This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.
Ha. I was going to write a very similar comment. It's a really interesting situation, but the story as told is incomplete and lacking in really obvious parts, such throwing out "30 FBI agents kicking down the door" but not giving anything concrete. Was he there at the time? Was he even still living there? If so, it seems to go directly against his lawyer's "[you will] never hear from the FBI".
Now it's out there, though. This can be the V1.0 of the story and although it won't be breaking news if written professionally, it can be a great investigative piece still!
Really? I actually like it this way. Journalist tries to make it intriguing and longer. But that doesn't change the events or make them more interesting. I guess I just like simple and straightforward.
Except for the fact that he was working on data sets of oil pressure and speed sensors, but somehow that was for silk road.... maybe I didn't follow it, but I don't understand what he was doing.
Sounds like he was told that's where the data was coming from, but his tool could have been used to visualize totally different data. I don't see anything in the design he posted that would limit it's usefulness to sensor data.
It was exactly the opposite of simple and straightforward. I had to read it several times to ever understand what was happening and there is still giant pieces missing. One thing doesn't follow from the next and the whole thing is just confusing and disjointed.
Normally I wouldn't waste my time on such nonsense but it was an interesting story so I really wanted to understand it. It's a great story.
He also didn't mention that it wasn't the original Silk Road, which is pretty significant information.
But this story wasn't simple or straight forward. If someone challenged me to draw up a simple timeline of events, I wouldn't be able to. I'm not even sure who he was directly reporting to while doing the work for Silk Road, or to whom he sent the final "I quit" email, or what he was doing for them at all.
I agree. This would be awesome if it was written up like the Paul le Roux story on The Atavist [0]. That was gripping. I'd be so excited to read the next piece each week. I want to hear the rest of this story.
I thought you were just being petty until I tried to read it. There is so just much context switching without any clues at all to the reader, it is really jarring.
I assume you mean about the credibility? We don't know those e-mails are real. A journalist handling the story would contact the relevant parties to confirm the account given.
I assume they meant that it was seriously confusing to read an email without context, only to find the context in an earlier email after reading another full page of content.
Edit: Turns out the headline is completely made up. This was in the comment section:
> So was “Sciview” actually some sort of analytics app for Silk Road, with the “sensors” representing some other Silk Road metrics? Or was BB truly freelancing for SpaceX while administering Silk Road?
> AUTHOR: Excellent question, I don’t know.
So he has no idea if he was just a subcontractor or if he was doing work for Silk Road. If I had to bet on this, I'd guess the friend subcontracted a project to him for easy cash (or because he was in over his head) and the Silk Road stuff was completely unrelated.
What would Silk Road do with such an application anyway?
Don't recall if I ever met the author of this blog post personally, but his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. I was thousands of miles away from SF but it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX as an internal tool. He always juggled lots of projects and besides this SpaceX idea, I remember him telling me 2 weeks before the arrest about another unrelated project he was trying to get a team together for so he could apply to Y Combinator. Never once did I hear anything hinting at involvement with the Silk Road, but he always talked about a million ideas at once. Anyone who knew him for long knew that he traveled a lot for years and years (back in 2010 he was the first person I knew who jumped on Jet Blue's special offer of a month of unlimited travel for only $600), so the author would've realized that was routine if he knew him for long. I do find the author's story very plausible.
Lots of plausibly lucrative subprojects also make a good cover story and/or attempt at money laundering for someone running a drug trading platform.
Seems more likely that this was his intention (or, as you say, he genuinely thought he might be able to flog it to his ex-employer) rather than getting design work for part of the back end for the Silk Road. If he wanted an analytics package for his trading platform, surely he'd have just told the blog post author he was subcontracting an analytics package for a very boring company under NDA's trading platform rather than trying to disguise his design brief as curiosity-inducing stuff like metrics for rocket launches?
> his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. . . it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX
> I do find the author's story very plausible.
Aren't these statements completely contradictory?
On the one hand, you say it was a SpaceX project. But later, you say that the author is correct (meaning it was a Silk Road project).
A little confusing, I know, and it doesn't help that the HN title is currently different from the blog post title. I find it plausible that the author was wondering what the project was really for, because it wasn't an official SpaceX project. It wasn't even contracted by SpaceX, but rather intended to be completed and then pitched to SpaceX and hopefully sold to SpaceX. But the author wouldn't have had any interaction with SpaceX and therefore is wondering to this day whether there was a real chance that SpaceX would have ever used this code.
Edit: That being said, I'm a little surprised the author thinks this code would've been used for anything related to Silk Road.
Not sure, but Silk Road obviously couldn't rely on traditional third party web analytics, even though they still needed to identify and fight spammers/fraud.
There's also a lot of open-source solutions for things like this (PiWik, AWStats) so, as you said, the author probably was involved in the outsourcing a different project for someone in L.A. But then why would they try to disguise the sample as rocket sensor data?
I also don't think you can go this long with living and working with someone, notice the major purchases/parties (with outstanding invoices from SpaceX), and not get a hint about what's going on. If there were so many parties, what did they think when none of the coworkers from SpaceX showed up to one? Or his roommate's Linkedin profile shows something else other than SpaceX?
He had worked for SpaceX in the past. The blog post author omitted many details, probably because 2 years ago this story was so heavily documented by every major publication you can think of (BBC, NY Times, IB Times, Wired, Ars Technica) that he felt his audience would know the details.
I'm not doubting the story, but it doesn't seem to fit together much the way that it's told here. Exactly who was he really working for, and what was his "friend"s relationship to them?
All I can really say is maybe you should be extra skeptical when somebody talks about working for a "big name" company, like SpaceX, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. If you're never reading or writing emails from a company.com email address, going to company's actual public website, going for interviews or meetings at an actual company office, then maybe you should look really closely at who you're really working for.
He was working for "Defcon" or Blake Benthall (his roommate in the story). Defcon was running Silk Road 2.0 after the second "Dread Pirate Roberts" left.
>Why is enabling our species to be interplanetary often a harder sell than the prospect of trading years of your life for a small chance that you might exit with a few billion dollars?
Demand and supply people. The answer is very simple. No matter what amount of wishful thinking you may undertake, if you don't satisfy that simple principle of demand and supply, it just won't matter.
I'm not sure why, but that comment gave me a few chills.. I think that comment was made about 9 months before he got caught[1]. I imagined he was already running the site if not developing Silk Road 2.0 at that time.
I'm unsure if ironic is the right word but it's bizarre to see yourself "progressing humanity" while working on something completely opposite..
> it's bizarre to see yourself "progressing humanity" while working on something completely opposite..
I'm very ambivalent about sites like the Silk Road, but I'm sure some people view them as progressing humanity.
If you see it as a platform that enables "evil" activities, like illegal gun purchases, then it might be regressing humanity.
Alternatively you can view Silk-Road-like websites as disrupting existing illegal markets by moving them from the street to the internet. This enables these services to be offered with less violence, more competition, better "regulation" (banning frauds, community checking quality etc.), etc. With the primary market apparently being drugs, it seems likely that these online platforms save more lives than they cost.
Then again, more readily available drugs likely decrease humanities overall productivity. Depending on what "progressing humanity" means to you, that's bad.
It's a complicated subject, but as far as startups go it has some very compelling arguments why it is progressing humanity (even though the counter arguments are surely not without merrit).
I am extremely skeptical that silk road like sites reduce violence to any significant degree. I'm under the impression that most of the violence is further up in the supply chain.
I'd suspect they likely do reduce drug deaths and fraud, though. Their escrow and reputation systems guarantee that the vast majority of drug sales are pure products and at the correct dosage listed.
I don't know about that. I think it's pretty common for people to build up a strong rep and then at the end pull off a big scam before re-registering as someone else.
I admit I haven't kept up with the whole Silk Road 2.0 story, but I don't see DPR as sympathetic considering the only reason he didn't have a hitman kill people was that he was too bumbling to hire a real one.
Wait until it happens to you. There are many crimes that don't actually hurt anyone which would still ruin your life if you were caught committing them. Blackmail pulls someone from the innocent-citizen category and puts them into just-another-gangster category in a way that smoking some pot does not.
But also, there's a big difference between giving someone an absolute 100% pass and simply being able to empathize.
But he wasn't just smoking pot (and it's hard to imagine anyone really caring about unsubstantiated allegations of some guy smoking pot), he was running a massive drug dealing enterprise.
If the laws were even slightly focused on harm reduction instead of stocking private prisons then maybe they wouldn't be ridiculous. And obviously the blackmailer, turning someone in for something that isn't an actual harm to society, is more of a harm than the "criminal" is.
Your whole argument is "law enforcement is good", with as much proof as you'd supply for the existence of Santa. That's a stupidly naive view to have. Yes, kidnapping is bad and stopping kidnappers is good. But very little of what law enforcement does is in our best interests, as individuals or as a society.
Clearly the rightness of evading law enforcement and shooting blackmailers depends on the rightness of the law the enforcers are enforcing. With bad law backing them up...
It's not that "law enforcement is good" or even "drug laws are good" but "hiring people to commit murder on your behalf is morally wrong."
> Clearly the rightness of evading law enforcement and shooting blackmailers depends on the rightness of the law the enforcers are enforcing. With bad law backing them up...
That's not exactly clear, no. In fact it's less than clear, to me, that hiring a hitman is anywhere near the same moral level as "evading law enforcement."
> "hiring people to commit murder on your behalf is morally wrong."
No, unjustifiably murdering people is wrong. Killing someone for the "right" reasons, either by yourself or by proxy, is morally right.
> > Clearly the rightness of evading law enforcement and shooting blackmailers depends on the rightness of the law the enforcers are enforcing.
> That's not exactly clear, no.
Sure it is. You never taken a history class, or watched current events on TV, if you think all laws are equal and that all rulers have a right to be obeyed. Without recognizing a bad law you can't recognize good law.
> In fact it's less than clear, to me, that hiring a hitman is anywhere near the same moral level as "evading law enforcement."
Soldiers are hit men. Sending them some places results in war crimes, sending them other places prevents war crimes. Overall, I'd rather have and use soldiers than not.
For a meaningful comparison with "law enforcement", first specify which legal system and which laws.
> Killing someone for the "right" reasons, either by yourself or by proxy, is morally right.
Avoiding the consequences for running your large criminal enterprise, through which you are enriching yourself, doesn't strike me as a good case for justifiable homicide.
The invented consequences, yes. But the consequences of the crime itself (ie hitting someone while drunk driving) have to be bad in and of themselves for the concept of crime to be distinct from angering the king.
> doesn't strike me as a good case for justifiable homicide.
Being threatened with having your life ruined for actions that don't hurt anyone actually seems like the only reasonable justification for killing someone. Especially in the case of a blackmailer where they aren't attempting to right any (theoretical) wrongs.
No, you refuse to put yourself in the shoes of someone breaking an unjust law and being persecuted for it. You may never agree with a drug dealer killing an informant, but the concept of killing your blackmailer is much broader.
The fact is that our law. (You and me. We paid for it.) Doesn't help us, and was used to hurt (blackmail) someone. You might not think the hit was "Fair" or in proportion but it was a consequence of our useless law - making someone defend themselves. As long as we have bad law we'll have its unintended consequences.
Silk Road was the best public-safety advancement in drugs in the last millennium. It was impossible for someone to stumble into unaware, it wasn't near a school, church, rehab clinic, etc. And our useless laws treated it like he was shoving crack cocaine into a toddler's mouth, and denied him the protection of the police.
And useless isn't just a term of dislike, it's that our drug laws don't increase safety for anyone, dealers, users, or bystanders.
Not a martyr, that's a silly religious concept. He's just not served by the law and neither are we. He was denied protection despite not hurting people, and yet we are no safer because of the actions of law enforcement.
Anyways, as long as we create this class of people (criminals whose crimes don't hurt anyone) and deny them protection, they will protect themselves. That's not further criminality, it's humanity. You would defend yourself, and so do they. We can stick our heads in the sand and say "It's wrong, they're criminal" or we can stop with the ridiculous laws.
No, that's a really imbecilic interpretation of what I said. If you're making yourself rich you can't turn around and plead that your act was selfless public service. Ulbricht was no different than any other violent drug lord and you won't convince me otherwise by repeating arguments about how drug laws should be reformed -- that's not a notion I disagree with but I think it has zero bearing on this case.
Funnily enough, I watched the Breaking Bad series finale with him at his house. I also confronted him about his spending 9 months before he was arrested, but he lied to me and I bought it because his story made more sense than "my friend is running the Silk Road".
In the time since he was arrested, I've moved from coding to fraud investigations, and my time with him is a constant reminder to trust my observations over anything I am told.
I disagree that he was more hateable than Ulbricht. He never tried to have people tortured/murdered.
Yeah, he had the potential for a lot of public support but squandered it when evidence of the hits came out. (And the evidence looks very convincing to me.)
An argument can be made for SR's value to humanity. But he was a megalomaniacal asshole with shitty opsec, and he got what he deserved. Running a large "enterprise" doesn't give you the right to play dice with people's lives.
Thanks, that's interesting. Sounds like Blake's story could be much better than this one. We can only wonder how many thousands of HN readers have read these DarkNet stories and thought they could make one secure enough to withstand an FBI investigation.
If you take a look at the code on Github you quickly realize it's complete bullshit, a bit of hardcoded data [1] and one file of backend code that looks like it was copied from somewhere [2].
But he talks about an ongoing business relationship. He probably spend a lot of time that isn't obvious in the code (requirements, interface design, software design etc.), but we can only see code that anyone could have coded within one hour. That's substantially less than what I would have expected from the article.
The lawyer was correct. If you have reason to suspect the FBI is watching you, they already have what they need. The men-in-black routine is meant to alter your behavior, to cause you to do something rare like empty an account or contact a distant friend. This was federal investigation 101.
Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.
I have a PI friend (retired) who pretended to be a cable guy as one of his go-to methods, even had a van with the right paint job. In that context, what you're saying sounds about right--why would you make yourself more obvious if you didn't have to?
I would love to hear more about this. Both you and the lawyer in the story recognize it as true, but is this something you're taught ... or learn officially ... or learn unofficially?
Exact procedures are of of course classified, but talk to enough people under investigation, read enough warrant affidavits, and you learn the patterns. They haven't changed much over the decades. They still dress in 1950ish black suits with sunglasses, at least when they want people to recognze them. This is a culture no different than any other corporation. They all dress to look like the boss/oldest man in the room.
FBI agents follow the trial lawyers credo "never ask a question you don't already know the answer to". They dont ask for a meeting until they know enough to dominate the conversation. Thats why they watch nearly everyone they ever deal with.
Actual footage of a low-level FBI agent engaged in semi-covert activities. Note the suit, haircut and body language (Ex-soldier, doesn't know a thing about the tech he is standing amongst). He stands in the middle of the action because he thinks that makes him part of the process, but all he can really do to help is close the cage door. This is a very junior agent out doing unimportant grunt work. He doesn't even have a partner with him.
> FBI agents follow the trial lawyers credo "never ask a question you don't already know the answer to"
When I was 18 I got a visit from the FBI that was related to some trouble I had gotten into when I was 15. They asked me a question about something I definitely never did and then later in the conversation circled back to my denial and told me they had proof that I did it. It was a really scary and bizarre moment. It was at that moment that I realized they were asking questions not to get the answers but to see what I said. I asked them to leave (they had showed up to my house) and to come back the next day when I could have a lawyer present. They did.
I was interviewed by FBI agents in a small town, and they did not appear sophisticated at all.
First, they went to my mother's old employer that she had left 8 years prior. The message got passed to me and I called them.
They mispronounced words, tried to intimidate me and at one point said, "We aren't the Federal Bureau of Information" when I pointed out holes in their questions.
I'm sure if I was a high priority this would had been different.
A group that tries to provide secure means of communication for protests and activists. Take the fact that the FBI have seized and replaced their co-located servers as you will.
Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but they might actually "love that" if their objective at that point of the investigation is to alarm you and see what you do. It's an acknowledgment that they have indeed alarmed you.
I can actually do them a favour. That agent doesnt like sitting there all day. He was assinged to intimidate. Mission acomplished. By photographing him you acknowledge the message and he can be assigned to sonething else. Moving the nonverbal conversation along might actually trigger them to make a formal, polite, approach.
A lone FBI agent wont be happy, but he wont break cover be reacting. He will just drive away.
I think the idea is.
Step 1: FBI agents watch you without you realizing it. They find out what you normally do.
Step 2: The FBI agents do something obvious so you know they are watching you. In this case, taking your picture.
Step 3: The FBI agents then watch you to see what you do next. Do you go to an unusual bank to take out money? Run out and buy a burner phone and make weird calls? etc.
The point of it is, I suppose, to react in a strange way, and let them know that you know. Most people would do one of the things you listed in Step 3 - not take pictures of the person taking pictures of them.
Yep. Seems like a classic dumb move(tm) designed to convey that you're on to their FBI games.
I'd say that unless you're a TV spy complete with a complicated plan, sidekicks and knowledge of how the script ends, the right answer here is "skip the high school psych-outs and talk to a lawyer yesterday".
Why did the silk road want a data visualization app?
The "live demo" in the linked github doesn't seem to be very "live", in that it seems to be totally static. The post talks about "drawing correlations" but all it does it make a graph. http://sciview.herokuapp.com/#/data-sets/0
> Why did the silk road want a data visualization app?
Telemetry, analytics, data visualization, and things like AB testing would probably work just as well for a dark web market as they would for Amazon. It's all about the money.
As for why they felt they needed to create their own specific tool for this specifically, I'm not sure.
Because it's virtually all SaaS these days. Can't exactly use some hosted service when you're running an illegal business over Tor.
And it takes less time and is safer to write the software yourself than to do a full code audit of any self-hosted solution. Plus that would usually involve business contracts, etc.
You want to believe it, because it would be a more exciting story. But if I wanted you to make me an analytic app for the Silk Road, I would tell you I want an analytic app for a marketplace. Which will be selling toys or whatever. Amazon 2.0. Not a fucking spaceship.
It wouldn't be very plausible even if this guy was a programmer, asked to make some generic analytics engine for a spaceship (because things rarely are truly completely generic). But this guy is a designer. You do not hire a designer, because drawing a picture for UI is some secret knowledge available only to them, but because it requires spending your time thinking about this specific problem and picking pretty colors. So if I wanted to make some app without telling designers about the real purpose of the app, I wouldn't really need a designer at all. I would hire a programmer and ask him to make me another Salesforce, with exactly the same GUI.
space x also wouldn't hire some random green designer to develop a solution to analyze space ship data. They will use well vetted commercial solutions. LOL this author is BSing for sure..
SpaceX didn't hire anyone. Did you read it at all? It was some guy (Blake Benthall aka "Defcon"), who previously worked at SpaceX, who allegedly hired this guy Thomas to make UI for some project of his own that he (Defcon) intended to sell to SpaceX later.
I'm not saying the whole story isn't BS, but at least it didn't claim what you assume it claimed.
I'm saying from the author's perspective, wouldn't he question why spacex need such paltry solution to visualize data from billion dollar projects? Either author is too dim to realize this obvious conflict, or he is just lying, and a poor lie at that.. Don't even say spacex. Just claim some CRUD start up instead
Is it possible he was really working a SpaceX project as a subcontractor of a contractor? I do that sometimes. Give my work to someone else to do because I am too busy working on something else.
I think this is a great story to tell buddies when grabbing a drink, but not really good for posting online which will last forever.
Maybe if the project was actually functional and high quality, but it's just a half baked project that doesn't even work.
Furthermore, there's no proof that what he worked on was actually silk road. Even looking at the screenshots it says nothing about silkroad, looks actually like a spacex project.
Like others said, I think his main motivation is to post it for the record, so if one day he disappears, people know where to track him down.
This story is completely unintelligible. I have no idea what this story is about, where does it say he was designing for Silk Road? Did he say he was talking with DPR or something?
...thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. I kept backtracking thinking I missed something. It's reads like a random stream of thoughts.
Trying to give an account of one's potential involvement in illegal activities without first consulting a lawyer is a far, far worse idea than just saying nothing at all.
horrible story.. i guess anyone can write on medium and the nice layout makes it somewhat legitimate looking. It could have very well been a rant on IRC
I honestly have no clue how this is voted so high on HN right now, I assume it's just the title people are voting on. It makes no sense, jumps around and no flow. I had to re-read parts multiple times and I still have no clue what is going on.
As bad as the writing style is, I still found the story interesting. The bits of info about working with his friend are juicy, even if the title is overblown and there's not much meat to the post.
A common idiom is "not know whether to laugh or cry", which usually means a situation is extremely bad. I don't really know how that applies to having a birthday party a week after you announce you're quitting, though.
"Not know whether to laugh or cry" usually means (to me) a situation is both funny and sad. Like you wouldn't say "my entire family was killed in an automobile crash, I don't know whether to laugh or cry," there's no humorous component.
Like you said, birthday cake celebration of an outgoing employee is neither.
Wtf? Why would spacex utilize a freelancer front end Dev / designer to develop a one off crappy custom soln for data analysis? When much more robust, performant, established solutions exist?
Also space x is not a green start up, why would they still lack the ability to visualize and analyze data?
The author obviously failed to ask himself this obvious questions.
On the plus side, the OP had plausible deniability. I wonder whether he could've been considered an accomplice or liable in any way, or not knowing who he was working for completely exonerated him.
The Silk Road reference--is he saying he was working for Chinese interests? Where was the sensor data coming from?
I understand it's probably a painful story to tell, but a lot of little details are missing here, and they'd probably help both the author's friends and new readers like me understand what happened.
Thanks, so it sounds like the SpaceX pitch was just the client wanting to build up a really cool cover story while he worked on(?) Silk Road in secret. Right?
Presumably yes, and the datapoints being visualised would have presumably been transactions. The admin in question would have been Blake Benthall, not Ross Ulbricht who'd already been caught by then.
The author's title seems misleading, since in the post's comments Thomas acknowledges how he's not sure if his design was being actually used for Silk Road or if his leaseholder really was freelancing for SpaceX.
