Lex Fridman Podcast #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road
Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors.

The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cybercrime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Albergt, the leader of Silk Road, the billion-dollar drug marketplace, and he tracked down and arrested Hector Montegur, aka Sabu of Lulzec and Anonymous, which are some of the most influential hacker groups in history. He is co-founder of Nexo, a complex cybercrime investigation firm, and is a co-host of a podcast called The Hacker and the Fed. This conversation gives the perspective of the FBI cybercrime investigator, both the technical and the human story. I would also like to interview people on the other side, the cybercriminals who have been caught, and perhaps the cybercriminals who have not been caught and are still out there. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. 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So I recommend it not just for books you haven't read, but also for books you have read, and it includes basically all the major nonfiction books you can think of. You can claim a special offer for savings if you visit blinkist dot com slash lex. This is a lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here is Chris Tarbell. You are one of the most successful cybersecurity law enforcement agents of all time. You tracked and brought down Russ Albergt, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road and. Sabu of Lulzec 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 Albergt and Silk Road? Let's start from the very beginning. 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, take that back. You couldn't. There is 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 postings 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. You know 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 could possibly find. And I think one time I saw a posting for baby parts. So let's say that you you know 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 they wanted to eat body parts. I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI. That's another crazy story, but but that that one actually weirded me out. Sorry, I just watched Jeffrey Dahmer documentary on Netflix and it just changed the way I see human beings because it's a it's a 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 primary drugs and that's where it started. It started off with Russ Albergt 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 want to do for yourself and do it. And in 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 on the deep web. It was actually invented by the U.S. Navy back in the mid nineties or so. But it also used cryptocurrency. So it was the first time that we saw this birth on the internet of mixing cryptocurrency and an IP blocking software. So you know 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 the some kind of identifying thing of the computer. It's your telephone number for on your computer. So yeah, all all computers have you know a unique four octet numbers. You know so one two three dot one two three dot one two three dot one two three and you know the computer uses DNS or domain name services to to render that name. So if you were looking for you know cnn dot 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 it or was that considered to have guns or was did it naturally emerge and then Russ realized like this is not good. It went back and forth. I think there were guns on there and he tried to police it. You know he he told himself the captain of the boat so he had to follow his rules. So you know 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 isn't 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 the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that 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 the CEO of Silk Road. And so primarily 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 want to put in your body. And when you were presenting a case of why this should be investigated, you were 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 this would we arrested him was the second time he had been arrested for 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 know you look up anything. I could look up your name or or whatever if you are associated with my case. And we were finding at the time a lot of things in you look it up, a case would end be like oh this is Tor and just stopped. Like we couldn't get any further. So you know we had just had this bigger arrest of Sabu and took down Anonymous and and sometimes in the FBI, the way it used the old school FBI. When you had a big case and you are working seven days a week and fourteen hours fifteen hours a day, you sort of take a break. The boss kind of said, "Yeah, see in a few months, go go get to know your family a little bit, you know 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 you know 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 am 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 cybersecurity 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 am actually indirectly connected. Oh, to I am I am sure I am not admitting anything that's not already on my FBI file. Oh, I can already tell you what you are going to tell me though. What's that? The when you were at college, you wrote a paper and you are connected to the person that started. You son of a bitch. You clever son of a bitch. I am an FBI agent or a former FBI agent. Well, how would I not have known? No, but I could have told you other stuff. No, it'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 Greenstadt and she is married to Roger Dingell Dineen, which is the cofounder of the Tor project. And I actually reached out to him last night to do a podcast together. I don't know. No, it was it was a good it was a good party trick. I mean, it was it's cool that you know this and the timing of it. It was just like beautiful, but just the linker on the 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? Are there? It's like when you talk about Bitcoin for example, a cryptocurrency, especially today, much more people use it for legal activity versus illegal activity. What about Tor? Tor was originally invented by the U.S. 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 is dot onion sites which is like a normal website a dot com, but it's only found within the Tor browser. You can only get there if you know the whole address and get there. The other 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 are 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 at 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 I I and that sort of jaded my opinion towards towards Tor because that because it it helps facilitate those sites. So this ideal of freedom that Russ Albergt 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 the specific example for it. You know and it's I can it's easy for me to sit here and say child exploitation child porn because no one listening to this is ever going to say that I am 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 am a technologist. I want technology to move forward. You know people are going to do bad things and they're going to use technology to help them do bad things. Well, let me ask you then. Oh, 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. 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 onto your Facebook and you've got pictures of all inside your house and what's going on. I mean it's not you know 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 they're 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 is something going wrong wrong with the country I love, I want to be able to to help. And the one of the great things about the United States of America is there is that individual revolutionary spirit, like so that the the government doesn't become too powerful. You can always protest. There is always the best of the ideal of freedom of speech. You can always say "fuck you" to the man. And I think there is a concern of direct or indirect suppression of that through mass surveillance. You might not. Is that that little subtle fear that grows with time? That why you know why bother criticizing the government? It's going to be a headache. I'm going to get a ticket every time I say something bad. That kind of thing. So it gets it can get out of hand. The bureaucracy grows and the freedom slip away. Is that's the that's the criticism. I completely see your point. I agree with it. I mean, but I mean on the other side, people criticize the government of the freedoms. But I mean, tech companies are talk 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 you know they're taking away your freedoms of what you can say. And we've heard certain some things where maybe government officials were in line with with tech companies to take away some of that freedom. And that's I agree with you that gets scary. Yeah, there is 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 is 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. Yeah, 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. You know my parents didn't have that 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 you know do something along those lines. So you know 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 we took that away. But let's return to to Silk Road and Ross outbreak. 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 we came up with 26 web different onion dot onions that we targeted. We were looking for nexus to hacking because I was on a squad called Cy Two and we were like the premier. Squad in New York that was working criminal cyber intrusions. And so you know any website that was offering hackers for hire or hacking tools for free, you know or paid services, you know like 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 on I think we called it. So 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. You know case goes by. I think we called this onion peeler because of the. So a little bit of humor, a little bit of wit, and some profundity to the language. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to have to work with this for quite a lot. So yeah, this one had the potential of being a big one. You know because I think 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 you know law enforcement is getting some publicity out of it that you know that makes others think not to do it. We should say that Tor is the name of the project, the browser. What is the onion technology behind Tor? Let's say you want to go to a dot onion site. You'll you'll put in the dot onion you want to 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 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. That and then even the onion service doesn't know except for the 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 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 yeah, you know the more relays you have, the slower it is. I mean that's one of the big drawbacks on Tor is is how slow it operates. So how do you peel the onion? So what what are the different methodologies for trying to get some information from cybersecurity perspective on these operations like Silk Road? It's very difficult. People have come up with different techniques. There there's been techniques to put out in the in the news media about how they do it running like massive amounts of relays and you're controlling those relays. I think I think somebody tried that once. So there's a technical solution and 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 in our takedown, we used that. There was one of my partners, Jerry Derryagan. 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 he was inside and and talking to you know at that time we only know it is DPR or Dread Pirate Roberts. We didn't know who who that was yet but but we had that open communication. You know and one of the things you know the technical aspects on that is there was a jabber server that 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 what part of the we part of the country he was in. I mean, isn't that from from DPR's perspective from Ross's perspective? Isn't that clumsy? He wasn't a 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 techy savvy ones we don't arrest, we don't get to them, we don't find them. Shout out to the techy criminals. They're probably watching this. I mean yeah, I mean we're getting the low hanging fruit. I mean we'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 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, I got a funny story about about him and what who people think he is. Can 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 Lolsec was was a she was a 17 year old girl. And my source in the case the the guy Sabu that I arrested and part of in we sat side by side for nine months and then took down you know the case and all that. He was convinced she was a girl and we said you know and he was in love with her almost at one point. It turns out to be a 35 year old guy that living in England. Oh, so he was convinced it was a yes. He was absolutely based on what exactly by linguistic like human based linguistic analysis or what she she he whatever you know Kayla is what went it which ended up being like 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 and it's funny like 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 the everybody else that you know they're a Brazilian you know ISP owner or something like that. That's how I'm so powerful. Well, yeah, that social engineering aspect is part of living a life of cyber crime or cybersecurity and offensive or defensive. So AV Unit. Can I get 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 on a podcast? I would think so. I would think that that someone could. I mean, someone who has been living a double life for for long enough where you think they're not a criminal. No, no, no. They would have to admit that they they would say I am AV Unit. Oh, you would want to have a conversation with AV Unit. Yes. Is there way? I'm just speaking from an FBI perspective, technically speaking. Because I I 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 is that is it possible? If I was technically advising you, I would say first off, don't advertise it. Don't the fewer people you're going to tell that you're having this conversation with, the better. And yeah, you could you do it in person. Are you doing it? 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 are not going to you're going to have to alter those tapes. I say tapes because it's old school. You know. Exactly, I'm sure a lot of people just said that like oh shit this old guy just a tape. I heard a VHS was in 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 going to do it without a bag over your head. I don't know if that's the life you want to live. I'm fine with a bag over my head. That's going to get taken out of context. But I just I think it's a worthy effort. It's a worth 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 going to have the honest conversation that you're looking for. I mean it may sound honest, but it may not be the truth. I found most times when I was talking to criminals, it's lies mixed with half truth. And you you kind of 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 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 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 going to 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 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. Do you think ethically it's a good thing to do? I don't. I mean I 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 coacher here, yeah. But well that's interesting. I mean so because I thought you would have become jaded and exhausted by the criminal mind. It's funny, you know. I I'm you know fast forward in our story. I'm very good friends with with Hector Montazer the Sabu the guy arrested. And he tells stories of what he did in his past, and I'm like, I'm that Hector, you know. You know, but then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson, and I was like, this guy stealing money from from the U.S. 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. Let's finish with let's return tangent to back to a tangent. Oh, one tangent up. Who's AV Unit? I don't know. Interesting. So he's at the core of Anonymous. He's one of the critical people. Anonymous. What is known about him? There's what's known in public and what was known because I sat with Hector and. He was sort of like the the set things up guy. So if Lolsec had like their hackers, which was Sabu and Kayla, and they had their their their media guy, this guy Topiary up. He lived up in the northern end of England, and they had a few other guys. But 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 trying to get more out of Hector that early on in that relationship. You know I'm sure he was a little bit guarded, maybe trying to social engineer me. Maybe he wanted that that oh shit there's law enforcement involved in this. And and not to say I mean I 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. You know it was swimming in the deep end. So it was just at the end of the case I looked back and I was like, AV Unit, I could have had them all. You know maybe that's the perfectionist in me. Oh man, well reach out somehow. I can't. 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 about you the whole time. That's perfect. He probably doesn't even care about me. Well now he will 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. Better there you go,