Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road | Lex Fridman Podcast #340
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Chris Tarbell is a former FBI special agent and cybercrime investigation specialist who brought down Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road, and Hector Monsegur (aka Sabu) of LulzSec and Anonymous. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Hacker And The Fed podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hacker-and-the-fed/id1649541362
Naxo: https://naxo.com/who-we-are

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:16 - Silk Road
11:39 - Mass surveillance
15:50 - Operation Onion Peeler
21:06 - Hacker Avunit
31:56 - Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road
44:39 - Edward Snowden
46:44 - NSA surveillance
58:51 - Silk Road murders
1:07:37 - Dark web
1:11:39 - Ross Ulbricht's arrest
1:19:37 - Aaron Swartz
1:22:55 - Donald Trump and the Mar-a-Lago raid
1:26:01 - Tech companies and censorship
1:35:00 - War in Ukraine
1:38:58 - Anonymous and LulzSec
1:49:10 - FBI
1:52:11 - Personal threats
1:57:57 - Hector Monsegur a.k.a Sabu
2:11:07 - Cyber attack threats against civilians
2:27:55 - Most secure operating system
2:31:44 - Cyber war
2:39:38 - Advice for young people
2:44:50 - FBI's credibility
2:53:21 - Love

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 You could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could throw things, drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff. Hacking tools, you could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire. The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cyber crime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Albrecht, the leader of Silk Road, the billion dollar drug marketplace. And he tracked down and arrested Hector Massaguer, AKA Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous, which are some of the most influential hacker groups in history. He is co-founder of Naxo, a complex cyber crime investigation firm, and is a co-host of a podcast called The Hacker and the Fed. This conversation gives the perspective of the FBI cyber crime investigator, both the technical and the human story. I would also like to interview people on the other side, the cyber criminals who have been caught, and perhaps the cyber criminals who have not been caught and are still out there. This is the Alex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Tarbell. You are one of the most successful cybersecurity law enforcement agents of all time. You tracked and brought down Russ Albrecht, AKA DreadPirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, and Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous, who was one of the most influential hackers in the world. So first, can you tell me the story of tracking down Russ Albrecht and Silk Road? Let's start from the very beginning. And maybe let's start by explaining what is the Silk Road. It was really the first dark market website. You literally could buy anything there. Well, I'll take that back. There's two things you couldn't buy there. You couldn't buy guns, because that was a different website, and you couldn't buy fake degrees. So no one could become a doctor, but you could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could buy things, drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff. Hacking tools, you could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire, if you wanted someone killed. Now, so when I was an FBI agent, I had to kind of sell some of these cases, and this was a big drug case. That's the way people saw Silk Road. So internally to the FBI, how I had to sell it, I had to find the worst thing on there that I could possibly find. And I think one time I saw a posting for baby parts. So let's say that you had a young child and that needed a liver. You could literally go on there and ask for a six-month-old liver if you wanted to. For like surgical operations versus something darker. Yeah, I never saw anything that dark as far as people wanted to eat body parts. I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI. That's another crazy story, but that one actually weirded me out. So I just watched Jeffrey Dahmer, a documentary on Netflix, and it just changed the way I see human beings because it's a portrayal of a normal-looking person doing really dark things, and doing so not out of a place of insanity seemingly, but just because he has almost like a fetish for that kind of thing. It's disturbing that people like that are out there. So people like that would then be using Silk Road, not like that necessarily, but people of different walks of life would be using Silk Road to primarily, what was the primary thing, drugs? It was primarily drugs, and that's where it started. It started off with Ross Albrecht growing mushrooms out in the wilderness of California and selling them. But really his was more of a libertarian viewpoint. I mean, it was like, you choose what you wanna do for yourself and do it. And the way Silk Road kind of had the anonymity is it used what's called Tor, the onion router, which is an anonymizing function on the deep web. It was actually invented by the US Navy back in the mid-90s or so, but it also used cryptocurrency. So it was the first time we saw this birth on the internet of mixing cryptocurrency and an IP blocking software. So in cyber crime, you go after one the IP address and trace it through the network, or two, you go after the cash, and this one kind of blocked both. Cash meaning the flow of money, physical or digital. And then IP is some kind of identifying thing over the computer. It's your telephone number on your computer. So yeah, all computers have a unique four octet numbers. So 123.123.123.123. And the computer uses DNS or domain name services to render that name. So if you were looking for CNN.com, your computer then translates that to that IP address or that telephone number where it can find that information. Didn't Silk Road used to have guns in the beginning? Or was that considered to have guns? Or did it naturally emerge and then Ross realized like this is not good? It went back and forth. I think there were guns on there and he tried to police it. He told himself that they're the captain of the boat. So he had to follow his rules. So I think he took off those posts eventually and moved guns elsewhere. What was the system of censorship that he used of selecting what is okay and not okay? I mean- Him alone, he's the captain of the boat. Do you know by chance if there was a lot of debates and criticisms internally amongst the criminals of what is and isn't allowed? I mean, it's interesting to see a totally different moral code emerge that's outside the legal code of society. We did get the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that happened. I mean, all the records were there. I don't remember big debates. I mean, there was a clear leadership and that was the final decision. That was the CEO of Silk Road. And so primarily it was drugs and primarily out of an ideology of freedom, which is if you want to use drugs, you should be able to use drugs. You should put in your body what you wanna put in your body. And when you were presenting a case of why this should be investigated, you're trying to find, as you mentioned, the worst possible things on there. Is that what you were saying? So we had arrested a guy named Jeremy Hammond and he hit himself. He was a hacker and he would be arrested. It was the second time he had been arrested for hacking. He used Tor. And so that kind of brought us to a point. The FBI has a computer system where you look up things. You look up anything. I could look up your name or whatever if you're associated with my case. And we were finding at the time a lot of things in you need to look it up, a case would end. Be like, oh, this is Tor. And just stopped. Like we couldn't get any further. So we had just had this bigger rest of a Sabu and took down Anonymous. And sometimes in the FBI, the way it used to, the old school FBI, when you had a big case and you're working seven days a week and 14 hours, 15 hours a day, you sort of take a break. The boss kind of said, yeah, I'll see you in a few months. Go get to know your family a little bit and come back. But the group of guys I was with was like, let's find the next big challenge. And that's when we were finding case closed, it was Tor. Case closed, it was Tor. So said, let's take a look at Tor and let's see what we can do. Maybe we'll take a different approach. And Silk Road was being looked at by other law enforcement, but it was taking like a drug approach where I'm going to find a drug buyer who got, you know, the drug sent to them in the mail and let's arrest up. Let's go up the chain. But the buyers didn't know their dealers. They never met them. And so you were taking a cyber security approach. Yeah, we said, let's try to look at this from a cyber approach and see if we can gleam anything out of it. So I'm actually indirectly connected to, I'm sure I'm not admitting anything that's not already on my FBI file. Oh, I can already tell you what you're gonna tell me though. What's that? That when you were at college, you wrote a paper and you're connected to the person that started. You son of a bitch. You clever son of a bitch. I'm an FBI agent or a former FBI agent. How would I not have known that? I could have told you other stuff. No, that's exactly what you were about to tell me. I was looking up his name because I forgot it. So one of my advisors for my PhD was Rachel Greenstatt and she is married to Roger Dingledyne, which is the co-founder of the Tor Project. And I actually reached out to him last night to do a podcast together. I don't know. It's, I have, it was, it was a good, it was a good party trick. I mean, it was cool that you know this and the timing of it, it was just like beautiful. But just to link around on the Tor Project, so we understand. So Tor is this black box that people disappear in, in terms of like the, when you were tracking people. Can you paint a picture of what Tor is used in general? Other, it's like when you talk about Bitcoin, for example, cryptocurrency, especially today, much more people use it for legal activity versus illegal activity. What about Tor? Tor was originally invented by the US Navy so that like spies inside countries could talk to spies and no one could find them. There was no way of tracing them. And then they released that information free to the world. So Tor has two different versions of, not versions, two different ways it can be utilized. There's.onionsites, which is like a normal website, a.com, but it's only found within the Tor browser. You can only get there if you know the whole address and get there. So the way Tor is used is to go through the internet and then come out the other side if you want a different IP address, if you're trying to hide your identity. So if you were doing like, say cyber crime, I would have the victim computer and I would trace it back out to a Tor relay. And then because you don't have an active connection or what's called a circuit at the time, I wouldn't be able to trace it back. But even if you had an active circuit, I would have to go to each machine physically live and try to rebuild that, which is literally impossible. So what do you feel about Tor ethically, philosophically, as a human being on this world that spent quite a few years of your life and still trying to protect people? So part of my time in the FBI was working on child exploitation, kiddie porn, as they call it. That really changed my life in a way. And so anything that helps facilitate the exploitation of children fucking pisses me off. And that sort of jaded my opinion towards Tor, because it helps facilitate those sites. So this ideal of freedom that Russell Albrecht, for example, tried to embody is something that you don't connect with anymore because of what you've seen that ideal being used for. I mean, the child exploitation is a specific example for it. And it's easy for me to sit here and say child exploitation, child porn, because no one listening to this is ever gonna say that I'm wrong and that we should allow child porn. Should, because some people utilize it in a bad way, should it go away? No, I mean, I'm a technologist. I want technology to move forward. People are gonna do bad things and they're going to use technology to help them do bad things. Well, let me ask you then, we'll jump around a little bit, but the things you were able to do in tracking down information, and we'll get to it, there is some suspicion that this was only possible with mass surveillance, like with NSA, for example. First of all, is there any truth to that? And second of all, what do you feel are the pros and cons of mass surveillance? There is no truth to that. And then my feelings on mass surveillance. If there was, would you tell me? Probably not, but. Yeah. I love this conversation so much. But what do you feel about the, given that you said child porn, what are the pros and cons of surveillance at a society level? I mean, nobody wants to give up their privacy. I say that, I say no one wants to give up their privacy, but I mean, I used to have to get a search warrant to look inside your house, or I can just log on to your Facebook and you've got pictures of all inside your house and what's going on. I mean, it's not, so people like the idea of not giving up their privacy, but they do it anyways. They're giving away their freedoms all the time. They're carrying watches that gives out their heartbeat to a weight of companies that are storing that. I mean, what's more personal than your heartbeat? So I think people on mass really want to protect their privacy, and I would say most people don't really need to protect their privacy. But the case against mass surveillance is that if you want to criticize the government in a very difficult time, you should be able to do it. So when you need the freedom, you should have it. So when you wake up one day and realize there's something going wrong with the country I love, I want to be able to help. One of the great things about the United States of America is there's that individual revolutionary spirit, like so that the government doesn't become too powerful. You can always protest. There's always the best of the ideal of freedom of speech. You can always say, fuck you to the man. And I think there's a concern of direct or indirect suppression of that through mass surveillance. You might not, is that little subtle fear that grows with time that, why bother criticizing the government? It's gonna be a headache. I'm gonna get a ticket every time I say something bad, that kind of thing. So it can get out of hand. The bureaucracy grows and the freedoms slip away. That's the criticism, right? I completely see your point and I agree with it. But I mean, on the other side, people criticize the government of these freedoms, but I mean, tech companies are talking about destroying your privacy and controlling what you can say. I realize they're private platforms and they can decide what's on their platform, but they're taking away your freedoms of what you can say. And we've heard some things where maybe government officials were in line with tech companies to take away some of that freedom. And I agree with you, that gets scary. Yeah, there's something about government that feels, maybe because of the history of human civilization, maybe because tech companies are a new thing, but just knowing the history of abuses of government, there's something about government that enables the corrupting nature of power to take hold at scale more than tech companies, at least what we've seen so far. I agree, I agree. But I mean, we haven't had a voice like we've had until recently. I mean, anyone that has a Twitter account now can speak and become a news article. My parents didn't have that voice. If they wanted to speak out against the government or do something, they had to go to a protest or organize a protest or do something along those lines. So we have more of a place to put our voice out now. Yeah, it's incredible, but that's why it hurts and that's why you notice it when certain voices get removed. The president of the United States of America was removed from one such or all such platforms. And that hurts. Yeah, that's crazy to me. That's insane. That's insane that we took that away. Let's return to Silk Road and Rosalbrink. So how did your path with this very difficult, very fascinating case cross? We were looking to open a case against Tor because it was a problem. All the cases were closing because Tor. So we went on Tor and we came up with 26 different onion, dot onions that we targeted. We were looking for nexuses to hacking because I was on a squad called CY2 and we were like the premier squad in New York that was working criminal cyber intrusions. And so, any website that was offering hackers for hire or hacking tools for free, or paid services, now we're seeing ransomware as a paid service and phishing as a paid service, anything that offered that. So we opened this case on, I think we called it, we say you have to name cases. One of the fun thing in the FBI is when you start a case, you get to name it. You would not believe how much time is spent in coming up with the name. Casey goes by, I think we called this onion peeler because of the, yeah. So a little bit of humor, a little bit of wit, and some profundity to the language. Yeah, yeah. Because you're gonna have to work with this for quite a lot. Yeah, this one had the potential of being a big one because I think Silk Road was like the sixth on the list for that case, but we all knew that was sort of the golden ring. If you could make the splash that that onion site was going down, then it would probably get some publicity. And that's part of law enforcement, is getting some publicity out of it that makes others think not to do it. I wish to say that Tor is the name of the project, the browser. What is the onion technology behind Tor? Let's say you wanna go to a dot onion site. You'll put in the dot onion you wanna go to and your computer will build communications with a Tor relay, which are all publicly available out there, but you'll encrypt it. You'll put a package around your data. And so it's encrypted and so can't read it. It goes to that first relay. That first relay knows about you and then knows about the next relay down the chain. And so it takes your data and then encrypts that on the outside and sends it to relay number two. Now relay number two only knows about relay number one. It doesn't know who you are asking for this. And it goes through there adding those layers on top, layers of encryption till it gets where it is. And then even the onion service doesn't know except for the relay it came from, who it's talking to. And so it peels back that, gives the information, puts another layer back on. And so it's layers like you're peeling an onion back of the different relays and that encryption protects who the sender is and what information they're sending. The more layers there are, the more exponentially difficult it is to decrypt it. I mean, you get to a place where you don't have to have so many layers because it doesn't matter anymore. It's mathematically impossible to decrypt it. But the more relays you have, the slower it is. I mean, that's one of the big drawbacks on TOR is how slow it operates. So how do you peel the onion? So what are the different methodologies for trying to get some information from a cybersecurity perspective on these operations like the Silk Road? It's very difficult. People have come up with different techniques. There's been techniques to put out in the news media about how they do it, running massive amounts of relays and you're controlling those relays. I think someone tried that once. So there's a technical solution and what about social engineering? What about trying to infiltrate the actual humans that are using the Silk Road and trying to get in that way? Yeah, I mean, I definitely could see the way of doing that. And in this case, in our takedown, we used that. There was one of my partners, Jared Dariegan, he was an HSI investigator and he had worked his way up to be a system admin on the site. So that did gleam quite a bit of information because he was inside and talking to, at that time, we only know it as DPR or Dreadpire Roberts. We didn't know who that was yet, but we had that open communication. And one of the things, the technical aspects on that is there was a Jabber server. There was, that's a communication, type of communication server that was being used. And we knew that Ross had his Jabber set to Pacific time. So we had a pretty good idea what part of the, what part of the country he was in. I mean, isn't that, from DPR's perspective, from Ross's perspective, isn't that clumsy? He wasn't a big computer guy. Do you notice that aspect of like the technical savvy of some of these guys doesn't seem to be quite, why weren't they good at this? Well, the real techie savvy ones, we don't arrest. We don't get to them, we don't find them. You don't get to them. Shout out to the techie criminals. They're probably watching this. I mean, yeah, I mean, you were getting the low hanging fruit. I mean, you're getting the ones that can be caught. I mean, they, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but the anonymous case, there was a guy named AV Unit. He's still, I lose sleep over him because we didn't catch him. We caught everybody else, we didn't catch him. He's good though. He pops up too once in a while on the internet and it pisses me off. Yeah, what's his name again? AV Unit, that's all I know is his AV Unit. AV Unit. Yeah, AV Unit. Yeah, I got a funny story about him and who people think he is. Can I actually, can we go on that brief tangent? Sure, I love tangents. Well, let me ask you, since he's probably he or she, do we know it's a he? We have no idea. Okay. I mean, that's another funny story about hackers, the he-she issue. What's the funny story there? Well, one of the guys in LulzSec was a she, it was a 17-year-old girl. And my source in the case, the guy Sabu that I arrested and part of it, and we sat side by side for nine months and then took down the case and all that. He was convinced she was a girl and he said, and he was in love with her almost at one point. It turns out to be a 35-year-old guy living in England. Oh, so he was convinced as a... Yes, he was absolutely convinced. Based on what exactly, by linguistic, like human-based linguistic analysis or what? She, he, whatever, Kayla, ended up being a modification of his sister's name, the real guy's sister's name, was so good at building the backstory. All these guys, and it's funny, these guys are part of a hacking crew. They social engineer the shit out of each other just to build if one of them ever gets caught. They'll convince everybody else that they're a Brazilian ISP owner or something like that, and that's how I'm so powerful. Well, yeah, that social engineering aspect is part of living a life of cybercrime or cybersecurity and the offensive or defensive. So AV unit, can I ask you also just the attention of a tangent first? That's my favorite tangent. Okay. Is it possible for me to have a podcast conversation with somebody who hasn't been caught yet, and because they have the conversation, they still won't be caught? And is that a good idea? Meaning, is there a safe way for a criminal to talk to me at a podcast? I would think so. I would think that someone could, I mean, someone who has been living a double life for long enough where you think they're not a criminal. No, no, no, they would have to admit that they would say, I am AV unit. Oh, you would wanna have a conversation with AV unit? Yes. Is there a way? I think from an FBI perspective, technically speaking, because I, so let me explain my motivation. Sure. I think I would like to be able to talk to people from all walks of life and understanding criminals, understanding their mind, I think is very important. And I think there's fundamentally something different between a criminal who's still active versus one that's been caught. The mind just from observing it changes completely once you're caught. You have a big shift in your understanding of the world. I mean, I do have a question about the ethics of having such conversations, but first, technically, is that possible? If I was technically advising you, I would say, first off, don't advertise it. The fewer people that you're gonna tell that you're having this conversation with, the better. And yeah, you could, are you doing it in person? Are you doing it in- In person would be amazing, yeah, but their face would not be shown. Face would not be shown, yeah. I mean, you couldn't publish a show for a while. They'd have to put a lot of trust in you that you're not going to, you're gonna have to alter those tapes. I say tapes, cause it's old school. Optima, you know. It's a tape. Exactly, I'm sure a lot of people just said that. Like, oh shit, this old guy just said tape. I heard VHS was in the 1800s, I think. But yeah, yeah, you could do it. They'd have to have complete faith and trust in you that you destroy the originals after you've altered it. What about if they don't have faith? Is there a way for them to attain security? So, like, for me to go through some kind of process where I meet them somewhere where- I mean, you're not gonna do it without a bag over your head. I don't know if that's the life you wanna live. I'm fine with a bag over my head. That's gonna get taken out of context. But I just, I think it's a worthy effort. It's a worthy, it's worthy to go through the hardship of that to understand the mind of somebody. I think fundamentally, conversations are a different thing than the operation of law enforcement. Understanding the mind of a criminal, I think, is really important. I don't know if you're gonna have the honest conversation that you're looking for. I mean, it may sound honest, but it may not be the truth. I've found most times when I was talking to criminals, it's lies mixed with half-truths. And you kinda, it's, if they're good, they can keep that story going for long enough. If they're not, you know, you kind of see the relief in them when you finally break that wall down. That's the job of an interviewer. If the interviewer is good, then perhaps not directly, but through the gaps, seeps out the truth of the human being. So not necessarily the details of how they do the operations and so on, but just who they are as a human being, what their motivations are, what their ethics are, how they see the world, what is good, what is evil. Do they see themselves as good? What do they see their motivation as? Do they have resentment? What do they think about love for the people within their small community? Do they have resentment for the government or for other nations or for other people? Do they have childhood issues that led to a different view of the world than others perhaps have? Do they have certain fetishes, like sexual and otherwise, that led to the construction of the world? They might be able to reveal some deep flaws to the cybersecurity infrastructure of our world. Not in detail, but like philosophically speaking, they might have, I know you might say it's just a narrative, but they might have a kind of ethical concern for the well-being of the world that they're essentially attacking the weakness of the cybersecurity infrastructure because they believe ultimately that would lead to a safer world. So the attacks will reveal the weaknesses. And if they're stealing a bunch of money, that's okay because that's gonna enforce you to invest a lot more money in defending, yeah, defending things that actually matter, you know, nuclear warheads and all those kinds of things. I mean, I could see, you know, it's fascinating to explore the mind of a human being like that because I think it will help people understand. Now, of course, it's still a person that's creating a lot of suffering in the world, which is a problem. So do you think ethically it's a good thing to do? I don't, I mean, I feel like I have a fairly high ethical bar that I have to put myself on and I don't think I have a problem with it. I would love to listen to it. Okay, great. I mean, not that I'm your ethical coach here. Yeah, well, that's interesting. I mean, so, cause I thought you would have become jaded and exhausted by the criminal mind. It's funny. You know, I'm, you know, fast forward in our story. I'm very good friends with Hector Montziger, with the Sabu, the guy I arrested. And he tells stories of what he did in his past. And I'm like, oh, that Hector, you know, but then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson and I was like, ah, this guy stealing money from the US government and welfare fraud and all that sort of things, it just pissed me off. And I don't know why I have that differentiation in my head. I don't know why I think one's just, oh, Hector will be Hector and then this guy just pissed me off. Well, you didn't feel that way about Hector until you probably met him. Well, I didn't know Hector, I knew Sabu. So I hunted down Sabu and I learned about Hector over those nine months. We'll talk about it later. Let's finish with, let's return Tangent to back to Tangent. Oh, one Tangent up, who's AV Unit? I don't know. That's interesting. So he's at the core of Anonymous. He's one of the critical people in Anonymous. What is known about him? There's what's known in public and what was known because he sat with Hector. And he was sort of like the set things up guy. So if, LulzSec had like their hackers, which was Sabu and Kayla, and they had their media guy, this guy Topiary, he lived up in the northern end of England. And they had a few other guys, but AV Unit was the guy that set up infrastructure. So if you need a VPN in Brazil or something like that to pop through, one of the first things Hector told me after we arrested him is that AV Unit was a secret service agent. And I was like, oh shit. Just because he kind of lived that lifestyle. He'd be around for a bunch of days and then all of a sudden gone for three weeks. And I tried to get more out of Hector and that early on in that relationship, I'm sure he was a little bit guarded and maybe trying to social engineer me. Maybe he wanted that, oh shit, there's law enforcement involved in this. And not to say, I mean, I was in over my head with that case, just the amount of work that was going on. So to track them all down, plus the 350 hacks that came in about just military institutions, it was swimming in the deep end. So it was just at the end of the case, I looked back and I was like, oh fuck, AV Unit, I could have had them all. Maybe that's the perfectionist in me. Oh man, well, reach out somehow. I won't say how, right? We'll have to figure out. Would you have them on? Yeah. Oh my God. If you just let me know. Just talk shit about you the whole time. That's perfect. He probably doesn't even care about me. Well, now he will. Oh, yeah. Because there's a certain pleasure of a guy who's extremely good at his job not catching another guy who's extremely good at his job. Obviously better, he got away. There you go, he's still eating at you. I love it. You or she. If I can meet that guy one day, he or she, that'd be great. I mean, I have no power. So yes, Silk Road, can you speak to the scale of this thing? What, just for people who are not familiar, how big was it? And any other interesting things you understand about its operation when it was active? So it was when we finally got looking through the books and the numbers came out, it was about $1.2 billion in sales. It's kind of hard with the fluctuation value of Bitcoin at the time to come up with a real number. So you kind of pick a daily average and go across. Most of the operation was done in Bitcoin. It was all done in Bitcoin. You couldn't, you had escrow accounts. You came in and you put money in an escrow account and the transaction wasn't done until the client got the drugs or whatever they had bought. And then the drug dealers had sent it in. There was some talk at the time that the cartel was starting to sell on there. So that started getting a little hairy there at the end. What was your understanding of the relationship between organized crime, like the cartels, and this kind of more ad hoc, new age market that is the Silk Road? I mean, it was all just chatter. It was just, you know, cause like I said, Jared was in the inside. So we saw some of it from the admin sides and Ross had a lot of private conversations with the different people that he had advised him, but no one knew each other. I mean, the only thing that they knew were the admins had to send an ID to Ross, had to send a picture of their driver's license or passport, which I always found very strange because if you are an admin on a site that sells fake IDs, why would you send your real ID? And then why would the guy running the site who profits from selling fake IDs believe that it was? But fast forward, they were all real IDs. All the IDs that we found on Ross's computer as the admins were the real people's IDs. What do you make of that? Just other clumsiness? Yeah, low hanging fruit, I guess. I guess that's what it is. I mean, I would have bought, I mean, even Ross bought fake IDs off the site. He had federal agents knock on his door, you know, and then he got a little cocky about it. The landscape, the dynamics of trust is fascinating here. So you trust certain ideas are, like who do you trust in that kind of market? What was your understanding of the network of trust? I don't think anyone trusts anybody, you know? I mean, I think Ross had his advisors of trust, but outside of that, I mean, he required people to send their ID for their trust. He, you know, people stole from him. There was, there's open cases of that. It's a criminal world. You can't trust anybody. What was his life like, you think? Lonely. Can you imagine being trapped in something like that where your whole world focused on that and you can't tell people what you do all day? Could he have walked away? Like someone else take over or the site just shut down? Either one. Just you putting yourself in his shoes, the loneliness, the anxiety, the just the growing immensity of it. So walk away with some kind of financial stability. I couldn't have made it past two days. I don't like loneliness. I mean, if my wife's away, I'd probably call her 10, 12 times a day. We just talk about things, you know? I just, you know, something crossed my mind. I want to talk about it. And I'm sure she... And you'd like to talk to her, like honestly, about everything. So if you were running so crotious, you wouldn't be able to like... Hopefully I'd have a little protection. I'd only mentioned to her when we were in bed to have that marital connection, but who knows? I mean, she's going to question me. I mean, she's going to question why the Ferrari is outside and things like that. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you can come up with something. Why didn't he walk away? It's another question of why don't criminals walk away in these situations? Well, I mean, I don't know every criminal mind and some do. I mean, AV unit walked away. I mean, not to go back to that son of a bitch, but... There's a theme to this. But you know, Ross started counting his dollars. I mean, he really kept track of how much money he was making and it started getting exponentially growth. I mean, if he would have stayed at it, he would have probably been one of the richest people in the world. And do you think he liked the actual money or the fact of the number growing? I mean, have you ever held a Bitcoin? Yeah. Oh, you have? Well, he never did. What do you mean held a Bitcoin? You can't hold it. It's not real. It's not like I can give you a briefcase of Bitcoin or something like that. He liked the idea of it growing. He liked the idea. I mean, I think it started off as sharing this idea, but then he really did turn to like, I am the captain of this ship and that's what goes. And he was making a lot of money. And again, my interactions with Ross was about maybe five or six hours over a two-day period. I knew DPR because I read his words and all that. I didn't really know Ross. There was a journal found on his computer and so it sort of kind of gave me a little insight. So I don't like to do a playbook for criminals, but I'll tell you right now, don't write things down. There was a big fad about people, like remember kids going around and shooting people with paintballs and filming it? I don't know why you would do that. Why would you videotape yourself committing crime and then publish it? Like if there's one thing I've taught my children, don't record yourself doing bad things. It never goes well. And you actually give advice in the other end of logs being very useful for the defense perspective for information is useful for being able to figure out what the attacks were all about. Logs are the only reason I found Hector Montsegur. I mean, the one time his VPN dropped during a Fox hack and he says he did, it wasn't even hacking. He just was sent a link and he clicked on it. And in 10 million lines of logs, there was one IP address that stuck out. This is fascinating. We'll explore several angles of that. So what was the process of bringing down Ross and the Silk Road? All right, so that's a long story. You want the whole thing or you wanna break it up? Let's start at the beginning. Once we had the information of the chat logs and all that from the server, we found- What's the server? What's the chat log? So the dot onion was running the website, the Silk Road was running on a server in Iceland. How did you figure that out? That was one of the claims that the NSA- Yeah, that's the one that we said that, yeah, I wouldn't tell you if it was. It's on the internet. I mean, the internet has their conspiracy theories and all that, so. But you figure out, that's the part of the thing you do. It's puzzle pieces and you have to put them together and look for different pieces of information and figure out, okay, so you figure out the servers in Iceland. We get a copy of it and so we start getting clues off of that. With a physical copy of the server? Yeah, you fly over there. So you go, if you've been to Iceland if you've never been, you should definitely go to Iceland. Is it beautiful or? I love it, I love it. It was, so I'll tell you this. So, sorry, tangents. I love this, yeah. So I went to Iceland for the anonymous case, then I went to Iceland for the Silk Road case and I was like, oh shit, all cybercrime goes through Iceland. It was just my sort of thing. And I was over there for like the third time and I said, if I ever can bring my family here. Like so there's a place called Thingavar and I'm sure I'm fucking up the name, the Icelandics are pissed right now. But it's where the North American continental plate and the European continental plate are pulling apart and it's being filled in with volcanic material in the middle. And it's so cool. Like, I was like, one day I'll be able to afford to bring my family here. And once I left. It's just like the humbling and the beauty of nature. Just everything, man, it was a different world. It was insane how great Iceland is. And so we went back and we rented a van and we took friends and we drove around the entire country. Absolutely, like a beautiful place. Like Reykjavik's nice, but get out of Reykjavik as quick as you can and see the countryside. How is this place even real? Well, it's so new. I mean, that's so, you know, our rivers have been going through here for millions of years and flattened everything out and all that. These are new, this is new land being carved by these rivers. You can walk behind a waterfall in one place. It's the most beautiful place I've ever been. You understand why this is a place where a lot of hacking is being done? Because the energy is free and it's cool. So you have a lot of servers going on there. Server farms, you know, the energy has come up out of the ground, geothermal. And so, and then it keeps all the servers nice and cool. So why not keep your computers there at a cheap rate? I'll definitely visit for several reasons, including to talk to AV unit. Yeah, he'll let you there. Well, the servers are there, but they don't probably live there. I mean, that's the interesting, I mean, the Pacific, the PSC, the time zones, there's so many fascinating things to explore here, but so you got- Sorry, to add to that, I mean, the European internet cable goes through there. So, you know, across the Greenland and down through Canada and all that. So they have backbone access with cheap energy and free cold weather, you know. And beautiful. Oh, and beautiful, yes. So chat logs on that server, what was in the chat logs? Everything, he kept them all. That's another issue. If you're writing a criminal enterprise, please don't keep all, again, I'm not making a guidebook of how to commit your perfect crime, but you know, every chat he ever had and everyone's chat, it was like going into Facebook of criminal activity. Yeah, just looking at texts with Elon Musk being part of the conversations, I don't know if you're familiar, but they've been made public for the court cases going through, was going through, is going through, was going through with Twitter. I don't know where it is. But it made me realize that, oh, okay. I'm generally, that's my philosophy on life is like anything I text or email or say publicly or privately, I should be proud of. So I try to kind of do that because you basically, you say don't keep chat logs, but it's very difficult to erase chat logs from this world. I guess if you're a criminal, that should be, like you have to be exceptionally competent at that kind of thing. To erase your footprints is very, very difficult. Can't make one mistake. All it takes is one mistake of keeping it. But yeah, I mean, not only do you have to be, whatever you put in a chat log or whatever you put in an email, it has to hold up and you have to stand behind it publicly when it comes out, but if it comes out 10 years from now, you have to stand behind it. I mean, we're seeing that now in today's society. Yeah, but that's a responsibility you have to take really, really seriously. If I was a parent and advising teens, you kind of have to teach them that. I know there's a sense like, no, we'll become more accustomed to that kind of thing, but in reality, no, I think in the future we'll still be held responsible for the weird shit we do. Yeah, a friend of mine, his daughter got kicked out of college because of something she posted in high school. And the shittiest thing for him, but great for my kids, great lesson. Look over there and you don't want that to happen to you. Yeah, okay, so in the chat logs was useful information, like breadcrumbs of what, of information that you can then pull out. Yeah, great evidence and stuff, you know, I mean, obviously. Oh, evidence too. Yeah, a lot of evidence. Here's a sale of this much heroin because Ross ended up getting charged with a czar status on certain things. And that's a certain weight in each type of drug that you had, like, I think it's four or five employees of your empire and that you made more than $10 million. And so it's just like what the narco traffickers get charged with or anybody out of Columbia, you know. And that was primarily what he was charged with during when he was arrested is the drug. Yeah, and he got charged with some of the hacking tools too. Okay, because he's in prison, what, for? Two life sentences plus 40 years. And no possibility of parole? In the federal system, there's no possibility of parole when you have life. The only way you get out is if the president pardons you. There's always a chance. There is, I think it was close. I heard rumors there was close. Well, right, so it depends, given, it's fascinating, but given the political, the ideological ideas that he represented and espoused, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Yeah, I mean, I've been asked before, does he get out of prison first or does Snowden come back into America? I don't know, I have no idea. Snowden just became a Russian citizen? I saw that and I've heard a lot of weird theories about that one. Well, actually, on another tangent, let me ask you, do you think Snowden is a good or a bad person? A bad person. Can you make the case that he's a bad person? There's ways of being a whistleblower and there's rules set up on how to do that. He didn't follow those rules. I mean, I'm red, white and blue, so I'm pretty, you know. So you think his actions were anti-American? I think the results of his actions were anti-American. I don't know if his actions were anti-American. Do you think he could have anticipated the negative consequences of his action? Should we judge him by the consequences or the ideals of the intent of his actions? I think we all get to judge him by our own beliefs, but I believe what he did was wrong. Can you still man the case that he's actually a good person and good for this country, for the United States of America, as a flag bearer for the whistleblowers, the check on the power of government? Yeah, I mean, I'm not big government type guy, you know. So even that sounds weird coming from a government guy for so many years, but there's rules in place for a reason. I mean, he put some of our best capabilities, he made them publicly available. They really kind of set us back in the, and this isn't my world at all, but the offensive side of cybersecurity. Right, so he revealed stuff that he didn't need to reveal in order to make the point. Correct. So if you could imagine a world where he leaked stuff that revealed the mass surveillance efforts and not reveal other stuff. Yeah. Like, is the mass surveillance, I mean, that's the thing that, of course, in the interpretation of that, there's fear-mongering, but at the core, that was a real shock to people, that it's possible for government to collect data at scale. It's surprising to me that people are that shocked by it. Well, there's conspiracies, and then there's actual evidence that that is happening. I mean, there's a lot of reality that people ignore, but when it hits you in the face, you realize, holy shit, we're living in a new world. This is the new reality, and we have to deal with that reality. Just like you work in cybersecurity, I think it really hasn't hit most people how fucked we all are in terms of cybersecurity. Okay, let me rephrase that. How many dangers there are in a digital world, how much under attack we all are, and how more intensity attacks are getting, and how difficult the defense is, and how important it is, and how much we should value it, and all the different things we should do at the small and large scale to defend. Like most people really haven't woken up, they think about privacy from tech companies, they don't think about attacks, cyber attacks. People don't think they're a target, and that message definitely has to get out there. I mean, if you have a voice, you're a target. If the place you work, you might be a target. So your husband might work at some place, because now people are working from home, so they're gonna target you to get access to his network in order to get in. Well, in that same way, the idea that the US government or any government could be doing mass surveillance on its citizens is one that was a wake-up call, because you could imagine the ways in which that could, like you could abuse the power of that to control the citizenry for political reasons and purposes. Absolutely, you could abuse it. I think during the part of the Snowden League saw that two NSA guys were moderating their girlfriends, and there's rules in place for that. Those people should be punished for abusing that. But how else are we going to hear about terrorists that are in the country talking about birthday cakes? And that was a case where that was the trip word, that we're gonna go bomb New York City's subway. Yeah, it's complicated, but it just feels like there should be some balance of transparency. There should be a check on that power. Because in the name of the war on terror, you can sort of sacrifice, there is a trade-off between security and freedom, but it just feels like there's a giant slippery slope on the sacrificing of freedom in the name of security. I hear you. We live in a world where, well, I live in a world where I had to tell you exactly, when I arrested someone, I had to write a 50-page document of how I arrested you and all the probable cause I have against you and all that. Well, bad guys are reading that. They're reading how I caught you and they're changing the way they're doing things. They're changing their MO. They're doing it to be more secure. If we tell people how we're monitoring, what we're surveilling, we're gonna lose that. I mean, the terrorists are just gonna go a different way. And I'm not trying to, again, I'm not big government. I'm not trying to say that it's cool that we're monitoring the US government's monitoring everything, big tech's monitoring everything. They're just monetizing it versus possibly using it against you. But there is a balance. In those 50 pages, they have a lot of value. If they make your job harder, but they prevent you from abusing the power of the job. Yeah. There's a balance. Yeah. That's a tricky balance. So the chat logs in Iceland give you evidence of the heroin and all the large scale czar level drug trading. What else did it give you in terms of the how to catch? It gave us infrastructure. So the onion name was actually running on a server in France. So if you like, and it only came in through a back channel of VPN to connect to the Iceland server. There was a Bitcoin like kind of vault server. There was also in Iceland. And I think that was so that the admins couldn't get into the Bitcoins, the other admins that were hired to work on the site. So you could get into the site, but you couldn't touch the money. Only Ross had access to that. And then, another big mistake on Ross's part is he had the backups for everything at a data center in Philadelphia. Don't put your infrastructure in United States. I mean, again, let's not make a playbook, but you know. Well, I think these are law hanging fruit that people of competence would know already. I agree. But it's interesting that he wasn't competent enough to make. So he was incompetent in certain ways. Yeah, I don't think he was a mastermind of setting up an infrastructure that would protect his online business because, you know, keeping chat logs, keeping a diary, putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be, bad decisions. How did you figure out that he's in San Francisco? So we had that part with Jared, that he was on the West Coast. And then- Who again is Jared? Jared Day-Eaggen was a, he was a partner in, he was a DHS agent, worked for HSI, Homeland Security Investigations in Chicago. He started his Silk Road investigation because he was working at O'Hare and a weird package came in, come to find out he traced it back to Silk Road. So he started working at a Silk Road investigation long before I started my case. And he made his way up undercover all the way to be an admin on Silk Road. So he was talking to Ross on a Jabra server, the private Jabra server, private chat communication server. And we noticed that Ross's time zone on that Jabra server was set to the West Coast. So we had Pacific time on there. So we had a region, 1 24th of the world was covered of where we thought he might be. And from there, how do you get to San Francisco? There was another guy, an IRS agent that was part of the team and he used a powerful tool to find his clue. He used the world of Google. He simply just went back and Googled around for Silk Road at the time it was coming up and found some posts on like some help forums that this guy was starting an onion website and wanted some cryptocurrency help. And if you could help him, please reach out to ross.albrick at gmail.com in my world. That's a clue. Okay, so that's as simple as that. Yeah, and the name he used on that post was Frosty. Yeah, so you had to connect Frosty and other uses in Frosty and here's a Gmail and the Gmail has the name. The Gmail posted that I need help under the name Frosty on this forum. So what's the connection of Frosty elsewhere? The person logging into the Philadelphia backup server, the name of the computer was Frosty. Another clue in my world. And that's it. The name is there, the connection to the Philadelphia server and then to Iceland is there. And so the rest is small details in terms of, or is there interesting details? No, I mean, there's some electronic surveillance that find Ross.albrick living in a house and is there, is a computer at his house attaching to, does it have tour traffic at the same time that DPR is on? Another big clue. Matching up timeframes. Again, just putting your email out there, putting your name out there like that. Like what I see from that, just at the scale of that market, what just makes me wonder how many criminals are out there that are not making these low hanging fruit mistakes and are still successfully operating. To me, it seems like you could be a criminal, it's much easier to be a criminal on the internet. What else to you is interesting to understand about that case of Ross and Silk Road and just the history of it from your own relationship with it, from a cybersecurity perspective, from an ethical perspective, all that kind of stuff. Like when you look back, what's interesting to you about that case? I think my views on the case have changed over time. I mean, it was my job back then. So I just looked at it as of, I'm going after this, I sort of made a name for myself in the bureau for the anonymous case. And then this one was just, I mean, this was a bigger deal. I mean, they flew me down to DC to meet with the director about this case. The president of the United States was gonna announce this case, the arrest. Unfortunately, the government shut down two days before. So it was just us. And that's really the only reason I had any publicity out of it is because the government shut down and the only thing that went public was that affidavit with my signature at the end. Otherwise it would have just been the attorney general and the president announcing the rest of this big thing and you wouldn't have seen me. Did you understand that this was a big case? Yeah, I knew at the time. Was it because of the scale of it or what it stood for? I just knew that the public was gonna react in a big way, like the media was. Now, did I think that it was gonna be on the front page of every newspaper the day after the arrest? No, but I could sense it. Like I went like three or four days without sleep. When I was out in San Francisco to arrest Ross, I had sent three guys to Iceland to... So it was a three-prong approach for the take down. It was get Ross, get the bitcoins and seize the site. Like we didn't want someone else taking control of the site. And we wanted that big splash of that banner. Like, look, the government found this site. Like you might not wanna think about doing this again. So... And you were able to pull off all three? Maybe that's my superpower. I'm really good about putting smarter people on than I am to gather on the right things. You know, I've done... It's the only way to do it. In the business I formed, that's what I did. I hired only smarter people than me. And I'm not that smart, but you know, smart enough to know who the smart people are. The team was able to do all three. Yeah, we were able to get all three done. Yeah, and the one guy, one of the guys, the main guys I sent to Iceland, man, he was so smart. Like I sent another guy from the FBI to France to get that part and he couldn't do it. So the guy in Iceland did it from Iceland. They had to pull some stuff out of memory on a computer. You know, it's live process stuff. I'm sure you've done that before, but... I'm sure you did. Look what you're doing. This is like a multi-layer interrogation going on. Was there a concern that somebody else would step in and control the site? Absolutely. We didn't have insight on who exactly had control. So it turns out that Ross had like dictatorial control. So it wasn't easy to delegate to somebody else. He hadn't. I think he had some sort of ideas. I mean, his diary talked about walking away and giving it to somebody else, but he didn't... He couldn't give up that control to anybody apparently. Which makes you think that power corrupts and his ideals were not as strong as he espoused about. Because if it was about the freedom of being able to buy drugs, if you want to, then he surely should have found ways to delegate that power. Well, he changed over time. You could see it in his writings that he changed. So people argue back and forth that there was never murders on Silk Road. When we were doing the investigation, to us there were six murders. So the way we saw him at the time was Ross ordered people to be murdered. You know, people stole from him and all that. It was sort of an evolution from, oh man, I can't deal with this. I can't do it. It's too much. To the last one was like, the guy said, well, he's got three roommates. It's like, oh, we'll kill them too. Was that ever proven in court? No, the murders never went forward because there was some stuff, problems in that case. So there was a separate case in Baltimore that they had been working on for a lot longer. And so, you know, during the investigation, that caused a bunch of problems because now we have multiple federal agencies case against the same thing. How do you decide not to push forward the murder investigations? So there was a deconfliction meeting that happened in DC. I didn't happen to go to that meeting, but Jared went, this is before I ever knew Jared. And we have like televisions where we can just sit in a room and sit in on the meeting, but it's all, you know, secured network and all that. So we can talk openly about secure things. And we sat in on the meeting and people just kept saying the term sweat equity. I've got sweat equity, meaning that they had worked on the case for so long that they deserve to take them down. And by this time, you know, no one knew about us, but we told them at the meeting that, well, we had found the server and we have a copy of it and we have the infrastructure. And these guys had just had communications under covers. They didn't really know what was going on. And this wasn't my first deconfliction meeting. We had a huge deconfliction meeting during the anonymous case. What's the deconfliction meeting? Agents within your agency or other federal agencies have an investigation that if you expose your case or took down your case would hurt their case or the other way. Oh, so you kind of have a, it's like the rival gangs meet at the table in a smoke filled room and- Less bullets at the end, but yes. Yes. It's a boy with the sweat equity. Yeah. I mean, there's careers at stake, right? Yeah. You hate that idea. Yeah. I mean, why would you, why is that a stake? Just because you've worked on it long enough, longer than I have, that means you did better? Yeah. That's insane to me. That's rewarding bad behavior. And so the part of the sweat equity discussion was about murder and this was, here's a chance to actually bust them given the data you have from Iceland and all that kind of stuff. So why- Well, they wanted us just to turn the data over to them. To them. Yeah. Thanks for getting us this far. Here it is. I mean, it came to the point where they sent us, like they had a picture of what they thought Ross was and it was an internet meme. It really was a meme. It was a photo that we could look up. Like it was insane. All right. So there's different degrees of competence all across the world between different people. Yes. Okay. Does part of you regret because you pushed forward the heroin and the drug trade, never got to the murder discussion? I mean, the only regret in is that the internet doesn't seem to understand. Like they just kind of blow that part off that he literally paid people to have people murdered. It didn't result in a murder. And I thank God no one resulted in a murder. But that's where his mind was. His mind and where he wrote in his diary was that I had people killed and here's the money. He paid it. He paid a large amount of bitcoins for that murder. So he didn't just even think about it. He actually took action. But the murders never happened. He took action by paying the money. Correct. And the people came back with results. He thought they were murdered. That said, can you understand the steelman the case for the drug trade on Silk Road? Like making, can you make the case that it's a net positive for society? So there was a time period of when we found out the infrastructure and when we built the case against Ross. I don't remember exactly. Six weeks, a month, two months, I don't know. Somewhere in there. But then at Ross' sentencing, there was a father that stood up and talked about his son dying. And I went back and kind of did the math. And it was between those time periods of when we knew we could shut it down. We could have pulled the plug on the server and gone. And when Ross was arrested, his son died from buying drugs on Silk Road. And I still think about that father a lot. But if we look at scale at the war on drugs, let's just even outside of Silk Road, do you think the war on drugs by the United States has caused, has alleviated more suffering or caused more suffering in the world? That might be above my pay scale. I mean, I understand the other side of the argument. I mean, people said that I don't have to go down to the corner to buy drugs. I'm not gonna get shot on the corner buying drugs or something. I can just have them sent to my house. People are gonna do drugs anyways. I understand that argument. From my personal standpoint, if I made it more difficult for my children to get drugs, then I'm satisfied. So your personal philosophy is that if we legalize all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, that that would not make for a better world. I don't, no, personally, I don't believe legalizing all drugs would make for a better world. Can you imagine that it would? Do you understand that argument? Sure, I mean, as I've gotten older, I've started to, I like to see both sides of an argument. And when I can't see the other side, that's when I really like to dive into it. And I can see the other side. I can see why people would say that. But I don't wanna be, my group raised children in a world where drugs are just free for reuse. Well, and then the other side of it is with Silk Road, did taking down Silk Road, did that increase or decrease the number of drug trading criminals in the world? It's unclear. Online, I think it increased. I think, that is one of the things I think about a lot with Silk Road was that no one really knew. I mean, there was thousands of users, but then after that, it was on the front page of the paper. And there was millions of people that knew about Tor and Onion Sites. It was an advertisement. I would have thought, I thought crypto was gonna crash right after that. Like, I don't like, the people that now see that bad people are doing bad things with crypto, that'll crash. Well, I'm obviously wrong on that one. And I thought, Ross was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years. No one's gonna start up these, dark markets exploded after that. Some of them started as opportunistic. I'm gonna take those escrow accounts and I'm gonna steal all the money that came in. They were for that, but you know, but there were a lot of dark markets that popped up after that. Now we put the playbook out there. Yeah. Yeah. But, and also there's a case for, do you ever think about not taking down, if you have not taken down Silk Road, you could use it because it's a market. It itself is not necessarily the primary criminal organization. It's a market for criminals. So it could be used to track down criminals in the physical world. So if you don't take it down, and given that it was, you know, the central, how centralized it was, it could be used as a place to find criminals, right? As opposed to- So the dealers, the drug dealers, take you down to the drug dealers? Yeah. So if you have the cart, get the cartels, start getting involved, you go after the dealers. It would have been very difficult. Because of Tor and all that. Because of all the protections, anonymity, decloaking all that would have been drastically more difficult. And a lot of people in upper management of the FBI didn't have the appetite of running something like that. That would have been the FBI running a drug market. How many kids, how many fathers would have to come in and said, my kid bought while the FBI was running a site, a drug site, my kid died. So I didn't know anybody in the FBI in management, they would have the appetite to let us run what was happening on Silk Road. You know, because remember at that time, we're still believing six people are dead. We're still investigating, you know, where are all these bodies? You know, that's pretty much why we took down Ross when we did, I mean, we had to jump on it fast. What else can you say about this complicated world that has grown of the dark web? I don't understand it. I like, like it would have been a something for me. I thought I thought it was gonna collapse, but I mean, it's just gotten bigger in what's going out there now, I'm really surprised in that it hasn't grown into other networks or people haven't developed other networks, but, but you mean like instead of tour? Yeah, tour is still the main one out there. I mean, there's some, there's a few others and I'm not gonna put an advertisement out for them, but, but you know, I thought that market would have grown. Yeah, my sense was when I interacted with tour, it was that there's huge usability issues, but that's for like legal activity. It's like, if you care about privacy, it's just not as good of a browser, like it's too, too, too, to look at stuff. No, it's way too slow. It's way too slow. But I mean, you can't even like, I know some people would use it to like view movies like Netflix. You can only view certain movies in certain countries. You can use it for that, but it's too slow even for that. So were you ever able to hold in your mind the landscape of the dark web, like what, what's going on out there? It's to me as a human being, it's just difficult to understand the digital world. Like these anonymous usernames, like doing anonymous activity, it's just, it's hard to, what am I trying to say? It's hard to visualize it in the way I can visualize it. Like I've been reading a lot about Hitler. I can visualize meetings between people, military strategy, deciding on certain evil atrocities, all that kind of stuff. I can visualize the people, there's agreements, hands, handshakes, stuff signed, groups built, like in the digital space, like with bots, with anonymity, anyone human can be multiple people. It's just. Yeah, it's all lies. It's all lies. Like, yeah, it feels like I can't trust anything. No, you can't. You honestly can't. And like, you can talk to two different people and it's the same person. Like, like there's so many different, you know, Hector had so many different identities online, that, you know, of things that, you know, the lies to each other. I mean, he lied to people inside his group just to use another name to spy on, make sure what they, you know, we're talking shit behind his back or weren't doing anything. It's all lies and people that can keep all those lies straight, it's unbelievable to me. Ross Albrecht represents the very early days of that. That's why the competence wasn't there. Just imagine how good the people are now. The kids that grow up. Oh, they've learned from his mistakes. Just the extreme competence. You just see how good people are at video games. Like the level of play in terms of video games. Like I used to think I sucked. Now I'm not even like, I'm not even in the like, consideration of calling myself shitty at video games. I'm not even, I'm like non-existent. I'm like the mold. Yeah, I stopped playing because it's so embarrassing. It's embarrassing. It's like wrestling with your kid and he finally beats you. He's like, well, fuck that. I'm not wrestling with my kid any ever again. And in some sense hacking at its best and its worst is a kind of game. And you can get exceptionally good at that kind of game. And you get the accolades of it. I mean, there's, you know, there's power that comes along. If you have success, look at the kid that was hacking into Uber and Rockstar games. He put it out there that he was doing it. I mean, he used the name, whatever hacked into Uber was his screen name. He was very proud of it. I mean, the one building evidence against himself, but you know, he wanted that slap on the back. Like look at what a great hacker you are. Yeah. What do you think is in the mind of that guy? What do you think is in the mind of Ross? Do you think they see themselves as good people? Do you think they acknowledge the bad they're doing around to the world? So that Uber hacker, I think that's just you thing, not realizing what consequences are, I mean, based on his actions. Ross was a little bit older. I think I, Ross truly is a libertarian. He was truly had his beliefs that, that he could provide the gateway for other people to live that libertarian lifestyle and put in their body what they want. I don't think that was a front or a lie. What's the difference between DPR and Ross? You said like, I have never met Ross until, I have only had those two days of worth of interaction. Yeah. That's just interesting given how long you've chased him and then having met him, what was the difference to you as a human being? He was a human being. He was, he was, you know, he was an actual person. He was nervous when we arrested him. So one of the things that I learned through my law enforcement career is, if I'm going to be the case agent, I'm going to be the one in charge of, you know, dealing with this person, I'm not putting handcuffs on him. Something else is going to do that. Like I'm going to be there to help him. You know, I'm your conduit to help. And so, you know, right after someone's arrested, you obviously have had them down for weapons to make sure for everybody's safety. But then I just put my hand on their chest, just feel their heart, feel their breathing. You're going to, it's, I'm sure it's the scariest day, but then to have that human contact kind of settles people down. And you can kind of like, let's start thinking about this. I'm going to tell you, you know, I'm going to be open and honest with you. You know, there's a lot of cops out there and federal agents cops that just go to the hard ass tactic. You don't get very far with that. You don't get very far being a mean asshole to somebody, you know, be compassionate, be human. And it's going to go a lot further. So given everything he's done, you were still able to have compassion for him. Yeah, we took him to the jail and we, so he, it was after hours. So he didn't get to see a judge that day. So you stick, we stuck him in the San Francisco jail. I hadn't slept for about four days because I was dealing with people in Iceland, bosses in DC, bosses in New York. So I, and I was in San Francisco. So timeframe, like, like the Iceland people were calling me when I was supposed to be sleeping. It was insane. But I still went out that night while Ross sat in jail and bought him breakfast. I said, what do you want for breakfast? I'll have a nice breakfast for you. Cause we picked him up in the morning and took him over to the FBI to do the, the FBI booking, the fingerprints and all that. And I got him breakfast. I mean, and you don't get paid back for that sort of thing. I'm not looking, but out of my own- Did he make special requests for breakfast? Yeah, he asked for certain things. Can you mention there's that top secret FBI? That's not top secret. I think he wanted some granola bars, like, and, and, and, you know, but he'd already had lawyered up. So we, you know, which is his right. He can do that. So I knew we were going to work together, you know, like I did with Hector. But I mean, this is the last day. Most of the conversations have to be them with lawyers. From that point on, I can't question him when he asked for a lawyer. Or if I did, it couldn't be used against him. So we just had conversation where I talked to him. You know, he could, you know, could, could say things to me, but then I would remind him that he asked for a lawyer and he'd have to waive that and all that. But we didn't talk about his case so much. We just talked about like human beings. Did he, with his eyes, with his words, reveal any kind of regret or did you see a human being changing, understanding something about themselves in the process of being caught? No, I don't think that. I mean, he did offer me $20 million to let him go when we were driving to the jail. Oh no. And I asked him what I was going to, we were going to do with the agent that sat in the front seat. The money really broke him, huh? I think so. I think he kind of got caught up in how much money it was and how, you know, when crypto started, it was pennies. And by the time he got arrested, it was 120 bucks. And you know, 177,000 bitcoins, even today, you know, that's a lot of bitcoins. So you really could have been, if you continued to be one of the richest people in the world. I possibly could have been if I took that $20 million then. I could have been living, we could have this conversation in Venezuela. Uh. In a castle, in a palace. Yeah, until it runs out and then the government storms the castle. Yeah. Have you talked to Russ since? No, no. I would, I'd be open to it. I don't think he probably wants to hear from me. Do you know where, in which prison he is? I think he's somewhere out in Arizona. I know he was in the one next to Supermax for a little while, like the high security one that's like shares the fence with Supermax, but I don't think he's there anymore. I think he's out in Arizona. I haven't seen in a while. I wonder if he can do interviews in prison. That'd be nice. Some people are allowed to. So I don't, I've not seen an interview with him. I know people have wanted to interview him about books and that sort of thing. Right, because the story really blew up. Did it surprise you how much the story and many elements of it blew up? Movies? It did surprise me. My wife's uncle, who I didn't, I've been married to my wife for 22 years now. I don't think he knew my name. And he was excited about that. He reached out when Silk Road came out. So that was surprising to see. Did you think the movie on the topic was good? I didn't have anything to do with that movie. I've watched it once. It was kind of cool that Jimmy Simpson was my name in the movie, but outside of that, I thought it sort of missed the mark on some things. When Hollywood, I don't think they understand what's interesting about these kinds of stories. And there's a lot of things that are interesting and they missed all of them. So for example, I recently talked to John Carmack, who's a world-class developer and so on. So Hollywood would think that the interesting thing about John Carmack is some kind of like shitty, like a parody of a hacker or something like that. They would show like really crappy emulation of some kind of Linux terminal thing. The reality is like the technical details for five hours with him, for 10 hours with him, is what people actually wanna see. Even people that don't program, they want to see a brilliant mind, the details that they're not, even if they don't understand all the details, they want to have an inkling of the genius there. That's just one way I'm saying like, that you wanna reveal the genius, the complexity of that world in interesting ways. And to make a Hollywood almost parody caricature of it, it just destroys the spirit of the thing. So one, the operation FBI is fascinating, just tracking down these people on the cybersecurity front is fascinating. The other is just how you run, tour, how you run this kind of organization, the trust issues of the different criminal entities involved, the anonymity, the low hanging fruit, the being shitty at certain parts on the technical front, all of those are fascinating things. That's what a movie should reveal. Should probably be a series, honestly, a Netflix series than a movie. Yeah, maybe one of the FX show or something like that, because they were kind of gritty, you know? Yeah, yeah, gritty, exactly, gritty. I mean, shows like Chernobyl from HBO made me realize, okay, you can do a good job of a difficult story and reveal the human side, but also reveal the technical side and have some deep, profound understanding on that case, on the bureaucracy of a Soviet regime. In this case, you could reveal the bureaucracy, the chaos of a criminal organization, of a law enforcement organization. I mean, there's so much to explore, it's fascinating. Yeah, I like Chernobyl. When I re-watch it, I can't watch episode three, though. The animals in the episode, they go around shooting all the dogs and all that. I gotta skip that part. You're a big softie, aren't you? I really am. I'm sure I'll probably cry at some point. I love it, I love it. Don't get me talking about that episode you made about your grandmother. Oh my God, that was rough. Just to linger on this ethical versus legal question, what do you think about people like Aaron Schwartz? I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he was somebody who broke the law in the name of an ethical ideal. He downloaded and released academic publications that were behind a paywall. And he was arrested for that and then committed suicide. And a lot of people see him, certainly in the MIT community, but throughout the world as a hero because you look at the way knowledge, scientific knowledge is being put behind paywalls, it does seem somehow unethical. And he basically broke the law to do the ethical thing. Now you could challenge it, maybe it is unethical, but there's a gray area and to me at least, it is ethical. To me at least, he is a hero because I'm familiar with the paywall created by the institutions that hold these publications. They're adding very little value. So it is basically holding hostage the work of millions of brilliant scientists for some kind of, honestly, a crappy capitalist institution. Like they're not actually making that much money. It doesn't make any sense to me. It should, to me, it should all be open public access. There's no reason it shouldn't be. All publications should be. So he stood for that ideal and was punished harshly for it. That's the other criticism, it was too harshly. And of course, deeply unfortunately, that also led to his suicide because he was also tormented on many levels. I mean, are you familiar with him? What do you think about that line between what is legal and what is ethical? So it's tough, it's a tough case. I mean, the outcome was tragic, obviously. Unfortunately, when you're in law enforcement, you have to, your job is to enforce the laws. I mean, it's not, if you're told that you have to do a certain case, and there is a violation of at the time, 18 USC 1030, computer hacking, you have to press forward with that. I mean, you have to charge, you bring the case to the US Attorney's Office and whether they're gonna press charges or not, you can't really pick and choose what you press and don't press forward. I never felt that, at least that flexibility, not in the FBI. I mean, maybe when you're a street cop and you pull somebody over, you can let them go with a warning. So in the FBI, you're sitting in a room, but you're also a human being. You have compassion, you arrested, you're arrested, you're arrested, you arrested Ross and the hand on the chest. I mean, that's a human thing. So there's a... But I can't be the jury for whether it was a good hack or a bad hack. It's all someone, a victim has come forward and said, we're the victim of this. And I agree with you, because again, the basis of the internet was to share academic thought. I mean, that's where the internet was born. But it's not up to you. So the role of the FBI is to enforce the law. Correct. And there's a limited number of tools on our Batman belt that we can use. Not to get into all the aspects of the Trump case and Mar-a-Lago and the documents there. I mean, the FBI has so many tools they can use and a search warrant is the only way they could get in there. I mean, that's it. There's no other legal document or legal way to enter and get those documents. What do you think about the FBI and Mar-a-Lago and the FBI taking the documents for Donald Trump? You know, it's a tough spot. It's a really tough spot. The FBI has gotten a lot of black eyes recently. And I don't know if it's the same FBI that I remember when I was there. Do you think they deserve it in part? Was it done clumsily? Their rating of the former president's residence. It's tough. Because again, they're only limited to what they're allowed, what they're legally allowed to do. And a search warrant is the only legal way of doing it. I have my personal and political views on certain things. I think it might be surprising to some where those political points stand. But you told me offline that you're a hardcore communist. That was very strange, very surprising to me. Well, that's only who you tried to bring me into the communist party. Exactly, I was trying to recruit you. It's giving you all kinds of flyers. Okay, but you said like, you know, people in the FBI are just following the law, but there's a chain of command and so on. What do you think about the conspiracy theories that people, some small number of people inside the FBI conspire to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump? If you would ask me when I was inside, and before all this happened, I would say it could never happen. I don't believe in conspiracies. You know, there's too many people involved. Somebody is gonna come out with some sort of information. But I mean, the more the stuff that comes out, it's surprising that, you know, agents are being fired because of certain actions they're taking inside and being dismissed because of politically motivated actions. So do you think it's explicit or just pressure? Just, do you think there could exist just pressure at the higher ups that has a political leaning and you kind of maybe don't explicitly order any kind of thing, but just kind of pressure people to lean one way or the other and then create a culture that leans one way or the other based on political leanings? You would really, really hope not, but I mean, that seems to be the narrative that's being written. But when you were operating, you didn't feel that pressure. Man, I was still at such a low level. You know, I had no aspirations of being a boss. I wanted to be a case agent my entire life. So you love the puzzle of it, the chase. I love solving things, yeah. To be in management and manage people and all that and like no desire whatsoever. What do you think about Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan's podcast saying that the FBI warned Facebook about potential foreign interference? And then Facebook inferred from that that they're talking about Hunter Biden laptop story and thereby censored it. What do you think about that whole story? Again, you asked me when I was in the FBI, I wouldn't believed it from being on the inside and I wouldn't believe these things, but there's a certain narrative being written that is surprising to me that the FBI is involved in these stories. So, but the interesting thing there is the FBI is saying that they didn't really make that implication. They're saying that there's interference activity happening. Just watch out. And it's a weird relationship between FBI and Facebook. You could see from the best possible interpretation that the FBI just wants Facebook to be aware because it is a powerful platform, a platform for viral spread of misinformation. So in the best possible interpretation of it, it makes sense for FBI to sell it. In the best possible interpretation of it, it makes sense for FBI to send some information saying like we were seeing some shady activity. Absolutely. But it seems like all of that somehow escalated to a political interpretation. I mean, yeah, it sounded like there was a wink-wink with it. Right. I don't know if Mark met for that to be that way. Again, are we being social engineered or was that a true expression that Mark had? I think the wink-wink is direct or it's just culture. Maybe certain people responsible on the Facebook side have a certain political lean and then certain people on the FBI side have a political lean when they're interacting together. And it's like literally has nothing to do with a giant conspiracy theory, but just with a culture that has a particular political lean during a particular time in history. Like maybe it could be Hunter Biden laptop one time, and then it could be whoever, Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop another time. It's a tough job. I mean, if you're the liaison, if you're the FBI's liaison to Facebook, there are certain people that I'm sure they were offered a position at some point. It seems there's FBI agents that go. I know of a couple that's gone to Facebook. There's a really good agent that now leads up their child exploitation stuff. Another squad mate runs their internal investigations, both great investigators. So there's good money, especially when you're an FBI agent that's capped out at a 1310 or whatever pay scale you're capped out at. It's alluring to be, maybe want to please them and be asked to join them. Yeah. And over time that corrupts. I think there has to be an introspection in tech companies about the culture that they develop, about the political ideology, the bubble. It's interesting to see that bubble. Like I've asked myself a lot of questions. I've interviewed the Pfizer CEO, which seems now a long time ago. And I've gotten a lot of criticism, positive comments, but also criticism from that conversation. And I did a lot of soul searching about the kind of bubbles we have in this world. And it makes me wonder, pharmaceutical companies, they all believe they're doing good. And I wonder, because the ideal they have is to create drugs that help people and do so at scale. And it's hard to know at which point that can be corrupted. And it's hard to know when it was corrupted and if it was corrupted and where, which drugs, and which companies and so on. And I don't know. I don't know that complicated. It seems like inside a bubble, you can convince yourself if anything is good. People inside the Third Reich regime were able to convince themselves, I'm sure, many, just Bloodlands is another book I've been recently reading about it. And the ability of humans to convince they're doing good when they're clearly murdering and torturing people in front of their eyes is fascinating. They're able to convince themselves they're doing good. It's crazy. Like there's not even a inkling of doubt. Yeah, I don't know what to make of that. So it has taught me to be a little bit more careful when I enter into different bubbles to be skeptical about what's taken as an assumption of truth. Like you always have to be skeptical about like, what's assumed as true? Is it possible it's not true? You know, if you're doing, if you're talking about America, it's assumed that, you know, in certain places that surveillance is good. Well, let's question that assumption. Yeah. And I also, it inspired me to question my own assumptions that I hold as true, constantly. Constantly, it's tough. It's tough. But you don't grow. I mean, do you want to be just static and not grow? You have to question yourself on some of these things if you want to grow as a person. Yeah, for sure. Now, one of the tough things actually of being a public personality when you speak publicly is you get attacked all along the way as you're growing. And I'm in part a big softie as well, if I may say. And those hurt, it hurts. It hurts. It hurts. Do you pay attention to it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very hard. Like, I have two choices. One, you can shut yourself off from the world and ignore it. I never found that compelling, this kind of idea of like, hater's gonna hate. Yeah. Like, this idea that anyone with a big platform or anyone's ever done anything has always gotten hate. Yeah, okay, maybe. But I still want to be vulnerable where my heart and my sleeve really show myself, open myself to the world, really listen to people. And that means every once in a while, somebody will say something that touches me in a way that's like, what if they're right? Do you let that hate influence you? I mean, can you be bullied into a different opinion than you think you really are just because of that hate? No, no, I believe not. But it hurts in a way that's hard to explain. Yeah, it just, it gets to like, it shakes your faith in humanity, actually, is probably why it hurts. Like, people that call me a Putin apologist or a Zelensky apologist, which I'm currently getting almost an equal amount of, but it hurts. It hurts because I, it hurts because it damages slightly my faith in humanity to be able to see the love that connects us and then to see that I'm trying to find that. And that's, I'm doing my best in the limited capabilities I have to find that. And so to call me something like a bad actor, essentially, from whatever perspective, it just makes me realize, well, people don't have empathy and compassion for each other. And it makes me question that for a brief moment. And that's like a crack and it hurts. How many people do this to your face? Very few. It's online e-muscles, man. They're just flexing their muscles. I have to be honest, that, it happens. Because I've hung around with Rogan enough, when your platform grows, there's people that will come up to Joe and say stuff to his face that they forget. They still, they forget he's actually a real human being. They'll make accusations about him. So does that cause him to wall himself off more? No, he's pretty gangster on that. But yeah, it still hurts. If you're human, if you really feel others, I think that's also the difference with Joe and me. He has a family that he deeply loves, and that's an escape from the world for him. There's a loneliness in me that I'm always longing to connect with people and with regular people, just to learn their stories and so on. And so if you open yourself up that way, the things they tell you can really hurt in every way. Like just me going to Ukraine, just seeing so much loss and death, some of it is like, I mean, unforgettably haunting. Not in some kind of political way, activist way, or who's right, who's wrong way, but just like, man, like so much pain. And you see it and it just stays with you. When you see a human being bad to another human, you can't get rid of that in your head. You can't imagine that we can treat each other like that. That's the hard part, I think. I mean, for me it is. When I saw parents, like when I did the child exploitation stuff, when they rented their children out, they literally rented infant children out to others for sexual gratification. Like I don't know how a human being could do that to another human being. And that sounds like the kind of thing you're going through. I mean, I went through a huge funk when I did those cases afterwards. I should have talked to somebody, but in the FBI you have to keep that machismo up or they're gonna take your gun away from you. Well, I think that's examples of evil. That's like the worst of human nature, but just because I have- War is just as bad, I mean. Somehow war, it's somehow understandable, given all the very intense propaganda that's happening. So you can understand that there is love in the heart of the soldiers on each side, given the information they're given. There's a lot of people on the Russian side believe they're saving these Ukrainian cities from Nazi occupation. Now, there is stories, there is a lot of evidence of people for fun murdering civilians. Now that is closer to the things you've experienced of like evil embodied. And I haven't interacted with that directly, with people who for fun murdered civilians. But you know it's there in the world. You're not naive to it. Yes, but if you experience that directly, if somebody shot somebody for fun in front of me, that would probably break me. Like seeing it yourself, knowing that it exists is different than seeing it yourself. Now I've interacted with the victims of that and they tell me stories and you see their homes destroyed, destroyed for no good military reason. It's civilians with civilian homes being destroyed. That really lingers with you. Yeah, the people that are capable of that. That goes with the propaganda. I mean, if you were to build a story, you have to have on the other side, the homes are gonna be destroyed. The non-military targets are gonna be destroyed. To put it in perspective, I'm not sure a lot of people understand the deep human side or even the military strategy side of this war. There's a lot of experts outside of the situation that are commenting on it with certainty. And that kind of hurts me because I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. There's so much propaganda, it's very difficult to know what is true. Yeah, so my whole hope was to travel to Ukraine, to travel to Russia, to talk to soldiers, to talk to leaders, to talk to real people that have lost homes, that have lost family members, that who this war has divided, who this war changed completely, how they see the world, whether they have love or hate in their heart to understand their stories. I've learned a lot on the human side of things by having talked to a lot of people there. But it has been on the Ukrainian side for me currently. Traveling to the Russian side is more difficult. Let me ask you about your now friend. Can we go as far as to say his friend in Asabu, Hector Massaguer. What's the story, what's your long story with him? Can you tell me about what is LALSEC, who is Sabu, and who's Anonymous, what is Anonymous? Where's the right place to start that story? Probably Anonymous. Anonymous was a, it still is I guess, a decentralized organization. They call themselves headless, but once you look into them a little ways, they're not really headless. The power struggle comes with whoever has a hacking ability. That might be you're a good hacker or you have a giant botnet used for DDoS. So you're gonna wield more power if you can control where it goes. Anonymous started doing their hacktivism stuff in 2010 or so. The word hack was in the media all the time then. And then right around then, there was a federal contractor named HB Gary Federal. Their CEO is Aaron Barr. And Aaron Barr said he was gonna come out and de-anonymize Anonymous, he was gonna come out and talk at Black Hat or Defcon or one of those and say who they are. He figured it out by based on when people were online, when people were in IRC, when tweets came out, there was no scientific proof behind it or anything. So he was just gonna falsely name people that were in Anonymous. So Anonymous went on the attack. They went and hacked in HB Gary Federal and they turned his life upside down. They took over his Twitter account and all that stuff. Pretty quickly. So I have very mixed feelings about all of this. Okay. I get, like part of me admires the positive side of the hacktivism. Okay. Is there no room for admiration there of the fuck you to the man? Not at the time. Again, it was a violation. The 18 USC 1030. So it was my job. So at the time, no. In retrospect, I was a little bit disappointed at the time, no. In retrospect, sure. Okay. Yeah. But what was the philosophy of the hacktivism? Was the philosophically, were they at least expressing it for the good of humanity or no? They outwardly said that they were gonna go after people that they thought were corrupt. So they were judging jury on corruption. They were gonna go after it. Once you get inside and realize what they were doing, they were going after people that they had an opportunity to go after. So maybe someone had a zero day and then they searched for servers running that zero day. And then from there, let's find a target. I mean, one time they went after a toilet paper company. I still don't understand what that toilet paper company did, but it was an opportunity to make a splash. Is there some way for the joke for the lulz? It developed into that. So I think the hacktivism and the anonymous stuff wasn't so much for the lulz, but from that HBGear federal hack, then there were six guys that worked well together and they formed a crew, a hacking crew, and they kind of split off into their own private channels. And that was lulzsec or laughing at your security was their motto. So that's L-U-L-Z-S-E-C, lulzsec. Of course it is. Lulzsec. And who founded that organization? So Kayla and Sabu were the hackers of the group. And so they really did all the work on HBGear. So they're- And these are code names. Yeah, these are online names. They're NICs. And so, you know, that's all they knew each other as. You know, they talked as those names. And they worked well together. And so they formed a hacking crew. And that's when they started the, at first they didn't name it this, but it was the 50 days of lulz where they would just release major, major breaches. And it stirred up the media. I mean, they put hacking in the media every day. They had 400 or 500,000 Twitter followers. You know, and it was kind of interesting. But then they started swinging at the beehive and they took out some FBI affiliated sites. And then they started Fuck FBI Fridays, where every Friday they would release something. And we waited it for with bated breath. I mean, they had us hook, line and sinker pissed. We were waiting to see what was gonna be dropped every Friday. It was, it's a little embarrassing looking back on it now. And this is in the early 2010s. Yeah, this was 2010, 2011 around there. So actually linger on anonymous. What do you still understand? What the heck is anonymous? Just a place where you hang out. I mean, it's just, it started on 4chan, went to 8chan. And then it's really just anyone, you could be an anonymous right now if you wanted to, just you're in there hanging out in the channel. Now you're probably not gonna get much credit until you work your way up and prove who you are. Someone vouches for you, but anybody can be an anonymous. Anybody can leave anonymous. What's the leadership of anonymous? Do you have a sense that there is a leadership? There's a power play. Now there's not someone that says, this is what we're doing, no, we're doing. I love the philosophical and the technical aspect of all of this. But I think there is a slippery slope to where for the laws, you can actually really hurt people. That's the terrifying thing. When you attach, I'm actually really terrified of the power of the law. The fun thing somehow becomes a slippery slope. I haven't quite understood the dynamics of that, but even in myself, if you just have fun with a thing, you lose track of the ethical grounding of the thing. And so it feels like hacking for fun can just turn it, literally lead to nuclear war. Literally destabilize nations. Yada, yada, yada, nuclear war, I could say, yeah. So I've been more careful with the law. Yeah, I've been more careful about that. And I wonder about it because in internet speak, somehow ethics can be put aside through the slippery slope of language. I don't know, everything becomes a joke. If everything's a joke, then everything's allowed and everything's allowed, then you don't have a sense of what is right and wrong. You lose sense of what is right and wrong. You still have victims. I mean, you're laughing at someone. Someone's the butt of this joke. Whether it's major corporations or the individuals, some of the stuff they did was just releasing people's PII and their personal identifying information and stuff like that. Is it a big deal? I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But if you could choose to not have your information put out there, probably wouldn't. We do have a sense of what anonymous is today. Has it ever been one stable organization or is it a collection of hackers that kind of emerge for particular tasks, for particular hacktivism tasks and that kind of stuff? It's a collection of people that has some hackers in it. There's not a lot of big hackers in it. I mean, there's some that have come bouncing and bounce out. Even back then, there was probably just as many reporters in it, people in the media in it than hackers at the time, just trying to get the inside scoop on things. Some giving the inside scoop. We arrested a reporter that gave over the username and password to his newspaper and just so he could break the story. He trusted him. Speaking of trust, reporters, boy, there's good ones. There is good ones. There are. There are. But boy, do I have a complicated relationship with them. How many stories about you are completely true? You can just make stuff up on the internet and one of the things that, I mean, there's so many fascinating psychological, sociological elements of the internet to me. One of them is that you can say that Lex is a lizard, right? And if it's not funny, so lizard is kind of funny, what should we say? Lex has admitted to being an agent of the FBI, okay? You can just say that, right? And then the response that the internet will be like, oh, is that true? I didn't realize that. They won't go like, provide evidence, please, right? They'll just say like, oh, that's weird. I didn't, I kind of thought he might be kind of weird. And then it piles on. It's like, hey, hey, hey, guys. Like, here's a random dude on the internet just said a random thing. You can't just like pile up as, and then- Johnny6969 is now a source that says- And then like, the thing is, I'm a tiny guy, but when it grows, if you're like have a big platform, I feel like newspapers will pick that up and then they'll like start to build on a story. And you never know where that story really started. It's so cool. I mean, to me, actually, honestly, it's kind of cool that there's a viral nature of the internet that can just fabricate truth completely. I think we have to accept that new reality and try to deal with it somehow. You can't just like complain that Johnny6969 can start a random thing, but I think in the best possible world, it is the role of the journalist to be the adult in the room and put a stop to it versus look for the sexiest story so that there could be clickbait that can generate money. Journalism should be about sort of slowing things down, thinking deeply through what is true and not and showing that to the world. I think there's a lot of hunger for that. And I think that would actually get the most clicks in the end. I mean, it's that same pressure, I think we're talking about with the FBI and with the tech companies about controllers. I mean, the editors have to please and get those clicks. I mean, they're measured by those clicks. So, you know, I'm sure the journalists, the true journalists, the good ones out there want that, but they want to stay employed too. Can I actually ask you really as another tangent, the Jared and others, they're doing undercover. In terms of the tools you have for catching cybersecurity criminals, how much of it is undercover? Undercover is a high bar to jump over. You have to do a lot to start an undercover in the FBI. There's a lot of thresholds. So it's not your first investigative tool step. You have to identify a problem and then show that the lower steps can't get you there. But I mean, I think we had an undercover going on in the squad about all times when one was being shut down or taken down, we were spinning up another one. So it's a good tool to have, you know, and utilize. They're a lot of work. I don't think if you run one, you'll never run another one in your life. Oh, so it's like psychologically, there's a lot of work just technically, but also psychologically, like you have to really... It's 24 seven, you're inside that world. Like you have to know what's going on and what's happening. You know, you're taking on, you have to remember who you are when you're, because you're a criminal online. You have to go to a special school for it too. Was that ever something compelling to you? I went through the school, but I'm a pretty open and honest guy and so it's tough for me to build that wall of lies. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to keep all the lies straight. Yeah, but a guy who was good at building up a wall of lies would say that exact same thing. Exactly. It's so annoying the way truth works in this world. It's like people have told me like, because I'm trying to be honest and transparent, that's exactly what an agent would do, right? But I feel like an agent would not wear a suit and tie. I wore a suit and tie every day. I was a suit and tie guy. You were? Yeah, every day. I remember one time I wore shorts in and the SAC came in and this was when I was a rock star at the time in the bureau and I had shorts in and I said, sorry, ma'am, I apologize for my attire. And she goes, you could wear a bike shorts in here. I wouldn't care. I was like, oh shit, that sounds nice. I never wore the bike shorts, but. Yeah. Well, I see a suit and tie is constraining. I think it's liberating in sorts. It's like shows that you're taking the moment seriously. Well, not just that, people wanted it. I mean, people expected when you're not, you are dressed like a perfect FBI agent. When someone knocks on their door, that's what they wanna see. They wanna see what Hollywood built up is what an FBI agent is. You show up like my friend, Il-Wan, he was dressed always in t-shirts and shorts and people aren't gonna take him serious. They're not gonna give him what they want. I wonder how many police that can just show up and like say I'm from the FBI and start interrogating them. Like at a bar. Probably. Like how. Oh, definitely if they've had a few drinks, you can definitely. Well, but people are gonna recognize you. That's the only problem. That's another thing. You start taking out a big cases. You can't work cases anymore in the FBI. Your face gets out there. Your name too. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually let me ask you about that before we return to our friend Sabu. Okay. You've tracked and worked on some of the most dangerous people in this world. Have you ever feared for your life? So I had to make a really, really shitty phone call one time. I was sitting in the bureau and this was right after Silk Road and Jared called me. He was back in Chicago. And he called me and said, hey, your name and your kid's name are on a website for an assassination. They're paying to have you guys killed. Now that these things happen on the black market, they come up and people debate whether they're real or not, but we have to take it serious. Someone's paying to have me killed. So I had to call my wife and we have a word in that if I said this word and we only said it one time to each other, if I said this word, this is serious, drop what you're doing and get to the kids. And so I had to drop the word to her. And I could feel the breath come out of her because she thought her kids were in danger. And at the time they were. I wasn't in a state of mind to drive myself. So an agent on the squad, a girl named Evelina, she drove me lights and sirens all the way to my kid's school. And we had locked, I called the school, we were in a lockdown. Nobody should get in or out, especially someone with a gun. The first thing they did was lock me up. The second thing they did was let me in the building with a gun. So I was a little disappointed with that. My kids were, I think kindergarten and fifth grade or somewhere around there, maybe they're closer, second year, I'm not sure where. But all hell broke loose. And we had to, from there, go move into a safe house. I live in New York City, NYPD surrounded my house. The FBI put cameras outside my house. You couldn't drive in my neighborhood without like your license plate being read. Hey, why is this person here? Why is that person there? I got to watch my house on an iPad while I sat at my desk. But again, I put my family through that and it scared the shit out of them. And that's, to be honest, I think that's sort of my mother-in-law's words were, I thought you did cyber crime. And because during Silk Road, I didn't tell my family what I was working on. I don't talk about that sort of, I wanna escape that, I don't wanna be there. I remember that like, so when I was in the FBI, driving in, I used to go in at 4.30 every morning because I used to go to the gym before I go to the desk. So I'd be at the desk at seven, so in the gym at five, a couple hours and then go. The best time I had was that drive in in the morning where I could just be myself. I listened to a sports podcast out of DC. And we talked about sports and the nationals and whatever it was, the capitals. It was great to not think about Silk Road for 10 minutes. So, but that was my best time, but yeah, again. So yeah, I've had that move into the safe house. I left my MP5 at home. That's the bureau's machine gun. Showed my wife to just pull and spray. But how often did you live or work and live with fear in your heart? It was only that time. I mean, for actual physical security. Then, I mean, after the anonymous stuff, I really tightened down to my cybersecurity. I don't have social media. I don't have pictures of me and my kids online. I don't really, if I go to a wedding or something, I say, I don't take my picture with my kids, if you're gonna post it someplace or something like that. So that sort of security I have. But just like everybody, you start to relax a little bit and security breaks down because it's not convenient. But it's also part of your job. So you're much better at, like your job now and your job before. So you're probably much better taking care of the low hanging fruit at least. I understand the threat. And I think that's what a lot of people don't understand is understanding what the threat against them is. So I'm aware of that and what possibly, and I think about it, I think about things. I do remember, so you tripped a memory in my mind. I remember a lot of times and I had a gun on my hip, I still carry a gun to this day, opening my front door and being concerned what was on the other side, walking out of the house because I couldn't see it. I remember those four o'clock heading to the car. I was literally scared. Yeah. I mean, having seen some of the things you've seen, it makes you perhaps question how much evil there is out there in the world. How many dangerous people there are out there. Crazy people even. There's a lot of crazy, there's a lot of evil. Most people I think get into cybercrime or just opportunistic, not necessarily evil. They don't really know, maybe think about the victim. It's a crime of opportunity. I don't label that as evil. And one of the things about America that I'm also very happy about is that rule of law, despite everything we talk about, there is, it's tough to be a criminal in the United States. So if you walk outside of your house, you're much safer than you are in most other places in the world. You're safer and the system's tougher. I mean, LulzSec, six guys, one guy in the United States, five guys other places. Hector was facing 125 years. Those guys got slapped on the wrist and went back to college. Different laws, different places. So who's Hector? Tell me the story of Hector. So this LulzSec organization was started. So Hector was before that in, he was in part anonymous. He was doing all kinds of hacking stuff. But then he launched LulzSec. He's an old school hacker. I mean, he learned how to hack. And I don't wanna tell his story, but he learned to hack. Because he grew up in the Lower East Side of New York and picked up some NYPD computers that were left on the sidewalk for trash. Taught himself how to hack. He doesn't exactly look like a hacker. For people who don't know, he looks, I don't know exactly what he looks like, but not like a technical, not what you would imagine. But perhaps that's a Hollywood portrayal. Yeah, I think you get in trouble these days saying that what a hacker looks like. I don't know if they have a traditional look. Just like I said, Hollywood has an idea of what an FBI looks like. I don't think you can do that anymore. I don't think you can say that anymore. Well, he certainly has a big personality and charisma and all that kind of stuff. That's Sabu. I can see him selling me anything. That's Sabu. That's convincing me of anything. You know, two different people. There's Sabu and there's Hector. Hector is a sweet guy. He likes to have intellectual conversations with people. He likes to have intellectual conversations and that's just a thing. He'd rather just sit there and have a one-on-one conversation with you. But Sabu, that's a ruthless motherfucker. And you first met Sabu. I was tracking Sabu. That's all I knew was Sabu. I didn't know Hector. So when did your paths cross in terms of tracking? When did you first take on the case? The spring of 11. So it was through anonymous. Through anonymous, but really kind of LulzSec. LulzSec was a big thing and it was pushed out to all the cyber, 56 field offices in the FBI. Most of them have cyber squads or cyber units. And so, you know, it was being pushed out there and it was in the news every day, but it really wasn't ours. So we didn't have a lot of victims in our AOR area of responsibility. And so we just kind of pay attention to it. Then I got a tip that a local hacker in New York had broken into AOL. And so Olivia Olson and I, she's another agent who she's still in. She's a supervisor out in LA. She's a great agent. We went all around New York looking for this kid just to see what we can find and ended up out in Staten Island at his grandmother's house. She didn't know where he was obviously, why would she? But I left my card. He gave me a call that night and started talking to me. And I said, let's just meet up tomorrow at the McDonald's across from 26 Fed. And he came in and three of us sat there and talked and gave me his stuff. He started telling me about the felonies he was committing those days, including that break into AOL. And then he finally says, you know, I can give you Sabu. And Sabu to us was the Kaiser associate of Aachen. He was our guy. He was the guy that was in the news that was pissing us off. So he was part of the FBI Fridays? Sabu was, yeah. Oh, he led it. Yeah, he was the leader of Fuck FBI Fridays. So yeah. What was one of the more memorable F, the triple Fs? I said, how do you get, why, how and why do you go after the beehive? That's kind of intense. You get you on the news. It gets you, it's the lulls. It's funnier to go after the big ones. You know, and they weren't getting like real FBI. They weren't breaking into FBI mainframes or anything, but they, you know, they were, you know, affiliate sites or anything that had to, a lot of law enforcement stuff was coming out. So, but, you know, we looked back. And so if this kid knew that Sabu, maybe there was a chance we used him to lure Sabu out. But we also said, well, maybe this kid knows Sabu in real life. And so we went and looked through the IPs and 10 million IPs, we find one and it belonged to him. And so that day Sabu, someone had doxed Sabu and we were a little afraid he was going to be on the run. We had a surveillance team and FBI surveillance teams are awesome. Like you cannot even tell they're FBI agents. It's, they are really that good. I mean, there's baby strollers and all, whatever you wouldn't expect an FBI agent to have. So that's a little like the movies. A little bit. Yeah. I mean, it is true, but, and, but they fit into the area. So now they're on the Lower East Side, which is, you know, a baby stroller might not fit in there as well. So, you know, somebody just laying on the ground or something like that. They really get plenty of the character and get into it. So now I can never trust a baby stroller. Yeah. Well, yeah, probably shouldn't. Every, every baby, I'm just like, look at the stare of them suspiciously. Especially if the mom's wearing cargo pants while she pushes it. So yeah. So if it's like a very stereotypical mom, stereotypical baby, I'm going to be very suspicious. I'm going to question the baby. Baby's wired. Be careful. You know, we raced out there and like our squads, not even full. There's only a few guys there. And like I said, I was a suit guy, but that day I had shorts and a t-shirt on, I had a white t-shirt on. And I only bring it up because Sabu makes fun of me to this day. So I had a bulletproof vest and a white t-shirt on and that was it. I had shorts too and all that, but raced over to there. We didn't have any equipment. We brought our boss's boss's boss. He stopped off at NYPD, got us like a ballistic shield and a battering ram if we needed it. And then we get to Hector's house, Sabu's house, and he's on the sixth floor. And so normally, you know, we're the cyber dork squad. We'll hop in the elevator. Sixth floor is a long ways to go up in a bulletproof vest and a ballistic shield, but we had been caught in an elevator before on a search. So we didn't, took the stairs. We get to the top, a tad winded, but knocking the door and this big towering guy opens the door just slightly. And he sees the green vest with big yellow letters, FBI, and he steps outside. Can I help you? You know, tries to social engineer us. But eventually we get our way inside the house. You know, I noticed a few things that are kind of out of place. There's a laptop charger and a flashing modem. And I said, well, do you have a computer here? And he said, no, there's no computer here. So we knew the truths and then the half lies and all that sort of thing. So it took us about another two hours and finally he gave up. He was that boo. He was the guy we were looking for. So we sat there and we kind of showed him sort of the evidence we had against him. And, you know, from his words, we sat there and talked like two grown adults. And, you know, I gave him the options and he said, well, let's talk about working together. So he chose to become an informant. I don't think he chose that night, but that's where it kind of went to. So then we brought him down to the FBI that night, which was, it was a funny trip because I'm sitting in the back seat of the car with him. And I was getting calls from all over the US from different FBI agents saying that we arrested the wrong guy. And I was like, I don't think so. And they're like, why do you think so? I was like, because he says it's him. And they still said, no, it's the wrong guy. So I said, well, we'll see how it plays out. That's so interesting because it's such a strange world. Such a strange world because it's tough to, because you still have to prove it's the same guy, right? Because the anonymity. Yeah, I mean, we had his laptop at that point. Yeah, I know. Him saying, that helped. I gave him a clue in my world. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, if he would have fought it, I mean, that definitely would have come in as evidence that every FBI agent is saying it's not him. You have to disclose that stuff. So you had a lot of stuff on him. What was he facing if? He was facing 125 years. 125 years in prison. That's, now that's if you took every charge we had against him and put him, you know, consecutively. No one ever gets charged with that, but yeah, he had, essentially, it would have been 125 years. You know, fast forward to the end. He got thanked by the judge for his service after nine months. And he walked out of the court of free man. But that's being, while being an informant. Yes. Well, so the word informant here really isn't that good. It's not fitting that technically, I guess that's what he was, but he didn't know the other people. It was all anonymous. He knew Nix and all that. He really gave us the insight of what was happening in the hacker world. Like I said, he was an old school hacker. Back when hackers didn't work together with Anonymous, he was down, you know, cult of dead cow and those type guys, like way back. And he was around for that. He's like an encyclopedia of hacking. But, you know, we just- So like Kiss Prime was in the 90s. For terror hack, but yeah, he kind of came back when Anonymous started going after MasterCard and PayPal and all that, do the WikiLeak stuff. But even that little interaction, being an informant, he probably made a lot of enemies. How do you protect a guy like that? He made enemies after it was revealed? Yeah. How does the FBI protect him? Yeah. Good luck. I mean, perhaps I'll talk to him one day, but is that guy afraid for his life? I, again, I think- It doesn't seem like it. He has very good security for himself, cyber security. But, you know, yeah, he doesn't like the negative things said about him online. I don't think anybody does. But, you know, I think it's so many years of the internet kind of bitching at you and all that, you get calloused to, it's just internet bitching. And also the hacking world moves on very quickly. He is kind of- Yeah. Like they have their own wars to fight now, and he's not part of those wars anymore. There's still people out there that bitch and moan about him, but yeah, I think it's less. I think, you know, he has a good message out there of, you know, trying to keep kids from making the same mistakes he made. He tries to really preach that. How do people get into this line of work? Is there all kinds of ways being, not your line of work, his line of work, just all the stories you've seen of people that are in anonymous and lolsec and silk road and all the cyber criminals you've interacted with, what's the profile of a cyber criminal? I don't think there's a profile anymore. You know, I used to be able to say, you know, the kid in your mom's basement or something like that, but it's not true anymore. You know, it's wide. And it's like, I've arrested people that you wouldn't expect would be cyber criminals. And it's in the United States, it's international, it's everything? Oh, it's international. I mean, we're seeing a lot of the big hackers now, the big arrests for hackers in England, surprisingly, you know, there's, you know, you're not gonna see there's a lot of good hackers like down in Brazil, but I don't think Brazil law enforcement is as good at hunting them down. So you're not gonna see the big arrests. How much state-sponsored cyber attacks are there, do you think? More than you can imagine. And what do you wanna say an attack? You had a successful attack or just a probing? Probing for information, just like feeling, you know, testing that there's where the attack factors are, trying to collect all the possible attack factors. Put a Windows 7 machine on the internet, forward-facing and put a packet sniffer on there and look at where the driver comes from. I mean, in 24 hours, you are gonna fill up a hard drive with packets just coming at it. I mean, it's not hard to know. I mean, it's just constantly probing for entry points into things, you know. You could go mad putting up honeypot, draws in intrusions, try to see what methodologies. Just to see what's out there. Yeah, and it doesn't go anywhere. It maybe has fake information and stuff like that. You know, it's just kind of to see what's going on and judge what's happening on the internet. You know, lick your finger and test the wind of what's happening these days. The funny thing about, like, because I'm at MIT, that attracted even more attention for the, not for the laws, but for the technical challenge. It seems like people enjoy hacking MIT. It's just the amount of traffic MIT was getting for that, in terms of just the sheer number of attacks from different places is crazy. Yeah, like, just like that. Putting up a machine, seeing what comes. NASA used to be the golden ring. Now everybody got NASA. That was like the early 90s. If you could hack NASA, that was the, now, yeah, MIT is a big one. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to see. Respect. Because I think in that case, it comes from a somewhat good place. Because, you know, they're not getting any money from MIT. It's more for the challenge. Let me ask you about that, about this world of cybersecurity. How big of a threat are cyber attacks for companies and for individuals? Like, let's lay out, where are we in this world? What's out there? It's the wild, wild west. And it's, I mean, people want the idea of security, but it's inconvenient, so they don't, they push back on it. And there are a lot of opportunistic nation state, financially motivated hackers, hackers for the lulz. You got three different tiers there. And they're on the prowl. They have tools. They have really good tools that are being used against us. And at what scale? So when you're thinking of, I don't know what's, let's talk about companies first. So say you're talking to a mid-tier. I wonder what the most interesting business is. So Google, we can look at large tech companies or we can look at medium-sized tech companies. And like you were sitting in a room with a CTO, with a CEO, and the question is, how fucked are we? And what should we do? What's the low hanging fruit? What are the different strategies and those companies should consider? I mean, the problem is they want a push button. They want an out of the box solution that I'm secure. They want to tell people they're secure. But- And that's very challenging to have. It's impossible. But if someone had it, they'd be a billionaire. They'd be beyond a billionaire, because that's what everybody wants. So you can buy all the tools you want. It's configuring them the proper way. And if anyone's trying to tell you that there's one solution that fits all, there's Stain Coil Salesman. And there's a lot of people in cybersecurity that are Stain Coil Salesmen. Yeah, and I feel like there's tools, if they're not configured correctly, they just introduce, they don't increase security significantly, and they introduce a lot of pain for the people. They decrease efficiency of the actual work you have to do. So like we had, I was at Google for a time, and I think mostly I want to give props to their security efforts, but user data. So like data that belongs to users is like the holy, like the amount of security they have around that is incredible. So most, anytime I had to work with anything even resembling user data, so I never got a chance to work with actual user data, anything resembling that, first of all, you have no access to the internet. It's impossible to even come close to the access to the internet. And there's so much pain to actually like interact with that data. Where it, I mean, it was extremely inefficient in places where I thought it didn't have to be that inefficient, the security was too much. But I have to give respect to that, because in that case, you want to err on the side of security, but that's Google. They were doing a good job with this. Reputational harm if it got out. I mean, Google, why is Google drive free? Because they want your data. They want you to park your data there. So, if they got hacked or leaked information, the reputational harm would be tremendous. But for a company that's not, it's really hard to do that, right? And the company is not as big as Google or not as tech savvy as Google. Might have a lot of trouble doing that kind of stuff. Instead of increasing security, they'll just decrease the efficiency. Well, yeah, so there's a big difference between IT and security. And unfortunately, these mid-side companies, they try to stack security into their IT department. Your IT department is about business continuity. They're about trying to move business forward. They want users to get the data they need to do their job so the company can grow. Security is not that. They don't want you to get the data. But there's fine tuning you can do to ensure that. I mean, it's simple as having good onboarding procedures for employees. Like, you come into my company, you don't need access to everything. Maybe you need access to something for one day. Turn the access on, don't leave it on. I mean, I was the victim of the OPM hack, the Office of Personnel Management, because old credentials from a third-party vendor were sitting there inactive. And the Chinese government found those credentials and were able to log in and steal all my information. So a lot could be helped if you just control the credentials, the access, the access control, how long they last, and people who need access to a certain thing only get access to that thing and nothing else, and then it just gets refreshed like that. Access control, like we said, setting up people leaving the company, get rid of their, they don't need control. Two-factor authentication, that's a big thing. I mean, I sound like a broken record because this isn't anything new. This isn't rocket science. The problem is we're not implementing it. If we are, we're not doing it correctly because these guys are taking us. Well, two-factor authentication is a good example of something that I just was annoyed by for the longest time. Because yes, it's very good, but it seems that it's pretty easy to implement horribly to where it's not convenient at all for the legitimate user to use. It should be trivial to do, like to authenticate yourself twice should be super easy. If security, if it's slightly inconvenient for you, it's think about how inconvenient it is for a hacker and how they're just gonna move on to the next person. Yes, yes, in theory, when implemented extremely well. But I just don't think so. I think actually if it's inconvenient, it shows that system hasn't been thought through a lot. Do you know why we need two-factor authentication? People using the same password across the same site. So when one site is compromised, people just take that username and password, it's called credential stuffing and just stuff it across the internet. So if 10 years ago when we told everybody, don't use the same fucking password across the internet, across the vulnerable sites, maybe two-factor wouldn't be needed. Yeah, so you wouldn't need two-factor if everyone did a good job with passwords. Yeah. Right, but I'm saying like the two-factor authentication, it should be super easy to authenticate myself with some other device really quickly. Like it should be frictionless. Like you just hit okay? Okay, and anything that belongs to me, yeah. And like it should very importantly be easy to set up what belongs to me. I don't know the full complexity of the cyber attacks these platforms are under. They're probably under insane amount of attacks. Yeah, you've got it right there. People have no idea these large companies, how often they're attacked, you know, on a per second basis. And they have to fight all that often and pick out the good traffic in there. So yeah, there's no way I'd wanna run a large tech company. What about protecting individuals? For individuals, what's good advice for to try to protect yourself from this increasingly dangerous world of cyber attacks? Again, educate yourself that you understand that there is a threat. First, you have to realize that. Then you're gonna step up and you're gonna do stuff a little bit more. Sometimes I guess think I take that to a little bit extreme. I remember one time my mom called me and she was screaming that I woke up this morning and I just clicked on a link and now my phone is making weird noises. And I was like, throw your phone in a glass of water. Just put it in a glass of water right now. And I made my mom cry. It was not a pleasant thing. So sometimes I go to a little extremes on those ones, but understanding is a risk and making it a little bit more difficult to become a victim. I mean, just understanding certain things. Simple things like, as we add more internet of the things to people's houses, I mean, how many Wi-Fi networks do people have? It's normally just one. And you're bumping your phones and giving your password to people to come to visit. Set up a guest network. Set up something you can change every 30 days. Simple little things like that. I hate to remind you, but change your passwords. I mean, I feel like I'm a broken record again, but just make it more difficult for others to victimize you. And then don't use the same password everywhere. That, yes. I mean- I still know people that do that. I mean, ask.fm.gotpopped last week, two weeks ago, and that's 350 million username and passwords with connected Twitter accounts, Google accounts, all the different social media accounts. That is a treasure trove for the next two and a half, three years of just using those credentials everywhere. Using, you'll learn, even if it's not the right password, you'll learn people's password styles. Bad guys are making portfolios out of people. We're figuring out how people generate their passwords and kind of figuring, and then it's easier to crack their password. We're making a dossier on each person. It's 350 million dossiers just in that one hack. Yahoo, there was half a billion. So the thing a hacker would do with that is try to find all the low hanging fruit, like have some kind of program that, yeah, evaluates the strength of the passwords, and then finds the weak ones. That means that this person is probably the kind of person that would use the same password across multiple. Or even just write a program into that. Remember the Ring hack a couple of years ago? That's all it was, is credential stuffing. So Ring, the security system by default, had two factor but didn't turn it on, and they also had don't try unlimited tries to log into my account. You can lock it out after 10 by default, not turned on, because it's not convenient for people. Ring, it was like, I want people to stick these little things up and have security in their house. But cybersecurity don't make it inconvenient, then people won't buy our product. That's how they got hacked. They wanted to say that it's insecure, and got hacked into, reputational harm right there for Ring, but they didn't, it was just credential stuffing. People bought username and passwords on the black market, and just wrote a bot that just went through Ring and used every one of them, maybe 1% hit, but that's a big hit to the number of Ring users. You can use also password managers to make the changing of the passwords easier. And to make you can choose the difficulty, the number of special characters, the length of it and all that. My favorite thing is on websites, yell at you for your password being too long, or having too many special characters, or like, or yay, you're not allowed to have this special character or something. You can only use these three special characters. You know, do you understand how password cracking works if you specifically tell me which pass, what special characters I can use? I want to, like, I honestly just want to have a one-on-one meeting, like late at night with the engineer that programmed that, because that's like an intern. I just want to have a sit down meeting. Yeah, I made my parents switch banks once because the security was so poor. I was like, you just, you can't have money here. But then there's also like the zero day tax, like I mentioned before the QNAP NAS that got hacked. Luckily I didn't have anything private on there, but it really woke me up to like, okay, so like, if you take everything extremely seriously. Unfortunately for the end users, there's nothing you can do about zero day. It's, you know, there's this, you have no control over that. I mean, it's the engineers that made the software don't even know about it. Now, let's talk about one days. So there's a patch now out there for the security. So if you're not updating your systems for these security badges, if it's just not on you, my father-in-law has such an old iPhone, you can't security patch it anymore. So, you know, and I tell him, I say, you know, this is what you're missing out on. This is what you're exposing yourself to because, you know, we talked about that powerful tool that, how we found Rossalbrick at gmail.com. Well, bad guys are using that too. It's called, you know, it used to be called Google dorking. Now it's, I think it's named kind of Google hacking by the community. You can go in, you know, and find a vulnerability, read about the white paper, what's wrong with that software. And then you can go on the internet and find all of the computers that are running that outdated software. And there's your list, there's your target list. I know the vulnerabilities that are running. Again, not making a playbook here, but you know, that's how easy it is to find your targets. And that's what the bad guys are doing. Then the reverse is tough. It's much tougher, but it's still doable, which is like the first find the target. If you have specific targets, to hack into a Twitter account, for example. Much harder. That's probably social engineering, right? That's probably the best way. Probably, if you wanted something specific to that, I mean, if you really want to go far, you know, if you're targeting a specific person, you know, how hard is it to get into their office and put a little device, USB device, in line with their mouse? Who checks how their mouse is plugged in? And you can, for 40 bucks on the black market, you can buy a keylogger that just USB, then the mouse plugs right into it. It looks like an extension on the mouse, if you can even find it. You can buy the stuff with a mouse inside of it and just plug it into somebody's computer. And as there's a keylogger that lives in there and calls home, sends everything you want. So, I mean, and it's cheap. Yeah, in grad school, a program that built a bunch of keyloggers. It was fascinating, a tracking mouse, just for what I was doing as part of the research, I was doing to see if by the dynamics of how you type and how you move the mouse, you can tell who the person is. Oh, wow. That's like, it's called the active authentication. Like, it's basically biometrics that's not using bio to see how identifiable that is. So it's fascinating to study that, but it's also fascinating how damn easy it is to install keyloggers. So I think it's, in natural, what happens is you realize how many vulnerabilities there are in this world. You do that when you understand bacteria and viruses, you realize they're everywhere. And the same way with, I'm talking about biological ones. And then you realize that all the vulnerabilities that are out there. One of the things I've noticed quite a lot is how many people don't log out of their computers. Just how easy physical access the system actually is. Like in a lot of places in this world. And I'm not talking about private homes, I'm talking about companies, especially large companies. It seems quite trivial in certain places that I've been to to walk in and have physical access to a system. And that's depressing to me. It is. I laugh because one of my partners at Naxo that I work at now, he worked at a big company. Like you would know the name as soon as I told you, I'm not gonna say it. But the guy who owned the company, and the company has his name on it, didn't want to ever log into a computer just to annoy the shit out of him. So they hired a person that stands next to his computer when he's not there. And that's his physical security. See, that's good. That's pretty good actually. Yeah, I mean I guess if you could afford to do that. At least you're taking your security seriously. I feel like there's a lot of people in that case who just not have a login. Yeah. No, the security team there had to really work around to make that work. Non-compliant with company policy. But that's interesting. The keylogger, there's a lot of, there's just a lot of threats. Yeah, I mean. There's a lot of ways to get in. Yeah, I mean so you can't sit around and worry about someone physically gaining access to your computer with keylogger and stuff like that. If you're traveling to a foreign country and you work for the FBI, then yeah, you do. You pick little, sometimes some countries you would bring a fake laptop just to see if they stole it or accessed it. I really want, especially in this modern day, to just create a lot of clones of myself that generate lex sounding things and just put so much information out there. I actually dox myself all across the world. And then you're not a target, I guess. Just put it out there. I've always said that though. We do these searches in FBI houses and stuff like that. If someone just got a box load of 10 terabyte drives and just encrypted them, oh my god, do you know how long the FBI would spin their wheels trying to get that data off there? Be insane. Oh, so just give them. You don't even know which one you're looking for. Yeah. That's true, that's true. So it's like me printing like a treasure map to a random location, just get people to go on Goosechases. Yeah, what about operating system? What have you found, what's the most secure and what's the least secure operating system? Windows, Linux? Is there no universal? There's no universal security. I mean, it changed. People used to think Macs were the most secure just because they just weren't out there. But now kids have had access to them. So, I know you're a Linux guy, I like Linux too. But it's tough to run a business on Linux. People wanna move more towards the Microsofts and the Googles just because it's easier to communicate with other people that maybe aren't computer guys. So you have to just take what's best, what's easiest and secure the shit out of it as much as you can and just think about it. What are you doing these days at Naxo? So we just started Naxos. So I left the government and went to a couple consultancies and I started working, really all the people I worked good in the government with, I brought them out with me. And now- You used to work for the man and now you're the man. Exactly, but now we formed a partnership and it's a new cybersecurity firm. Our launch party is actually on Thursday, so it's gonna be exciting. You wanna give more details about the party so that somebody can hack into it? No, I don't even tell you where it is. You can come if you want, but don't bring the hackers. Hector will be there with us. I can't believe you invited me because you also say insider threat is the biggest threat. By the way, can you explain what the insider threat is? The biggest insider threat in my life is my children. My son's big into Minecraft and will download executables mindlessly and just run them on the network. So he is- Do you recommend against marriage and family and kids? Nope, nope. From a security perspective. From a security perspective, absolutely. But no, I just segmentation. I mean, we do it in all businesses for years. Started segmenting networks, different networks. I just do it at home. My kid's on his own network. It makes it a little bit easier to see what they're doing too. You can monitor traffic and then also throttle bandwidth if your Netflix isn't playing fast enough or buffers or something. So you can obviously change that a little too. You know they're gonna listen to this, right? They're gonna get your tricks. Yeah, that's true. They'll definitely listen. But there's nothing more humbling than your family. You think you've done something big and you go on a big podcast and talk to Les Freeman and they don't fucking care. Unless you're on TikTok or- Yeah, you'll show up on a YouTube feed or something like that and they'll be like, oh yeah. This guy's boring. My son does a podcast for his school and I still can't get him to tell. So Hector and I just started a podcast talking about cybersecurity. We do a podcast called Hacker in the Fed. It just came out yesterday, so first episode. So yeah, we got 1,300 downloads the first day. We were at the top of Hacker News, which is a big website in our world. So it's called Hacker in the Fed? Hacker in the Fed's name is. Go download and listen to Hacker in the Fed. I can't wait to see what, because I don't think I've seen a video of YouTube together so I can't wait to see what the chemistry is like. It's not weird that you guys used to be enemies and now you're friends? So yeah, I mean, we just did a trailer and all that and our producer, we have a great producer, a guy named Phineas and he kind of pulls things out of me and I said, okay, I got one. My relationship with Hector, we're very close friends now and then he's like, oh, I arrested one of my closest friends, which is a very strange relationship. Yeah, it's weird. But he says that I changed his life. He was going down a very dark path and I gave him an option that one night and he made the right choice. He now does penetration testing, he does a lot of good work and he's turned his life around. Do you worry about cyber war in the 21st century? Absolutely. If there is a global war, it'll start with cyber, if it's not already started. Do you feel like there's a boiling, like the drums of war are beating? What's happening in Ukraine with Russia? It feels like the United States becoming more and more involved in the conflict in that part of the world and China is watching very closely, it's starting to get involved geopolitically and probably in terms of cyber. Do you worry about this kind of thing happening in the next decade or two, like where it really escalates? You know, people in the 1920s were completely terrible at predicting the World War II. Do you think we're at the precipice of war potentially? I think we could be. I mean, I would hate to just be, you know, fear-mongering out there, you know, COVID's over, so we're not gonna be able to do anything. You know, COVID's over, so the next big thing in the media is war and all that, but I mean, there's some flags going up that are very strange to me. Is there ways to avoid this? I hope so. I hope smarter people than I are figuring it out. I hope people are playing their parts and talking to the right people, because the war is the last thing I want. Well, there's two things to be concerned about on the cyber side. One is the actual defense on the technical side of cyber, and the other one is the panic that might happen when something like some dramatic event happened because of cyber, some major hack that becomes public. I'm honestly more concerned about the panic, because I feel like if people don't think about this stuff, the panic can hit harder. Like if they're not conscious about the fact that we're constantly under attack, I feel like it'll come like a much harder surprise. Yeah, I think people will be really shocked on things. I mean, so we talked about LulzSec today, and LulzSec was 2011. They had access into the water supply system of a major US city. They didn't do anything with it. They were sitting on it in case someone got arrested and they were gonna maybe just expose that it's insecure. Maybe they were gonna do something to fuck with it. I don't know, but that's 2011. I don't think it's gotten a lot better since then. And there's probably nation states or major organizations that are sitting secretly on hacks like this. 100%, 100% they're sitting seriously, waiting to expose things. I mean, again, I don't wanna scare the shit out of people, but people have to understand the cyber threat. I mean, there are thousands of nation state hackers in some countries. I mean, we have them too. We have offensive hackers. You know, the terrorist attacks of 9-11, there's planes that actually hit actual buildings and it was visibly clear and you can trace the information. With cyber attacks, say something that would result in a major explosion in New York City, how the hell do you trace that? Like, if it's well done, it's going to be extremely difficult. The problem is, there's so many problems. One of which the US government in that case has complete freedom to blame anybody they want. True. And then to go start war with anybody, anybody that actually see a Jew, all right, sorry, that's one cynical take on it, of course. No, but you're going down the right path. I mean, the guys that flew the planes in the buildings wanted attribution. They took credit for it. When we see the cyber attack, I doubt we're going to see attribution. Maybe the victim side, the US government on this side might come out and try to blame somebody, but you know, like you've brought up, they could blame anybody they want. There's not really a good way of verifying that. Can I just ask for your advice? So in my personal case, am I being tracked? How do I know? How do I protect myself? Should I care? You are being tracked. I wouldn't say you're being tracked by the government. You're definitely being tracked by big tech. No, I mean, me personally, Lex and an escalated level. So like, like you mentioned, there's an FBI file on people. Sure. I'd love to see what's in that file. Who did I have the argument for? Oh, let me ask you, FBI. How's the cafeteria food in FBI? At the academy, it's bad. Yeah. What about like- At headquarters? Headquarters. Little bit better, cause that's what the director, I mean, he eats up on the seventh floor. Have you been like at Google, have you been to Silicon Valley, those cafeterias, like those- I've been to the Google in Silicon Valley. I've been to the Google in New York. Yeah, the food is incredible. It is great. So FBI is worse. Well, when you're going through the academy, they don't let you outside of the building. So you have to eat it. And I think that's the only reason people eat it. Okay. It's pretty bad. I got it. Okay, I don't know why- But there's also a bar inside the FBI academy. People don't know that. Alcohol bar? Yes, alcohol bar. And if you, as long as you've passed your PT and in going well, you're allowed to go to the bar. Nice. It feels like if I was a hacker, I would be going after like celebrities, cause they're a little bit easier, like celebrity celebrities like Hollywood. The Hollywood nudes were a big thing there for a long time. But now you, yeah, I guess nudes- That's what they went after. I mean, all those guys, they socialize. They social engineered Apple to get backups, to get the recoveries for backups. And then they just pulled all their nudes. And I mean, whole websites were dedicated to that. Yeah. See that, see, I wouldn't do that kind of stuff. It's very creepy. I would go, if I was a hacker, I would go after like major, like powerful people and like tweet something from their account and like something that like positive, like loving. But like for the, for the walls, the obvious that it's a troll. God, you get busted so quick. By a bad hacker. Really? But why? Because hackers never put things out about love. Oh, you mean like, this is clearly- Yeah, this is clearly Lex. What the fuck? He talks about love in every podcast he does. I would just be like, no, oh God damn it. Now somebody's gonna do it. You'll blame me. It wasn't me. Looking back at your life, is there something you- I'm only 44 years old. I'm already looking back. Is there stuff that you regret? EV unit. Yeah. It got away. So is the one that got away. Yeah, I mean, it took me a while into my law enforcement career to learn about like the compassionate side. And it took Hector Montserrat to make me realize that criminals aren't really criminals, they're human beings. That really humanized the whole thing for me, sitting with him. For nine months. I think that's maybe why I had a lot more compassion when I arrested Ross. Probably wouldn't have been so compassionate if it was before Hector. But yeah, he changed my life and showed me that humanity side of things. So would it be fair to say that all the criminals, or most criminals are just people that took a wrong turn at some point? They all have the capacity for good and for evil in them? I'd say 99% of the criminals that I've interacted with, yes, the people with the child exploitation, no, I don't have any place in my heart for them. What advice would you give to people in college, people in high school, trying to figure out what they wanna do with their life? How to have a life they can be proud of, how to have a career they can be proud of, all that kind of stuff. In the US budget that was just put forward, there's 18 billion dollars in the US budget for the next year, there's 18 billion dollars for cybersecurity. We're about a million people short of where we really should be in the industry, if not more. If you want job security and want to work and see exciting stuff, head towards cybersecurity. It's a good career. And one thing I dislike about cybersecurity right now is they expect you to come out of college and have 10 years experience in protecting and knowing every different Python script out there and having a job that's not as difficult. The industry needs to change and let the lower people in in order to broaden and get those billion jobs filled. But as far as their personal security, just remember it's all gonna follow you. I mean, there's laws out there now that you have to turn over your social media accounts in order to have certain things. They just changed that in New York state, if you wanna carry a gun, you have to turn over your social media and do something about it, just like you're doing now. And that's why I'm making a video that's gonna be about a political character. So hopefully you didn't say something strange in the last few years and it's gonna follow you forever. I bet Ross Albrecht would tell you the same thing when he not don't put Ross Albrecht at gmail.com on things because it's gonna last forever. Yeah, people sometimes, for some reason, they interact on social media you know, what is that, busting each other's chops, like making fun of yourself, like being, especially gaming culture, like people who stream. Thank God that's not recorded. Oh my God, the things people say on those streams. Yeah, but a lot of them are recorded. That's just, there's a whole Twitch thing where people stream for many hours a day. And I mean, just outside of the very offensive things they say, they just swear a lot. They're not the kind of person that I would wanna hire. I wanna work with. Now I understand that some of us might be that way privately, I guess, when you're shooting the shit with friends, like playing a video game and talking shit to each other, maybe, but like that's all out there. You have to be conscious of the fact that that's all out there. And it's just not, it's not a good look. It's not like you're, you should, it's complicated because I'm like against hiding who you are. Oh, for an asshole, you should hide some of it. Yeah, but like, I just feel like it's going to be misinterpreted. When you talk shit to your friends while you're playing video games, it doesn't mean you're an asshole. Because you're an asshole to your friend, but that's how a lot of friends show love. Yeah, an outside person can't judge how I'm friends with you. If I wanna be, this is our relationship. If that person can say that I'm an asshole to them, then that's fine, I'll take it. But you can't tell me I'm an asshole to them just because you saw my interaction. I agree with that. They'll take those words out of context and now that's considered who you are is dangerous. And people take that very nonchalantly. People treat their behavior on the internet very carelessly. That's definitely something that you need to learn and take extremely seriously. Also, I think that taking that seriously will help you figure out how to be a good friend about who you really stand for. If you use your language carelessly, you'd never really ask, what do I stand for? I feel like it's a good opportunity when you're young to ask what are the things that are okay to say? What are the things, what are the ideas I stand behind? Especially if they're controversial and I'm willing to say them because I believe in them versus just saying random shit for the lols. Because for the random shit for the lols, keep that off the internet. That said, man, I was an idiot for most of my life and I'm constantly learning and growing. I'd hate to be responsible for the kind of person I was in my teens, in my 20s. I didn't do anything offensive, but I changed as a person. I used to, I guess I probably still do, but I used to read so much existential literature. That was a phase. There's like phases. Yeah, you grow and evolve as a person that changes you in the future. Yeah, thank God there wasn't social media when I was in high school. Thank God. Oh my God, I would never have gotten the FBI. Would you recommend that people consider a career at a place like the FBI? I loved the FBI. I never thought I would go anyplace else but the FBI. I thought I was gonna retire with the gold watch and everything from the FBI. That was my plan. You get the gold watch? No, but you know what it is. It's a, oh, it's an expression. You get a gold badge. You actually get your badge in Lucite and your creds put in Lucite and all that. Does it, by the way, just on a tangent, since we like those, does it hurt you that the FBI by certain people is distrusted or even hated? 100%, it kills me. I've never, until recently, I sometimes be embarrassed about the FBI sometimes, which is really, really hard for me to say because I love that place. I love the people in it. I love the brotherhood that you have with all the guys in your squad, the guys and girls. I just use guys. You know, we, I developed a real drinking problem there because we were so social of going out after work and continuing on. It really was a family. You know, so I do miss that. But yeah, I mean, if someone can become an FBI agent, I mean, it's pretty fucking cool, man. The day you graduate and walk out of the academy with a gun and a badge and, you know, the power to charge someone with a misdemeanor for flying a United States flag at night, that's awesome. So there is a part of like representing and loving your country. And especially if you're doing cybersecurity. So there's a lot of technical savvy in different places in the FBI. Yeah, I mean, there's different pieces. Sometimes, you know, you'll see an older agent that's done, you know, not cyber crime, come over to cyber crime at the end so he can get a job once he goes out. But there's also some guys that come in, you know, I won't name his name, but there was a guy, I mean, I think he was a hacker when he was a kid and now he's been an agent. Now he's way up in management. Great guy. I love this guy and he knows who he is if he's listening. You know, that, you know, he had some skills. But we also lost a bunch of guys that had some skills because we had one guy in the squad that he had to leave the FBI because his wife became a doctor and she got her residency down in Houston and she couldn't move. He wasn't allowed to transfer. So he decided to keep his family versus the FBI. So there's some stringent rules in the FBI that need to be relaxed a little bit. Yeah, I love hackers turned like leaders. Like one of my quickly becoming good friends is Mudge. He was a big hacker in the 90s and then now was recently Twitter Chief Security Officer, CSO, but he had a bunch of different leadership positions including being my boss at Google. But originally a hacker. It's cool to see like hackers become like leaders. I just wonder what would cause him to stop doing it. Why he would then take like a managerial route for high tech companies versus- I think a lot of those guys, so this is like the 90s, they really were about like the freedom. There's like a philosophy to it. And when I think the hacking culture evolved over the years and I think when it leaves you behind, you start to realize like, oh, actually what I wanna do is I wanna help the world and I can do that and legitimate routes and so on. But that's the story that, and yeah, I would love to talk to him one day. But I wonder how common that is too. Like young hackers turn good. You're saying it like pulls you in. If you're not careful, it can really pull you in. Yeah, you're good at it. You become powerful. You become, everyone's slapping you on the back and say, what a good job and all that, at a very young age. Yeah, I would love to get into my buddy's mind on why he stopped hacking and moved on. That's gonna be a good conversation. In his case, maybe it's always about a great woman involved, a family and so on that grounds you. Because like we have, there is a danger to hacking that once you're in a relationship, once you have family, maybe you're not willing to partake in. What's your story? What, from childhood, what are some fond memories you have? Fond memories? Where did you grow up? Well, I don't give away that information. In the United States? Yeah, yeah, yeah, in Virginia. In Virginia. What are some rough moments? What are some beautiful moments that you remember? I had a very good family growing up. The rough moment, and I'll tell you a story that just happened to me two days ago and it fucked me up, man. It really didn't. You'll be the first, I've never told, I tried to tell my wife this two nights ago and I couldn't get it out. So my father, he's a disabled veteran, or he was a disabled veteran. He was in the army and got hurt and was in a wheelchair his whole life, all my growing up. He was my biggest fan. He just wanted to know everything about what was going on in the FBI, my stories. I was a local cop before the FBI and I got to a high-speed car chase, foot chase and all that and kicking doors in. He wanted to hear none of those stories. At some points I was kind of too cool for school and, ah, dad, I just want a break and all that and things going on. We lost my dad during COVID. Not because of COVID, but it was around that time, but it was right when COVID was kicking off. He died in the hospital by himself and I didn't get to see him then. My mom had some people visiting her the other night, Tom and Karen Roggerberg. I'll say they're my second biggest fans. Right behind my dad. They always asking about me and my career and they read the books and seen the movie. They'll even tell you that Silk Road movie was good. They'll lie to you on that. And so they came over and I helped them with something and my mom called me back a couple days later and she said, I appreciate you helping them. I know fixing someone's Apple phone over the phone really isn't what you do for a living. It's kind of beneath you and all that, but I appreciate it. She said, oh, they loved hearing the stories about Silk Road and all those things. And she goes, your dad, he loved those stories. I just wish he could have heard them. He even would tell me, he would say, maybe Chris will come home and I'll get him drunk and he'll tell me the stories. But, and then she goes, maybe one day in heaven you can tell them those stories. And I fucking lost it. I literally stood in my shower sobbing, like a child, like just thinking about, like all my dad wanted was those stories. Yeah. And now I'm on a fucking podcast telling the stories to the world and I didn't tell him. Yeah. Did you ever have like a long heart to heart with him about like, about such stories? He was in the hospital one time and I went through and I want to know about his history, like his life, what he did. And I think he may be sensationalized some of it, but that's what you want. Your dad's a hero, so you want to hear those things. Is he a good storyteller? Yeah, again, I don't know what was true and not true, but you know, some of it was really good. And it was just good to hear his life, but you know, we lost him and now those stories are gone. You miss him? Yeah. What did he teach you about what it means to be a man? So my dad, he was an engineer. And so part of his job, we worked for Vermont power and electric or whatever it was. I mean, he, when he first got married to my mom and all that, like he flew around in a helicopter checking out like power lines and dams. He used to swim inside to scuba into dams to check to make sure they were functioning properly and all that. Pretty cool shit. And then he couldn't walk anymore. I probably would have killed myself if my life switched like that so bad. And my dad probably went through some dark points, but he had that from me maybe. And so to get through that struggle, to teach me like, you know, you press on, you have a family, people count on you, you do what you got to do. That was big. I'm sure you make him proud, man. I'm sure I do, but I don't think he knew that, that I knew that. Well, you get to pass on that love to your kids now. I try, I try, but I can't impress them as much as my dad impressed me. I can try all I want, but. Well, what do you think is the role of love? Because you gave me some grief, you busted my balls a little bit for talking about love a lot. What do you think is the role of love in the human condition? I think it's the greatest thing. I think everyone should be searching for it. If you don't have it, find it, get it as soon as you can. I love my wife, I really do. I had no idea what love was until my kids were born. My son came out and, this is a funny story, he came out and I just wanted to be safe, be healthy and all that. And I said to the doctor, I said, 10 and 10 doc, 10 fingers, 10 toes, everything good. And he goes, nine and nine. I was like, what the fuck? He's like, oh, this is gonna suck. Okay, we'll deal with it and all that. He was talking about the apnoeocard cord or some score about breathing and color and all that. And I was like, oh shit, but no one told me this. But so I'm just sobbing. I couldn't even cut the umbilical cord. Like just fell in love with my kids when I saw them. And that to me really is what love is, like just for them, man. And I see that through your career that love developed, which is awesome. The being able to see the humanity in people. I didn't when I was young, the foolishness of youth. I needed to learn that lesson hard. I mean, when I was young in my career, it was just about career goals and resting people became stats. You rest someone, you get a good stat, you get an atta boy. Maybe the boss likes it and you get a better job or you move up the chain. It took a real change in my life to see that humanity. And I can't wait to listen to your talk. It was just probably hilarious and insightful given the life of the two of you lived and given how much you've changed each other's lives. I can't wait to listen brother. Thank you so much. This is a huge honor. You're an amazing person with an amazing life. This was an awesome conversation. Dude, huge fan. I love the podcast. Glad I could be here. Thanks for the invite. So exercising the brain too. It was great. It was a great conversation. And the heart too, right? Oh yeah, yeah. You got some tears there at the end. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Darbell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Benjamin Franklin. They can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
 You could buy literally whatever else you wanted.
 You could throw things, drugs.
 You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff.
 Hacking tools, you could hack for hire.
 You could buy murders for hire.
 The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell,
 a former FBI special agent and cyber crime specialist
 who tracked down and arrested Russ Albrecht,
 the leader of Silk Road, the billion dollar drug marketplace.
 And he tracked down and arrested Hector Massaguer,
 AKA Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous,
 which are some of the most influential hacker groups
 in history.
 He is co-founder of Naxo,
 a complex cyber crime investigation firm,
 and is a co-host of a podcast called The Hacker and the Fed.
 This conversation gives the perspective
 of the FBI cyber crime investigator,
 both the technical and the human story.
 I would also like to interview people on the other side,
 the cyber criminals who have been caught,
 and perhaps the cyber criminals who have not been caught
 and are still out there.
 This is the Alex Friedman podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors
 in the description.
 And now, dear friends, here's Chris Tarbell.
 You are one of the most successful
 cybersecurity law enforcement agents of all time.
 You tracked and brought down Russ Albrecht,
 AKA DreadPirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road,
 and Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous,
 who was one of the most influential hackers in the world.
 So first, can you tell me the story
 of tracking down Russ Albrecht and Silk Road?
 Let's start from the very beginning.
 And maybe let's start by explaining
 what is the Silk Road.
 It was really the first dark market website.
 You literally could buy anything there.
 Well, I'll take that back.
 There's two things you couldn't buy there.
 You couldn't buy guns, because that was a different website,
 and you couldn't buy fake degrees.
 So no one could become a doctor,
 but you could buy literally whatever else you wanted.
 You could buy things, drugs.
 You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan,
 the good stuff.
 Hacking tools, you could hack for hire.
 You could buy murders for hire,
 if you wanted someone killed.
 Now, so when I was an FBI agent,
 I had to kind of sell some of these cases,
 and this was a big drug case.
 That's the way people saw Silk Road.
 So internally to the FBI, how I had to sell it,
 I had to find the worst thing on there
 that I could possibly find.
 And I think one time I saw a posting for baby parts.
 So let's say that you had a young child
 and that needed a liver.
 You could literally go on there and ask
 for a six-month-old liver if you wanted to.
 For like surgical operations versus something darker.
 Yeah, I never saw anything that dark
 as far as people wanted to eat body parts.
 I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI.
 That's another crazy story,
 but that one actually weirded me out.
 So I just watched Jeffrey Dahmer, a documentary on Netflix,
 and it just changed the way I see human beings
 because it's a portrayal of a normal-looking person
 doing really dark things,
 and doing so not out of a place of insanity seemingly,
 but just because he has almost like a fetish
 for that kind of thing.
 It's disturbing that people like that are out there.
 So people like that would then be using Silk Road,
 not like that necessarily,
 but people of different walks of life
 would be using Silk Road to primarily,
 what was the primary thing, drugs?
 It was primarily drugs, and that's where it started.
 It started off with Ross Albrecht growing mushrooms
 out in the wilderness of California and selling them.
 But really his was more of a libertarian viewpoint.
 I mean, it was like, you choose what you wanna do
 for yourself and do it.
 And the way Silk Road kind of had the anonymity
 is it used what's called Tor, the onion router,
 which is an anonymizing function on the deep web.
 It was actually invented by the US Navy
 back in the mid-90s or so, but it also used cryptocurrency.
 So it was the first time we saw this birth on the internet
 of mixing cryptocurrency and an IP blocking software.
 So in cyber crime, you go after one the IP address
 and trace it through the network,
 or two, you go after the cash,
 and this one kind of blocked both.
 Cash meaning the flow of money, physical or digital.
 And then IP is some kind of identifying thing
 over the computer.
 It's your telephone number on your computer.
 So yeah, all computers have a unique four octet numbers.
 So 123.123.123.123.
 And the computer uses DNS or domain name services
 to render that name.
 So if you were looking for CNN.com,
 your computer then translates that to that IP address
 or that telephone number where it can find that information.
 Didn't Silk Road used to have guns in the beginning?
 Or was that considered to have guns?
 Or did it naturally emerge and then Ross realized
 like this is not good?
 It went back and forth.
 I think there were guns on there and he tried to police it.
 He told himself that they're the captain of the boat.
 So he had to follow his rules.
 So I think he took off those posts eventually
 and moved guns elsewhere.
 What was the system of censorship that he used
 of selecting what is okay and not okay?
 I mean-
 Him alone, he's the captain of the boat.
 Do you know by chance if there was a lot of debates
 and criticisms internally amongst the criminals
 of what is and isn't allowed?
 I mean, it's interesting to see
 a totally different moral code emerge
 that's outside the legal code of society.
 We did get the server and was able to read
 all of the chat logs that happened.
 I mean, all the records were there.
 I don't remember big debates.
 I mean, there was a clear leadership
 and that was the final decision.
 That was the CEO of Silk Road.
 And so primarily it was drugs
 and primarily out of an ideology of freedom,
 which is if you want to use drugs,
 you should be able to use drugs.
 You should put in your body
 what you wanna put in your body.
 And when you were presenting a case
 of why this should be investigated,
 you're trying to find, as you mentioned,
 the worst possible things on there.
 Is that what you were saying?
 So we had arrested a guy named Jeremy Hammond
 and he hit himself.
 He was a hacker and he would be arrested.
 It was the second time he had been arrested for hacking.
 He used Tor.
 And so that kind of brought us to a point.
 The FBI has a computer system where you look up things.
 You look up anything.
 I could look up your name or whatever
 if you're associated with my case.
 And we were finding at the time a lot of things
 in you need to look it up, a case would end.
 Be like, oh, this is Tor.
 And just stopped.
 Like we couldn't get any further.
 So we had just had this bigger rest of a Sabu
 and took down Anonymous.
 And sometimes in the FBI, the way it used to,
 the old school FBI, when you had a big case
 and you're working seven days a week
 and 14 hours, 15 hours a day, you sort of take a break.
 The boss kind of said, yeah, I'll see you in a few months.
 Go get to know your family a little bit and come back.
 But the group of guys I was with was like,
 let's find the next big challenge.
 And that's when we were finding case closed, it was Tor.
 Case closed, it was Tor.
 So said, let's take a look at Tor
 and let's see what we can do.
 Maybe we'll take a different approach.
 And Silk Road was being looked at by other law enforcement,
 but it was taking like a drug approach
 where I'm going to find a drug buyer who got, you know,
 the drug sent to them in the mail and let's arrest up.
 Let's go up the chain.
 But the buyers didn't know their dealers.
 They never met them.
 And so you were taking a cyber security approach.
 Yeah, we said, let's try to look at this
 from a cyber approach and see if we can
 gleam anything out of it.
 So I'm actually indirectly connected to,
 I'm sure I'm not admitting anything
 that's not already on my FBI file.
 Oh, I can already tell you what you're gonna tell me though.
 What's that?
 That when you were at college, you wrote a paper
 and you're connected to the person that started.
 You son of a bitch.
 You clever son of a bitch.
 I'm an FBI agent or a former FBI agent.
 How would I not have known that?
 I could have told you other stuff.
 No, that's exactly what you were about to tell me.
 I was looking up his name because I forgot it.
 So one of my advisors for my PhD was Rachel Greenstatt
 and she is married to Roger Dingledyne,
 which is the co-founder of the Tor Project.
 And I actually reached out to him last night
 to do a podcast together.
 I don't know.
 It's,
 I have,
 it was,
 it was a good, it was a good party trick.
 I mean, it was cool that you know this
 and the timing of it, it was just like beautiful.
 But just to link around on the Tor Project,
 so we understand.
 So Tor is this black box that people disappear in,
 in terms of like the, when you were tracking people.
 Can you paint a picture of what Tor is used in general?
 Other, it's like when you talk about Bitcoin,
 for example, cryptocurrency, especially today,
 much more people use it for legal activity
 versus illegal activity.
 What about Tor?
 Tor was originally invented by the US Navy
 so that like spies inside countries could talk to spies
 and no one could find them.
 There was no way of tracing them.
 And then they released that information free to the world.
 So Tor has two different versions of,
 not versions, two different ways it can be utilized.
 There's.onionsites, which is like a normal website,
 a.com, but it's only found within the Tor browser.
 You can only get there if you know the whole address
 and get there.
 So the way Tor is used is to go through the internet
 and then come out the other side
 if you want a different IP address,
 if you're trying to hide your identity.
 So if you were doing like, say cyber crime,
 I would have the victim computer
 and I would trace it back out to a Tor relay.
 And then because you don't have an active connection
 or what's called a circuit at the time,
 I wouldn't be able to trace it back.
 But even if you had an active circuit,
 I would have to go to each machine physically live
 and try to rebuild that, which is literally impossible.
 So what do you feel about Tor ethically, philosophically,
 as a human being on this world
 that spent quite a few years of your life
 and still trying to protect people?
 So part of my time in the FBI
 was working on child exploitation,
 kiddie porn, as they call it.
 That really changed my life in a way.
 And so anything that helps facilitate
 the exploitation of children fucking pisses me off.
 And that sort of jaded my opinion towards Tor,
 because it helps facilitate those sites.
 So this ideal of freedom that Russell Albrecht, for example,
 tried to embody is something that you
 don't connect with anymore because
 of what you've seen that ideal being used for.
 I mean, the child exploitation
 is a specific example for it.
 And it's easy for me to sit here
 and say child exploitation, child porn,
 because no one listening to this is ever gonna say
 that I'm wrong and that we should allow child porn.
 Should, because some people utilize it in a bad way,
 should it go away?
 No, I mean, I'm a technologist.
 I want technology to move forward.
 People are gonna do bad things
 and they're going to use technology
 to help them do bad things.
 Well, let me ask you then,
 we'll jump around a little bit,
 but the things you were able to do
 in tracking down information, and we'll get to it,
 there is some suspicion that this was only possible
 with mass surveillance, like with NSA, for example.
 First of all, is there any truth to that?
 And second of all, what do you feel
 are the pros and cons of mass surveillance?
 There is no truth to that.
 And then my feelings on mass surveillance.
 If there was, would you tell me?
 Probably not, but.
 Yeah.
 I love this conversation so much.
 But what do you feel about the,
 given that you said child porn,
 what are the pros and cons of surveillance
 at a society level?
 I mean, nobody wants to give up their privacy.
 I say that, I say no one wants to give up their privacy,
 but I mean, I used to have to get a search warrant
 to look inside your house,
 or I can just log on to your Facebook
 and you've got pictures of all inside your house
 and what's going on.
 I mean, it's not, so people like the idea
 of not giving up their privacy,
 but they do it anyways.
 They're giving away their freedoms all the time.
 They're carrying watches that gives out their heartbeat
 to a weight of companies that are storing that.
 I mean, what's more personal than your heartbeat?
 So I think people on mass really want
 to protect their privacy,
 and I would say most people don't really need
 to protect their privacy.
 But the case against mass surveillance is that
 if you want to criticize the government
 in a very difficult time, you should be able to do it.
 So when you need the freedom, you should have it.
 So when you wake up one day and realize
 there's something going wrong with the country I love,
 I want to be able to help.
 One of the great things about the United States of America
 is there's that individual revolutionary spirit,
 like so that the government doesn't become too powerful.
 You can always protest.
 There's always the best of the ideal of freedom of speech.
 You can always say, fuck you to the man.
 And I think there's a concern of direct
 or indirect suppression of that through mass surveillance.
 You might not, is that little subtle fear
 that grows with time that,
 why bother criticizing the government?
 It's gonna be a headache.
 I'm gonna get a ticket every time I say something bad,
 that kind of thing.
 So it can get out of hand.
 The bureaucracy grows and the freedoms slip away.
 That's the criticism, right?
 I completely see your point and I agree with it.
 But I mean, on the other side,
 people criticize the government of these freedoms,
 but I mean, tech companies are talking
 about destroying your privacy
 and controlling what you can say.
 I realize they're private platforms
 and they can decide what's on their platform,
 but they're taking away your freedoms
 of what you can say.
 And we've heard some things
 where maybe government officials were in line
 with tech companies to take away some of that freedom.
 And I agree with you, that gets scary.
 Yeah, there's something about government that feels,
 maybe because of the history of human civilization,
 maybe because tech companies are a new thing,
 but just knowing the history of abuses of government,
 there's something about government
 that enables the corrupting nature of power
 to take hold at scale more than tech companies,
 at least what we've seen so far.
 I agree, I agree.
 But I mean, we haven't had a voice
 like we've had until recently.
 I mean, anyone that has a Twitter account now can speak
 and become a news article.
 My parents didn't have that voice.
 If they wanted to speak out against the government
 or do something, they had to go to a protest
 or organize a protest or do something along those lines.
 So we have more of a place to put our voice out now.
 Yeah, it's incredible, but that's why it hurts
 and that's why you notice it
 when certain voices get removed.
 The president of the United States of America
 was removed from one such or all such platforms.
 And that hurts.
 Yeah, that's crazy to me.
 That's insane.
 That's insane that we took that away.
 Let's return to Silk Road and Rosalbrink.
 So how did your path with this very difficult,
 very fascinating case cross?
 We were looking to open a case against Tor
 because it was a problem.
 All the cases were closing because Tor.
 So we went on Tor and we came up with 26 different onion,
 dot onions that we targeted.
 We were looking for nexuses to hacking
 because I was on a squad called CY2
 and we were like the premier squad in New York
 that was working criminal cyber intrusions.
 And so, any website that was offering hackers for hire
 or hacking tools for free, or paid services,
 now we're seeing ransomware as a paid service
 and phishing as a paid service, anything that offered that.
 So we opened this case on, I think we called it,
 we say you have to name cases.
 One of the fun thing in the FBI is when you start a case,
 you get to name it.
 You would not believe how much time is spent
 in coming up with the name.
 Casey goes by, I think we called this onion peeler
 because of the, yeah.
 So a little bit of humor, a little bit of wit,
 and some profundity to the language.
 Yeah, yeah.
 Because you're gonna have to work with this
 for quite a lot.
 Yeah, this one had the potential of being a big one
 because I think Silk Road was like the sixth on the list
 for that case, but we all knew that was sort of
 the golden ring.
 If you could make the splash that that onion site
 was going down, then it would probably get some publicity.
 And that's part of law enforcement,
 is getting some publicity out of it
 that makes others think not to do it.
 I wish to say that Tor is the name of the project,
 the browser.
 What is the onion technology behind Tor?
 Let's say you wanna go to a dot onion site.
 You'll put in the dot onion you wanna go to
 and your computer will build communications
 with a Tor relay, which are all publicly available
 out there, but you'll encrypt it.
 You'll put a package around your data.
 And so it's encrypted and so can't read it.
 It goes to that first relay.
 That first relay knows about you
 and then knows about the next relay down the chain.
 And so it takes your data and then encrypts that
 on the outside and sends it to relay number two.
 Now relay number two only knows about relay number one.
 It doesn't know who you are asking for this.
 And it goes through there adding those layers on top,
 layers of encryption till it gets where it is.
 And then even the onion service doesn't know
 except for the relay it came from, who it's talking to.
 And so it peels back that, gives the information,
 puts another layer back on.
 And so it's layers like you're peeling an onion back
 of the different relays and that encryption protects
 who the sender is and what information they're sending.
 The more layers there are,
 the more exponentially difficult it is to decrypt it.
 I mean, you get to a place where you don't have to have
 so many layers because it doesn't matter anymore.
 It's mathematically impossible to decrypt it.
 But the more relays you have, the slower it is.
 I mean, that's one of the big drawbacks on TOR
 is how slow it operates.
 So how do you peel the onion?
 So what are the different methodologies
 for trying to get some information
 from a cybersecurity perspective
 on these operations like the Silk Road?
 It's very difficult.
 People have come up with different techniques.
 There's been techniques to put out in the news media
 about how they do it, running massive amounts of relays
 and you're controlling those relays.
 I think someone tried that once.
 So there's a technical solution
 and what about social engineering?
 What about trying to infiltrate the actual humans
 that are using the Silk Road and trying to get in that way?
 Yeah, I mean, I definitely could see the way of doing that.
 And in this case, in our takedown, we used that.
 There was one of my partners, Jared Dariegan,
 he was an HSI investigator and he had worked his way up
 to be a system admin on the site.
 So that did gleam quite a bit of information
 because he was inside and talking to, at that time,
 we only know it as DPR or Dreadpire Roberts.
 We didn't know who that was yet,
 but we had that open communication.
 And one of the things, the technical aspects on that
 is there was a Jabber server.
 There was, that's a communication,
 type of communication server that was being used.
 And we knew that Ross had his Jabber set to Pacific time.
 So we had a pretty good idea what part of the,
 what part of the country he was in.
 I mean, isn't that, from DPR's perspective,
 from Ross's perspective, isn't that clumsy?
 He wasn't a big computer guy.
 Do you notice that aspect of like the technical savvy
 of some of these guys doesn't seem to be quite,
 why weren't they good at this?
 Well, the real techie savvy ones, we don't arrest.
 We don't get to them, we don't find them.
 You don't get to them.
 Shout out to the techie criminals.
 They're probably watching this.
 I mean, yeah, I mean, you were getting the low hanging fruit.
 I mean, you're getting the ones that can be caught.
 I mean, they, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it,
 but the anonymous case, there was a guy named AV Unit.
 He's still, I lose sleep over him
 because we didn't catch him.
 We caught everybody else, we didn't catch him.
 He's good though.
 He pops up too once in a while on the internet
 and it pisses me off.
 Yeah, what's his name again?
 AV Unit, that's all I know is his AV Unit.
 AV Unit.
 Yeah, AV Unit.
 Yeah, I got a funny story about him
 and who people think he is.
 Can I actually, can we go on that brief tangent?
 Sure, I love tangents.
 Well, let me ask you, since he's probably he or she,
 do we know it's a he?
 We have no idea.
 Okay.
 I mean, that's another funny story
 about hackers, the he-she issue.
 What's the funny story there?
 Well, one of the guys in LulzSec was a she,
 it was a 17-year-old girl.
 And my source in the case, the guy Sabu
 that I arrested and part of it,
 and we sat side by side for nine months
 and then took down the case and all that.
 He was convinced she was a girl and he said,
 and he was in love with her almost at one point.
 It turns out to be a 35-year-old guy living in England.
 Oh, so he was convinced as a...
 Yes, he was absolutely convinced.
 Based on what exactly, by linguistic,
 like human-based linguistic analysis or what?
 She, he, whatever, Kayla, ended up being
 a modification of his sister's name,
 the real guy's sister's name,
 was so good at building the backstory.
 All these guys, and it's funny,
 these guys are part of a hacking crew.
 They social engineer the shit out of each other
 just to build if one of them ever gets caught.
 They'll convince everybody else
 that they're a Brazilian ISP owner or something like that,
 and that's how I'm so powerful.
 Well, yeah, that social engineering aspect
 is part of living a life of cybercrime or cybersecurity
 and the offensive or defensive.
 So AV unit, can I ask you also just
 the attention of a tangent first?
 That's my favorite tangent.
 Okay.
 Is it possible for me to have a podcast conversation
 with somebody who hasn't been caught yet,
 and because they have the conversation,
 they still won't be caught?
 And is that a good idea?
 Meaning, is there a safe way for a criminal
 to talk to me at a podcast?
 I would think so.
 I would think that someone could,
 I mean, someone who has been living a double life
 for long enough where you think they're not a criminal.
 No, no, no, they would have to admit
 that they would say, I am AV unit.
 Oh, you would wanna have a conversation with AV unit?
 Yes.
 Is there a way?
 I think from an FBI perspective, technically speaking,
 because I, so let me explain my motivation.
 Sure.
 I think I would like to be able to talk to people
 from all walks of life and understanding criminals,
 understanding their mind, I think is very important.
 And I think there's fundamentally something different
 between a criminal who's still active
 versus one that's been caught.
 The mind just from observing it changes completely
 once you're caught.
 You have a big shift in your understanding of the world.
 I mean, I do have a question about the ethics
 of having such conversations, but first, technically,
 is that possible?
 If I was technically advising you,
 I would say, first off, don't advertise it.
 The fewer people that you're gonna tell
 that you're having this conversation with, the better.
 And yeah, you could, are you doing it in person?
 Are you doing it in-
 In person would be amazing, yeah,
 but their face would not be shown.
 Face would not be shown, yeah.
 I mean, you couldn't publish a show for a while.
 They'd have to put a lot of trust in you
 that you're not going to,
 you're gonna have to alter those tapes.
 I say tapes, cause it's old school.
 Optima, you know.
 It's a tape.
 Exactly, I'm sure a lot of people just said that.
 Like, oh shit, this old guy just said tape.
 I heard VHS was in the 1800s, I think.
 But yeah, yeah, you could do it.
 They'd have to have complete faith and trust in you
 that you destroy the originals after you've altered it.
 What about if they don't have faith?
 Is there a way for them to attain security?
 So, like, for me to go through some kind of process
 where I meet them somewhere where-
 I mean, you're not gonna do it without a bag over your head.
 I don't know if that's the life you wanna live.
 I'm fine with a bag over my head.
 That's gonna get taken out of context.
 But I just, I think it's a worthy effort.
 It's a worthy, it's worthy to go through the hardship
 of that to understand the mind of somebody.
 I think fundamentally, conversations are a different thing
 than the operation of law enforcement.
 Understanding the mind of a criminal,
 I think, is really important.
 I don't know if you're gonna have the honest conversation
 that you're looking for.
 I mean, it may sound honest, but it may not be the truth.
 I've found most times when I was talking to criminals,
 it's lies mixed with half-truths.
 And you kinda, it's, if they're good,
 they can keep that story going for long enough.
 If they're not, you know, you kind of see the relief in them
 when you finally break that wall down.
 That's the job of an interviewer.
 If the interviewer is good, then perhaps not directly,
 but through the gaps,
 seeps out the truth of the human being.
 So not necessarily the details of how they do the operations
 and so on, but just who they are as a human being,
 what their motivations are, what their ethics are,
 how they see the world, what is good, what is evil.
 Do they see themselves as good?
 What do they see their motivation as?
 Do they have resentment?
 What do they think about love for the people
 within their small community?
 Do they have resentment for the government
 or for other nations or for other people?
 Do they have childhood issues that led to a different view
 of the world than others perhaps have?
 Do they have certain fetishes, like sexual and otherwise,
 that led to the construction of the world?
 They might be able to reveal some deep flaws
 to the cybersecurity infrastructure of our world.
 Not in detail, but like philosophically speaking,
 they might have, I know you might say it's just a narrative,
 but they might have a kind of ethical concern
 for the well-being of the world that they're essentially
 attacking the weakness of the cybersecurity infrastructure
 because they believe ultimately
 that would lead to a safer world.
 So the attacks will reveal the weaknesses.
 And if they're stealing a bunch of money, that's okay
 because that's gonna enforce you to invest a lot more money
 in defending, yeah, defending things that actually matter,
 you know, nuclear warheads and all those kinds of things.
 I mean, I could see, you know, it's fascinating
 to explore the mind of a human being like that
 because I think it will help people understand.
 Now, of course, it's still a person that's creating
 a lot of suffering in the world, which is a problem.
 So do you think ethically it's a good thing to do?
 I don't, I mean, I feel like I have a fairly high
 ethical bar that I have to put myself on
 and I don't think I have a problem with it.
 I would love to listen to it.
 Okay, great.
 I mean, not that I'm your ethical coach here.
 Yeah, well, that's interesting.
 I mean, so, cause I thought you would have become jaded
 and exhausted by the criminal mind.
 It's funny.
 You know, I'm, you know, fast forward in our story.
 I'm very good friends with Hector Montziger,
 with the Sabu, the guy I arrested.
 And he tells stories of what he did in his past.
 And I'm like, oh, that Hector, you know,
 but then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson
 and I was like, ah, this guy stealing money
 from the US government and welfare fraud
 and all that sort of things, it just pissed me off.
 And I don't know why I have that differentiation in my head.
 I don't know why I think one's just,
 oh, Hector will be Hector and then this guy just pissed me off.
 Well, you didn't feel that way about Hector
 until you probably met him.
 Well, I didn't know Hector, I knew Sabu.
 So I hunted down Sabu and I learned about Hector
 over those nine months.
 We'll talk about it later.
 Let's finish with, let's return Tangent to back to Tangent.
 Oh, one Tangent up, who's AV Unit?
 I don't know.
 That's interesting.
 So he's at the core of Anonymous.
 He's one of the critical people in Anonymous.
 What is known about him?
 There's what's known in public and what was known
 because he sat with Hector.
 And he was sort of like the set things up guy.
 So if, LulzSec had like their hackers,
 which was Sabu and Kayla, and they had their media guy,
 this guy Topiary, he lived up in the northern end of England.
 And they had a few other guys,
 but AV Unit was the guy that set up infrastructure.
 So if you need a VPN in Brazil or something like that
 to pop through, one of the first things Hector told me
 after we arrested him is that AV Unit
 was a secret service agent.
 And I was like, oh shit.
 Just because he kind of lived that lifestyle.
 He'd be around for a bunch of days
 and then all of a sudden gone for three weeks.
 And I tried to get more out of Hector
 and that early on in that relationship,
 I'm sure he was a little bit guarded
 and maybe trying to social engineer me.
 Maybe he wanted that, oh shit,
 there's law enforcement involved in this.
 And not to say, I mean, I was in over my head
 with that case, just the amount of work that was going on.
 So to track them all down,
 plus the 350 hacks that came in
 about just military institutions,
 it was swimming in the deep end.
 So it was just at the end of the case,
 I looked back and I was like, oh fuck, AV Unit,
 I could have had them all.
 Maybe that's the perfectionist in me.
 Oh man, well, reach out somehow.
 I won't say how, right?
 We'll have to figure out.
 Would you have them on?
 Yeah. Oh my God.
 If you just let me know.
 Just talk shit about you the whole time.
 That's perfect.
 He probably doesn't even care about me.
 Well, now he will.
 Oh, yeah.
 Because there's a certain pleasure
 of a guy who's extremely good at his job
 not catching another guy who's extremely good at his job.
 Obviously better, he got away.
 There you go, he's still eating at you.
 I love it.
 You or she.
 If I can meet that guy one day, he or she,
 that'd be great.
 I mean, I have no power.
 So yes, Silk Road, can you speak to the scale of this thing?
 What, just for people who are not familiar,
 how big was it?
 And any other interesting things you understand
 about its operation when it was active?
 So it was when we finally got looking through the books
 and the numbers came out,
 it was about $1.2 billion in sales.
 It's kind of hard with the fluctuation value of Bitcoin
 at the time to come up with a real number.
 So you kind of pick a daily average and go across.
 Most of the operation was done in Bitcoin.
 It was all done in Bitcoin.
 You couldn't, you had escrow accounts.
 You came in and you put money in an escrow account
 and the transaction wasn't done until the client got
 the drugs or whatever they had bought.
 And then the drug dealers had sent it in.
 There was some talk at the time that the cartel
 was starting to sell on there.
 So that started getting a little hairy there at the end.
 What was your understanding of the relationship
 between organized crime, like the cartels,
 and this kind of more ad hoc, new age market
 that is the Silk Road?
 I mean, it was all just chatter.
 It was just, you know, cause like I said,
 Jared was in the inside.
 So we saw some of it from the admin sides
 and Ross had a lot of private conversations
 with the different people that he had advised him,
 but no one knew each other.
 I mean, the only thing that they knew
 were the admins had to send an ID to Ross,
 had to send a picture of their driver's license or passport,
 which I always found very strange
 because if you are an admin on a site that sells fake IDs,
 why would you send your real ID?
 And then why would the guy running the site
 who profits from selling fake IDs believe that it was?
 But fast forward, they were all real IDs.
 All the IDs that we found on Ross's computer as the admins
 were the real people's IDs.
 What do you make of that?
 Just other clumsiness?
 Yeah, low hanging fruit, I guess.
 I guess that's what it is.
 I mean, I would have bought,
 I mean, even Ross bought fake IDs off the site.
 He had federal agents knock on his door,
 you know, and then he got a little cocky about it.
 The landscape, the dynamics of trust is fascinating here.
 So you trust certain ideas are,
 like who do you trust in that kind of market?
 What was your understanding of the network of trust?
 I don't think anyone trusts anybody, you know?
 I mean, I think Ross had his advisors of trust,
 but outside of that, I mean, he required people
 to send their ID for their trust.
 He, you know, people stole from him.
 There was, there's open cases of that.
 It's a criminal world.
 You can't trust anybody.
 What was his life like, you think?
 Lonely. Can you imagine being trapped
 in something like that where your whole world
 focused on that and you can't tell people
 what you do all day?
 Could he have walked away?
 Like someone else take over or the site just shut down?
 Either one.
 Just you putting yourself in his shoes,
 the loneliness, the anxiety,
 the just the growing immensity of it.
 So walk away with some kind of financial stability.
 I couldn't have made it past two days.
 I don't like loneliness.
 I mean, if my wife's away,
 I'd probably call her 10, 12 times a day.
 We just talk about things, you know?
 I just, you know, something crossed my mind.
 I want to talk about it.
 And I'm sure she...
 And you'd like to talk to her, like honestly,
 about everything.
 So if you were running so crotious,
 you wouldn't be able to like...
 Hopefully I'd have a little protection.
 I'd only mentioned to her when we were in bed
 to have that marital connection, but who knows?
 I mean, she's going to question me.
 I mean, she's going to question why the Ferrari is outside
 and things like that.
 Yeah.
 Well, I'm sure you can come up with something.
 Why didn't he walk away?
 It's another question of why don't criminals walk away
 in these situations?
 Well, I mean, I don't know every criminal mind
 and some do.
 I mean, AV unit walked away.
 I mean, not to go back to that son of a bitch, but...
 There's a theme to this.
 But you know, Ross started counting his dollars.
 I mean, he really kept track of how much money he was making
 and it started getting exponentially growth.
 I mean, if he would have stayed at it,
 he would have probably been one of the richest people
 in the world.
 And do you think he liked the actual money
 or the fact of the number growing?
 I mean, have you ever held a Bitcoin?
 Yeah.
 Oh, you have?
 Well, he never did.
 What do you mean held a Bitcoin?
 You can't hold it.
 It's not real.
 It's not like I can give you a briefcase of Bitcoin
 or something like that.
 He liked the idea of it growing.
 He liked the idea.
 I mean, I think it started off as sharing this idea,
 but then he really did turn to like,
 I am the captain of this ship and that's what goes.
 And he was making a lot of money.
 And again, my interactions with Ross was about
 maybe five or six hours over a two-day period.
 I knew DPR because I read his words and all that.
 I didn't really know Ross.
 There was a journal found on his computer
 and so it sort of kind of gave me a little insight.
 So I don't like to do a playbook for criminals,
 but I'll tell you right now, don't write things down.
 There was a big fad about people,
 like remember kids going around
 and shooting people with paintballs and filming it?
 I don't know why you would do that.
 Why would you videotape yourself committing crime
 and then publish it?
 Like if there's one thing I've taught my children,
 don't record yourself doing bad things.
 It never goes well.
 And you actually give advice in the other end of logs
 being very useful for the defense perspective
 for information is useful for being able to figure out
 what the attacks were all about.
 Logs are the only reason I found Hector Montsegur.
 I mean, the one time his VPN dropped during a Fox hack
 and he says he did, it wasn't even hacking.
 He just was sent a link and he clicked on it.
 And in 10 million lines of logs,
 there was one IP address that stuck out.
 This is fascinating.
 We'll explore several angles of that.
 So what was the process of bringing down Ross
 and the Silk Road?
 All right, so that's a long story.
 You want the whole thing or you wanna break it up?
 Let's start at the beginning.
 Once we had the information of the chat logs
 and all that from the server, we found-
 What's the server?
 What's the chat log?
 So the dot onion was running the website,
 the Silk Road was running on a server in Iceland.
 How did you figure that out?
 That was one of the claims that the NSA-
 Yeah, that's the one that we said that,
 yeah, I wouldn't tell you if it was.
 It's on the internet.
 I mean, the internet has their conspiracy theories
 and all that, so.
 But you figure out, that's the part of the thing you do.
 It's puzzle pieces and you have to put them together
 and look for different pieces of information
 and figure out, okay, so you figure out
 the servers in Iceland.
 We get a copy of it and so we start getting clues
 off of that.
 With a physical copy of the server?
 Yeah, you fly over there.
 So you go, if you've been to Iceland
 if you've never been, you should definitely go to Iceland.
 Is it beautiful or?
 I love it, I love it.
 It was, so I'll tell you this.
 So, sorry, tangents.
 I love this, yeah.
 So I went to Iceland for the anonymous case,
 then I went to Iceland for the Silk Road case
 and I was like, oh shit, all cybercrime goes through Iceland.
 It was just my sort of thing.
 And I was over there for like the third time
 and I said, if I ever can bring my family here.
 Like so there's a place called Thingavar
 and I'm sure I'm fucking up the name,
 the Icelandics are pissed right now.
 But it's where the North American continental plate
 and the European continental plate are pulling apart
 and it's being filled in with volcanic material
 in the middle.
 And it's so cool.
 Like, I was like, one day I'll be able to afford
 to bring my family here.
 And once I left.
 It's just like the humbling and the beauty of nature.
 Just everything, man, it was a different world.
 It was insane how great Iceland is.
 And so we went back and we rented a van
 and we took friends and we drove around the entire country.
 Absolutely, like a beautiful place.
 Like Reykjavik's nice, but get out of Reykjavik
 as quick as you can and see the countryside.
 How is this place even real?
 Well, it's so new.
 I mean, that's so, you know, our rivers have been going
 through here for millions of years
 and flattened everything out and all that.
 These are new, this is new land being carved
 by these rivers.
 You can walk behind a waterfall in one place.
 It's the most beautiful place I've ever been.
 You understand why this is a place
 where a lot of hacking is being done?
 Because the energy is free and it's cool.
 So you have a lot of servers going on there.
 Server farms, you know, the energy has come
 up out of the ground, geothermal.
 And so, and then it keeps all the servers nice and cool.
 So why not keep your computers there at a cheap rate?
 I'll definitely visit for several reasons,
 including to talk to AV unit.
 Yeah, he'll let you there.
 Well, the servers are there,
 but they don't probably live there.
 I mean, that's the interesting, I mean, the Pacific,
 the PSC, the time zones, there's so many fascinating things
 to explore here, but so you got-
 Sorry, to add to that,
 I mean, the European internet cable goes through there.
 So, you know, across the Greenland
 and down through Canada and all that.
 So they have backbone access with cheap energy
 and free cold weather, you know.
 And beautiful.
 Oh, and beautiful, yes.
 So chat logs on that server, what was in the chat logs?
 Everything, he kept them all.
 That's another issue.
 If you're writing a criminal enterprise,
 please don't keep all, again, I'm not making a guidebook
 of how to commit your perfect crime, but you know,
 every chat he ever had and everyone's chat,
 it was like going into Facebook of criminal activity.
 Yeah, just looking at texts with Elon Musk
 being part of the conversations,
 I don't know if you're familiar,
 but they've been made public for the court cases
 going through, was going through, is going through,
 was going through with Twitter.
 I don't know where it is.
 But it made me realize that, oh, okay.
 I'm generally, that's my philosophy on life
 is like anything I text or email or say publicly
 or privately, I should be proud of.
 So I try to kind of do that because you basically,
 you say don't keep chat logs,
 but it's very difficult to erase chat logs from this world.
 I guess if you're a criminal, that should be,
 like you have to be exceptionally competent
 at that kind of thing.
 To erase your footprints is very, very difficult.
 Can't make one mistake.
 All it takes is one mistake of keeping it.
 But yeah, I mean, not only do you have to be,
 whatever you put in a chat log or whatever you put in an email,
 it has to hold up and you have to stand behind it publicly
 when it comes out, but if it comes out 10 years from now,
 you have to stand behind it.
 I mean, we're seeing that now in today's society.
 Yeah, but that's a responsibility
 you have to take really, really seriously.
 If I was a parent and advising teens,
 you kind of have to teach them that.
 I know there's a sense like, no,
 we'll become more accustomed to that kind of thing,
 but in reality, no, I think in the future
 we'll still be held responsible for the weird shit we do.
 Yeah, a friend of mine, his daughter got kicked out
 of college because of something she posted in high school.
 And the shittiest thing for him,
 but great for my kids, great lesson.
 Look over there and you don't want that to happen to you.
 Yeah, okay, so in the chat logs was useful information,
 like breadcrumbs of what,
 of information that you can then pull out.
 Yeah, great evidence and stuff, you know, I mean, obviously.
 Oh, evidence too.
 Yeah, a lot of evidence.
 Here's a sale of this much heroin
 because Ross ended up getting charged
 with a czar status on certain things.
 And that's a certain weight in each type of drug
 that you had, like, I think it's four or five employees
 of your empire and that you made more than $10 million.
 And so it's just like what the narco traffickers
 get charged with or anybody out of Columbia, you know.
 And that was primarily what he was charged with
 during when he was arrested is the drug.
 Yeah, and he got charged with some of the hacking tools too.
 Okay, because he's in prison, what, for?
 Two life sentences plus 40 years.
 And no possibility of parole?
 In the federal system, there's no possibility
 of parole when you have life.
 The only way you get out is if the president pardons you.
 There's always a chance.
 There is, I think it was close.
 I heard rumors there was close.
 Well, right, so it depends, given, it's fascinating,
 but given the political, the ideological ideas
 that he represented and espoused,
 it's not out of the realm of possibility.
 Yeah, I mean, I've been asked before,
 does he get out of prison first
 or does Snowden come back into America?
 I don't know, I have no idea.
 Snowden just became a Russian citizen?
 I saw that and I've heard a lot of weird theories
 about that one.
 Well, actually, on another tangent, let me ask you,
 do you think Snowden is a good or a bad person?
 A bad person.
 Can you make the case that he's a bad person?
 There's ways of being a whistleblower
 and there's rules set up on how to do that.
 He didn't follow those rules.
 I mean, I'm red, white and blue, so I'm pretty, you know.
 So you think his actions were anti-American?
 I think the results of his actions were anti-American.
 I don't know if his actions were anti-American.
 Do you think he could have anticipated
 the negative consequences of his action?
 Should we judge him by the consequences
 or the ideals of the intent of his actions?
 I think we all get to judge him by our own beliefs,
 but I believe what he did was wrong.
 Can you still man the case that he's actually
 a good person and good for this country,
 for the United States of America,
 as a flag bearer for the whistleblowers,
 the check on the power of government?
 Yeah, I mean, I'm not big government type guy, you know.
 So even that sounds weird coming from a government guy
 for so many years, but there's rules in place for a reason.
 I mean, he put some of our best capabilities,
 he made them publicly available.
 They really kind of set us back in the,
 and this isn't my world at all,
 but the offensive side of cybersecurity.
 Right, so he revealed stuff that he didn't need to reveal
 in order to make the point.
 Correct.
 So if you could imagine a world where he leaked stuff
 that revealed the mass surveillance efforts
 and not reveal other stuff.
 Yeah.
 Like, is the mass surveillance,
 I mean, that's the thing that,
 of course, in the interpretation of that,
 there's fear-mongering, but at the core,
 that was a real shock to people,
 that it's possible for government to collect data at scale.
 It's surprising to me that people are that shocked by it.
 Well, there's conspiracies,
 and then there's actual evidence that that is happening.
 I mean, there's a lot of reality that people ignore,
 but when it hits you in the face,
 you realize, holy shit, we're living in a new world.
 This is the new reality,
 and we have to deal with that reality.
 Just like you work in cybersecurity,
 I think it really hasn't hit most people
 how fucked we all are in terms of cybersecurity.
 Okay, let me rephrase that.
 How many dangers there are in a digital world,
 how much under attack we all are,
 and how more intensity attacks are getting,
 and how difficult the defense is, and how important it is,
 and how much we should value it,
 and all the different things we should do
 at the small and large scale to defend.
 Like most people really haven't woken up,
 they think about privacy from tech companies,
 they don't think about attacks, cyber attacks.
 People don't think they're a target,
 and that message definitely has to get out there.
 I mean, if you have a voice, you're a target.
 If the place you work, you might be a target.
 So your husband might work at some place,
 because now people are working from home,
 so they're gonna target you to get access
 to his network in order to get in.
 Well, in that same way, the idea that the US government
 or any government could be doing mass surveillance
 on its citizens is one that was a wake-up call,
 because you could imagine the ways in which that could,
 like you could abuse the power of that
 to control the citizenry for political reasons and purposes.
 Absolutely, you could abuse it.
 I think during the part of the Snowden League
 saw that two NSA guys were moderating their girlfriends,
 and there's rules in place for that.
 Those people should be punished for abusing that.
 But how else are we going to hear about terrorists
 that are in the country talking about birthday cakes?
 And that was a case where that was the trip word,
 that we're gonna go bomb New York City's subway.
 Yeah, it's complicated, but it just feels like
 there should be some balance of transparency.
 There should be a check on that power.
 Because in the name of the war on terror,
 you can sort of sacrifice,
 there is a trade-off between security and freedom,
 but it just feels like there's a giant slippery slope
 on the sacrificing of freedom in the name of security.
 I hear you.
 We live in a world where, well, I live in a world
 where I had to tell you exactly, when I arrested someone,
 I had to write a 50-page document of how I arrested you
 and all the probable cause I have against you
 and all that.
 Well, bad guys are reading that.
 They're reading how I caught you
 and they're changing the way they're doing things.
 They're changing their MO.
 They're doing it to be more secure.
 If we tell people how we're monitoring,
 what we're surveilling, we're gonna lose that.
 I mean, the terrorists are just gonna go a different way.
 And I'm not trying to, again, I'm not big government.
 I'm not trying to say that it's cool
 that we're monitoring the US government's monitoring
 everything, big tech's monitoring everything.
 They're just monetizing it versus
 possibly using it against you.
 But there is a balance.
 In those 50 pages, they have a lot of value.
 If they make your job harder,
 but they prevent you from abusing the power of the job.
 Yeah.
 There's a balance.
 Yeah.
 That's a tricky balance.
 So the chat logs in Iceland
 give you evidence of the heroin
 and all the large scale czar level drug trading.
 What else did it give you in terms of the how to catch?
 It gave us infrastructure.
 So the onion name was actually running on a server in France.
 So if you like,
 and it only came in through a back channel of VPN
 to connect to the Iceland server.
 There was a Bitcoin like kind of vault server.
 There was also in Iceland.
 And I think that was so that the admins
 couldn't get into the Bitcoins,
 the other admins that were hired to work on the site.
 So you could get into the site,
 but you couldn't touch the money.
 Only Ross had access to that.
 And then, another big mistake on Ross's part
 is he had the backups for everything
 at a data center in Philadelphia.
 Don't put your infrastructure in United States.
 I mean, again, let's not make a playbook, but you know.
 Well, I think these are law hanging fruit
 that people of competence would know already.
 I agree.
 But it's interesting that he wasn't competent enough to make.
 So he was incompetent in certain ways.
 Yeah, I don't think he was a mastermind
 of setting up an infrastructure that would protect
 his online business because, you know,
 keeping chat logs, keeping a diary,
 putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be,
 bad decisions.
 How did you figure out that he's in San Francisco?
 So we had that part with Jared,
 that he was on the West Coast.
 And then-
 Who again is Jared?
 Jared Day-Eaggen was a, he was a partner in,
 he was a DHS agent, worked for HSI,
 Homeland Security Investigations in Chicago.
 He started his Silk Road investigation
 because he was working at O'Hare
 and a weird package came in, come to find out
 he traced it back to Silk Road.
 So he started working at a Silk Road investigation
 long before I started my case.
 And he made his way up undercover
 all the way to be an admin on Silk Road.
 So he was talking to Ross on a Jabra server,
 the private Jabra server, private chat communication server.
 And we noticed that Ross's time zone
 on that Jabra server was set to the West Coast.
 So we had Pacific time on there.
 So we had a region, 1 24th of the world was covered
 of where we thought he might be.
 And from there, how do you get to San Francisco?
 There was another guy, an IRS agent
 that was part of the team and he used a powerful tool
 to find his clue.
 He used the world of Google.
 He simply just went back and Googled around for Silk Road
 at the time it was coming up
 and found some posts on like some help forums
 that this guy was starting an onion website
 and wanted some cryptocurrency help.
 And if you could help him, please reach out
 to ross.albrick at gmail.com in my world.
 That's a clue.
 Okay, so that's as simple as that.
 Yeah, and the name he used on that post was Frosty.
 Yeah, so you had to connect Frosty
 and other uses in Frosty and here's a Gmail
 and the Gmail has the name.
 The Gmail posted that I need help
 under the name Frosty on this forum.
 So what's the connection of Frosty elsewhere?
 The person logging into the Philadelphia backup server,
 the name of the computer was Frosty.
 Another clue in my world.
 And that's it.
 The name is there, the connection to the Philadelphia server
 and then to Iceland is there.
 And so the rest is small details in terms of,
 or is there interesting details?
 No, I mean, there's some electronic surveillance
 that find Ross.albrick living in a house
 and is there, is a computer at his house attaching to,
 does it have tour traffic at the same time that DPR is on?
 Another big clue.
 Matching up timeframes.
 Again, just putting your email out there,
 putting your name out there like that.
 Like what I see from that, just at the scale of that market,
 what just makes me wonder how many criminals are out there
 that are not making these low hanging fruit mistakes
 and are still successfully operating.
 To me, it seems like you could be a criminal,
 it's much easier to be a criminal on the internet.
 What else to you is interesting to understand
 about that case of Ross and Silk Road
 and just the history of it from your own relationship
 with it, from a cybersecurity perspective,
 from an ethical perspective, all that kind of stuff.
 Like when you look back,
 what's interesting to you about that case?
 I think my views on the case have changed over time.
 I mean, it was my job back then.
 So I just looked at it as of, I'm going after this,
 I sort of made a name for myself in the bureau
 for the anonymous case.
 And then this one was just, I mean, this was a bigger deal.
 I mean, they flew me down to DC to meet with the director
 about this case.
 The president of the United States was gonna announce
 this case, the arrest.
 Unfortunately, the government shut down two days before.
 So it was just us.
 And that's really the only reason I had any publicity
 out of it is because the government shut down
 and the only thing that went public was that affidavit
 with my signature at the end.
 Otherwise it would have just been the attorney general
 and the president announcing the rest of this big thing
 and you wouldn't have seen me.
 Did you understand that this was a big case?
 Yeah, I knew at the time.
 Was it because of the scale of it or what it stood for?
 I just knew that the public was gonna react
 in a big way, like the media was.
 Now, did I think that it was gonna be on the front page
 of every newspaper the day after the arrest?
 No, but I could sense it.
 Like I went like three or four days without sleep.
 When I was out in San Francisco to arrest Ross,
 I had sent three guys to Iceland to...
 So it was a three-prong approach for the take down.
 It was get Ross, get the bitcoins and seize the site.
 Like we didn't want someone else taking control of the site.
 And we wanted that big splash of that banner.
 Like, look, the government found this site.
 Like you might not wanna think about doing this again.
 So...
 And you were able to pull off all three?
 Maybe that's my superpower.
 I'm really good about putting smarter people on
 than I am to gather on the right things.
 You know, I've done...
 It's the only way to do it.
 In the business I formed, that's what I did.
 I hired only smarter people than me.
 And I'm not that smart, but you know,
 smart enough to know who the smart people are.
 The team was able to do all three.
 Yeah, we were able to get all three done.
 Yeah, and the one guy, one of the guys,
 the main guys I sent to Iceland, man, he was so smart.
 Like I sent another guy from the FBI to France
 to get that part and he couldn't do it.
 So the guy in Iceland did it from Iceland.
 They had to pull some stuff out of memory on a computer.
 You know, it's live process stuff.
 I'm sure you've done that before, but...
 I'm sure you did.
 Look what you're doing.
 This is like a multi-layer interrogation going on.
 Was there a concern that somebody else
 would step in and control the site?
 Absolutely.
 We didn't have insight on who exactly had control.
 So it turns out that Ross had like dictatorial control.
 So it wasn't easy to delegate to somebody else.
 He hadn't.
 I think he had some sort of ideas.
 I mean, his diary talked about walking away
 and giving it to somebody else, but he didn't...
 He couldn't give up that control to anybody apparently.
 Which makes you think that power corrupts
 and his ideals were not as strong as he espoused about.
 Because if it was about the freedom
 of being able to buy drugs, if you want to,
 then he surely should have found ways to delegate that power.
 Well, he changed over time.
 You could see it in his writings that he changed.
 So people argue back and forth
 that there was never murders on Silk Road.
 When we were doing the investigation,
 to us there were six murders.
 So the way we saw him at the time
 was Ross ordered people to be murdered.
 You know, people stole from him and all that.
 It was sort of an evolution from,
 oh man, I can't deal with this.
 I can't do it.
 It's too much.
 To the last one was like, the guy said,
 well, he's got three roommates.
 It's like, oh, we'll kill them too.
 Was that ever proven in court?
 No, the murders never went forward
 because there was some stuff, problems in that case.
 So there was a separate case in Baltimore
 that they had been working on for a lot longer.
 And so, you know, during the investigation,
 that caused a bunch of problems
 because now we have multiple federal agencies
 case against the same thing.
 How do you decide not to push forward
 the murder investigations?
 So there was a deconfliction meeting that happened in DC.
 I didn't happen to go to that meeting,
 but Jared went, this is before I ever knew Jared.
 And we have like televisions
 where we can just sit in a room and sit in on the meeting,
 but it's all, you know, secured network and all that.
 So we can talk openly about secure things.
 And we sat in on the meeting
 and people just kept saying the term sweat equity.
 I've got sweat equity, meaning that they had worked
 on the case for so long that they deserve to take them down.
 And by this time, you know, no one knew about us,
 but we told them at the meeting that,
 well, we had found the server and we have a copy of it
 and we have the infrastructure.
 And these guys had just had communications under covers.
 They didn't really know what was going on.
 And this wasn't my first deconfliction meeting.
 We had a huge deconfliction meeting
 during the anonymous case.
 What's the deconfliction meeting?
 Agents within your agency or other federal agencies
 have an investigation that if you expose your case
 or took down your case would hurt their case
 or the other way.
 Oh, so you kind of have a,
 it's like the rival gangs meet at the table
 in a smoke filled room and-
 Less bullets at the end, but yes.
 Yes.
 It's a boy with the sweat equity.
 Yeah.
 I mean, there's careers at stake, right?
 Yeah.
 You hate that idea.
 Yeah. I mean, why would you, why is that a stake?
 Just because you've worked on it long enough,
 longer than I have, that means you did better?
 Yeah.
 That's insane to me.
 That's rewarding bad behavior.
 And so the part of the sweat equity discussion
 was about murder and this was,
 here's a chance to actually bust them
 given the data you have from Iceland
 and all that kind of stuff.
 So why-
 Well, they wanted us just to turn the data over to them.
 To them.
 Yeah. Thanks for getting us this far.
 Here it is.
 I mean, it came to the point where they sent us,
 like they had a picture of what they thought Ross was
 and it was an internet meme.
 It really was a meme.
 It was a photo that we could look up.
 Like it was insane.
 All right.
 So there's different degrees of competence
 all across the world between different people.
 Yes.
 Okay.
 Does part of you regret because you pushed forward
 the heroin and the drug trade,
 never got to the murder discussion?
 I mean, the only regret in is that
 the internet doesn't seem to understand.
 Like they just kind of blow that part off
 that he literally paid people to have people murdered.
 It didn't result in a murder.
 And I thank God no one resulted in a murder.
 But that's where his mind was.
 His mind and where he wrote in his diary
 was that I had people killed and here's the money.
 He paid it.
 He paid a large amount of bitcoins for that murder.
 So he didn't just even think about it.
 He actually took action.
 But the murders never happened.
 He took action by paying the money.
 Correct.
 And the people came back with results.
 He thought they were murdered.
 That said, can you understand the steelman
 the case for the drug trade on Silk Road?
 Like making, can you make the case
 that it's a net positive for society?
 So there was a time period of when we found out
 the infrastructure and when we built the case against Ross.
 I don't remember exactly.
 Six weeks, a month, two months, I don't know.
 Somewhere in there.
 But then at Ross' sentencing, there was a father
 that stood up and talked about his son dying.
 And I went back and kind of did the math.
 And it was between those time periods
 of when we knew we could shut it down.
 We could have pulled the plug on the server and gone.
 And when Ross was arrested,
 his son died from buying drugs on Silk Road.
 And I still think about that father a lot.
 But if we look at scale at the war on drugs,
 let's just even outside of Silk Road,
 do you think the war on drugs by the United States
 has caused, has alleviated more suffering
 or caused more suffering in the world?
 That might be above my pay scale.
 I mean, I understand the other side of the argument.
 I mean, people said that I don't have to go down
 to the corner to buy drugs.
 I'm not gonna get shot on the corner
 buying drugs or something.
 I can just have them sent to my house.
 People are gonna do drugs anyways.
 I understand that argument.
 From my personal standpoint,
 if I made it more difficult for my children to get drugs,
 then I'm satisfied.
 So your personal philosophy is that
 if we legalize all drugs, including heroin and cocaine,
 that that would not make for a better world.
 I don't, no, personally, I don't believe
 legalizing all drugs would make for a better world.
 Can you imagine that it would?
 Do you understand that argument?
 Sure, I mean, as I've gotten older,
 I've started to, I like to see both sides of an argument.
 And when I can't see the other side,
 that's when I really like to dive into it.
 And I can see the other side.
 I can see why people would say that.
 But I don't wanna be, my group raised children in a world
 where drugs are just free for reuse.
 Well, and then the other side of it is with Silk Road,
 did taking down Silk Road, did that increase or decrease
 the number of drug trading criminals in the world?
 It's unclear.
 Online, I think it increased.
 I think, that is one of the things I think about a lot
 with Silk Road was that no one really knew.
 I mean, there was thousands of users,
 but then after that, it was on the front page of the paper.
 And there was millions of people that knew about Tor
 and Onion Sites.
 It was an advertisement.
 I would have thought,
 I thought crypto was gonna crash right after that.
 Like, I don't like, the people that now see
 that bad people are doing bad things with crypto,
 that'll crash.
 Well, I'm obviously wrong on that one.
 And I thought, Ross was sentenced to two life sentences
 plus 40 years.
 No one's gonna start up these,
 dark markets exploded after that.
 Some of them started as opportunistic.
 I'm gonna take those escrow accounts
 and I'm gonna steal all the money that came in.
 They were for that, but you know,
 but there were a lot of dark markets
 that popped up after that.
 Now we put the playbook out there.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 But, and also there's a case for,
 do you ever think about not taking down,
 if you have not taken down Silk Road,
 you could use it because it's a market.
 It itself is not necessarily
 the primary criminal organization.
 It's a market for criminals.
 So it could be used to track down criminals
 in the physical world.
 So if you don't take it down,
 and given that it was, you know, the central,
 how centralized it was,
 it could be used as a place to find criminals, right?
 As opposed to-
 So the dealers, the drug dealers,
 take you down to the drug dealers?
 Yeah.
 So if you have the cart, get the cartels,
 start getting involved, you go after the dealers.
 It would have been very difficult.
 Because of Tor and all that.
 Because of all the protections, anonymity,
 decloaking all that would have been drastically
 more difficult.
 And a lot of people in upper management of the FBI
 didn't have the appetite of running something like that.
 That would have been the FBI running a drug market.
 How many kids, how many fathers would have to come in
 and said, my kid bought while the FBI was running a site,
 a drug site, my kid died.
 So I didn't know anybody in the FBI in management,
 they would have the appetite to let us run
 what was happening on Silk Road.
 You know, because remember at that time,
 we're still believing six people are dead.
 We're still investigating, you know,
 where are all these bodies?
 You know, that's pretty much why we took down Ross
 when we did, I mean, we had to jump on it fast.
 What else can you say about this complicated world
 that has grown of the dark web?
 I don't understand it.
 I like, like it would have been a something for me.
 I thought I thought it was gonna collapse,
 but I mean, it's just gotten bigger in what's going out
 there now, I'm really surprised in that it hasn't grown
 into other networks or people haven't developed
 other networks, but, but you mean like instead of tour?
 Yeah, tour is still the main one out there.
 I mean, there's some, there's a few others
 and I'm not gonna put an advertisement out for them,
 but, but you know, I thought that market would have grown.
 Yeah, my sense was when I interacted with tour,
 it was that there's huge usability issues,
 but that's for like legal activity.
 It's like, if you care about privacy, it's just not as good
 of a browser, like it's too, too, too, to look at stuff.
 No, it's way too slow.
 It's way too slow.
 But I mean, you can't even like, I know some people
 would use it to like view movies like Netflix.
 You can only view certain movies in certain countries.
 You can use it for that, but it's too slow even for that.
 So were you ever able to hold in your mind the landscape
 of the dark web, like what, what's going on out there?
 It's to me as a human being, it's just difficult
 to understand the digital world.
 Like these anonymous usernames,
 like doing anonymous activity, it's just, it's hard to,
 what am I trying to say?
 It's hard to visualize it in the way I can visualize it.
 Like I've been reading a lot about Hitler.
 I can visualize meetings between people, military strategy,
 deciding on certain evil atrocities, all that kind of stuff.
 I can visualize the people, there's agreements, hands,
 handshakes, stuff signed, groups built,
 like in the digital space, like with bots, with anonymity,
 anyone human can be multiple people.
 It's just.
 Yeah, it's all lies.
 It's all lies.
 Like, yeah, it feels like I can't trust anything.
 No, you can't.
 You honestly can't.
 And like, you can talk to two different people
 and it's the same person.
 Like, like there's so many different, you know,
 Hector had so many different identities online,
 that, you know, of things that, you know,
 the lies to each other.
 I mean, he lied to people inside his group
 just to use another name to spy on,
 make sure what they, you know,
 we're talking shit behind his back or weren't doing anything.
 It's all lies and people that can keep
 all those lies straight, it's unbelievable to me.
 Ross Albrecht represents the very early days of that.
 That's why the competence wasn't there.
 Just imagine how good the people are now.
 The kids that grow up.
 Oh, they've learned from his mistakes.
 Just the extreme competence.
 You just see how good people are at video games.
 Like the level of play in terms of video games.
 Like I used to think I sucked.
 Now I'm not even like, I'm not even in the like,
 consideration of calling myself shitty at video games.
 I'm not even, I'm like non-existent.
 I'm like the mold.
 Yeah, I stopped playing because it's so embarrassing.
 It's embarrassing.
 It's like wrestling with your kid and he finally beats you.
 He's like, well, fuck that.
 I'm not wrestling with my kid any ever again.
 And in some sense hacking at its best and its worst
 is a kind of game.
 And you can get exceptionally good at that kind of game.
 And you get the accolades of it.
 I mean, there's, you know, there's power that comes along.
 If you have success,
 look at the kid that was hacking into Uber
 and Rockstar games.
 He put it out there that he was doing it.
 I mean, he used the name,
 whatever hacked into Uber was his screen name.
 He was very proud of it.
 I mean, the one building evidence against himself,
 but you know, he wanted that slap on the back.
 Like look at what a great hacker you are.
 Yeah.
 What do you think is in the mind of that guy?
 What do you think is in the mind of Ross?
 Do you think they see themselves as good people?
 Do you think they acknowledge
 the bad they're doing around to the world?
 So that Uber hacker, I think that's just you thing,
 not realizing what consequences are,
 I mean, based on his actions.
 Ross was a little bit older.
 I think I, Ross truly is a libertarian.
 He was truly had his beliefs that,
 that he could provide the gateway for other people
 to live that libertarian lifestyle
 and put in their body what they want.
 I don't think that was a front or a lie.
 What's the difference between DPR and Ross?
 You said like, I have never met Ross until,
 I have only had those two days of worth of interaction.
 Yeah.
 That's just interesting given how long you've chased him
 and then having met him,
 what was the difference to you as a human being?
 He was a human being.
 He was, he was, you know, he was an actual person.
 He was nervous when we arrested him.
 So one of the things that I learned
 through my law enforcement career is,
 if I'm going to be the case agent,
 I'm going to be the one in charge of, you know,
 dealing with this person,
 I'm not putting handcuffs on him.
 Something else is going to do that.
 Like I'm going to be there to help him.
 You know, I'm your conduit to help.
 And so, you know, right after someone's arrested,
 you obviously have had them down for weapons
 to make sure for everybody's safety.
 But then I just put my hand on their chest,
 just feel their heart, feel their breathing.
 You're going to, it's, I'm sure it's the scariest day,
 but then to have that human contact
 kind of settles people down.
 And you can kind of like, let's start thinking about this.
 I'm going to tell you, you know,
 I'm going to be open and honest with you.
 You know, there's a lot of cops out there
 and federal agents cops that just go to the hard ass tactic.
 You don't get very far with that.
 You don't get very far being a mean asshole to somebody,
 you know, be compassionate, be human.
 And it's going to go a lot further.
 So given everything he's done,
 you were still able to have compassion for him.
 Yeah, we took him to the jail and we, so he,
 it was after hours.
 So he didn't get to see a judge that day.
 So you stick, we stuck him in the San Francisco jail.
 I hadn't slept for about four days
 because I was dealing with people in Iceland,
 bosses in DC, bosses in New York.
 So I, and I was in San Francisco.
 So timeframe, like, like the Iceland people
 were calling me when I was supposed to be sleeping.
 It was insane.
 But I still went out that night while Ross sat in jail
 and bought him breakfast.
 I said, what do you want for breakfast?
 I'll have a nice breakfast for you.
 Cause we picked him up in the morning
 and took him over to the FBI to do the, the FBI booking,
 the fingerprints and all that.
 And I got him breakfast.
 I mean, and you don't get paid back for that sort of thing.
 I'm not looking, but out of my own-
 Did he make special requests for breakfast?
 Yeah, he asked for certain things.
 Can you mention there's that top secret FBI?
 That's not top secret.
 I think he wanted some granola bars, like, and, and, and,
 you know, but he'd already had lawyered up.
 So we, you know, which is his right.
 He can do that.
 So I knew we were going to work together, you know,
 like I did with Hector.
 But I mean, this is the last day.
 Most of the conversations have to be them with lawyers.
 From that point on, I can't question him
 when he asked for a lawyer.
 Or if I did, it couldn't be used against him.
 So we just had conversation where I talked to him.
 You know, he could, you know, could, could say things to me,
 but then I would remind him that he asked for a lawyer
 and he'd have to waive that and all that.
 But we didn't talk about his case so much.
 We just talked about like human beings.
 Did he, with his eyes, with his words,
 reveal any kind of regret or did you see a human being
 changing, understanding something about themselves
 in the process of being caught?
 No, I don't think that.
 I mean, he did offer me $20 million to let him go
 when we were driving to the jail.
 Oh no.
 And I asked him what I was going to,
 we were going to do with the agent
 that sat in the front seat.
 The money really broke him, huh?
 I think so.
 I think he kind of got caught up in how much money it was
 and how, you know, when crypto started, it was pennies.
 And by the time he got arrested, it was 120 bucks.
 And you know, 177,000 bitcoins, even today, you know,
 that's a lot of bitcoins.
 So you really could have been, if you continued
 to be one of the richest people in the world.
 I possibly could have been if I took that $20 million then.
 I could have been living,
 we could have this conversation in Venezuela.
 Uh.
 In a castle, in a palace.
 Yeah, until it runs out
 and then the government storms the castle.
 Yeah.
 Have you talked to Russ since?
 No, no.
 I would, I'd be open to it.
 I don't think he probably wants to hear from me.
 Do you know where, in which prison he is?
 I think he's somewhere out in Arizona.
 I know he was in the one next to Supermax
 for a little while, like the high security one
 that's like shares the fence with Supermax,
 but I don't think he's there anymore.
 I think he's out in Arizona.
 I haven't seen in a while.
 I wonder if he can do interviews in prison.
 That'd be nice.
 Some people are allowed to.
 So I don't, I've not seen an interview with him.
 I know people have wanted to interview him
 about books and that sort of thing.
 Right, because the story really blew up.
 Did it surprise you how much the story
 and many elements of it blew up?
 Movies?
 It did surprise me.
 My wife's uncle, who I didn't,
 I've been married to my wife for 22 years now.
 I don't think he knew my name.
 And he was excited about that.
 He reached out when Silk Road came out.
 So that was surprising to see.
 Did you think the movie on the topic was good?
 I didn't have anything to do with that movie.
 I've watched it once.
 It was kind of cool that Jimmy Simpson
 was my name in the movie,
 but outside of that, I thought it sort of missed
 the mark on some things.
 When Hollywood, I don't think they understand
 what's interesting about these kinds of stories.
 And there's a lot of things that are interesting
 and they missed all of them.
 So for example, I recently talked to John Carmack,
 who's a world-class developer and so on.
 So Hollywood would think that the interesting thing
 about John Carmack is some kind of like shitty,
 like a parody of a hacker or something like that.
 They would show like really crappy emulation
 of some kind of Linux terminal thing.
 The reality is like the technical details
 for five hours with him, for 10 hours with him,
 is what people actually wanna see.
 Even people that don't program,
 they want to see a brilliant mind,
 the details that they're not,
 even if they don't understand all the details,
 they want to have an inkling of the genius there.
 That's just one way I'm saying like,
 that you wanna reveal the genius,
 the complexity of that world in interesting ways.
 And to make a Hollywood almost parody caricature of it,
 it just destroys the spirit of the thing.
 So one, the operation FBI is fascinating,
 just tracking down these people
 on the cybersecurity front is fascinating.
 The other is just how you run,
 tour, how you run this kind of organization,
 the trust issues of the different criminal entities
 involved, the anonymity, the low hanging fruit,
 the being shitty at certain parts on the technical front,
 all of those are fascinating things.
 That's what a movie should reveal.
 Should probably be a series, honestly,
 a Netflix series than a movie.
 Yeah, maybe one of the FX show or something like that,
 because they were kind of gritty, you know?
 Yeah, yeah, gritty, exactly, gritty.
 I mean, shows like Chernobyl from HBO made me realize,
 okay, you can do a good job of a difficult story
 and reveal the human side,
 but also reveal the technical side
 and have some deep, profound understanding on that case,
 on the bureaucracy of a Soviet regime.
 In this case, you could reveal the bureaucracy,
 the chaos of a criminal organization,
 of a law enforcement organization.
 I mean, there's so much to explore, it's fascinating.
 Yeah, I like Chernobyl.
 When I re-watch it, I can't watch episode three, though.
 The animals in the episode,
 they go around shooting all the dogs and all that.
 I gotta skip that part.
 You're a big softie, aren't you?
 I really am.
 I'm sure I'll probably cry at some point.
 I love it, I love it.
 Don't get me talking about that episode
 you made about your grandmother.
 Oh my God, that was rough.
 Just to linger on this ethical versus legal question,
 what do you think about people like Aaron Schwartz?
 I don't know if you're familiar with him,
 but he was somebody who broke the law
 in the name of an ethical ideal.
 He downloaded and released academic publications
 that were behind a paywall.
 And he was arrested for that and then committed suicide.
 And a lot of people see him, certainly in the MIT community,
 but throughout the world as a hero
 because you look at the way knowledge,
 scientific knowledge is being put behind paywalls,
 it does seem somehow unethical.
 And he basically broke the law to do the ethical thing.
 Now you could challenge it, maybe it is unethical,
 but there's a gray area and to me at least, it is ethical.
 To me at least, he is a hero
 because I'm familiar with the paywall
 created by the institutions that hold these publications.
 They're adding very little value.
 So it is basically holding hostage
 the work of millions of brilliant scientists
 for some kind of, honestly, a crappy capitalist institution.
 Like they're not actually making that much money.
 It doesn't make any sense to me.
 It should, to me, it should all be open public access.
 There's no reason it shouldn't be.
 All publications should be.
 So he stood for that ideal and was punished harshly for it.
 That's the other criticism, it was too harshly.
 And of course, deeply unfortunately,
 that also led to his suicide
 because he was also tormented on many levels.
 I mean, are you familiar with him?
 What do you think about that line
 between what is legal and what is ethical?
 So it's tough, it's a tough case.
 I mean, the outcome was tragic, obviously.
 Unfortunately, when you're in law enforcement,
 you have to, your job is to enforce the laws.
 I mean, it's not, if you're told
 that you have to do a certain case,
 and there is a violation of at the time,
 18 USC 1030, computer hacking,
 you have to press forward with that.
 I mean, you have to charge,
 you bring the case to the US Attorney's Office
 and whether they're gonna press charges or not,
 you can't really pick and choose
 what you press and don't press forward.
 I never felt that, at least that flexibility,
 not in the FBI.
 I mean, maybe when you're a street cop
 and you pull somebody over,
 you can let them go with a warning.
 So in the FBI, you're sitting in a room,
 but you're also a human being.
 You have compassion, you arrested,
 you're arrested, you're arrested,
 you arrested Ross and the hand on the chest.
 I mean, that's a human thing.
 So there's a...
 But I can't be the jury for whether
 it was a good hack or a bad hack.
 It's all someone, a victim has come forward
 and said, we're the victim of this.
 And I agree with you, because again,
 the basis of the internet was to share academic thought.
 I mean, that's where the internet was born.
 But it's not up to you.
 So the role of the FBI is to enforce the law.
 Correct.
 And there's a limited number of tools
 on our Batman belt that we can use.
 Not to get into all the aspects of the Trump case
 and Mar-a-Lago and the documents there.
 I mean, the FBI has so many tools they can use
 and a search warrant is the only way they could get in there.
 I mean, that's it.
 There's no other legal document or legal way
 to enter and get those documents.
 What do you think about the FBI and Mar-a-Lago
 and the FBI taking the documents for Donald Trump?
 You know, it's a tough spot.
 It's a really tough spot.
 The FBI has gotten a lot of black eyes recently.
 And I don't know if it's the same FBI
 that I remember when I was there.
 Do you think they deserve it in part?
 Was it done clumsily?
 Their rating of the former president's residence.
 It's tough.
 Because again, they're only limited to what they're allowed,
 what they're legally allowed to do.
 And a search warrant is the only legal way of doing it.
 I have my personal and political views on certain things.
 I think it might be surprising to some
 where those political points stand.
 But you told me offline that you're a hardcore communist.
 That was very strange, very surprising to me.
 Well, that's only who you tried to bring me
 into the communist party.
 Exactly, I was trying to recruit you.
 It's giving you all kinds of flyers.
 Okay, but you said like, you know,
 people in the FBI are just following the law,
 but there's a chain of command and so on.
 What do you think about the conspiracy theories
 that people, some small number of people inside the FBI
 conspire to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump?
 If you would ask me when I was inside,
 and before all this happened,
 I would say it could never happen.
 I don't believe in conspiracies.
 You know, there's too many people involved.
 Somebody is gonna come out with some sort of information.
 But I mean, the more the stuff that comes out,
 it's surprising that, you know, agents are being fired
 because of certain actions they're taking inside
 and being dismissed because of politically motivated actions.
 So do you think it's explicit or just pressure?
 Just, do you think there could exist just pressure
 at the higher ups that has a political leaning
 and you kind of maybe don't explicitly order
 any kind of thing, but just kind of pressure people
 to lean one way or the other and then create a culture
 that leans one way or the other based on political leanings?
 You would really, really hope not,
 but I mean, that seems to be the narrative
 that's being written.
 But when you were operating, you didn't feel that pressure.
 Man, I was still at such a low level.
 You know, I had no aspirations of being a boss.
 I wanted to be a case agent my entire life.
 So you love the puzzle of it, the chase.
 I love solving things, yeah.
 To be in management and manage people and all that
 and like no desire whatsoever.
 What do you think about Mark Zuckerberg
 on Joe Rogan's podcast saying that the FBI warned Facebook
 about potential foreign interference?
 And then Facebook inferred from that
 that they're talking about Hunter Biden laptop story
 and thereby censored it.
 What do you think about that whole story?
 Again, you asked me when I was in the FBI,
 I wouldn't believed it from being on the inside
 and I wouldn't believe these things,
 but there's a certain narrative being written
 that is surprising to me that the FBI is involved
 in these stories.
 So, but the interesting thing there is the FBI
 is saying that they didn't really make that implication.
 They're saying that there's interference activity happening.
 Just watch out.
 And it's a weird relationship between FBI and Facebook.
 You could see from the best possible interpretation
 that the FBI just wants Facebook to be aware
 because it is a powerful platform,
 a platform for viral spread of misinformation.
 So in the best possible interpretation of it,
 it makes sense for FBI to sell it.
 In the best possible interpretation of it,
 it makes sense for FBI to send some information saying
 like we were seeing some shady activity.
 Absolutely.
 But it seems like all of that somehow escalated
 to a political interpretation.
 I mean, yeah, it sounded like there was a wink-wink with it.
 Right.
 I don't know if Mark met for that to be that way.
 Again, are we being social engineered
 or was that a true expression that Mark had?
 I think the wink-wink is direct or it's just culture.
 Maybe certain people responsible on the Facebook side
 have a certain political lean
 and then certain people on the FBI side
 have a political lean when they're interacting together.
 And it's like literally has nothing to do
 with a giant conspiracy theory,
 but just with a culture that has a particular political lean
 during a particular time in history.
 Like maybe it could be Hunter Biden laptop one time,
 and then it could be whoever,
 Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop another time.
 It's a tough job.
 I mean, if you're the liaison,
 if you're the FBI's liaison to Facebook,
 there are certain people that I'm sure they were offered
 a position at some point.
 It seems there's FBI agents that go.
 I know of a couple that's gone to Facebook.
 There's a really good agent that now leads up
 their child exploitation stuff.
 Another squad mate runs their internal investigations,
 both great investigators.
 So there's good money, especially when you're an FBI agent
 that's capped out at a 1310
 or whatever pay scale you're capped out at.
 It's alluring to be, maybe want to please them
 and be asked to join them.
 Yeah.
 And over time that corrupts.
 I think there has to be an introspection in tech companies
 about the culture that they develop,
 about the political ideology, the bubble.
 It's interesting to see that bubble.
 Like I've asked myself a lot of questions.
 I've interviewed the Pfizer CEO,
 which seems now a long time ago.
 And I've gotten a lot of criticism,
 positive comments, but also criticism
 from that conversation.
 And I did a lot of soul searching
 about the kind of bubbles we have in this world.
 And it makes me wonder, pharmaceutical companies,
 they all believe they're doing good.
 And I wonder, because the ideal they have
 is to create drugs that help people and do so at scale.
 And it's hard to know at which point that can be corrupted.
 And it's hard to know when it was corrupted
 and if it was corrupted and where, which drugs,
 and which companies and so on.
 And I don't know.
 I don't know that complicated.
 It seems like inside a bubble,
 you can convince yourself if anything is good.
 People inside the Third Reich regime
 were able to convince themselves, I'm sure, many,
 just Bloodlands is another book
 I've been recently reading about it.
 And the ability of humans to convince they're doing good
 when they're clearly murdering and torturing people
 in front of their eyes is fascinating.
 They're able to convince themselves they're doing good.
 It's crazy.
 Like there's not even a inkling of doubt.
 Yeah, I don't know what to make of that.
 So it has taught me to be a little bit more careful
 when I enter into different bubbles
 to be skeptical about what's taken
 as an assumption of truth.
 Like you always have to be skeptical about like,
 what's assumed as true?
 Is it possible it's not true?
 You know, if you're doing,
 if you're talking about America,
 it's assumed that, you know,
 in certain places that surveillance is good.
 Well, let's question that assumption.
 Yeah.
 And I also, it inspired me to question my own assumptions
 that I hold as true, constantly.
 Constantly, it's tough.
 It's tough.
 But you don't grow.
 I mean, do you want to be just static and not grow?
 You have to question yourself on some of these things
 if you want to grow as a person.
 Yeah, for sure.
 Now, one of the tough things actually
 of being a public personality when you speak publicly
 is you get attacked all along the way as you're growing.
 And I'm in part a big softie as well, if I may say.
 And those hurt, it hurts.
 It hurts.
 It hurts.
 Do you pay attention to it?
 Yeah.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 It's very hard.
 Like, I have two choices.
 One, you can shut yourself off from the world
 and ignore it.
 I never found that compelling,
 this kind of idea of like, hater's gonna hate.
 Yeah.
 Like, this idea that anyone with a big platform
 or anyone's ever done anything has always gotten hate.
 Yeah, okay, maybe.
 But I still want to be vulnerable
 where my heart and my sleeve really show myself,
 open myself to the world, really listen to people.
 And that means every once in a while,
 somebody will say something that touches me
 in a way that's like, what if they're right?
 Do you let that hate influence you?
 I mean, can you be bullied into a different opinion
 than you think you really are just because of that hate?
 No, no, I believe not.
 But it hurts in a way that's hard to explain.
 Yeah, it just, it gets to like,
 it shakes your faith in humanity, actually,
 is probably why it hurts.
 Like, people that call me a Putin apologist
 or a Zelensky apologist,
 which I'm currently getting almost an equal amount of,
 but it hurts.
 It hurts because I,
 it hurts because it damages slightly my faith in humanity
 to be able to see the love that connects us
 and then to see that I'm trying to find that.
 And that's, I'm doing my best in the limited capabilities
 I have to find that.
 And so to call me something like a bad actor, essentially,
 from whatever perspective, it just makes me realize,
 well, people don't have empathy and compassion
 for each other.
 And it makes me question that for a brief moment.
 And that's like a crack and it hurts.
 How many people do this to your face?
 Very few.
 It's online e-muscles, man.
 They're just flexing their muscles.
 I have to be honest, that, it happens.
 Because I've hung around with Rogan enough,
 when your platform grows, there's people that will come up
 to Joe and say stuff to his face that they forget.
 They still, they forget he's actually a real human being.
 They'll make accusations about him.
 So does that cause him to wall himself off more?
 No, he's pretty gangster on that.
 But yeah, it still hurts.
 If you're human, if you really feel others,
 I think that's also the difference with Joe and me.
 He has a family that he deeply loves,
 and that's an escape from the world for him.
 There's a loneliness in me that I'm always longing
 to connect with people and with regular people,
 just to learn their stories and so on.
 And so if you open yourself up that way,
 the things they tell you can really hurt in every way.
 Like just me going to Ukraine,
 just seeing so much loss and death,
 some of it is like,
 I mean, unforgettably haunting.
 Not in some kind of political way, activist way,
 or who's right, who's wrong way,
 but just like, man, like so much pain.
 And you see it and it just stays with you.
 When you see a human being bad to another human,
 you can't get rid of that in your head.
 You can't imagine that we can treat each other like that.
 That's the hard part, I think.
 I mean, for me it is.
 When I saw parents, like when I did
 the child exploitation stuff,
 when they rented their children out,
 they literally rented infant children out
 to others for sexual gratification.
 Like I don't know how a human being
 could do that to another human being.
 And that sounds like the kind of thing you're going through.
 I mean, I went through a huge funk
 when I did those cases afterwards.
 I should have talked to somebody,
 but in the FBI you have to keep that machismo up
 or they're gonna take your gun away from you.
 Well, I think that's examples of evil.
 That's like the worst of human nature,
 but just because I have-
 War is just as bad, I mean.
 Somehow war, it's somehow understandable,
 given all the very intense propaganda that's happening.
 So you can understand that there is love
 in the heart of the soldiers on each side,
 given the information they're given.
 There's a lot of people on the Russian side
 believe they're saving these Ukrainian cities
 from Nazi occupation.
 Now, there is stories, there is a lot of evidence
 of people for fun murdering civilians.
 Now that is closer to the things you've experienced
 of like evil embodied.
 And I haven't interacted with that directly,
 with people who for fun murdered civilians.
 But you know it's there in the world.
 You're not naive to it.
 Yes, but if you experience that directly,
 if somebody shot somebody for fun in front of me,
 that would probably break me.
 Like seeing it yourself,
 knowing that it exists is different than seeing it yourself.
 Now I've interacted with the victims of that
 and they tell me stories and you see their homes destroyed,
 destroyed for no good military reason.
 It's civilians with civilian homes being destroyed.
 That really lingers with you.
 Yeah, the people that are capable of that.
 That goes with the propaganda.
 I mean, if you were to build a story,
 you have to have on the other side,
 the homes are gonna be destroyed.
 The non-military targets are gonna be destroyed.
 To put it in perspective,
 I'm not sure a lot of people understand
 the deep human side
 or even the military strategy side of this war.
 There's a lot of experts outside of the situation
 that are commenting on it with certainty.
 And that kind of hurts me
 because I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty.
 There's so much propaganda,
 it's very difficult to know what is true.
 Yeah, so my whole hope was to travel to Ukraine,
 to travel to Russia, to talk to soldiers,
 to talk to leaders, to talk to real people
 that have lost homes, that have lost family members,
 that who this war has divided,
 who this war changed completely, how they see the world,
 whether they have love or hate in their heart
 to understand their stories.
 I've learned a lot on the human side of things
 by having talked to a lot of people there.
 But it has been on the Ukrainian side for me currently.
 Traveling to the Russian side is more difficult.
 Let me ask you about your now friend.
 Can we go as far as to say his friend in Asabu,
 Hector Massaguer.
 What's the story, what's your long story with him?
 Can you tell me about what is LALSEC, who is Sabu,
 and who's Anonymous, what is Anonymous?
 Where's the right place to start that story?
 Probably Anonymous.
 Anonymous was a, it still is I guess,
 a decentralized organization.
 They call themselves headless,
 but once you look into them a little ways,
 they're not really headless.
 The power struggle comes with whoever has a hacking ability.
 That might be you're a good hacker
 or you have a giant botnet used for DDoS.
 So you're gonna wield more power
 if you can control where it goes.
 Anonymous started doing their hacktivism stuff
 in 2010 or so.
 The word hack was in the media all the time then.
 And then right around then,
 there was a federal contractor named HB Gary Federal.
 Their CEO is Aaron Barr.
 And Aaron Barr said he was gonna come out and de-anonymize
 Anonymous, he was gonna come out and talk at Black Hat
 or Defcon or one of those and say who they are.
 He figured it out by based on when people were online,
 when people were in IRC, when tweets came out,
 there was no scientific proof behind it or anything.
 So he was just gonna falsely name people
 that were in Anonymous.
 So Anonymous went on the attack.
 They went and hacked in HB Gary Federal
 and they turned his life upside down.
 They took over his Twitter account and all that stuff.
 Pretty quickly.
 So I have very mixed feelings about all of this.
 Okay.
 I get, like part of me
 admires the positive side of the hacktivism.
 Okay.
 Is there no room for admiration there
 of the fuck you to the man?
 Not at the time.
 Again, it was a violation.
 The 18 USC 1030.
 So it was my job.
 So at the time, no.
 In retrospect, I was a little bit disappointed
 at the time, no.
 In retrospect, sure.
 Okay.
 Yeah.
 But what was the philosophy of the hacktivism?
 Was the philosophically,
 were they at least expressing it
 for the good of humanity or no?
 They outwardly said that they were gonna go after people
 that they thought were corrupt.
 So they were judging jury on corruption.
 They were gonna go after it.
 Once you get inside and realize what they were doing,
 they were going after people
 that they had an opportunity to go after.
 So maybe someone had a zero day
 and then they searched for servers running that zero day.
 And then from there, let's find a target.
 I mean, one time they went after a toilet paper company.
 I still don't understand
 what that toilet paper company did,
 but it was an opportunity to make a splash.
 Is there some way for the joke for the lulz?
 It developed into that.
 So I think the hacktivism and the anonymous stuff
 wasn't so much for the lulz,
 but from that HBGear federal hack,
 then there were six guys that worked well together
 and they formed a crew, a hacking crew,
 and they kind of split off into their own private channels.
 And that was lulzsec or laughing at your security
 was their motto.
 So that's L-U-L-Z-S-E-C, lulzsec.
 Of course it is.
 Lulzsec.
 And who founded that organization?
 So Kayla and Sabu were the hackers of the group.
 And so they really did all the work on HBGear.
 So they're- And these are code names.
 Yeah, these are online names.
 They're NICs.
 And so, you know, that's all they knew each other as.
 You know, they talked as those names.
 And they worked well together.
 And so they formed a hacking crew.
 And that's when they started the,
 at first they didn't name it this,
 but it was the 50 days of lulz
 where they would just release major, major breaches.
 And it stirred up the media.
 I mean, they put hacking in the media every day.
 They had 400 or 500,000 Twitter followers.
 You know, and it was kind of interesting.
 But then they started swinging at the beehive
 and they took out some FBI affiliated sites.
 And then they started Fuck FBI Fridays,
 where every Friday they would release something.
 And we waited it for with bated breath.
 I mean, they had us hook, line and sinker pissed.
 We were waiting to see what was gonna be dropped
 every Friday.
 It was, it's a little embarrassing looking back on it now.
 And this is in the early 2010s.
 Yeah, this was 2010, 2011 around there.
 So actually linger on anonymous.
 What do you still understand?
 What the heck is anonymous?
 Just a place where you hang out.
 I mean, it's just, it started on 4chan, went to 8chan.
 And then it's really just anyone,
 you could be an anonymous right now if you wanted to,
 just you're in there hanging out in the channel.
 Now you're probably not gonna get much credit
 until you work your way up and prove who you are.
 Someone vouches for you,
 but anybody can be an anonymous.
 Anybody can leave anonymous.
 What's the leadership of anonymous?
 Do you have a sense that there is a leadership?
 There's a power play.
 Now there's not someone that says,
 this is what we're doing, no, we're doing.
 I love the philosophical
 and the technical aspect of all of this.
 But I think there is a slippery slope
 to where for the laws,
 you can actually really hurt people.
 That's the terrifying thing.
 When you attach, I'm actually really terrified
 of the power of the law.
 The fun thing somehow becomes a slippery slope.
 I haven't quite understood the dynamics of that,
 but even in myself, if you just have fun with a thing,
 you lose track of the ethical grounding of the thing.
 And so it feels like hacking for fun
 can just turn it, literally lead to nuclear war.
 Literally destabilize nations.
 Yada, yada, yada, nuclear war, I could say, yeah.
 So I've been more careful with the law.
 Yeah, I've been more careful about that.
 And I wonder about it because in internet speak,
 somehow ethics can be put aside
 through the slippery slope of language.
 I don't know, everything becomes a joke.
 If everything's a joke, then everything's allowed
 and everything's allowed,
 then you don't have a sense of what is right and wrong.
 You lose sense of what is right and wrong.
 You still have victims.
 I mean, you're laughing at someone.
 Someone's the butt of this joke.
 Whether it's major corporations or the individuals,
 some of the stuff they did was just releasing people's PII
 and their personal identifying information
 and stuff like that.
 Is it a big deal?
 I don't know, maybe, maybe not.
 But if you could choose to not have your information
 put out there, probably wouldn't.
 We do have a sense of what anonymous is today.
 Has it ever been one stable organization
 or is it a collection of hackers
 that kind of emerge for particular tasks,
 for particular hacktivism tasks and that kind of stuff?
 It's a collection of people that has some hackers in it.
 There's not a lot of big hackers in it.
 I mean, there's some that have come bouncing and bounce out.
 Even back then, there was probably
 just as many reporters in it, people in the media in it
 than hackers at the time,
 just trying to get the inside scoop on things.
 Some giving the inside scoop.
 We arrested a reporter that gave over the username
 and password to his newspaper
 and just so he could break the story.
 He trusted him.
 Speaking of trust, reporters, boy, there's good ones.
 There is good ones.
 There are.
 There are.
 But boy, do I have a complicated relationship with them.
 How many stories about you are completely true?
 You can just make stuff up on the internet
 and one of the things that,
 I mean, there's so many fascinating psychological,
 sociological elements of the internet to me.
 One of them is that you can say that Lex is a lizard, right?
 And if it's not funny, so lizard is kind of funny,
 what should we say?
 Lex has admitted to being an agent of the FBI, okay?
 You can just say that, right?
 And then the response that the internet will be like,
 oh, is that true?
 I didn't realize that.
 They won't go like, provide evidence, please, right?
 They'll just say like, oh, that's weird.
 I didn't, I kind of thought he might be kind of weird.
 And then it piles on.
 It's like, hey, hey, hey, guys.
 Like, here's a random dude on the internet
 just said a random thing.
 You can't just like pile up as, and then-
 Johnny6969 is now a source that says-
 And then like, the thing is, I'm a tiny guy,
 but when it grows, if you're like have a big platform,
 I feel like newspapers will pick that up
 and then they'll like start to build on a story.
 And you never know where that story really started.
 It's so cool.
 I mean, to me, actually, honestly, it's kind of cool
 that there's a viral nature of the internet
 that can just fabricate truth completely.
 I think we have to accept that new reality
 and try to deal with it somehow.
 You can't just like complain that Johnny6969
 can start a random thing,
 but I think in the best possible world,
 it is the role of the journalist
 to be the adult in the room and put a stop to it
 versus look for the sexiest story
 so that there could be clickbait that can generate money.
 Journalism should be about sort of slowing things down,
 thinking deeply through what is true and not
 and showing that to the world.
 I think there's a lot of hunger for that.
 And I think that would actually get the most clicks
 in the end.
 I mean, it's that same pressure,
 I think we're talking about with the FBI
 and with the tech companies about controllers.
 I mean, the editors have to please and get those clicks.
 I mean, they're measured by those clicks.
 So, you know, I'm sure the journalists,
 the true journalists, the good ones out there want that,
 but they want to stay employed too.
 Can I actually ask you really as another tangent,
 the Jared and others, they're doing undercover.
 In terms of the tools you have
 for catching cybersecurity criminals,
 how much of it is undercover?
 Undercover is a high bar to jump over.
 You have to do a lot to start an undercover in the FBI.
 There's a lot of thresholds.
 So it's not your first investigative tool step.
 You have to identify a problem and then show
 that the lower steps can't get you there.
 But I mean, I think we had an undercover going on in the
 squad about all times when one was being shut down
 or taken down, we were spinning up another one.
 So it's a good tool to have, you know, and utilize.
 They're a lot of work.
 I don't think if you run one,
 you'll never run another one in your life.
 Oh, so it's like psychologically,
 there's a lot of work just technically,
 but also psychologically, like you have to really...
 It's 24 seven, you're inside that world.
 Like you have to know what's going on and what's happening.
 You know, you're taking on, you have to remember
 who you are when you're, because you're a criminal online.
 You have to go to a special school for it too.
 Was that ever something compelling to you?
 I went through the school, but I'm a pretty open
 and honest guy and so it's tough for me to build
 that wall of lies.
 Maybe I'm just not smart enough to keep all the lies straight.
 Yeah, but a guy who was good at building up a wall of lies
 would say that exact same thing.
 Exactly.
 It's so annoying the way truth works in this world.
 It's like people have told me like,
 because I'm trying to be honest and transparent,
 that's exactly what an agent would do, right?
 But I feel like an agent would not wear a suit and tie.
 I wore a suit and tie every day.
 I was a suit and tie guy.
 You were?
 Yeah, every day.
 I remember one time I wore shorts in and the SAC came in
 and this was when I was a rock star at the time
 in the bureau and I had shorts in and I said,
 sorry, ma'am, I apologize for my attire.
 And she goes, you could wear a bike shorts in here.
 I wouldn't care.
 I was like, oh shit, that sounds nice.
 I never wore the bike shorts, but.
 Yeah.
 Well, I see a suit and tie is constraining.
 I think it's liberating in sorts.
 It's like shows that you're taking the moment seriously.
 Well, not just that, people wanted it.
 I mean, people expected when you're not,
 you are dressed like a perfect FBI agent.
 When someone knocks on their door,
 that's what they wanna see.
 They wanna see what Hollywood built up
 is what an FBI agent is.
 You show up like my friend, Il-Wan,
 he was dressed always in t-shirts and shorts
 and people aren't gonna take him serious.
 They're not gonna give him what they want.
 I wonder how many police that can just show up
 and like say I'm from the FBI and start interrogating them.
 Like at a bar.
 Probably.
 Like how.
 Oh, definitely if they've had a few drinks,
 you can definitely.
 Well, but people are gonna recognize you.
 That's the only problem.
 That's another thing.
 You start taking out a big cases.
 You can't work cases anymore in the FBI.
 Your face gets out there.
 Your name too.
 Yeah, yeah.
 Well, actually let me ask you about that
 before we return to our friend Sabu.
 Okay.
 You've tracked and worked on
 some of the most dangerous people in this world.
 Have you ever feared for your life?
 So I had to make a really, really shitty phone call one time.
 I was sitting in the bureau
 and this was right after Silk Road
 and Jared called me.
 He was back in Chicago.
 And he called me and said,
 hey, your name and your kid's name
 are on a website for an assassination.
 They're paying to have you guys killed.
 Now that these things happen on the black market,
 they come up and people debate whether they're real or not,
 but we have to take it serious.
 Someone's paying to have me killed.
 So I had to call my wife and we have a word
 in that if I said this word
 and we only said it one time to each other,
 if I said this word, this is serious,
 drop what you're doing and get to the kids.
 And so I had to drop the word to her.
 And I could feel the breath come out of her
 because she thought her kids were in danger.
 And at the time they were.
 I wasn't in a state of mind to drive myself.
 So an agent on the squad, a girl named Evelina,
 she drove me lights and sirens
 all the way to my kid's school.
 And we had locked, I called the school,
 we were in a lockdown.
 Nobody should get in or out,
 especially someone with a gun.
 The first thing they did was lock me up.
 The second thing they did was let me
 in the building with a gun.
 So I was a little disappointed with that.
 My kids were, I think kindergarten and fifth grade
 or somewhere around there,
 maybe they're closer, second year, I'm not sure where.
 But all hell broke loose.
 And we had to, from there, go move into a safe house.
 I live in New York City, NYPD surrounded my house.
 The FBI put cameras outside my house.
 You couldn't drive in my neighborhood
 without like your license plate being read.
 Hey, why is this person here?
 Why is that person there?
 I got to watch my house on an iPad while I sat at my desk.
 But again, I put my family through that
 and it scared the shit out of them.
 And that's, to be honest, I think that's sort of
 my mother-in-law's words were,
 I thought you did cyber crime.
 And because during Silk Road,
 I didn't tell my family what I was working on.
 I don't talk about that sort of,
 I wanna escape that, I don't wanna be there.
 I remember that like, so when I was in the FBI,
 driving in, I used to go in at 4.30 every morning
 because I used to go to the gym before I go to the desk.
 So I'd be at the desk at seven, so in the gym at five,
 a couple hours and then go.
 The best time I had was that drive in in the morning
 where I could just be myself.
 I listened to a sports podcast out of DC.
 And we talked about sports and the nationals
 and whatever it was, the capitals.
 It was great to not think about Silk Road for 10 minutes.
 So, but that was my best time, but yeah, again.
 So yeah, I've had that move into the safe house.
 I left my MP5 at home.
 That's the bureau's machine gun.
 Showed my wife to just pull and spray.
 But how often did you live or work
 and live with fear in your heart?
 It was only that time.
 I mean, for actual physical security.
 Then, I mean, after the anonymous stuff,
 I really tightened down to my cybersecurity.
 I don't have social media.
 I don't have pictures of me and my kids online.
 I don't really, if I go to a wedding or something,
 I say, I don't take my picture with my kids,
 if you're gonna post it someplace or something like that.
 So that sort of security I have.
 But just like everybody, you start to relax a little bit
 and security breaks down because it's not convenient.
 But it's also part of your job.
 So you're much better at, like your job now
 and your job before.
 So you're probably much better taking care
 of the low hanging fruit at least.
 I understand the threat.
 And I think that's what a lot of people don't understand
 is understanding what the threat against them is.
 So I'm aware of that and what possibly,
 and I think about it, I think about things.
 I do remember, so you tripped a memory in my mind.
 I remember a lot of times and I had a gun on my hip,
 I still carry a gun to this day,
 opening my front door and being concerned
 what was on the other side, walking out of the house
 because I couldn't see it.
 I remember those four o'clock heading to the car.
 I was literally scared.
 Yeah.
 I mean, having seen some of the things you've seen,
 it makes you perhaps question
 how much evil there is out there in the world.
 How many dangerous people there are out there.
 Crazy people even.
 There's a lot of crazy, there's a lot of evil.
 Most people I think get into cybercrime
 or just opportunistic, not necessarily evil.
 They don't really know, maybe think about the victim.
 It's a crime of opportunity.
 I don't label that as evil.
 And one of the things about America
 that I'm also very happy about
 is that rule of law, despite everything we talk about,
 there is, it's tough to be a criminal in the United States.
 So if you walk outside of your house,
 you're much safer than you are
 in most other places in the world.
 You're safer and the system's tougher.
 I mean, LulzSec, six guys, one guy in the United States,
 five guys other places.
 Hector was facing 125 years.
 Those guys got slapped on the wrist and went back to college.
 Different laws, different places.
 So who's Hector?
 Tell me the story of Hector.
 So this LulzSec organization was started.
 So Hector was before that in,
 he was in part anonymous.
 He was doing all kinds of hacking stuff.
 But then he launched LulzSec.
 He's an old school hacker.
 I mean, he learned how to hack.
 And I don't wanna tell his story,
 but he learned to hack.
 Because he grew up in the Lower East Side of New York
 and picked up some NYPD computers
 that were left on the sidewalk for trash.
 Taught himself how to hack.
 He doesn't exactly look like a hacker.
 For people who don't know,
 he looks, I don't know exactly what he looks like,
 but not like a technical, not what you would imagine.
 But perhaps that's a Hollywood portrayal.
 Yeah, I think you get in trouble these days saying
 that what a hacker looks like.
 I don't know if they have a traditional look.
 Just like I said, Hollywood has an idea
 of what an FBI looks like.
 I don't think you can do that anymore.
 I don't think you can say that anymore.
 Well, he certainly has a big personality
 and charisma and all that kind of stuff.
 That's Sabu.
 I can see him selling me anything.
 That's Sabu.
 That's convincing me of anything.
 You know, two different people.
 There's Sabu and there's Hector.
 Hector is a sweet guy.
 He likes to have intellectual conversations with people.
 He likes to have intellectual conversations
 and that's just a thing.
 He'd rather just sit there
 and have a one-on-one conversation with you.
 But Sabu, that's a ruthless motherfucker.
 And you first met Sabu.
 I was tracking Sabu.
 That's all I knew was Sabu.
 I didn't know Hector.
 So when did your paths cross in terms of tracking?
 When did you first take on the case?
 The spring of 11.
 So it was through anonymous.
 Through anonymous, but really kind of LulzSec.
 LulzSec was a big thing
 and it was pushed out to all the cyber,
 56 field offices in the FBI.
 Most of them have cyber squads or cyber units.
 And so, you know, it was being pushed out there
 and it was in the news every day,
 but it really wasn't ours.
 So we didn't have a lot of victims
 in our AOR area of responsibility.
 And so we just kind of pay attention to it.
 Then I got a tip that a local hacker in New York
 had broken into AOL.
 And so Olivia Olson and I,
 she's another agent who she's still in.
 She's a supervisor out in LA.
 She's a great agent.
 We went all around New York looking for this kid
 just to see what we can find
 and ended up out in Staten Island at his grandmother's house.
 She didn't know where he was obviously, why would she?
 But I left my card.
 He gave me a call that night and started talking to me.
 And I said, let's just meet up tomorrow
 at the McDonald's across from 26 Fed.
 And he came in and three of us sat there and talked
 and gave me his stuff.
 He started telling me about the felonies
 he was committing those days,
 including that break into AOL.
 And then he finally says, you know,
 I can give you Sabu.
 And Sabu to us was the Kaiser associate of Aachen.
 He was our guy.
 He was the guy that was in the news
 that was pissing us off.
 So he was part of the FBI Fridays?
 Sabu was, yeah.
 Oh, he led it.
 Yeah, he was the leader of Fuck FBI Fridays.
 So yeah.
 What was one of the more memorable F, the triple Fs?
 I said, how do you get,
 why, how and why do you go after the beehive?
 That's kind of intense.
 You get you on the news.
 It gets you, it's the lulls.
 It's funnier to go after the big ones.
 You know, and they weren't getting like real FBI.
 They weren't breaking into FBI mainframes or anything,
 but they, you know, they were, you know,
 affiliate sites or anything that had to,
 a lot of law enforcement stuff was coming out.
 So, but, you know, we looked back.
 And so if this kid knew that Sabu,
 maybe there was a chance we used him to lure Sabu out.
 But we also said, well, maybe this kid knows Sabu
 in real life.
 And so we went and looked through the IPs
 and 10 million IPs, we find one and it belonged to him.
 And so that day Sabu,
 someone had doxed Sabu and we were a little afraid
 he was going to be on the run.
 We had a surveillance team and FBI surveillance teams
 are awesome.
 Like you cannot even tell they're FBI agents.
 It's, they are really that good.
 I mean, there's baby strollers and all,
 whatever you wouldn't expect an FBI agent to have.
 So that's a little like the movies.
 A little bit. Yeah.
 I mean, it is true, but, and, but they fit into the area.
 So now they're on the Lower East Side, which is, you know,
 a baby stroller might not fit in there as well.
 So, you know, somebody just laying on the ground or something
 like that.
 They really get plenty of the character and get into it.
 So now I can never trust a baby stroller.
 Yeah.
 Well, yeah, probably shouldn't.
 Every, every baby, I'm just like,
 look at the stare of them suspiciously.
 Especially if the mom's wearing cargo pants
 while she pushes it.
 So yeah.
 So if it's like a very stereotypical mom,
 stereotypical baby, I'm going to be very suspicious.
 I'm going to question the baby.
 Baby's wired.
 Be careful.
 You know, we raced out there and like our squads,
 not even full.
 There's only a few guys there.
 And like I said, I was a suit guy,
 but that day I had shorts and a t-shirt on,
 I had a white t-shirt on.
 And I only bring it up because Sabu makes fun of me
 to this day.
 So I had a bulletproof vest and a white t-shirt on
 and that was it.
 I had shorts too and all that, but raced over to there.
 We didn't have any equipment.
 We brought our boss's boss's boss.
 He stopped off at NYPD, got us like a ballistic shield
 and a battering ram if we needed it.
 And then we get to Hector's house, Sabu's house,
 and he's on the sixth floor.
 And so normally, you know, we're the cyber dork squad.
 We'll hop in the elevator.
 Sixth floor is a long ways to go up
 in a bulletproof vest and a ballistic shield,
 but we had been caught in an elevator before on a search.
 So we didn't, took the stairs.
 We get to the top, a tad winded, but knocking the door
 and this big towering guy opens the door just slightly.
 And he sees the green vest with big yellow letters, FBI,
 and he steps outside.
 Can I help you?
 You know, tries to social engineer us.
 But eventually we get our way inside the house.
 You know, I noticed a few things that are kind of out of place.
 There's a laptop charger and a flashing modem.
 And I said, well, do you have a computer here?
 And he said, no, there's no computer here.
 So we knew the truths and then the half lies
 and all that sort of thing.
 So it took us about another two hours and finally he gave up.
 He was that boo.
 He was the guy we were looking for.
 So we sat there and we kind of showed him
 sort of the evidence we had against him.
 And, you know, from his words, we sat there
 and talked like two grown adults.
 And, you know, I gave him the options and he said,
 well, let's talk about working together.
 So he chose to become an informant.
 I don't think he chose that night,
 but that's where it kind of went to.
 So then we brought him down to the FBI that night,
 which was, it was a funny trip
 because I'm sitting in the back seat of the car with him.
 And I was getting calls from all over the US
 from different FBI agents saying
 that we arrested the wrong guy.
 And I was like, I don't think so.
 And they're like, why do you think so?
 I was like, because he says it's him.
 And they still said, no, it's the wrong guy.
 So I said, well, we'll see how it plays out.
 That's so interesting because it's such a strange world.
 Such a strange world because it's tough to,
 because you still have to prove it's the same guy, right?
 Because the anonymity.
 Yeah, I mean, we had his laptop at that point.
 Yeah, I know.
 Him saying, that helped.
 I gave him a clue in my world.
 Yeah, yeah.
 But yeah, if he would have fought it,
 I mean, that definitely would have come in as evidence
 that every FBI agent is saying it's not him.
 You have to disclose that stuff.
 So you had a lot of stuff on him.
 What was he facing if?
 He was facing 125 years.
 125 years in prison.
 That's, now that's if you took every charge
 we had against him and put him, you know, consecutively.
 No one ever gets charged with that,
 but yeah, he had, essentially,
 it would have been 125 years.
 You know, fast forward to the end.
 He got thanked by the judge for his service
 after nine months.
 And he walked out of the court of free man.
 But that's being, while being an informant.
 Yes.
 Well, so the word informant here really isn't that good.
 It's not fitting that technically,
 I guess that's what he was,
 but he didn't know the other people.
 It was all anonymous.
 He knew Nix and all that.
 He really gave us the insight
 of what was happening in the hacker world.
 Like I said, he was an old school hacker.
 Back when hackers didn't work together with Anonymous,
 he was down, you know, cult of dead cow
 and those type guys, like way back.
 And he was around for that.
 He's like an encyclopedia of hacking.
 But, you know, we just-
 So like Kiss Prime was in the 90s.
 For terror hack, but yeah, he kind of came back
 when Anonymous started going after MasterCard and PayPal
 and all that, do the WikiLeak stuff.
 But even that little interaction, being an informant,
 he probably made a lot of enemies.
 How do you protect a guy like that?
 He made enemies after it was revealed?
 Yeah.
 How does the FBI protect him?
 Yeah. Good luck.
 I mean, perhaps I'll talk to him one day,
 but is that guy afraid for his life?
 I, again, I think-
 It doesn't seem like it.
 He has very good security for himself, cyber security.
 But, you know, yeah, he doesn't like the negative things
 said about him online.
 I don't think anybody does.
 But, you know, I think it's so many years of the internet
 kind of bitching at you and all that,
 you get calloused to, it's just internet bitching.
 And also the hacking world moves on very quickly.
 He is kind of-
 Yeah.
 Like they have their own wars to fight now,
 and he's not part of those wars anymore.
 There's still people out there that bitch and moan about him,
 but yeah, I think it's less.
 I think, you know, he has a good message out there
 of, you know, trying to keep kids
 from making the same mistakes he made.
 He tries to really preach that.
 How do people get into this line of work?
 Is there all kinds of ways being,
 not your line of work, his line of work,
 just all the stories you've seen of people
 that are in anonymous and lolsec and silk road
 and all the cyber criminals you've interacted with,
 what's the profile of a cyber criminal?
 I don't think there's a profile anymore.
 You know, I used to be able to say, you know,
 the kid in your mom's basement or something like that,
 but it's not true anymore.
 You know, it's wide.
 And it's like, I've arrested people
 that you wouldn't expect would be cyber criminals.
 And it's in the United States,
 it's international, it's everything?
 Oh, it's international.
 I mean, we're seeing a lot of the big hackers now,
 the big arrests for hackers in England,
 surprisingly, you know, there's, you know,
 you're not gonna see there's a lot of good hackers
 like down in Brazil, but I don't think Brazil law enforcement
 is as good at hunting them down.
 So you're not gonna see the big arrests.
 How much state-sponsored cyber attacks are there,
 do you think?
 More than you can imagine.
 And what do you wanna say an attack?
 You had a successful attack or just a probing?
 Probing for information, just like feeling,
 you know, testing that there's where the attack factors are,
 trying to collect all the possible attack factors.
 Put a Windows 7 machine on the internet,
 forward-facing and put a packet sniffer on there
 and look at where the driver comes from.
 I mean, in 24 hours, you are gonna fill up a hard drive
 with packets just coming at it.
 I mean, it's not hard to know.
 I mean, it's just constantly probing
 for entry points into things, you know.
 You could go mad putting up honeypot,
 draws in intrusions, try to see what methodologies.
 Just to see what's out there.
 Yeah, and it doesn't go anywhere.
 It maybe has fake information and stuff like that.
 You know, it's just kind of to see what's going on
 and judge what's happening on the internet.
 You know, lick your finger and test the wind
 of what's happening these days.
 The funny thing about, like, because I'm at MIT,
 that attracted even more attention for the,
 not for the laws, but for the technical challenge.
 It seems like people enjoy hacking MIT.
 It's just the amount of traffic MIT was getting for that,
 in terms of just the sheer number of attacks
 from different places is crazy.
 Yeah, like, just like that.
 Putting up a machine, seeing what comes.
 NASA used to be the golden ring.
 Now everybody got NASA.
 That was like the early 90s.
 If you could hack NASA, that was the, now,
 yeah, MIT is a big one.
 Yeah, it's fun.
 It's fun to see.
 Respect.
 Because I think in that case,
 it comes from a somewhat good place.
 Because, you know, they're not getting any money from MIT.
 It's more for the challenge.
 Let me ask you about that,
 about this world of cybersecurity.
 How big of a threat are cyber attacks
 for companies and for individuals?
 Like, let's lay out, where are we in this world?
 What's out there?
 It's the wild, wild west.
 And it's, I mean,
 people want the idea of security,
 but it's inconvenient, so they don't,
 they push back on it.
 And there are a lot of opportunistic nation state,
 financially motivated hackers, hackers for the lulz.
 You got three different tiers there.
 And they're on the prowl.
 They have tools.
 They have really good tools that are being used against us.
 And at what scale?
 So when you're thinking of,
 I don't know what's, let's talk about companies first.
 So say you're talking to a mid-tier.
 I wonder what the most interesting business is.
 So Google, we can look at large tech companies
 or we can look at medium-sized tech companies.
 And like you were sitting in a room with a CTO,
 with a CEO, and the question is, how fucked are we?
 And what should we do?
 What's the low hanging fruit?
 What are the different strategies
 and those companies should consider?
 I mean, the problem is they want a push button.
 They want an out of the box solution that I'm secure.
 They want to tell people they're secure.
 But-
 And that's very challenging to have.
 It's impossible.
 But if someone had it, they'd be a billionaire.
 They'd be beyond a billionaire,
 because that's what everybody wants.
 So you can buy all the tools you want.
 It's configuring them the proper way.
 And if anyone's trying to tell you
 that there's one solution that fits all,
 there's Stain Coil Salesman.
 And there's a lot of people in cybersecurity
 that are Stain Coil Salesmen.
 Yeah, and I feel like there's tools,
 if they're not configured correctly,
 they just introduce,
 they don't increase security significantly,
 and they introduce a lot of pain for the people.
 They decrease efficiency of the actual work you have to do.
 So like we had, I was at Google for a time,
 and I think mostly I want to give props
 to their security efforts, but user data.
 So like data that belongs to users is like the holy,
 like the amount of security they have
 around that is incredible.
 So most, anytime I had to work with anything
 even resembling user data,
 so I never got a chance to work with actual user data,
 anything resembling that,
 first of all, you have no access to the internet.
 It's impossible to even come close
 to the access to the internet.
 And there's so much pain to actually like interact
 with that data.
 Where it, I mean, it was extremely inefficient
 in places where I thought it didn't have to be
 that inefficient, the security was too much.
 But I have to give respect to that,
 because in that case, you want to err
 on the side of security, but that's Google.
 They were doing a good job with this.
 Reputational harm if it got out.
 I mean, Google, why is Google drive free?
 Because they want your data.
 They want you to park your data there.
 So, if they got hacked or leaked information,
 the reputational harm would be tremendous.
 But for a company that's not,
 it's really hard to do that, right?
 And the company is not as big as Google
 or not as tech savvy as Google.
 Might have a lot of trouble doing that kind of stuff.
 Instead of increasing security,
 they'll just decrease the efficiency.
 Well, yeah, so there's a big difference
 between IT and security.
 And unfortunately, these mid-side companies,
 they try to stack security into their IT department.
 Your IT department is about business continuity.
 They're about trying to move business forward.
 They want users to get the data they need
 to do their job so the company can grow.
 Security is not that.
 They don't want you to get the data.
 But there's fine tuning you can do to ensure that.
 I mean, it's simple as having good onboarding procedures
 for employees.
 Like, you come into my company,
 you don't need access to everything.
 Maybe you need access to something for one day.
 Turn the access on, don't leave it on.
 I mean, I was the victim of the OPM hack,
 the Office of Personnel Management,
 because old credentials from a third-party vendor
 were sitting there inactive.
 And the Chinese government found those credentials
 and were able to log in and steal all my information.
 So a lot could be helped
 if you just control the credentials, the access,
 the access control, how long they last,
 and people who need access to a certain thing
 only get access to that thing and nothing else,
 and then it just gets refreshed like that.
 Access control, like we said,
 setting up people leaving the company,
 get rid of their, they don't need control.
 Two-factor authentication, that's a big thing.
 I mean, I sound like a broken record
 because this isn't anything new.
 This isn't rocket science.
 The problem is we're not implementing it.
 If we are, we're not doing it correctly
 because these guys are taking us.
 Well, two-factor authentication is a good example
 of something that I just was annoyed by
 for the longest time.
 Because yes, it's very good,
 but it seems that it's pretty easy to implement horribly
 to where it's not convenient at all
 for the legitimate user to use.
 It should be trivial to do,
 like to authenticate yourself twice should be super easy.
 If security, if it's slightly inconvenient for you,
 it's think about how inconvenient it is for a hacker
 and how they're just gonna move on to the next person.
 Yes, yes, in theory, when implemented extremely well.
 But I just don't think so.
 I think actually if it's inconvenient,
 it shows that system hasn't been thought through a lot.
 Do you know why we need two-factor authentication?
 People using the same password across the same site.
 So when one site is compromised,
 people just take that username and password,
 it's called credential stuffing
 and just stuff it across the internet.
 So if 10 years ago when we told everybody,
 don't use the same fucking password across the internet,
 across the vulnerable sites,
 maybe two-factor wouldn't be needed.
 Yeah, so you wouldn't need two-factor
 if everyone did a good job with passwords.
 Yeah.
 Right, but I'm saying like the two-factor authentication,
 it should be super easy to authenticate myself
 with some other device really quickly.
 Like it should be frictionless.
 Like you just hit okay?
 Okay, and anything that belongs to me, yeah.
 And like it should very importantly be easy
 to set up what belongs to me.
 I don't know the full complexity of the cyber attacks
 these platforms are under.
 They're probably under insane amount of attacks.
 Yeah, you've got it right there.
 People have no idea these large companies,
 how often they're attacked, you know,
 on a per second basis.
 And they have to fight all that often
 and pick out the good traffic in there.
 So yeah, there's no way I'd wanna run a large tech company.
 What about protecting individuals?
 For individuals, what's good advice
 for to try to protect yourself
 from this increasingly dangerous world of cyber attacks?
 Again, educate yourself that you understand
 that there is a threat.
 First, you have to realize that.
 Then you're gonna step up
 and you're gonna do stuff a little bit more.
 Sometimes I guess think I take that to a little bit extreme.
 I remember one time my mom called me
 and she was screaming that I woke up this morning
 and I just clicked on a link
 and now my phone is making weird noises.
 And I was like, throw your phone in a glass of water.
 Just put it in a glass of water right now.
 And I made my mom cry.
 It was not a pleasant thing.
 So sometimes I go to a little extremes on those ones,
 but understanding is a risk
 and making it a little bit more difficult to become a victim.
 I mean, just understanding certain things.
 Simple things like,
 as we add more internet of the things to people's houses,
 I mean, how many Wi-Fi networks do people have?
 It's normally just one.
 And you're bumping your phones and giving your password
 to people to come to visit.
 Set up a guest network.
 Set up something you can change every 30 days.
 Simple little things like that.
 I hate to remind you, but change your passwords.
 I mean, I feel like I'm a broken record again,
 but just make it more difficult
 for others to victimize you.
 And then don't use the same password everywhere.
 That, yes.
 I mean-
 I still know people that do that.
 I mean, ask.fm.gotpopped last week, two weeks ago,
 and that's 350 million username and passwords
 with connected Twitter accounts, Google accounts,
 all the different social media accounts.
 That is a treasure trove for the next two and a half,
 three years of just using those credentials everywhere.
 Using, you'll learn,
 even if it's not the right password,
 you'll learn people's password styles.
 Bad guys are making portfolios out of people.
 We're figuring out how people generate their passwords
 and kind of figuring,
 and then it's easier to crack their password.
 We're making a dossier on each person.
 It's 350 million dossiers just in that one hack.
 Yahoo, there was half a billion.
 So the thing a hacker would do with that
 is try to find all the low hanging fruit,
 like have some kind of program that,
 yeah, evaluates the strength of the passwords,
 and then finds the weak ones.
 That means that this person is probably the kind of person
 that would use the same password across multiple.
 Or even just write a program into that.
 Remember the Ring hack a couple of years ago?
 That's all it was, is credential stuffing.
 So Ring, the security system by default,
 had two factor but didn't turn it on,
 and they also had don't try unlimited tries
 to log into my account.
 You can lock it out after 10 by default, not turned on,
 because it's not convenient for people.
 Ring, it was like,
 I want people to stick these little things up
 and have security in their house.
 But cybersecurity don't make it inconvenient,
 then people won't buy our product.
 That's how they got hacked.
 They wanted to say that it's insecure,
 and got hacked into,
 reputational harm right there for Ring,
 but they didn't, it was just credential stuffing.
 People bought username and passwords on the black market,
 and just wrote a bot that just went through Ring
 and used every one of them,
 maybe 1% hit, but that's a big hit
 to the number of Ring users.
 You can use also password managers to make the changing
 of the passwords easier.
 And to make you can choose the difficulty,
 the number of special characters,
 the length of it and all that.
 My favorite thing is on websites,
 yell at you for your password being too long,
 or having too many special characters,
 or like, or yay,
 you're not allowed to have this special character
 or something.
 You can only use these three special characters.
 You know, do you understand how password cracking works
 if you specifically tell me
 which pass, what special characters I can use?
 I want to, like, I honestly just want to have
 a one-on-one meeting, like late at night
 with the engineer that programmed that,
 because that's like an intern.
 I just want to have a sit down meeting.
 Yeah, I made my parents switch banks once
 because the security was so poor.
 I was like, you just, you can't have money here.
 But then there's also like the zero day tax,
 like I mentioned before the QNAP NAS that got hacked.
 Luckily I didn't have anything private on there,
 but it really woke me up to like, okay,
 so like, if you take everything extremely seriously.
 Unfortunately for the end users,
 there's nothing you can do about zero day.
 It's, you know, there's this,
 you have no control over that.
 I mean, it's the engineers that made the software
 don't even know about it.
 Now, let's talk about one days.
 So there's a patch now out there for the security.
 So if you're not updating your systems
 for these security badges, if it's just not on you,
 my father-in-law has such an old iPhone,
 you can't security patch it anymore.
 So, you know, and I tell him, I say, you know,
 this is what you're missing out on.
 This is what you're exposing yourself to because, you know,
 we talked about that powerful tool that,
 how we found Rossalbrick at gmail.com.
 Well, bad guys are using that too.
 It's called, you know,
 it used to be called Google dorking.
 Now it's, I think it's named kind of Google hacking
 by the community.
 You can go in, you know, and find a vulnerability,
 read about the white paper, what's wrong with that software.
 And then you can go on the internet
 and find all of the computers that are running
 that outdated software.
 And there's your list, there's your target list.
 I know the vulnerabilities that are running.
 Again, not making a playbook here,
 but you know, that's how easy it is to find your targets.
 And that's what the bad guys are doing.
 Then the reverse is tough.
 It's much tougher, but it's still doable,
 which is like the first find the target.
 If you have specific targets,
 to hack into a Twitter account, for example.
 Much harder.
 That's probably social engineering, right?
 That's probably the best way.
 Probably, if you wanted something specific to that,
 I mean, if you really want to go far, you know,
 if you're targeting a specific person,
 you know, how hard is it to get into their office
 and put a little device, USB device,
 in line with their mouse?
 Who checks how their mouse is plugged in?
 And you can, for 40 bucks on the black market,
 you can buy a keylogger that just USB,
 then the mouse plugs right into it.
 It looks like an extension on the mouse,
 if you can even find it.
 You can buy the stuff with a mouse inside of it
 and just plug it into somebody's computer.
 And as there's a keylogger that lives in there
 and calls home, sends everything you want.
 So, I mean, and it's cheap.
 Yeah, in grad school,
 a program that built a bunch of keyloggers.
 It was fascinating, a tracking mouse,
 just for what I was doing as part of the research,
 I was doing to see if by the dynamics of how you type
 and how you move the mouse, you can tell who the person is.
 Oh, wow.
 That's like, it's called the active authentication.
 Like, it's basically biometrics that's not using bio
 to see how identifiable that is.
 So it's fascinating to study that,
 but it's also fascinating how damn easy it is
 to install keyloggers.
 So I think it's, in natural,
 what happens is you realize how many vulnerabilities
 there are in this world.
 You do that when you understand bacteria and viruses,
 you realize they're everywhere.
 And the same way with, I'm talking about biological ones.
 And then you realize that all the vulnerabilities
 that are out there.
 One of the things I've noticed quite a lot
 is how many people don't log out of their computers.
 Just how easy physical access the system actually is.
 Like in a lot of places in this world.
 And I'm not talking about private homes,
 I'm talking about companies, especially large companies.
 It seems quite trivial in certain places that I've been to
 to walk in and have physical access to a system.
 And that's depressing to me.
 It is.
 I laugh because one of my partners at Naxo
 that I work at now, he worked at a big company.
 Like you would know the name as soon as I told you,
 I'm not gonna say it.
 But the guy who owned the company,
 and the company has his name on it,
 didn't want to ever log into a computer
 just to annoy the shit out of him.
 So they hired a person that stands next to his computer
 when he's not there.
 And that's his physical security.
 See, that's good.
 That's pretty good actually.
 Yeah, I mean I guess if you could afford to do that.
 At least you're taking your security seriously.
 I feel like there's a lot of people in that case
 who just not have a login.
 Yeah.
 No, the security team there had to really work around
 to make that work.
 Non-compliant with company policy.
 But that's interesting.
 The keylogger, there's a lot of,
 there's just a lot of threats.
 Yeah, I mean.
 There's a lot of ways to get in.
 Yeah, I mean so you can't sit around and worry
 about someone physically gaining access to your computer
 with keylogger and stuff like that.
 If you're traveling to a foreign country
 and you work for the FBI, then yeah, you do.
 You pick little, sometimes some countries
 you would bring a fake laptop just to see
 if they stole it or accessed it.
 I really want, especially in this modern day,
 to just create a lot of clones of myself
 that generate lex sounding things
 and just put so much information out there.
 I actually dox myself all across the world.
 And then you're not a target, I guess.
 Just put it out there.
 I've always said that though.
 We do these searches in FBI houses and stuff like that.
 If someone just got a box load of 10 terabyte drives
 and just encrypted them, oh my god,
 do you know how long the FBI would spin their wheels
 trying to get that data off there?
 Be insane.
 Oh, so just give them.
 You don't even know which one you're looking for.
 Yeah.
 That's true, that's true.
 So it's like me printing like a treasure map
 to a random location, just get people to go on Goosechases.
 Yeah, what about operating system?
 What have you found, what's the most secure
 and what's the least secure operating system?
 Windows, Linux?
 Is there no universal?
 There's no universal security.
 I mean, it changed.
 People used to think Macs were the most secure
 just because they just weren't out there.
 But now kids have had access to them.
 So, I know you're a Linux guy, I like Linux too.
 But it's tough to run a business on Linux.
 People wanna move more towards the Microsofts
 and the Googles just because it's easier to communicate
 with other people that maybe aren't computer guys.
 So you have to just take what's best, what's easiest
 and secure the shit out of it as much as you can
 and just think about it.
 What are you doing these days at Naxo?
 So we just started Naxos.
 So I left the government and went to a couple consultancies
 and I started working, really all the people
 I worked good in the government with,
 I brought them out with me.
 And now-
 You used to work for the man and now you're the man.
 Exactly, but now we formed a partnership
 and it's a new cybersecurity firm.
 Our launch party is actually on Thursday,
 so it's gonna be exciting.
 You wanna give more details about the party
 so that somebody can hack into it?
 No, I don't even tell you where it is.
 You can come if you want, but don't bring the hackers.
 Hector will be there with us.
 I can't believe you invited me
 because you also say insider threat is the biggest threat.
 By the way, can you explain what the insider threat is?
 The biggest insider threat in my life is my children.
 My son's big into Minecraft
 and will download executables mindlessly
 and just run them on the network.
 So he is-
 Do you recommend against marriage and family and kids?
 Nope, nope.
 From a security perspective.
 From a security perspective, absolutely.
 But no, I just segmentation.
 I mean, we do it in all businesses for years.
 Started segmenting networks, different networks.
 I just do it at home.
 My kid's on his own network.
 It makes it a little bit easier to see what they're doing too.
 You can monitor traffic and then also throttle bandwidth
 if your Netflix isn't playing fast enough
 or buffers or something.
 So you can obviously change that a little too.
 You know they're gonna listen to this, right?
 They're gonna get your tricks.
 Yeah, that's true.
 They'll definitely listen.
 But there's nothing more humbling than your family.
 You think you've done something big
 and you go on a big podcast and talk to Les Freeman
 and they don't fucking care.
 Unless you're on TikTok or-
 Yeah, you'll show up on a YouTube feed
 or something like that and they'll be like, oh yeah.
 This guy's boring.
 My son does a podcast for his school
 and I still can't get him to tell.
 So Hector and I just started a podcast
 talking about cybersecurity.
 We do a podcast called Hacker in the Fed.
 It just came out yesterday, so first episode.
 So yeah, we got 1,300 downloads the first day.
 We were at the top of Hacker News,
 which is a big website in our world.
 So it's called Hacker in the Fed?
 Hacker in the Fed's name is.
 Go download and listen to Hacker in the Fed.
 I can't wait to see what,
 because I don't think I've seen a video of YouTube together
 so I can't wait to see what the chemistry is like.
 It's not weird that you guys used to be enemies
 and now you're friends?
 So yeah, I mean, we just did a trailer and all that
 and our producer, we have a great producer,
 a guy named Phineas and he kind of pulls things out of me
 and I said, okay, I got one.
 My relationship with Hector,
 we're very close friends now and then he's like,
 oh, I arrested one of my closest friends,
 which is a very strange relationship.
 Yeah, it's weird.
 But he says that I changed his life.
 He was going down a very dark path
 and I gave him an option that one night
 and he made the right choice.
 He now does penetration testing,
 he does a lot of good work and he's turned his life around.
 Do you worry about cyber war in the 21st century?
 Absolutely.
 If there is a global war, it'll start with cyber,
 if it's not already started.
 Do you feel like there's a boiling,
 like the drums of war are beating?
 What's happening in Ukraine with Russia?
 It feels like the United States becoming
 more and more involved in the conflict
 in that part of the world and China is watching very closely,
 it's starting to get involved geopolitically
 and probably in terms of cyber.
 Do you worry about this kind of thing happening
 in the next decade or two, like where it really escalates?
 You know, people in the 1920s were completely terrible
 at predicting the World War II.
 Do you think we're at the precipice of war potentially?
 I think we could be.
 I mean, I would hate to just be, you know,
 fear-mongering out there, you know, COVID's over,
 so we're not gonna be able to do anything.
 You know, COVID's over, so the next big thing
 in the media is war and all that,
 but I mean, there's some flags going up
 that are very strange to me.
 Is there ways to avoid this?
 I hope so.
 I hope smarter people than I are figuring it out.
 I hope people are playing their parts
 and talking to the right people,
 because the war is the last thing I want.
 Well, there's two things to be concerned about
 on the cyber side.
 One is the actual defense on the technical side of cyber,
 and the other one is the panic that might happen
 when something like some dramatic event happened
 because of cyber, some major hack that becomes public.
 I'm honestly more concerned about the panic,
 because I feel like if people don't think about this stuff,
 the panic can hit harder.
 Like if they're not conscious about the fact
 that we're constantly under attack,
 I feel like it'll come like a much harder surprise.
 Yeah, I think people will be really shocked on things.
 I mean, so we talked about LulzSec today,
 and LulzSec was 2011.
 They had access into the water supply system
 of a major US city.
 They didn't do anything with it.
 They were sitting on it in case someone got arrested
 and they were gonna maybe just expose that it's insecure.
 Maybe they were gonna do something to fuck with it.
 I don't know, but that's 2011.
 I don't think it's gotten a lot better since then.
 And there's probably nation states or major organizations
 that are sitting secretly on hacks like this.
 100%, 100% they're sitting seriously,
 waiting to expose things.
 I mean, again, I don't wanna scare the shit out of people,
 but people have to understand the cyber threat.
 I mean, there are thousands of nation state hackers
 in some countries.
 I mean, we have them too.
 We have offensive hackers.
 You know, the terrorist attacks of 9-11,
 there's planes that actually hit actual buildings
 and it was visibly clear and you can trace the information.
 With cyber attacks, say something that would result
 in a major explosion in New York City,
 how the hell do you trace that?
 Like, if it's well done,
 it's going to be extremely difficult.
 The problem is, there's so many problems.
 One of which the US government in that case
 has complete freedom to blame anybody they want.
 True.
 And then to go start war with anybody,
 anybody that actually see a Jew,
 all right, sorry, that's one cynical take on it, of course.
 No, but you're going down the right path.
 I mean, the guys that flew the planes in the buildings
 wanted attribution.
 They took credit for it.
 When we see the cyber attack,
 I doubt we're going to see attribution.
 Maybe the victim side, the US government on this side
 might come out and try to blame somebody,
 but you know, like you've brought up,
 they could blame anybody they want.
 There's not really a good way of verifying that.
 Can I just ask for your advice?
 So in my personal case, am I being tracked?
 How do I know?
 How do I protect myself?
 Should I care?
 You are being tracked.
 I wouldn't say you're being tracked by the government.
 You're definitely being tracked by big tech.
 No, I mean, me personally, Lex and an escalated level.
 So like,
 like you mentioned, there's an FBI file on people.
 Sure.
 I'd love to see what's in that file.
 Who did I have the argument for?
 Oh, let me ask you, FBI.
 How's the cafeteria food in FBI?
 At the academy, it's bad.
 Yeah.
 What about like-
 At headquarters?
 Headquarters.
 Little bit better, cause that's what the director,
 I mean, he eats up on the seventh floor.
 Have you been like at Google,
 have you been to Silicon Valley, those cafeterias,
 like those-
 I've been to the Google in Silicon Valley.
 I've been to the Google in New York.
 Yeah, the food is incredible.
 It is great.
 So FBI is worse.
 Well, when you're going through the academy,
 they don't let you outside of the building.
 So you have to eat it.
 And I think that's the only reason people eat it.
 Okay.
 It's pretty bad.
 I got it.
 Okay, I don't know why-
 But there's also a bar inside the FBI academy.
 People don't know that.
 Alcohol bar?
 Yes, alcohol bar.
 And if you, as long as you've passed your PT
 and in going well, you're allowed to go to the bar.
 Nice.
 It feels like if I was a hacker,
 I would be going after like celebrities,
 cause they're a little bit easier,
 like celebrity celebrities like Hollywood.
 The Hollywood nudes were a big thing there
 for a long time.
 But now you, yeah, I guess nudes-
 That's what they went after.
 I mean, all those guys, they socialize.
 They social engineered Apple to get backups,
 to get the recoveries for backups.
 And then they just pulled all their nudes.
 And I mean, whole websites were dedicated to that.
 Yeah.
 See that, see, I wouldn't do that kind of stuff.
 It's very creepy.
 I would go, if I was a hacker,
 I would go after like major, like powerful people
 and like tweet something from their account
 and like something that like positive, like loving.
 But like for the, for the walls,
 the obvious that it's a troll.
 God, you get busted so quick.
 By a bad hacker.
 Really?
 But why?
 Because hackers never put things out about love.
 Oh, you mean like, this is clearly-
 Yeah, this is clearly Lex.
 What the fuck?
 He talks about love in every podcast he does.
 I would just be like, no, oh God damn it.
 Now somebody's gonna do it.
 You'll blame me.
 It wasn't me.
 Looking back at your life, is there something you-
 I'm only 44 years old.
 I'm already looking back.
 Is there stuff that you regret?
 EV unit.
 Yeah.
 It got away.
 So is the one that got away.
 Yeah, I mean, it took me a while
 into my law enforcement career
 to learn about like the compassionate side.
 And it took Hector Montserrat to make me realize
 that criminals aren't really criminals,
 they're human beings.
 That really humanized the whole thing for me,
 sitting with him.
 For nine months.
 I think that's maybe why I had a lot more compassion
 when I arrested Ross.
 Probably wouldn't have been so compassionate
 if it was before Hector.
 But yeah, he changed my life and showed me
 that humanity side of things.
 So would it be fair to say that all the criminals,
 or most criminals are just people
 that took a wrong turn at some point?
 They all have the capacity for good and for evil in them?
 I'd say 99% of the criminals that I've interacted with,
 yes, the people with the child exploitation,
 no, I don't have any place in my heart for them.
 What advice would you give to people in college,
 people in high school,
 trying to figure out what they wanna do with their life?
 How to have a life they can be proud of,
 how to have a career they can be proud of,
 all that kind of stuff.
 In the US budget that was just put forward,
 there's 18 billion dollars in the US budget
 for the next year, there's 18 billion dollars
 for cybersecurity.
 We're about a million people short
 of where we really should be in the industry, if not more.
 If you want job security and want to work
 and see exciting stuff, head towards cybersecurity.
 It's a good career.
 And one thing I dislike about cybersecurity right now
 is they expect you to come out of college
 and have 10 years experience in protecting
 and knowing every different Python script out there
 and having a job that's not as difficult.
 The industry needs to change and let the lower people in
 in order to broaden and get those billion jobs filled.
 But as far as their personal security,
 just remember it's all gonna follow you.
 I mean, there's laws out there now
 that you have to turn over your social media accounts
 in order to have certain things.
 They just changed that in New York state,
 if you wanna carry a gun,
 you have to turn over your social media
 and do something about it, just like you're doing now.
 And that's why I'm making a video
 that's gonna be about a political character.
 So hopefully you didn't say something strange
 in the last few years
 and it's gonna follow you forever.
 I bet Ross Albrecht would tell you the same thing
 when he not don't put Ross Albrecht at gmail.com on things
 because it's gonna last forever.
 Yeah, people sometimes, for some reason,
 they interact on social media
 you know, what is that, busting each other's chops,
 like making fun of yourself, like being,
 especially gaming culture, like people who stream.
 Thank God that's not recorded.
 Oh my God, the things people say on those streams.
 Yeah, but a lot of them are recorded.
 That's just, there's a whole Twitch thing
 where people stream for many hours a day.
 And I mean, just outside of the very offensive things
 they say, they just swear a lot.
 They're not the kind of person that I would wanna hire.
 I wanna work with.
 Now I understand that some of us might be that way privately,
 I guess, when you're shooting the shit with friends,
 like playing a video game and talking shit to each other,
 maybe, but like that's all out there.
 You have to be conscious of the fact
 that that's all out there.
 And it's just not, it's not a good look.
 It's not like you're, you should, it's complicated
 because I'm like against hiding who you are.
 Oh, for an asshole, you should hide some of it.
 Yeah, but like, I just feel like
 it's going to be misinterpreted.
 When you talk shit to your friends
 while you're playing video games,
 it doesn't mean you're an asshole.
 Because you're an asshole to your friend,
 but that's how a lot of friends show love.
 Yeah, an outside person can't judge
 how I'm friends with you.
 If I wanna be, this is our relationship.
 If that person can say that I'm an asshole to them,
 then that's fine, I'll take it.
 But you can't tell me I'm an asshole to them
 just because you saw my interaction.
 I agree with that.
 They'll take those words out of context
 and now that's considered who you are is dangerous.
 And people take that very nonchalantly.
 People treat their behavior on the internet very carelessly.
 That's definitely something that you need to learn
 and take extremely seriously.
 Also, I think that taking that seriously
 will help you figure out how to be a good friend
 about who you really stand for.
 If you use your language carelessly,
 you'd never really ask, what do I stand for?
 I feel like it's a good opportunity when you're young
 to ask what are the things that are okay to say?
 What are the things, what are the ideas I stand behind?
 Especially if they're controversial
 and I'm willing to say them because I believe in them
 versus just saying random shit for the lols.
 Because for the random shit for the lols,
 keep that off the internet.
 That said, man, I was an idiot for most of my life
 and I'm constantly learning and growing.
 I'd hate to be responsible for the kind of person
 I was in my teens, in my 20s.
 I didn't do anything offensive,
 but I changed as a person.
 I used to, I guess I probably still do,
 but I used to read so much existential literature.
 That was a phase.
 There's like phases.
 Yeah, you grow and evolve as a person
 that changes you in the future.
 Yeah, thank God there wasn't social media
 when I was in high school.
 Thank God.
 Oh my God, I would never have gotten the FBI.
 Would you recommend that people consider a career
 at a place like the FBI?
 I loved the FBI.
 I never thought I would go anyplace else but the FBI.
 I thought I was gonna retire with the gold watch
 and everything from the FBI.
 That was my plan.
 You get the gold watch?
 No, but you know what it is.
 It's a, oh, it's an expression.
 You get a gold badge.
 You actually get your badge in Lucite and your creds
 put in Lucite and all that.
 Does it, by the way, just on a tangent,
 since we like those, does it hurt you that the FBI
 by certain people is distrusted or even hated?
 100%, it kills me.
 I've never, until recently,
 I sometimes be embarrassed about the FBI sometimes,
 which is really, really hard for me to say
 because I love that place.
 I love the people in it.
 I love the brotherhood that you have with all the guys
 in your squad, the guys and girls.
 I just use guys.
 You know, we, I developed a real drinking problem there
 because we were so social of going out after work
 and continuing on.
 It really was a family.
 You know, so I do miss that.
 But yeah, I mean, if someone can become an FBI agent,
 I mean, it's pretty fucking cool, man.
 The day you graduate and walk out of the academy
 with a gun and a badge and, you know,
 the power to charge someone with a misdemeanor
 for flying a United States flag at night, that's awesome.
 So there is a part of like representing
 and loving your country.
 And especially if you're doing cybersecurity.
 So there's a lot of technical savvy
 in different places in the FBI.
 Yeah, I mean, there's different pieces.
 Sometimes, you know, you'll see an older agent
 that's done, you know, not cyber crime,
 come over to cyber crime at the end
 so he can get a job once he goes out.
 But there's also some guys that come in, you know,
 I won't name his name, but there was a guy,
 I mean, I think he was a hacker when he was a kid
 and now he's been an agent.
 Now he's way up in management.
 Great guy.
 I love this guy and he knows who he is if he's listening.
 You know, that, you know, he had some skills.
 But we also lost a bunch of guys that had some skills
 because we had one guy in the squad
 that he had to leave the FBI
 because his wife became a doctor
 and she got her residency down in Houston
 and she couldn't move.
 He wasn't allowed to transfer.
 So he decided to keep his family versus the FBI.
 So there's some stringent rules in the FBI
 that need to be relaxed a little bit.
 Yeah, I love hackers turned like leaders.
 Like one of my quickly becoming good friends is Mudge.
 He was a big hacker in the 90s
 and then now was recently Twitter Chief Security Officer,
 CSO, but he had a bunch of different leadership positions
 including being my boss at Google.
 But originally a hacker.
 It's cool to see like hackers become like leaders.
 I just wonder what would cause him to stop doing it.
 Why he would then take like a managerial route
 for high tech companies versus-
 I think a lot of those guys, so this is like the 90s,
 they really were about like the freedom.
 There's like a philosophy to it.
 And when I think the hacking culture evolved over the years
 and I think when it leaves you behind,
 you start to realize like, oh, actually what I wanna do
 is I wanna help the world and I can do that
 and legitimate routes and so on.
 But that's the story that, and yeah,
 I would love to talk to him one day.
 But I wonder how common that is too.
 Like young hackers turn good.
 You're saying it like pulls you in.
 If you're not careful, it can really pull you in.
 Yeah, you're good at it.
 You become powerful.
 You become, everyone's slapping you on the back
 and say, what a good job and all that,
 at a very young age.
 Yeah, I would love to get into my buddy's mind
 on why he stopped hacking and moved on.
 That's gonna be a good conversation.
 In his case, maybe it's always about a great woman involved,
 a family and so on that grounds you.
 Because like we have, there is a danger to hacking
 that once you're in a relationship, once you have family,
 maybe you're not willing to partake in.
 What's your story?
 What, from childhood, what are some fond memories you have?
 Fond memories?
 Where did you grow up?
 Well, I don't give away that information.
 In the United States?
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, in Virginia.
 In Virginia.
 What are some rough moments?
 What are some beautiful moments that you remember?
 I had a very good family growing up.
 The rough moment, and I'll tell you a story
 that just happened to me two days ago
 and it fucked me up, man.
 It really didn't.
 You'll be the first, I've never told,
 I tried to tell my wife this two nights ago
 and I couldn't get it out.
 So my father, he's a disabled veteran,
 or he was a disabled veteran.
 He was in the army and got hurt
 and was in a wheelchair his whole life, all my growing up.
 He was my biggest fan.
 He just wanted to know everything about
 what was going on in the FBI, my stories.
 I was a local cop before the FBI
 and I got to a high-speed car chase,
 foot chase and all that and kicking doors in.
 He wanted to hear none of those stories.
 At some points I was kind of too cool for school
 and, ah, dad, I just want a break and all that
 and things going on.
 We lost my dad during COVID.
 Not because of COVID, but it was around that time,
 but it was right when COVID was kicking off.
 He died in the hospital by himself
 and I didn't get to see him then.
 My mom had some people visiting her the other night,
 Tom and Karen Roggerberg.
 I'll say they're my second biggest fans.
 Right behind my dad.
 They always asking about me and my career
 and they read the books and seen the movie.
 They'll even tell you that Silk Road movie was good.
 They'll lie to you on that.
 And so they came over and I helped them with something
 and my mom called me back a couple days later
 and she said, I appreciate you helping them.
 I know fixing someone's Apple phone over the phone
 really isn't what you do for a living.
 It's kind of beneath you and all that,
 but I appreciate it.
 She said, oh, they loved hearing the stories
 about Silk Road and all those things.
 And she goes, your dad, he loved those stories.
 I just wish he could have heard them.
 He even would tell me, he would say,
 maybe Chris will come home and I'll get him drunk
 and he'll tell me the stories.
 But, and then she goes, maybe one day in heaven
 you can tell them those stories.
 And I fucking lost it.
 I literally stood in my shower sobbing,
 like a child, like just thinking about,
 like all my dad wanted was those stories.
 Yeah.
 And now I'm on a fucking podcast
 telling the stories to the world and I didn't tell him.
 Yeah.
 Did you ever have like a long heart to heart with him
 about like, about such stories?
 He was in the hospital one time and I went through
 and I want to know about his history,
 like his life, what he did.
 And I think he may be sensationalized some of it,
 but that's what you want.
 Your dad's a hero, so you want to hear those things.
 Is he a good storyteller?
 Yeah, again, I don't know what was true and not true,
 but you know, some of it was really good.
 And it was just good to hear his life,
 but you know, we lost him and now those stories are gone.
 You miss him?
 Yeah.
 What did he teach you about what it means to be a man?
 So my dad, he was an engineer.
 And so part of his job, we worked for Vermont power
 and electric or whatever it was.
 I mean, he, when he first got married to my mom
 and all that, like he flew around in a helicopter
 checking out like power lines and dams.
 He used to swim inside to scuba into dams
 to check to make sure they were functioning properly
 and all that.
 Pretty cool shit.
 And then he couldn't walk anymore.
 I probably would have killed myself
 if my life switched like that so bad.
 And my dad probably went through some dark points,
 but he had that from me maybe.
 And so to get through that struggle, to teach me like,
 you know, you press on, you have a family,
 people count on you, you do what you got to do.
 That was big.
 I'm sure you make him proud, man.
 I'm sure I do, but I don't think he knew that,
 that I knew that.
 Well, you get to pass on that love to your kids now.
 I try, I try, but I can't impress them
 as much as my dad impressed me.
 I can try all I want, but.
 Well, what do you think is the role of love?
 Because you gave me some grief,
 you busted my balls a little bit
 for talking about love a lot.
 What do you think is the role of love
 in the human condition?
 I think it's the greatest thing.
 I think everyone should be searching for it.
 If you don't have it, find it, get it as soon as you can.
 I love my wife, I really do.
 I had no idea what love was until my kids were born.
 My son came out and, this is a funny story,
 he came out and I just wanted to be safe,
 be healthy and all that.
 And I said to the doctor, I said,
 10 and 10 doc, 10 fingers, 10 toes, everything good.
 And he goes, nine and nine.
 I was like, what the fuck?
 He's like, oh, this is gonna suck.
 Okay, we'll deal with it and all that.
 He was talking about the apnoeocard cord
 or some score about breathing and color and all that.
 And I was like, oh shit, but no one told me this.
 But so I'm just sobbing.
 I couldn't even cut the umbilical cord.
 Like just fell in love with my kids when I saw them.
 And that to me really is what love is,
 like just for them, man.
 And I see that through your career
 that love developed, which is awesome.
 The being able to see the humanity in people.
 I didn't when I was young, the foolishness of youth.
 I needed to learn that lesson hard.
 I mean, when I was young in my career,
 it was just about career goals
 and resting people became stats.
 You rest someone, you get a good stat,
 you get an atta boy.
 Maybe the boss likes it and you get a better job
 or you move up the chain.
 It took a real change in my life to see that humanity.
 And I can't wait to listen to your talk.
 It was just probably hilarious and insightful
 given the life of the two of you lived
 and given how much you've changed each other's lives.
 I can't wait to listen brother.
 Thank you so much.
 This is a huge honor.
 You're an amazing person with an amazing life.
 This was an awesome conversation.
 Dude, huge fan.
 I love the podcast.
 Glad I could be here.
 Thanks for the invite.
 So exercising the brain too.
 It was great.
 It was a great conversation.
 And the heart too, right?
 Oh yeah, yeah.
 You got some tears there at the end.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation
 with Chris Darbell.
 To support this podcast,
 please check out our sponsors in the description.
 And now let me leave you with some words
 from Benjamin Franklin.
 They can give up essential liberty
 to obtain a little temporary safety,
 deserve neither liberty nor safety.
 Thank you for listening.
 I hope to see you next time.