public but decidedly less humane behind the scenes. He gave audience to loyal users seeking favors—one guy got help buying a wedding ring—but was decidedly unsympathetic to the real consequences of his business.
Green forwarded one troubling customer service complaint from a woman whose brother overdosed on heroin from Silk Road and noted that under the current system, children could use the site. Perhaps that was a hair too much freedom, Green said. DPR erupted: “THAT’S MY WHOLE IDEA!” Any constraints would destroy the fundamental concept, he said, and refused any assistance for the grieving sister. And yet Green stayed on, despite the insensitivity and ethical contradictions, becoming one of Silk Road’s most trusted employees.
On Silk Road, however, trust only went so far. DPR demanded a scan of Green’s driver’s license. It was a loyalty test. Green obliged, even though it exposed him while allowing DPR to remain in the shadows. Like Force, Green felt like he’d established quite a bond with DPR—partners in a secret world. But not all secrets are partnerships. No matter how close Green or Force or anyone else got to DPR, no one had any idea who he was.

Tarbell had three computers on his desk, as did Kiernan and Yum. The cybersquad crew looked for any flicker of information that would crack open the dark web. But their investigation was moving slowly. They explored the site, read the forums, and crawled Reddit, looking for Silk Road community members talking to each other or to DPR about cryptographic weaknesses they’d discovered. But a month went by with no traction.

The crew ate lunch together every day at 11:30 on the nose like the habit-happy cops they were. Most of the time they picked up sandwiches downstairs at the deli, where the guy behind the counter knew them all by their order. Kiernan would be happy with chicken cordon bleu forever, and Tarbell was such a fan of the chicken parmesan that when he’d occasionally get a salad the deli guy would say, “Awww, what’s the matter, Mr. CIA? No chicken parm today?”
Tarbell called Yum his “work wife.” They were a good team, he thought: the thinker and the talker. Tarbell was the talker; he had by now emerged as the dominant personality in the Pit. The dues-paying rookie of the previous year had given way to a raucous, confident alpha type who bristled when he heard rumblings from Washington about ownership of the Silk Road investigation.

The case had become an enormous bureaucratic battle, as every agency tried to plant its flag. The Baltimore task force—where Force’s case operated—was the most aggressive, claiming complete ownership and bad-mouthing the FBI cybersquad in particular. “They think we’re a joke, poking around on the Internet,” Tarbell told Yum. “But we’re going to prove them wrong.” The other agencies, he noted, had been at it for a while, “and they don’t have fuck-all.”
But in the bureaucratic muddle that is the United States government, there is no clear jurisdiction for cybercrime. It’s a growing field that’s fueling law enforcement funding, which attracts egos and politics. Silk Road represented the new frontier of crime, a digital-era Wild West. As with the original frontier, Washington wanted to fence it in—and whoever brought law to the lawless would be a hero. Subdue the digital frontier and there was a star waiting for you, which was why the Silk Road case had become the largest online manhunt in history.

Green wouldn’t stop talking, even covered in cocaine. That was how Force found him when the SWAT team finished ransacking his house. Force was running that show; as Nob, he’d orchestrated the shipment of coke, and the whole raid was part of the growing Marco Polo task force investigating Silk Road. He’d watched Green take the bait from a command post across the street, and when he walked in a few minutes later, Green was cuffed on the floor, blabbing already. Green had more answers than Force had questions. He talked and talked and talked until Force couldn’t stand it. Said he was a former EMT; he was just trying to help people; they could have just knocked; he thought the package was something else, a totally legal drug called N-Bombe.

Shut the fuck up already, Force thought.
Nevertheless, Green was a tangible lead in the Silk Road case, a corporeal asset rather than just letters on a screen. As Green was led to the squad car to be booked on possession by the local cops, Force put his number in Green’s phone and said, “When you get out, call me.”
In jail, Green jawboned for hours to anyone who would listen, even declaring that he had been asked to cooperate with the DEA, at which point his tattooed cell mates told him to stop talking. When Green was released on bail, he went home and found his door still broken. His daughter had cleaned up some. In his bedroom the cops had apparently discovered that this particular Mormon grandpa owned a dildo, which they left for him standing straight up on the bed.
Home alone with his two Chihuahuas, Green cried like a baby. “I’m a good little Mormon boy,” he said to himself. His thoughts grew dark. He loaded his dad’s .32. Then he looked down the barrel and threw it across the room. Green would be the first to admit that he was too chickenshit for suicide. He ran into the living room and threw himself onto the couch, where his Chihuahuas joined him, licking his face while he fell to his knees to pray. Eventually Green decided to get up, get his phone, and call DEA special agent Carl Force.

It wasn’t until Force spent some time on Green’s computer and saw DPR’s messages—“Why aren’t you clearing out your accounts?” “Get back to me ASAP”—that he realized they’d caught a big fish in their net. This guy was a DPR lieutenant. Force mobilized quickly, working with the task force to put Green up in a Salt Lake City Marriott and debrief him.

But DPR was jittery, and he’d noticed that his trusted admin had been offline for a few days. A Google search revealed that Green had been arrested, and DPR suspected he would flip. Moreover, he got a message from another employee, Inigo, that $350,000 in bitcoins had just disappeared from various accounts. Inigo quickly traced the theft to Green’s admin identity. DPR went into crisis mode, communicating with his confidants, scrambling for a solution. “This will be the first time I have had to call on my muscle,” he told Inigo. “Fucking sucks.”
Moments later, DPR messaged Nob that he had a “problem” in Utah that required violence. According to the backstory Force had created for Nob, his criminal repertoire included enforcement and collection talents, so he acted the part. Sitting in the Marriott, Force received a PDF of the target, opened it, and discovered a scan of Green’s driver’s license photo. Then he looked across the table, where at that very moment Green was half-asleep. Well, this sure is an opportunity! Force thought.

NOB: do you want him beat up. shot, just paid a visit?

DREAD: I’d like him beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back.

DREAD: not sure how these things usually go.

Green claimed he hadn’t stolen any bitcoins and protested that the task force had had his computer when the money went missing. But Force didn’t want to talk about the money. He used DPR’s request to construct an elaborate plan.

DREAD: how quickly do you think you can get someone over there? and what does that cost you?

Force got Green to sign a waiver, thereby commencing his role in an impromptu staged torture sting against DPR. Soon Green was being dunked in the bathtub of a Marriott suite by phony thugs who were in fact a Secret Service agent and a Baltimore postal inspector. Force recorded the action on a camera. “Did you get it?” Green asked, wet and wheezing on the floor. He’d felt like their simulation was a little too accurate. They dunked him four more times to get a convincing shot.
While waiting for news from Nob, DPR considered his options. A Silk Road user named Cimon, a trusted adviser who had guided DPR on opsec, programming, and leadership, asked DPR when a transgression against Silk Road requires a lethal response. “If this was the wild west,” DPR said, “and it kinda is, you’d get hung just for stealing a horse.” A few minutes later, Inigo chimed in, “I don’t condone murder but that’s almost worthy of assassinating him over lol.”
Later that day, DPR messaged Nob.

DREAD: ok, so can you change the order to execute rather than torture?

DREAD: he was on the inside for a while, and now that he’s been arrested, I’m afraid he’ll give up info.

Of course, DPR was right that Green had been flipped—by the very same man he’d just hired as an assassin. It was a surprising escalation. The Silk Road leader, who waxed lyrical about “respecting” the Silk Road community, was now pondering pricing for murder.

DREAD: never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case.

DREAD: how much will it cost?

DREAD: ballpark?

DREAD: less than $100k?

DREAD: have you killed or had someone killed before?

It was like Scarface on fast-forward, Force thought. But he played right along. Over a week or so, Force conspired with his team to complete the fake death of Green. Force sent DPR photos of the staged torture, followed by photos of Green, facedown on the floor, pallid, smeared with Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup—the supposed aftermath of asphyxiation. Green holed up in his house (he had to stay out of sight as part of the ruse) in a kind of self-imposed witness protection, and Force went back to Baltimore. DPR sent $40,000 to a Capital One account controlled by the government as an advance. DPR never got back the stolen bitcoins, but once in receipt of the putative proof of death, he sent another $40,000 for a job well done.

NOB: you ok?

DREAD: I am pissed I had to kill him.

DREAD: but what’s done is done.

DPR had momentarily wrestled with his decision. He had talked to Inigo about how he just wishes the best for people, and loves them in the libertarian spirit—even Green, in flagrante delicto—but ultimately concluded that his AWOL employee had become too much of a liability. And so, DPR’s principled, technological stand against the war on drugs slid into murder. Like so many revolutionaries before him, the idealist became an ideologue, willing to kill for his beloved vision. At one point, DPR corrected Inigo that this action was not revenge; it was justice—a new justice, according to the law of the Silk Road.
Back in Baltimore, sitting in his guest room with Pablo, Force thought about DPR’s shift. He wondered: What changed? DPR was asking himself the same question. Moral choices blur when your identity is shifting. This was the irony behind the very idea of the Dread Pirate Roberts moniker—an inherent danger that the wearer would become the mask. Unmoored, DPR sensed that he was in a state of becoming:

NOB: what have you learned?

DREAD: well, I’m also learning who I am. I don’t think this will be the hardest thing I’ll have to do.

NOB: what could be harder?

DREAD: I don’t know.

DREAD: maybe I’ll be faced with a decision where lives of innocent people will depend on the outcome.

As if seeking a makeshift moral compass among murderers, DPR asked Nob to let him know if he was abusing his authority. “That is what friends are for!” Nob replied. DPR confided to Inigo that one of his deepest fears was “being wildly successful” and “being corrupted by that power.” Nob also warned his online comrade about that power, how it could consume you. In his office, Force himself had put up a picture of Jesús Malverde, the Mexican nacro-saint, as inspiration for Nob, and felt the pull of the folk hero bandit. He reminded DPR not to “lose yourself.”
How could he not? Now astride a multimillion-dollar drug operation that he’d built in less than two years, Ross was no longer the tenderhearted soul who agonized over telling one lie to a young woman over a glass of wine. His diary had changed from a story about doubts and hopes to a catalog of hard-nosed empire-building.

the gipster

Monday, May 4, 2015

Scientists are skeptical about the secret blood test that has made Elizabeth Holmes a billionaire ~ look at their board mem's ... ??? & what's up wit ...US military ???

The clues we have so far

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Monday, May 4, 2015

The clues we have so far

An early academic interest might be the key

Does it work?

Potential roadblocks

The future of medicine

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