Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road | Lex Fridman Podcast #340
you could by literally whatever else you wanted you could post things drugs you could buy heroin write it 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 Albert the leader of Silk Road the billion dollar drug Marketplace and he tracked down and arrested Hector massager AKA Sabu of lolsek and Anonymous which is 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 cybercrime 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 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 cyber security law enforcement agents of all time you tracked and brought down Russ Albrecht AKA dread pirate robbers who ran Silk Road and Sabu of LOL SEC and Anonymous who was one of the most influential hackers in the world so first can you tell me the story of jacking down Ross 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 uh dark Market website um you literally could buy anything there well to go back you could there's two things you couldn't buy there you couldn't buy guns because that was a different website uh 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 post things drugs you could buy a heroin right from Afghanistan the good stuff uh 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 I could possibly find and I think one time I saw a posting for uh 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 uh if you wanted to for like surgical operations versus something darker yeah I never saw anything that dark as far as people like wanted to eat body parts yeah um I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI that's another crazy story but uh but that one actually weirded me out so I just watched uh Jeffrey Dahmer uh documentary on Netflix and it just changed the way I see human beings because it's a it's a portrayal of a normal looking person doing uh 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 he's disturbing the 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 abusing Silk Road to primarily what was the Prime 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 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 or the onion router which is an anonymizing uh function on uh on the Deep Web it was actually invented by the U.S Navy back in the mid 90s or so but it also used cryptocurrency so it was the first time like we saw this birth on the internet uh mixing cryptocurrency uh and uh 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 me 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 computers have you know a unique uh for octet uh numbers you know it's a 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're looking for you know CNN.com your computer then translates that to that IP address or that telephone number where it can find that information didn't sell called used to have guns in the beginning or was that considered to have guns or was did it naturally emerge and then Ross realized like this is not good it went back and forth uh I think there were guns on there and he tried to police it um you know he uh he told himself the captain of the boat so he had to follow his rules so you know I think you took off those posts eventually and moved guns elsewhere what was the system of censorship that he used like selecting what is okay and not okay I mean it's alone he's the captain of the boat do you know by chance if there was uh 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 the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that what that happened I mean all the records were there um I don't remember big debates I mean there was a clear leadership yeah 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 uh 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 are 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 this would be arrested him it's the second time he had been arrested for for hacking uh he used Tor um and so that kind of brought us to a point um the FBI has a computer system where you look up things uh you know you look up anything I can 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 look it up the case would end be like oh this is tor it just stopped like we didn't get any further yeah so you know we had just had this big arrest of uh Sabu and took down Anonymous and and sometimes in the FBI um the way it used 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've seen 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 tour case closed it was tour so said let's take a look at touring 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 um 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 uh gleam anything out of it so I'm actually indirectly connected to I'm 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 going to tell me though what's that the when you were at College you wrote a paper and you're connected to the person that started you said I'm a bitch you clever son of a bitch I'm an FBI Jenner a former FB agent how would I not no but I could have told you other stuff is 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 greenstat and she is married to Roger Dingle dine which is the co-founder of the tour project and actually reached out to him last night to do a hotel podcast together I don't know these uh no it was a good it was a good party trick I mean it was just cool that you know this and the timing of it it was just like beautiful but um just a link around the on the tour project so we understand it's a tour is this um black box that people disappear in uh in terms of like the when you were tracking people can you paint a picture of what tours used in general other it's like uh when you talk about Bitcoin for example cryptocurrency especially today much more people use it for legal activity versus illegal activity what about tour was originally invented by the U.S Navy so that like spies inside countries could talk to spies and no one could find them um 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 dot onion sites 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 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'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 tour 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 uh 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 Kitty porn as they call it um 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 I and that sort of jaded my opinion towards towards tour because that because it it helps facilitate those sites so this ideal of Freedom that Russell Albert for example uh tried to embody is something that you um 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 you know and it's I can it's easy for me to sit here and say child expert child porn because no one listening to this is ever going to say that I'm wrong and that we should allow child porn um should because some people utilize it in a bad way should it go away um no I mean I'm a technologist I want technology to move forward um 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's 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 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 yeah 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 you know so people like the idea of not giving up their privacy um but they do it anyways they're giving away their freedoms all the time they're they're carrying watches that gives out their heartbeat a weight of companies that are storing that I mean what's more personal than your heartbeat so I I think people and 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 wrong with the country I love I want to be able to uh to help the the one of the great things about the United States of America is there's that individual revolutionary Spirit like so that the 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 that little subtle fear that grows with time that uh 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 out you can get out of hand the bureaucracy grows and the freedom slip away because that's the that's the criticism right I completely see your point I agree with it I mean 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 you 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 uh with tech companies to take away some of that freedom and that's 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 if 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 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 um 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 protester organize a protester 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 uh to still growing so how did your path with this very difficult very fascinating case uh cross we were looking to open a case against Tor because it was a problem all the cases were closing uh because Tori so we went on tour and we we came up with 26 Web different onion dog 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 um Squad in New York that was working uh uh criminal cyber intrusions and so you know any website that was offering hackers for hire or um hacking tools for free you know or paid Services uh you know like now we're seeing ransomware for the paid service and phishing as a paid service um anything that offered that so we opened this case on on I think we called it we so you have to name cases one of the fun things in the FBI is if you start a case you get to name it you would not believe how much time is spent in coming up with the name yeah um you know 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 yes you're gonna 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 uh 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 of it that you know that makes others think not to do it I always just say that tour 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 done you want to go to and your computer will build uh Communications with a tour 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 until 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 you 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 uh who the sender is and what information they're saying 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 um you know the more relays you have the slower it is I mean that's one of the big drawbacks on tour 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 a cyber security perspective on these operations like the Silk Road it's very difficult people have come up with different techniques they're um there's been techniques to put out in the in the news media about how they do it um running like massive amounts of relays and you're controlling those relays I think I believe someone tried that once so there's a technical solution and and what about social engineering what about trying to infiltrate the actual humans they're using Nah The Silk Road and trying to get in that way yeah I mean I I definitely could see the way of doing that and then in this case uh in our takedown we use that um there was one of my partners uh Jared Dairy again he was an HSI investigator and he had worked his way up to be a system admin on the site um so that did glean quite a bit of information because he was he was inside and talking to uh you know at that time we only know it is DPR or dread pirate Roberts uh we didn't know who who that was yet but but we had that open communication um you know and one of the things you know the technical aspects on that is there was a jabber server that was uh that's a communication type of communication server um 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 what part of the country was in I mean isn't that from From dpr's perspective from Russ's perspective isn't that clumsy he wasn't a uh 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 techie uh criminals they're probably watching this I mean yeah I mean you were getting a 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 I 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 I actually can we go on that brief tangent sure I love tangents [Laughter] well let me ask you uh since he's probably he or she who knows that 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 lulsec was a was a she was a 17 year old girl yeah uh and uh my source in the case the the guy Sabu that I arrested and part of it and you know 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 as at one point it turns out to be a 35 year old guy living in England oh so he was convinced there's a uh yes he was absolutely based on what exactly by linguistic like human-based linguistic analysis or what she she he uh whatever you know Kayla 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 it's funny like these guys are part of a hacking crew they social engineer the shit out of each other yeah just to build if one of them ever gets caught they'll convince the everybody else that you know they're a Brazilian uh you know 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 cyber crime or cyber security and the offensive or defensive so AV unit casca also just uh attention of attention first that's my favorite tangent okay um is it possible for me to have a podcast conversation was 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 they 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 um no no no they would have to admit that they would say I am AV unit oh you would want to have a conversation with AV unit yes um is there a way I'm just speaking from an FBI perspective technically speaking because I I so let me explain my motivation or 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 you have a big shift in your understanding of the world um I mean that I do have a question about the ethics of having such conversations but first technically uh 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 that you're gonna tell that you're having this conversation with the better um and yeah you could if you do it in person are you doing it in person would be amazing yeah but they their face would not be shown face would not be 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 uh 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 said tape I heard of VHS was in the 1800s I think um 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 um so uh 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 gonna take get taken out of context but I just I think it's a worthy effort it's a word 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 truce uh and you you kind of it's if they're good they can keep that story going for long enough uh 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 a resentment what do they think about love for the people within their small community do they have for example for the government or for other nations or for other people to the 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 their construction of the world they might be able to reveal some deep flaws to the cyber security infrastructure of our world not in detail but like philosophically speaking they might have I 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 cyber security 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 um yeah defending things that actually matter you know nuclear warheads and all those kinds of things I mean I could I could see if you know it's fascinating to explore the mind of a human being like that because um I think it will help people understand now of course uh 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 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 culture here yeah but uh well that's interesting I mean so because I thought you would have become jaded and exhausted by the criminal um mind it's funny um you know I I'm I'm you know fast forwarding our story I'm very good friends with with Hector monster or the Cebu the guy arrested um and he tells stories of what he did in his past and I'm like um that actor you know you know but then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson and I was like ah this guy's stealing money from 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 we'll talk about this let's finish with yeah let's return tangent to back to attention 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 uh side with Hector and um he was sort of like the the set things up guy um so if littlesec had like their hackers which was Sabu and Kayla and they had their uh their their media guy this guy topiary uh he lived up in the northern end of England and uh 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 um one of the first things Hector told me after we arrested him is that heavy unit was the secret service agent and I was like oh shit um 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 um and I tried to get more out of Hector but that early on in that relationship um you know I'm sure he was a little bit guarded uh and maybe trying to social engineer Me Maybe he wanted that uh that oh shit there's law enforcement involved in this um 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 um so to track them all down um plus the 350 hacks that we came in about just military institutions um you know it was swimming in the deep end um so it was just at the end of the case I looked back and I was like oh fuck heavy unit I could have had them all uh 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 would you have them on yeah oh my God if you just let me know just just talk this shit about you the whole time that's perfect he probably doesn't even care about me but 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 better there you go he's still eating at you I love it you or she if I could meet that guy one day that 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 what just for people who are not familiar uh how big was it um and any other interesting things you understand about its operation when it was active so it was uh when we finally got looking through the books and you know the the numbers came out it's about 1.2 billion dollars 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 you know and go across so most of the operation was done in Bitcoin it's all done Bitcoin you you couldn't you had escrow accounts on you know you came in and you put money in an escrow account and you know it the transaction wasn't done until the client got the the drugs or whatever they had bought um and then the drug dealers had sent it in there was some talk at the time that that the cartel was starting to sell on there um so that started getting a little hairy there at the end what was the understanding of the relationship between organized crime like the cartels and this kind of more ad hoc new age uh Market that is the Silk Road I mean it was all just chatter it was just you know because like I said Jared was the inside so we saw some of it from for the admin sides and Ross had a lot of private conversations with the different people that he had advised him um but no one knew each other I mean the only thing the only thing that they knew with 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 believed that it was but fast forward tangent 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 because I have other clumsiness yeah low hanging fruit I guess I guess that's what it is I mean I mean I would have bought I mean even Ross bought fake IDs off the site he had federal agents knock on his door um you know and then he got a little cocky about it the landscape the Dynamics of trust is fascinating here so you trusts certain ideas or like who do you trust in that kind of Market what was your understanding of the network of trust I have nothing anyone trust 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 uh there was there's open cases of that um 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 you the your whole world focus on that and you can't tell people what you do all day could he have walked away like someone else take over the site just shut down either one just you putting yourself in his shoes the loneliness the 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 know I don't like loneliness yeah I mean my my wife's away I 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 like to talk to her like honestly about everything so if you were running Silk Road you would you wouldn't be able to like uh hopefully I'd have a little protection I'd only mention to her when we were in bed um to have that marital uh connection but but who knows I mean she's gonna 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 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 uh Ross started counting his dollars I mean he really kept track of how much money he was making and it started you know getting exponentially growth I mean he 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 really held the Bitcoin can't hold it it's not real it's not like I can give you a briefcase of Bitcoin right like you know or something like that like 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 the 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 uh over a two day period um I knew DPR because I read his words and all that I didn't really know Ross um there was a journal found on his computer and so it sort of kind of gave me a little insight um so I don't like to do a playbook for criminals but I'll tell you right now don't write things down um there was a big fad about people like remember kids going around 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 but goes well so you actually give advice in the other end of logs being very useful for the defense perspective uh for you know if information is useful for being able to figure out what the attacks were all about Vlogs are the only reason I found Hector monstergar I mean the the one time his uh VPN dropped during a fox act and he says he did it wasn't even hacking he just was sent a link and he clicked on it and then 10 million lines of uh of logs there was one IP address that stuck out this is fascinating we'll explore several angles of that so um uh what was the process of bringing down Ross and uh the Silk Road all right so that's a long story you want the whole thing you want to 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 the server what's a chat log so the dot onion was uh running the the website the Silk Road was running on a server in Iceland how did you figure that out that was one of the uh claims that the NSA yeah that's that's the one that we said that yeah I wouldn't tell you if it was the 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 you it's puzzle pieces you have to put them together yeah 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 the physical copy of the server yeah we flew you fly over there so you you go if you've been Iceland if you've never been you should definitely go to Iceland uh is it beautiful or I love it I love it it was what 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 cyber crime goes through Iceland um 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 thingovar and I'm sure I'm fucking up the name the icelandics are pissed right now but it's where the the North American continent play in the European Continental plane are pulling apart and it's being filled in with the volcanic uh material in the in the middle and it's so cool like it's like one day I'll be able to afford to bring my family here um and once I left just like The Humbling and the beauty of nature just everything man it was a different world it was it was it was insane how great Iceland is and so we went back and we we rented a van and we took friends and um we drove around the entire country uh 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 these are new this is new land being carved by these Rivers you can walk behind a waterfall in one place um it's 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 it's cool so you have a lot of servers going on there server Farms you know they're they're the energy has come up out everybody out of the ground geothermal um and so and then it keeps all the servers nice and cool so why not keep your computers there at a cheap rate uh I'll definitely visit for several reasons including to uh talk to AV unit yeah well the servers are there but they don't probably live there I mean that's the interesting I mean the Pacific uh the PST the time zones there's so many fascinating things to explore here but so you I mean the European internet cable goes through there so you know across the Greenland then down through Canada and all that so they have backbone access with cheap energy and uh free cold weather you know and beautiful oh and beautiful yes so chat logs on that server what what are the what 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 up again I'm not making a guidebook of how to commit the perfect crime uh but you know we every chat he ever had and everyone's chat it was it was like going into Facebook of criminal activity yeah I'm just looking at texts with Elon Musk being part of the conversations uh I don't know if you're familiar but they've been made public for the court cases going through what's going through is going through what's going through with Twitter I don't know where it is um 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 tried 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 like I guess if you're a criminal that should be um 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 but yeah I mean not only do you have to be whatever you put in chat log or whatever put an email it has to hold up and you have to be stand behind it publicly when it comes out but it has 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 like if I was a parent an advising teens like you kind of have to teach them that I I know there's a sense like no we'll become more accustomed to that kind of thing but in reality nope 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 uh useful information like uh uh breadcrumbs of what of information that you can then pull out yeah great evidence and stuff you know I mean obviously yeah a lot of evidence here's a sale of this much air win because you know Ross ended up getting charged with Czar status on certain things and that's there's it's a certain weight in each type of drug that you had like I think it was it's four or five employees of your Empire and that you made more than 10 million dollars and so it's it's it's you know it's just like the Narco track feeders get charged with their you know uh anybody out of Colombia you know and so and that was primarily what he was charged with doing 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 uh I heard I heard rumors there was close uh well right so it depends given it's fascinating but given the political the ideological ideas that he represented and espoused it's it's not out of the realm of possibility yeah I mean I've been asked before who you know who does he get out of prison first or does Snowden come back into America and I I don't know I have no idea it just became a Russian citizen I saw that and I said yeah I've heard a lot of good weird theories about that one well actually uh on another tangent let me ask you do you think Snowden is um 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 and there's there's rules set up on how to do that um he didn't follow those rules I mean they you know 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 or anything do you think he could have anticipated the 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 base 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 the whistleblowers the the check on the power of government yeah I mean I'm not a big government type guy uh you know so uh you know even that sounds weird coming from a government guy for so many years um but there's rules in place for a reason I mean he put you know some of our best capabilities um he made them publicly available um they really kind of set us back in the and this isn't my world at all but the offensive side of cyber security right so he revealed stuff that he didn't need to reveal in order to make the point correct the so so you if you can imagine a world where he leaked stuff that revealed the mass surveillance efforts and not reveal other stuff is the mass surveillance I mean that's the thing that uh of course there's in the interpretation of that there's fear-mongering but at the core that was a real shock to people that um 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 like actual uh evidence that that is happening I mean it's it's a real 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 this is the new reality and we have to deal with that reality just like you work in cyber security I think it really hasn't hit most people how fucked we all are in terms of cyber security okay let me rephrase that how many dangers there are in the digital world how much under attack we all are and how more uh 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 it's it that message definitely have to get out there I mean you know if you have a voice you're a Target if of the place you work you might be a Target you know your husband might work at some place you know and because now people are working from home so they're going to Target you know Target you to get access to to his Network in order to get in when that same way the idea that the US government or any government could be doing Mass surveillance on its citizens is um is one that was a wake-up call because you could imagine the ways in which that could um be a uh like you could abuse the power of that to control a citizenry for political reasons and purposes absolutely you know you could abuse it I I think during in the part of the Snowden League saw the two NSA guys were uh moderating like their girlfriends and there's rules in place for that those people should be punished and for abusing that but how else are we going to hear about you know terrorists that are in the country talking about birthday cakes uh and you know that was a case where that that was the trip word that that you know we're gonna go and 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 in that power because like you you know in the name of the war on terror you can sort of uh sacrifice it there is a trade-off between security and freedom uh but it just feels like there's a giant slippery slope on the sacrificing of freedom in the name of security it's I hear you and and you know we we live in a world where well I live in a world where I had to tell you exactly how when I arrested someone I had to write a 50-page document of how I arrested you uh and all the probable cause I have against you and all that well you know 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 um you know they're doing it to be more secure if you know we tell people how we're monitoring you know how what we're surveilling we're going to lose that I mean the the terrorists are just going to go a different way and I'm not trying to again I'm not big government I'm not trying to say that you know it's cool that that we're monitoring the US government's monitoring everything um you know big text Monitor and everything they're just monetizing it versus uh possibly using it against you but there is a balance and those 50 pages just 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 the large-scale Czar level drug trading what else did it give you in terms of the how to catch I gave us infrastructure so the onion name was actually running on a server in France so if you like and it only commuted through a back Channel a VPN to connect to the Iceland server um 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 you know another another big mistake on Ross's part is he had the backups for everything at a data center in Philadelphia they'll put your infrastructure in the United States I mean again let's not make a Playbook but you know well I think these are low-hanging food that people of confidence would know already I agree but it's interesting that he wasn't competent enough to make he so he was incompetent in certain ways yeah I know I don't think he was a mastermind of setting up an infrastructure that would protect his uh his his online business because you know keeping chat logs keeping a diary putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be um bad decisions how did uh you figure out that he is in San Francisco so we had that part with Jared that he was on the west coast and then who again is Jared Jerry Reagan was a he was a partner um in uh he he was a DHS agent um worked for HSI Homeland Security investigations in Chicago uh he started his Silk Road investigation because he was working at O'Hare and a weird package came in I'm coming to find out he traced it back to Silk Road so he he started working 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 um so he was talking to Ross on a jabber server the private jabber server private chat communication server and uh we noticed that Ross's um Time Zone on that Jabra server was set to the West Coast so we we had Pacific Time on there so we had a a region 124th of the world was covered of where we thought we 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 um to find uh his clue he used the world of Google he simply just went back and Googled around for uh 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 gmail.com in my world that's a clue so okay so that that's as simple as that yeah and the the name he used on that post was Frosty yeah so he had to connect Frosty and other uses in Frosty and here's a Gmail and the Gmail has the name the Gmail posted that 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 yeah 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 uh or is there interesting details no I mean there's some electronic surveillance the find Ross Albrecht living in a house and is there you know is a computer on his house attaching to uh uh you know does it have tour traffic at the same time the dpr's on um another big clue matching up time frames 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 would I what it just makes me wonder how many criminals are out there that are not making these little hanging fruit mistakes and are still successfully operating it to me it seems like you could be a criminal much 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 a Silk Road and just the history of it from your own relationship with it from a cyber security 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 um so I just looked at it as of you know 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 um the president United States was going to 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 the attorney general and the president announcing the rest of this this big thing and you wouldn't have seen me did you understand that this is a big case yeah I knew them all yeah they knew at the time was it because of the scale of it or what it stood for I just knew that the public was going to react in a big way like the media was now did I think that it was going to be on the front page of every newspaper and the day after the arrest no but I could sense it like I went like three or four days without sleep um when I was out in San Francisco to arrest Ross I had sent three guys to Iceland to um so it was a three-prong approach for the takedown 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 look the government found this site like you might not want to 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 uh to gathering on the right things um you know 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 you know I'm not that smart but you know uh 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 um 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 um to France to get that part and he couldn't do it so the guy in Iceland did it from from Iceland he had to pull some stuff out of memory on a computer um you know he's it's live process stuff I'm sure you've done that before but uh I'm sure you did look look what you're doing you're this is like a multi-layer interrogation going on uh was there a concern that somebody else would step in and control the site absolutely we we didn't have Insight on who exactly I control so it turns out that Russ had like dictatorial control so he 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 uh he couldn't give up that control on anybody apparently which makes you think that power corrupts and his ideals were not as strong as he espoused about because if 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 we changed over time you could see it in his writings um that he changed like so people will argue back and forth that there was never murders on Silk Road when we were doing the investigation to us there were six murders um so there there was the way we see him saw him at the time was Ross ordered people to be murdered um you know somebody 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 uh well he's got three roommates uh 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 uh some stuff problems in that case so there was a separate case in Baltimore uh 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 a case against the same thing how do you decide not to push forward the the the the murder investigations so there was a deconfliction meeting that happened in DC see I didn't happen to go to that meeting but Jared went this is before I ever knew Jared and um we have like um televisions where we can just sit in a room and sit in on the meeting um but it's all you know security network and all that so we can talk openly about uh secure things um 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 um and the by this time you know no one knew about us but we told them at the meeting that we had found the server and we have a copy of it and we have the infrastructure um and and these guys had just had Communications Undercovers they didn't really know what was going on and this wasn't my first deconfliction meeting we had a huge deconliction meeting during um during the anonymous case what's the deconfliction mean agents within your agency or other other federal agencies these have an open investigation that if you expose your case or took down your case would hurt their case or the other call so you kind of have a it's like the rival gangs meet at the table in a smoke-filled room and uh less bullets at the end but yes oh boy with the Sweat Equity yeah so I mean there's I hope 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 get you you you did better yeah that's that's insane to me the the that's rewarding bad behavior and so that one of the part of The Sweat Equity discussion was about murder and this was here's a chance to actually bust them and be given the data you have from Iceland and all that kind of stuff so why well they wanted us to turn the data over to them to them yeah thanks thanks for getting us this far here it is I mean it came to the point where they sent us like they 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 the competence all across the world between different people yes okay uh does part of you regret because you push forward the the heroin and the drug trade we never got to the murder discussion I mean the only regretting is that the the internet doesn't seem to understand like they they just kind of blow that part off that 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 he paid a large amount of Bitcoins uh to for that murder 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 and steal me on 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 um but then at Ross ascendancing 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 uh his son died from buying drugs until ground 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 going to get shot on the corner buying drugs or something I can just have them sent to my house people are going to do drugs anyways I understand that argument um from my personal standpoint if I made it more difficult for my children to get drugs that 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 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 I that's when I really like to dive into it and I can see the other side I can see the why people would say that um but I don't want to be my group race children in a world where where drugs are just free for for use well and then the other side of it is with Silk Road did uh you know taking down Silk Road did that increase or decrease the number of uh drug trading criminals in the world it's unclear online I think it increased I think uh you know that is one of the things I think about a lot with Silk Road was that no one really knew I mean There Was You Know 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 um you know I would have thought I thought crypto was going to crash right after that like I don't know like what people are now see that bad people are doing bad things with crypto that'll crash well I'm obviously wrong on that one uh and I thought you know Ross was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years no one's gonna start up these dark markets exploded after that yeah um you know some of them started as you know opportunistic I'm gonna you know take those escrow accounts and I'm gonna steal all the all the money they came in you know they were for that but you know but there were a lot of dark markets that popped up after that now we put playbook out there yeah yeah but and also there's a case for uh 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 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 dealers the drug dealers yeah so if you have the card get the cartels start get to involved you go after the dealers it would have been very difficult because it tore and because of all the Productions anonymity de-cloaking all that would have been drastically more difficult and a lot of people in upper management the FBI didn't have the appetite of running something like that that would have been the FBI running a drug Market how many how many kids how many fathers would have to come in and said my kid bought well 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 um you know because remember that time we still believe in six people are dead we're still investigating you know where the hell are these bodies um 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 I like it would have been a something for me I I thought I thought it was going to collapse but I mean it's just gotten bigger in what's going out there now I'm really surprised and that it hasn't grown into other networks or people haven't developed other networks but but you mean like instead of tour yeah tor's still the main one out there I mean there's some there's a few others and I'm not gonna put an advertisement up for them but uh but you know I thought that market would have grown yeah my sense was when I interacted with Tori was that there's huge usability issues but that's for like legal activity yeah because like if you care about privacy it's just not as good of a browser like uh it's to to to 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 use it to like view movies like Netflix so you can only view certain movies in certain countries you can use it for that but it's 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 a 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 um what am I trying to say it's hard to visualize it in the way I can visualize like I've been reading a lot about Hitler I can visualize meetings between people military strategy uh deciding on uh 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 uh 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 the you know the lies to each other I mean he lied to people inside his group uh just to use another name to spy on make sure what they're you know we're talking shit behind his back or weren't doing anything um 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 the competence wasn't there just imagine how good the people are now the kids that grow up oh they've learned from his his mistakes just the extreme competence you just see how good people are in video games like the level of uh play in terms of video games like I I used to think I sucked and 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 uh the mold yeah I stopped playing but it's so embarrassing it's embarrassing it's like wrestling with your kid and you finally beats you and he's like well fuck that I'm not wrestling my kid anymore ever again and in some sense hacking uh at its best and it's worse is a kind of game and you can get exceptionally good at that kind of game and you get the accolations of it I mean there's you know there's power that comes along if you have success I 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 um whatever hacked into Uber was his screen name he was very proud of it I mean one building evidence against himself uh but you know they 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 of us do you think they see themselves as good people do they do you think they acknowledged the bad they're doing around to the world so so that Uber hacker I think that's just youth I mean not realizing what consequences are I mean based on his actions Ross was a little bit older um I think I'd Rush 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 uh I I don't think that was a front or a lie what's the difference between uh DPR and Rossi said like I have never met Ross until I have only had those two uh to two days of worth of interaction yeah it'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 um so one of the things that that I I learned through my law enforcement career is if I'm going to be the case Asian I'm going to be the one in charge of you know dealing with this person I'm not putting handcuffs on it someone else is going to do that like I'm gonna be there to help him uh you know I'm your conduit to help and so you know right after someone's arrested you obviously you've had him down for weapons to make sure for every safety but then I just put my hand on their chest just feel their heart feel their breathing you're gonna 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 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 uh and it's going to go a lot further so given everything he's done you are still able to have a compassion for him yeah we took him to the jail and we 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 um 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 time frame 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 because 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 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 like team mentioners that top secret FBI not top secret I I think you want us some granola bars like and and you know but I mean he already had lawyered up so we you know which is his right you can do that so I I knew we weren't gonna work together you know like I did with Hector um but I mean this is most of the conversations have to be them with lawyers from that point on I can't question him yeah when he asked for a lawyer um or if I did it wouldn't be used against him um so we just had conversation where I talked to him yeah you know he could you know 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 um with his eyes with his words um 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 dollars to let him go when we were driving to the the jail oh no and I asked him what I was gonna we were gonna 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 and how you know when crypto started it was pennies and by the time he got arrested it was 120 bucks and you know I mean 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 I possibly could have been if I took that 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 uh and then the government storms the castle Yeah have you talked to Russ since no no I I would I'd be open to it I don't think he probably wants to hear from me and 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 super max for a little while like the the high security one that's like shares the fence with super max but I don't think he's there anymore I think he's out in Arizona I I haven't seen in a while I wonder if you can do interviews in prison that'll be nice some 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 surprised you how much the story and many elements of it blew up movies it did surprise me like it my wife's uncle who I didn't I've been married 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 he you know that was surprising to say did you think the movie was uh on the 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 you know 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 all right 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 uh shitty like a parody of a hacker or something like that that would show like really uh crappy like uh 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 want to see even people that don't program they want to see a brilliant mind the the details that they're not they 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 want to reveal the 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 um the operation FBI is fascinating just tracking down these people do on the cyber security 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 uh the uh the law hanging fruit being shitty at certain parts on the technical front all those are fascinating things and you know that's that's what a movie should reveal should probably be a series honestly a Netflix series than a movie yeah maybe one on an fx show or something like that because it was kind of gritty you know yeah yeah pretty yeah exactly gritty I mean uh shows like Chernobyl from HBO made me realize okay you can do a good job of a difficult story and and like reveal the human side but also reveal the technical side and have some deep profound understanding on that case on the bureaucracy of a of a of a Soviet regime in this case you could reveal the bureaucracy the chaos of a criminal organization of uh law enforcement organization I mean there's so much to like explore it's fascinating I don't know yeah I like Chernobyl when I re-watch it I can't watch episode three though the the the animals the episode they go around shooting all the dogs and all that I gotta skip that part big soft yeah I really am yeah I'm sure I'll probably cry at some point I love it I love it listen 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 uh he was somebody uh who broke the law in the name of an ethical ideal he uh downloaded and released um academic Publications that were behind a paywall and um 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 that you know 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 uh 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 um for for some kind of honesty a 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 of Public Access uh there's no reason it shouldn't be all publication should be so he stood for that ideal and um and was punished harshly for it that's the other criticism was too harshly and of course uh deeply unfortunately that also led to a suicide because he was also tormented on many levels I mean do you 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 the outcome was tragic obviously um unfortunately when you're in law enforcement you you have to your job is to enforce the laws I mean you just not if if you're told that you have to do a certain case you know and there is a violation of at the time you know 18 USC 10 10 30 computer hacking um you have to press forward with that I mean that you have to charge the you you bring the case to the university office and whether they're going to press charges or not you know you can't you can't really pick and choose what you press and don't press for it I never felt that at least that flexibility not in the FBI I mean maybe if you when you're a street cop and you pull somebody over you can let them go with a warning so the FBI you're sitting in a room but you're also you're also a human being you have compassion you're arrested Ross and the hand on the chest I mean that's that's a human thing sure so there's a but I'm 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 I like the basis of the internet was to share academic thought yeah I mean that's where the internet was born but it's not it's not up to you so the the role of the FBI is to enforce the law correct and you know there's a there's a limited number of tools on our on our Batman belt that we can use um you know not to get into all the aspects of the Trump case in Mar-A-Lago and the documents there I mean the the FBA has so many tools they can use in a search warrant is the only way they could get in there I mean that's it it's a you know there's no other legal document or legal way to enter and get those documents what do you think about the the FBI and Mar-A-Lago and the FBI taking the documents for Donald Trump you know it's a tough spot I it's a really tough spot the the FBI's got a lot of black guys um you know recently um and I don't know if it's the same FBI that I I remember when I was there do you think they deserve it in part was it done clumsily the the their rating of uh the former president's residence yeah um it's tough It's you know because again they're only limited to what they're allowed what they're legally allowed to do in a search warrant is the only legal way of doing it um I have my personal and political views on certain things um you know and and I think it might yes it might be surprising to somewhere those political point stand but uh you told me Offline that you're a hardcore communist that was very strange very surprising to me well that's only you try to bring me into the Communist Party exactly I was trying to recruit you giving you all kinds of Flyers um okay but um you said like you know people in the FBI is just following the law but there's a chain of command and so on uh what do you think about the conspiracy theories that people some small number of people inside the FBI conspired to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump if you would have asked me when I was inside and before all this happened I would say it could never happen I I don't believe in conspiracies you know there's too many people involved that somebody's going to come out with some sort of information but I mean from the more the stuff that comes out it's surprising that you know agents are being fired because of certain actions they're taken inside um 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 uh 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 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's seems to be the narrative that's being written but when you were operating you didn't feel that pressure man I was searched at a low level you know I had no aspirations of being a boss I wanted to be a case agent my entire life she loved the puzzle of it by the the chase I love solving things yeah yeah to be 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 uh 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 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 send some information saying like we we're 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 um the the I don't know if Mark meant for that to be that way you know like again are we being social engineered or was that a true uh you know expression that Mark had and I wonder if the wink wink is direct or it's just culture really you know maybe certain people responsible on the Facebook side and lean 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 the giant conspiracy theory but just with a culture that has a particular uh political lean during a a particular time in history and so like uh maybe it could be a hunter buying laptop one time and then it could be uh whoever uh Donald Trump Jr's uh laptop uh another time it's a tough job I mean if you're the liaison if you're the FBI's liaison to Facebook uh uh you know there there's certain people that I'm sure they were offered a position at some point it seems we you know there's FBI agents say goat I know I know a couple that's gone to Facebook there's a really good Agent that now leads up their child exploitation stuff um another Squad mate runs their internal investigations both great investigators so you know there's good money especially when you're an FBI agent that's capped out at a you know a 1310 or whatever whatever pay scale you're capped out at um it's it's alluring to to be you know maybe want to please them and uh and and be asked to 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 um the political ideology the bubble it's interesting to see that bubble like I've um asked myself a lot of questions I've interviewed the Pfizer CEO um what seems now a long time ago and I've gotten a lot of criticism uh the 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 the idea 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 it's hard to know when it was corrupted and if it was corrupted and where which 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 uh people inside the the Third Reich regime were able to convince themselves I'm sure many just um bloodlands is another book I've been really 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 um yeah that I don't I don't know what to make of that so um it has taught me to be a little bit more careful when I enter into different bubbles to um be skeptical about what's taken as an assumption of Truth like you always have to be skeptical about like what's assumed is true is it possible it's not true um you know if you're doing if you're talking about the America uh it's assumed that uh you know in certain places that surveillance is good well let's let's question that uh that's that assumption um yeah and I I also it inspired me to question my own assumptions that I I hold this true constantly uh 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 uh 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 right and and um uh in part a big softy as well if I may say and those heart it hurts it hurts it hurts do you pay attention to it yeah um yeah yeah yeah it's very hard like I have two choices one you can uh shut yourself off from the world and ignore it I've I never found that compelling this kind of idea of like Haters Gonna Hate yeah like uh this idea that uh anyone with a big platform or anyone's ever done anything was always gotten hate you know okay maybe but like I still want to be vulnerable where my heart and my sleeve really show myself like 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 like um yeah it just it gets to like a it shakes your faith in humanity actually is is probably why it hurts like um people that um call me a Putin apologist or as a landscape apologist which I'm currently getting almost an equal amount of but it hurts it hurts because I um it hurts because it like it it damages slightly my faith in humanity to be able to see um 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 in the limited capabilities I have to find that and so to call me something uh like a bad actor essentially from whatever perspective it just makes me realize well um people don't have empathy and compassion for each other it makes me question that for a brief moment and that that's like a crack and it hurts how many people do this to your face foreign I have to be honest that uh it's it happens yeah because I've hung around with uh 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 they still um they forget he's actually a real human being they'll they'll make accusations about him so does that cause him to wall himself off more no he's uh he's pretty gangster on that but uh yeah it still hurts if you're if you're human if you've really um feel others I think that's also the difference with with Joe and me he has a his family that he deeply loves and that's an escape from the world form um there's a loneliness in me that's I'm always longing to connect with people and with like regular people and like just to 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 uh just have me going to Ukraine just seeing so much loss and death some of it is like uh is I mean unforgettably haunting not in some kind of political way activist way or uh who's right who's wrong way but just like man like so much pain you see 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 you that that we can treat each other like that that's the hard part I think I mean it is it that 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 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 um that that's like the worst of human nature but I just like 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 it's you can understand um 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 uh now there is stories uh there is a lot of evidence of people for fun murdering civilians now that that is closer to the things you've experienced of like evil yeah um of evil embodied and I haven't interacted with with that directly with people who for fun murdered civilians which you know it's there in the world I mean 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 yeah like seeing yourself knowing that it exists is different than seeing it yourself now I've interacted with 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 holes being destroyed that really lingers with you but some yeah the people that are capable of that but that goes with the propaganda I mean if you were to build a story you have to you know you have to have on the other side you know the homes are going to be destroyed the non-military targets are going to 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 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 uh who this war has divided who this war changed completely how they see the world uh whether they have love or hate in their heart to understand their stories um I've learned a lot on The Human Side to 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 foreign let me ask you about your now friend can we go as far as it says friend uh in asabu and Hector massager what's the uh what's what's the story what's your long story with him can you tell me about what is LOL sec who is Sabu and who's Anonymous what is anonymous where's the right place to start that story probably anonymous anonymous is a was a decent it still is I guess a decentralized organization uh they call themselves headless but once you look into them a little ways they're not really headless um the the power struggle comes with whoever has a hacking ability um that might be you're a good hacker or you have a giant bot net used for DDOS um so so you're gonna wield more power if you can control where it goes Anonymous started doing their like hacktivism stuff in 2010 or so um the word hack was in the media all the time then um and then right around then there's a federal contractor named HB Gary Federal the the CEO is Aaron Barr and Aaron Barr said he was going to come out and de-anonymize anonymous he's gonna come out and talk at blackhead or Defcon or one of those and say you know who they are he figured it out or so he could figure it out by based on uh you know when people are online when people were in IRC when tweets came out it was there was no scientific proof behind it or anything uh so he's just gonna falsely name people that were that were in anonymous so Anonymous went on the attack they went and hacked an ATV HPA Federal and they turned his life upside down they took over his Twitter account and all that stuff um 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 the violation the 18 USC 10 30. so it was my job that's what I you know so at the time no in retrospect sure yeah but uh uh what was the philosophy of the hacktivism was it the philosophically were they at least expressing it for the good of humanity or no they outwardly said that they were going to go after people that they thought were corrupt so they were judging jury on corruption they were to go after it once you get on inside and realize what they were doing they were going after people that they had an opportunity to go after um 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 somewhere for the joke for the lulls it developed into that so I think the hacktivism and the anonymous stuff wasn't so much for the LOLs um but from that HP gear 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 lol SEC or laughing at your security was their motto so that's l-u-l-z-s-e-c Luz SEC of course it is sex and uh who founded that organization so Kayla and Sabu were the hackers of the group and so they really did all the work on HP Gary so these are code names yeah they're online names they're they're Knicks um and so you know they they and they that's all they knew each other as you know they talk to us as those names um and they worked well together and so they formed a hacking crew and that's when they started the the at first they didn't name it this was the 50 days of LOLs where they would just release major major breaches um and it stirred up the media I mean it put hacking in on in the media every day uh they had 400 or 500 000 Twitter followers um you know and it was kind of interesting um but then they started swinging at the Beehive and they they took out some FBI Affiliated sites uh and then they started uh fuck FBI Fridays uh where every every Friday they would release something and we waited it for baited breath I mean they had us alkaline and sinker pissed uh we were waiting to see what was going to be dropped every Friday here 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 I actually Linger on um Anonymous what do you still understand what the heck is anonymous it's just a place where you hang out I mean it's just to start on 4chan with Han 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 going to get much cred until you work your way up and prove who you are someone vouches for you uh but anybody can be an anonymous and if we can leave Anonymous what's the leadership of anonymous do you have a sense that there is a leadership there's a power play you know it's not someone that you know that says this is what we're doing all we're doing I love the 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 that's the terrifying thing when you attach I'm actually really terrified of the power of the lull it's 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 like it feels like hacking for fun can just turn it like literally lead to nuclear war like literally destabilize yeah like yada yada yada nuclear war I could see it yeah and so I've been more careful with the lull uh uh I I'm very yeah I've been more careful about that and I wonder about it because an internet speak somehow ethics can be put aside uh through the slippery slope of language I don't know everything becomes a joke if everything's a joke then everything is 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 you know whether it's major corporations or the individuals I mean some of the stuff they did was just you know releasing people's pii and their personal identifying information and stuff like that I mean is it a big deal I don't know maybe maybe not but you know 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 is it has it ever been one stable organization or is it a collection of hackers that kind of emerge for particular tasks for particular uh like a hacktivism task 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 are some that have come bounce in and bounce out even back then there's probably just as many reporters in it people the media in it with the than hackers at the time just trying to get the inside scoop on things you know some giving the inside scoop you know we arrested a reporter that gave over the uh username and password to his newspaper and uh you know just so he could break the story he trusted him speaking of trust reporters boy there's good ones there's good ones 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 uh to me one of them is that you can say that um Lex is a lizard right and if it's not funny uh so lizard is kind of funny what should we say um Lex has admitted to being an agent of the FBI okay you can just say that right right and then the response that the internet would 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 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 Johnny 6969 is now a source that says and then like the thing is I'm I'm a tiny guy but when it grows uh 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 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 Johnny 69 can start a random thing but I 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 they could be click bait that can generate money a journalism should be about sort of slowing things down thinking deeply through what is true or 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 the tech companies about controls 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 uh they're doing undercover in terms of the tools you have for catching cyber security criminals how much of his 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 um 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 um but I mean I think we we had an undercover going on 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 um 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 is it there's all a lot of work just technically but also psychologically like you have to really uh it's 24 7 you're inside that world like you have to know what's going on and what's happening you you know you're taking on you have to remember who you are when you're because you're 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 pretty open and honest guy and so it's tough for me to to Build That Wall of Lies um it's maybe I'm just not smart enough to keep all the lies straight yeah but a guy who's good at building up a wall of Lies would say that exact same exactly it's so annoying the way truth Works in this world it's like uh I think people have told me like because I'm trying to be honest and transparent that's exactly what an agent would do right um 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 I was a rock star at the time in the bureau and I had shorts in and uh um I said sorry ma'am I apologize for my attire and she goes you could wear bike shorts in here I wouldn't care I was like oh shit that sounds nice I never wore the bike shorts but yeah but see I don't I see a suit and ties constraining I think it's it's liberating and so it's it's like uh shows that you're taking the moment seriously well not just that people wanted it I mean people expected when you knock you you are dressed like the a perfect FBI agent When someone knocks on their door that's what they want to see they want to see what Hollywood built up is what an FBI agent is you show up like my friend no one he was dressed always in t-shirts and shorts people aren't going to take him serious they're not going to give them what they want I wonder how many police I can just show up and like Sam from the FBI start interrogating them like at a bar probably like definitely if they've had a few drinks you could definitely well but people are going to recognize you that's the only problem that's another thing you start taking out a big big cases you can't wear cases anymore in the FBI your face gets out there and your name too yeah yeah well actually let me ask you about that before we return to our friend Sabu okay um you've you've tracked and worked on some of the most dangerous people in this world um have you ever feared for your life so I had to make a really really shitty phone call one time um I was sitting in the bureau and this was right after Silk Road um and Jared called me he was back in Chicago and he called me and said hey your your name and your kid's name were on a website for an assassination they're they're paying to have you guys killed now these things happen on the black market they come up you know and when you know people debate whether they're real or not but we have to take it serious someone's paying to have me killed me so I had to call my wife and we have a word um and that if I said this word and we only said it one time to each other if I said this would this is serious drop what you're doing and get to the kids um and so I had to drop the word to her um and I could feel the breath come out of her because her she thought her kids were in danger and when they then at the time they were um I wasn't in a state of mind to drive myself so a an agent on the squad and a girl named Evelina she drove me lights and Sirens all the way to my kids school um and we had locked I called the school we were in a lockdown um nobody should get in or out especially someone with a gun um the first thing they did was let me in the building with a gun so I was a little disappointed with that um my kids were I think kindergarten and fifth grade or somewhere around there maybe they're closer second year I'm not sure where um 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 uh your license plate being read uh 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 um but you know again I put my family through that and it scared the shit out of them um and that that's to be honest I think that's sort of uh 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'll talk about that so like I want to escape that I don't want to be there you know I remember that like so when I was in the FBI like driving in I used to go in at 4 30 every morning um because I like to go to the gym before I hit go to the desk I would be at the desk at seven so in the gym at five a couple hours and then then go the 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 um and I I we talked about sports and you know the Nationals and whatever it was the capitals like you know it was great to not think about Silk Road for 10 minutes so but that was my best time but but yeah again so yeah I I've had that moving to the safe house I left my mb5 at home that's the the bureau's machine gun um showed my wife to just pull pull and spray so uh but how often did you live or work and live with fear in your heart it was only that time I mean in my for actual physical security um then I mean after the anonymous stuff I you know I really tightened down to my cyber security um you know 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 with my kids you know if you're gonna post it someplace or something like that um so that sort of security I have um but you know 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 you're much better at um let me your job now in 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 so I'm aware of that what what possibly and I think about it you know I think about things I do remember so you you tripped a memory in my my mind um 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 leave walking out of the house yeah because I couldn't see it I remember when those four o'clocks get into the car I I 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 there out there crazy people even but there's a lot of crazy there's a lot of evil most people I think get into like cyber crime or just opportunistic not necessarily evil they don't really know maybe think about the victim they just do as it's a crime of opportunity you know I 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 like if you walk outside your house you're much safer you than you are in most other places in the world you're safer and and the system's tougher uh I mean uh low SEC six guys one guy in the United States Five Guys other places um Hector was facing 125 years those guys got slaps on the wrist and went back to college you know different laws different places so who's Hector tell me the story of Hector so this lawsack organization was started so Hector was before that in uh he was he was in part Anonymous here's all the kids doing all kinds of hacking stuff but then he launched wall SEC he's old school hacker I mean he he's he learned how to hack and I don't want to tell his story but he he learned to hack because he grew up in the Lower East Side of New York and uh and picked up some NYPD computers that were left on this on the sidewalk for trash yeah taught himself how to it doesn't exactly look like a hacker for people don't know he he looks I don't know exactly what he looks like but not not a not like a technical not what you would imagine uh but perhaps that's that's uh that's a Hollywood portrayal yeah I think you get in trouble these days saying that uh 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 an FBI looks like yeah I don't think you can do that anymore I don't think you can say that anymore well he uh certainly has a big personality and Charisma and all that kind of stuff that's taboo I can again I can see him selling me anything that's convincing me of it you know they're two different people they're Sabu and there's Hector Hector Hector is a sweet guy that he he likes to have intellectual conversations and like that's just a thing he he'd rather you know just sit there and have a one-on-one conversation with you but saboo that that's a ruthless motherfucker and you first met Sabu I was tracking all I knew was that boo I didn't know Hector so when did your paths cross well in terms of tracking when did you first take on the case the spring of a 11 . so it was through Anonymous through Anonymous but then really kind of a little SEC um we were low SEC was a big thing and it was pushed out to all the Cyber you know 56 field offices in the FBI um 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 that we didn't have a lot of victims in our aor area of responsibility um 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 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 um just to see what we can find and ended up out in Staten Island uh at his grandmother's house she didn't know where he was obviously why would she um but I left my card um he gave me a call that night 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 you know gave me a stuff he started telling me about all the felonies he was committing those days including that break into AOL um and then he finally says you know you know I can give you Sabu and Sabu to us was the Kaiser so stay back and he was our guy uh you know he was the guy that was in the news that was pissing us off so so he was part a part of the FBI Fridays that we was yeah oh he led it yeah he was the leader of fuck FBI Fridays so yeah what was one of the more memorable uh F the triple F's I said what how 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 it's the 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 uh you know affiliate sites or anything that I do a lot of law enforcement stuff was coming out so but you know we looked back and so if this kid knew that Sabu we maybe there was a chance we could use them a little to lure Sabu out but we also said well maybe this kid knows Cebu in real life and so we went looked through the IPS and 10 million IPS we find one and it belonged to him and so that that day Sabu um someone had doxxed Sabu um and uh we were a little afraid he was gonna be on the Run we had a surveillance team and FBI surveillance teams are awesome like you cannot even tell their FBI agents it's it's in 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 you know a baby stroller might not fit in there as well as you know somebody's laying on the ground or something like that um they really get play the character and get into it so now I I can never trust a baby stroller Yeah well yeah probably shouldn't every every baby I'm just like look at stare at them suspiciously especially if the mom's wearing cargo pants while she pushes it so yes if it's like a verse stereotypical Mama stereotypical baby I'm gonna be very suspicious I'm gonna question the baby that baby's wired you know we raced out there and like our squad's not even full there's only a few guys there and like I said I I was a suit guy but that day I had shorts and a t-shirt on I had a white T-shirt on um 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 like shorts tune and all that but um raced over to there we didn't have any equipment um we brought our bosses bosses boss he stopped off at NYPD got us like a ballistic shield uh and a battering ram if we needed it um and then we get to Hector's house sabu's house and he's on the sixth floor um and so normally you know we're the the Cyber dork Squad um we'll hop in the elevator six floors is a long ways to go up and bulletproof vest and a ballistic shield but but we had been caught in an elevator before on a search so we we didn't took the stairs um we get to the top uh Tad winded um but uh knock on the door in this big towering guy opens the door just slightly and he sees the green vest with big yellow letters FBI and he steps outside um yeah can I help you you know it tries to social engineer US uh but eventually we get our way inside the house um you know I noticed a few things that are kind of out of place um 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 um so we we knew the the truce and then the half-lies and all that sort of thing so it took us about another two hours and finally he gave up that he was that boo he was the guy we were looking for uh so we sat there and we kind of showed him sort of the evidence we had against him um and you know from his words we sat there and talked uh talked like uh two grown adults and you know I gave him the options and he said well let's uh 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 um so the the we brought him down to the FBI that night um which was it was a funny trip because I'm sitting in the back seat of the car with him um and I was getting calls from all over uh the US from different FBI agents saying that we arrested the wrong guy 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 uh and they still said not the wrong guy so I said well we'll see how it plays out that's so interesting because it's it's such a strange world it's such a strange world because it's 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 by the you know by that point yeah I know he was saying that helped again I'm 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 ever FBI agents are saying it's not him you have to disclose that stuff so he had a lot of stuff on him um what was he facing if um he was raised 125 years 125 years in prison that's that now that's if you took every charge we had against him and put him you know uh consecutively no no one ever gets charged that but yeah he had essentially it would have been under 25 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 well so the word informant here really isn't that good it does it's not fitting that technically I guess that's what he was but he didn't know the other people it was all not he knew Nicks and all that um he really gave us the Insight of what was happening in the hacker world like I said he was an old school hacker he back when hackers didn't work together with Anonymous even though he was down you know Cult of dead cow and those type guys like way back um and he was around for that he's like an encyclopedia of hacking but you know we just kissed Prime was in the 90s for Terror hack but yeah he kind of came back when uh when Anonymous started going after MasterCard and PayPal and all that do the wikileak stuff but even even that little interaction being an informant he probably made a lot of enemies does 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 uh I mean perhaps I'll talk to him one day uh but uh is that guy afraid for his life I I again I think it doesn't seem like it he has very good security uh for himself cyber security um but you know I I yeah he doesn't like the negative thing said about him online uh I don't think anybody does um but you know I think it's so many years of the internet kind of bitching at you and all that you get Callister it's just internet bitching and also the the hacking world moves on very quickly he he is kind of um he's yeah like they're they're have their own Wars to fight now and he's not part of those Wars anymore there's still people out there that that bitch and moan about him but but yeah I think it's less um I I think you know he has a good message out there of you know he he 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 uh not not not your line of work his line of work it's just all the stories you've seen of people that are in Anonymous and LOL sick and Silk Road and all the Cyber criminals you've interacted with what's uh 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 like it's it's it's wide it's like I've arrested 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 so surprisingly you know there's you know you're not going to see there's a lot of good hackers like down in Brazil but I don't think Brazil law enforcement is as good as hunting them down so you're not going to see the big arrests how much state-sponsored uh cyber attacks are there do you think more than you can imagine and what wait what do you want to 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 attacks put a Windows 7 machine on the internet forward-facing and put a put a packet sniffer on there and look at where the driver comes from I mean it's been 24 hours you were going to fill up a hard drive with packets just coming at it yeah I mean it's it's not hard to to know I mean it's just constantly probing for entry points into things you know you could you could go mad put up Honeypot draws intrusions should I see what messages to see what's out there yeah and it doesn't go anywhere it maybe has fake information and stuff like that um you know it's just kind of to see what's going on and judge what's happening uh the internet gonna 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 uh respect uh because I think in that case it comes from a somewhat good place because you know they're not getting any money for my ID it's more for the challenge let me ask you about that about this world of cyber security um 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 it's it's uh I mean people want the idea of security but it's inconvenient so they don't they push back on it um and there are a lot of opportunistic nation-state financially motivated hackers hackers for the lulls you got three different tiers there um and and they're they're on the prowl they have tools they have really good tools that are being used against us and I would scale so when you're thinking of I don't know what's let's talk about companies first so say you're you're talking to um a mid-tier I wonder what the more most interesting business is so Google let's let's we can look at large tech companies and we can look at medium-sized tech companies and like you were sitting in a room with a CTO with a CEO and the the question is how fucked are we and what should we do what's the low hanging fruit what's what what are the different strategies and uh those companies should consider I mean the problem is they want a push button they wanna they wanna out of the box solution that I'm secure you know they want to tell people they're secure but and that's very challenging to have it's impossible but like if I could if someone had it they'd be a billionaire uh you know they'd be Beyond a billionaire you know because that's what everybody wants so it's you know you can buy all the tools you want it's configuring them the proper way and there's if anyone's trying to tell you uh that there's one solution that fits all their snake hole salesman and there's a lot of people in cyber security that are staying all salesmen yeah and I feel like there's tools if they're not configured correctly they uh they just introduce they don't increase security significantly and they introduce a lot of pain for the people they uh decrease efficiency of the actual work you have to do so like uh we had um 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 any time I had to work with anything even resembling user days 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's 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 you in that case you want to err on the side of security but that's Google yeah they were doing a good job of this the reputational harm if it got out I mean Google you know why is Google Drive free you know because they want your data they want you to park your data there so you know if the re if they got hacked or leaked information the reputational harm would be tremendous but you know for a company that not it's really hard to do that right and the company's not as big as Google or not as tech savvy as Google might have a lot of trouble with doing that kind of stuff instead instead of increasing security they'll just decrease the efficiency well yeah so so there's a big difference between I.T and security and unfortunately like these mid-side companies they try to stack security into their I.T Department your it department is about business continuity they're about trying to move business forward they want their 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 they you know but there's there's fine tuning you can do to you know ensure that I mean as simple as like having good onboarding procedures for employees like 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 act the office of personnel management because old credentials from a third-party vendor were sitting there and active 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 have who need access to a certain thing only get access to that thing and not nothing else and then and it just gets refreshed like that access control you know like we said setting up people leaving people leaving the company get rid of their they don't need control two-factor authentication you know that's a big thing you know we it's it's 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 and we're not if we are we're not doing it correctly uh because these guys are taking 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 like it's it seems that it's pretty easy to implement horribly to where it's like it's not convenient at all for the for the legitimate user to use it should be trivial to to do uh like to authenticate yourself twice should be super easy if security if it's slightly inconvenient for you it's think about how inconvenient is for a hacker and how this is just going to move on to the next person yes yes in theory when implemented extremely well yeah but I I just don't think so I think actually if it's inconvenient it shows that system has 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 frontal sites maybe two-factor wouldn't be needed yeah so you would need to factor if everyone did a good job with passwords yeah right but I'm saying like the two Factor authentication it should uh it should be super easy to authenticate myself uh in some with some other device really quickly like there should be it should be frictionless like you just hit okay okay and anything that belongs to me yeah and like I should it should very importantly be easy to set up what belongs to me uh 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 that 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 off and pick out the good traffic in there so yeah I would there's no way I'd want to 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 then you're going to step up and you're going to do stuff a little bit more sometimes I guess think I could take that to a little bit extreme I remember one time uh uh my mom called me and she was uh screaming that uh 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 in a glass of water right now and she's I made my mom cry it was not a pleasant thing um so sometimes I go to a little extremes on those ones but but understanding is a risk and making it a little bit more a little more difficult to become a victim I mean just understanding certain things um you know simple things like you know as we add more internet of 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 be able to come to visit set up a guest Network set up something you can change every 30 days simple little things like that um you know 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 that yes I mean I still I still know people that do that I mean ask.fm got popped last week two weeks ago and that's 350 million username and passwords with connected Twitter accounts Google accounts uh you know all the different social media accounts you know 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 learn people's password Styles you know bad guys are making portfolios out of people uh you know we're figuring out how people generate their passwords and kind of you know figuring and then it's easier to crack their password you know we're making a dossier on each person it's 350 million dossiers just in that one hack Yahoo there was a half a billion so the the thing a hacker would do with that is try to find all the link low hanging fruit like have some kind of program that yeah evaluates the strength of the passwords and then finds the weak ones and 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 and do that remember the ring hack a couple a year ago that's all it was is credential stuffing so ring the security system by default had to factor but didn't turn it on and they also had a 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 you know ring you know it's like I want people to stick these little things up and have Security in their house uh but you know cyber security don't make it inconvenient then people will not buy our product that's how they got hacked they want 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 passwords on the black market and just wrote a bot that just went through ring and used every one of them to maybe one percent hit but that's a big hit to the number of ring users you know you can use also password managers to make to make the changing of the passwords easier um to make you can choose the difficulty the number of special characters the length of it and all that um my favorite things on websites yell at you for your password being too long or having too many special care or like uh or yeah you're not allowed to have this special character or something you can only use these three special characters it's a you know do you understand how password cracking works if you specifically tell me which past which special characters I can use I want 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 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 attacks like uh we mentioned mentioned before the uh the qnep nas that got hacked uh luckily I didn't have anything private on there um 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 do about zero day it's you know there's this you have no control over that I mean it's a it's a the engineers that made the software don't even know about it now let's talk about one days um 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 um my father-in-law has such an old iPhone you can't security patch it anymore so you know and I tell him I said you know this is what you're missing out on this is what you're exposing yourself to because um you know we talked about that powerful tool that uh the the how we found Ross Albrecht 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 um you can go in you know and find a vulnerability read about the white paper what's wrong with that 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 yeah I know the vulnerabilities they're running I again not making a Playbook here but you know that's how easy it is to to find your targets and that's what that's what the 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 like if you have specific targets uh to to you know hack into a Twitter account for example much harder that's probably social engineering right that's probably the best way probably if you 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 you know 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 key logger 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 the stuff with a mouse inside of it uh and just plug it into somebody's computer and there's a key logger that lives in there and calls home sends everything you want so I mean and it's cheap yeah in grad school um a program to build a bunch of key loggers it was fascinating tracking Mouse just for uh what I was doing as part of the research uh I was doing to uh uh 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 um it's called the active authentication like it's basically Biometrics that's not using bio uh just 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 key loggers so I I think is is 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 in the same way with uh 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 systems actually is uh 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 it just I laugh because uh one of my my partners at naxo that I work at now um he worked at a big company like you would know the name as soon as I told you I'm not going to say it um but the guy who owned the company and the company has his name on it um didn't want to ever log into a computer just annoyed 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 that's pretty good actually so 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 would just not have a login yeah no the security team there had to really work around to make that work uh non-compliant with company policy but that's that's interesting the the key log is there's there's a lot of there's just a lot of threats yeah I mean 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 um you know if you're traveling to a foreign country and you work for the FBI then yeah you do you pick little you know 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 get put so much information out there actually docks myself all across the world and then you're not a Target I guess you just put it out there I've always said that though like we do these searches in FBI houses and stuff like that if someone just got like a box load of like 10 terabyte drives and just encrypted them oh my God you know how long the FBI would spin their wheels trying to get that data off there be insane also 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 uh me printing like a treasure map to a random location just get people to go on Goose goose chases yeah uh what what about operating system what what have you found uh 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 you people use anything Max for the most secure just because they just weren't out there but now kids have had access to them so you know it is you know I know you're a Linux guy I I like Linux too but you know it's tough to have run a business on on Linux you know people want to move more towards the microsofts and the Googles just because they don't it's easier to communicate with other people though maybe our computer guys so you have to just take what 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 in Axel so we just started nexos uh so I left the government and uh went to a couple consultancies and I started working uh really all the people I I I worked good in the government with um I brought them out with me um and now you used to work for the man and now you're the man exactly so but now we formed a partnership and it's it's just a it's a new cyber security firm that we our launch party is actually on Thursday so it's going to be exciting do you want to 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 don't bring the hackers well that's the center will be there I can't believe you invited me because you also say Insider threat is is the is the biggest threat uh by the way can you explain what the inside arthritis the biggest Insider threat in my life is my children um my son's big into Minecraft and we'll download executables mindlessly and just run them on the network so do you recommend against marriage and family and kids nope nope from a security perspective from a security perspective absolutely but uh no I just uh segmentation uh I mean we do it in off businesses for years um started segmenting networks different networks I just do it at home my kid's on his own network um it makes it a little bit easier to see what they're doing too you can monitor traffic and then also throttle bandwidth if uh 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 going to listen to this right uh you're gonna get your tricks yeah that's true they'll definitely will 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 they don't they don't care unless unless you're on Tick Tock or yeah you you'll show up on a YouTube feed or something like that and I'll be like oh yeah this guy's boring yeah my son does a podcast uh for his school and um it's still I still can't get him to telling so so one of the Hector and I just started a podcast uh talking about cyber security we we do a podcast called hacker in the FED it just came out yesterday so uh the first episode so yeah we got 13 uh 13 1300 downloads the first day so pretty we were at the top of Hacker News which is a big website in our world so it's called hacker and the FED hacker in the fed's demo so go download and listen to hacker and if I 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 the chemistry is like we're I mean it's not weird that you guys used to be enemies and now you're friends so yeah I mean we just did some a trailer and all that and uh the the our producer we have a great producer got him Phineas and he kind of pulls things out of me and I said I said okay I got one my relationship with Hector is you know we're very close friends now and and he's like oh I arrested one of my closest friends yeah which is a very strange relationship yeah um you know but but he he says that I changed his life I mean he was going down a very dark path and I gave him an option that one night and he he made the right choice I mean he's he now does penetration testing he does a lot of good work and uh you know he's turned his life around do you worry about cyber war in the 21st century absolutely yeah if there is a global war it'll start with cyber you know if it's not already started do you feel like there's a like a boiling like the the drums of War beating what's happening in Ukraine with Russia it feels like the United States is becoming more and more involved in the conflict in that part of the world and China is watching very closely is starting to get involved geopolitically and probably in terms of cyber um 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 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 I mean I I would hate to just be you know just fear-mongering out there um you know and kovid's over so the next big thing in the media is war and all that but I mean there's some some Flags going up that are that are very strange to me is there a ways to avoid this I hope so I hope smarter people and I are figuring it out I hope people are playing their parts and and talking to the right people um because that's 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 the stuff the Panic can hit harder like if they 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 low SEC today and low sick was 2011. they had access into a Waters the water supply system of a major U.S 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 there's insecure maybe they were gonna do something to fuck with it I don't know but you know that that's that's 2011. you know 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 100 a hundred percent they're sitting secretly waiting to expose things I mean I again I don't want to scare this shit out of people but people have to understand the Cyber threat I mean there are you know they are there are thousands of nation-state hackers in some countries I mean we have them too we have offensive hackers you know the 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 the ex 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 it 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 to go start war with anybody anybody that actually see uh all right that's sorry that's one cynical take on it of course no but you're going down the right path I mean the guys are the fluid planes in the buildings wanted attribution they took credit for it when we see the Cyber attack I doubt we're gonna 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 like they could blame anybody they want there's no 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 um I wouldn't say you're being tracked by the government you're definitely being tracked by big Tech uh no I mean me personally Lex and an escalated level so like uh um like you mentioned there's an FBI file on people sure I'd love to see what's in that file uh uh who would have the argument oh let me ask you FBI yeah um how's the cafeteria food in FBI at the Academy it's bad yeah um what about like at headquarters headquarters a little bit better because that's what the director I mean he he eats up on the seventh floor have you been like a Google have you been in the uh Silicon Valley those cafeteria 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 if 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 um and I think that's the only reason people eat it okay um it's it's pretty bad I got it okay but there's also a bar inside the FBI Academy people don't know that yes alcohol bar wow and if you as long as you've passed your PT and uh and and going well you're allowed to go to the bar nice it feels like if I was a hacker I'll be going after like celebrities because they're a little bit easier like celebrity celebrities like Hollywood the Hollywood nudes were a big thing there for a long time but not even yeah I guess news that's what they went after I mean all those guys they socialized they did they 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 I would go if I was a hacker I would go after um 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 that obviously it's a troll god you get busted so quick by what a bad hacker really but why because hackers never put things out about love oh God Oh you mean like this is clearly yeah this is clearly Lex what the fuck it's about love and every podcast he does I'll just be like no oh God damn it now somebody's gonna do it and 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 um you regret AV unit yeah he got away so is The One That Got Away uh yeah I mean it took me a while into my law enforcement career to learn about like the compassionate side and and it took Hector Monster Gear to make me realize that criminals aren't really criminals they're human beings um that really humanized the whole thing for me sitting with him for for nine months um 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 but yeah he changed my life and showed me that that Humanity side of things so would it be fair to say that all all the criminals or most criminals are uh just people that took a wrong turn at some point they all have the capacity for for good and for evil in them uh I'd say 99 of the people the criminals that I've interacted with yes the the people with the child exploitation no I don't have any place in my heart for them what advice would you give to to people in college people in high school trying to figure out what they want to 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 U.S budget that was just put forward there's 18 billion dollars for cyber security uh we're about a million people short of where we really should be in the industry if not more um if you have want job security and want to work and see exciting stuff uh head towards cyber security it's a it's a good career um and you know one thing I dislike about like uh cyber security 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 everything available um you know the industry needs to change and let the lower people in in order to to broaden and get those billion jobs filled but as far as their personal security just remember it's all going to follow you I mean I I you know there's laws out there now there you have to turn over your social media accounts in order to have certain things um they just change that in New York state if you want to carry a gun you have to turn over your social media to to figure if you're a good social uh character um so hopefully you didn't say something strange in the last few years and it's going to follow you forever um I I bet Ross Albrecht would tell you the same thing when not don't put Ross albrecha gmail.com on things because it's going to last forever yeah people sometimes uh for some for some reason they interact on social media as if they're talking to a couple of buddies uh like just shooting shit and mocking and and like um you know what is that busting each other's chops like making fun of yourself like being uh especially gaming culture uh 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 recording yeah so there's there's a whole twitch thing where people stream for many hours a day and uh 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 want to hire yeah I want to want to work with now I understand that some of us might be that way privately I guess when you're shooting shit with friends like uh playing a video game and talking shit to each other maybe yeah 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 but like 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 uh a lot of friends show love Yeah an outside person can't judge how I'm friends with you but if I want to be this is our relationship if that person can say that I'm an asshole to them uh 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 that's considered who you are is dangerous and people take that very nonchalant like people treat their behavior on the internet very very carelessly that's definitely something you need to learn and take extremely seriously also I think like taking that seriously will help you figure out who you what you really stand for if you use your language carelessly you never really ask like what do I stand for I feel like it's a good opportunity when you're young to ask like what are the things that are okay to say what are the things what are the ideas I stand behind like what especially if they're controversial and I'm willing to say them because I believe in them versus just saying random shit for the for the laws because for the random shift the laws keep that from off the internet that said man I was an idiot for most of my life and I'm constantly learning and growing it I'd hate to be responsible for the kind of person uh I was in my teens oh in my in my 20s I didn't do anything offensive but it just I changed as a person like I used to I guess I probably still do but I used to you know I used to read so much existential literature uh that was that was a phase there's like phases yeah you grow and involve 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 be on the FBI would you recommend that people consider a career as 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 going to retire with the the gold watch and everything from the FBI that was my plan now but you know what it is it's a oh it's an example um you get a gold badge you actually get your badge in the lucite and your creds they put in lucite and all that so does it 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 I like I've never until recently not I 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 the Brotherhood that you have with you know all the guys in your squad you know guys and girls I just use guys you know you know we I I developed a real drinking problem there because we were so social of going out after after work and and you know continuing on it really was a family um you know so I do miss that um but yeah I mean if someone could become an FBI agent I mean it's pretty fucking cool man so the day you graduate and walk out of the academy with a gun and a badge and you know the the power to charge someone with a misdemeanor for flying a United States flag at night that's awesome so you so there is a part of like representing and loving your country and especially if you're doing cyber security so there's a lot of technical Savvy in the uh 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 uh but there's also some some guys that come in um you know I won't name his name but there was a guy 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 um great guy I love this guy and he knows who he is if he's listening um you know that that you know he had some skills but we also lost a bunch of guys that had some skills because uh we had one guy in the squad um that he had to leave the FBI because his wife became a doctor and she got a residency down in Houston and and she couldn't move uh he 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 that need to be relaxed a little bit yeah I love hackers turned like leaders like oh one of my quickly becoming good friends is much he was a big hack in the 90s and then uh now was recently Twitter Chief security officer CSO but he had a bunch of different leadership positions including being my boss at Google but um 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 like a managerial route very high-tech companies I think a lot of those guys so this is like the 90s they really were about like the freedom uh 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 want to do is I want to help the world and I can do that in legitimate routes and so on but that's the story that and yeah I would I would love to uh talk to him one day but I I wonder how common that is to like young hackers turn turn good you're saying it like pulls you in it's if you're not careful it can really put you in yeah you know you're good at it you become powerful you become you know everyone's slapping on the back and say what a good job and all that you know at a very young age yeah so yeah I would love to get into my buddy's mind on why he stopped hacking and moved on Ah that's gonna be a good conversation in in his case maybe it's always about a great woman involved family and so on yeah that grounds you um uh because like we have there is a danger to hacking that that uh once you're in a relationship once you have family maybe you're not willing to partake in what's your story what uh from childhood what are some fun 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 yeah what are some rough moments what are some beautiful moments that you remember I had a very good family growing up um the the like 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 that I tried to tell my wife this two nights ago and I couldn't get it out so my father uh he's a disabled veteraner he was a disabled veteran he was in the Army and got hurt and uh it was in a wheelchair his whole life um for all my growing up he uh he was my biggest fan he just wanted to know everything about you know what's going on in the FBI my stories um I was a local cop before the FBI and I got to a high-speed car chase uh you know foot chase and all that and kicking doors and he he wanted to hear another stories and at some points I was kind of too cool for school and ah Dad I just want to break and all that and things going on uh I we we lost my dad during covid um not because of Kobe but it was around that time but but it was right when cover was kicking off and so he died in the hospital by himself and I didn't get to see him then um and then uh my mom had some people visiting her the other night and uh the Tom and Karen rogerberg and I'll say they're my second biggest fans right behind my dad um they they always asking about me and in my career and they've read the books and seen the movie they'll even tell you that Silk Road movie was good they'll hide again on that but and so they came over and uh and I helped them with something and uh my mom was that called me back a couple days later and she said I appreciate you helping them you know I know you know fixing someone's Apple phone over the phone really isn't what you do for a living it's not it's kind of an easy and all that and uh but but I appreciate it uh and she said oh they they loved hearing the stories about you know Silk Road and all those things and she goes you know your dad he loved those stories he just I just wish he could have heard him like he even would tell me he would say uh you know maybe maybe Chris will come home and uh I'll get him drunk and he'll tell me the stories um but and then she goes maybe one day in heaven you can tell them those stories and I fuck lost it I literally stood in my shower sobbing yeah like like a child like it just thinking about like all my dad wanted was those stories yeah and now I'm on a fucking podcast telling stories to the world and yeah and I didn't tell them yeah so 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 uh I want to know about his history like his life what he did and I think he may be sensationalize some of it but that's what you want your dad's a hero so you want to hear those things it's a good Storyteller um yeah again I don't know what was true and not true but you know some of it was really good um and it was just good to hear his life but you know we lost him and 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 um 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 um like he flew around a helicopter I'll check out like power lines and dancing he would he used to swim inside to scuba into dams to check to make sure like they were functioning properly and all that pretty cool shit yeah 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 um and so to to get through that struggle to teach me like you know you you press on you have a family people count on you you do what you got to do um that was that was big yeah I'm sure you make him proud man I I 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 I can't impress them as much as uh my dad impressed me I can try all I want but well what do you think is the role of love because you uh you you gave me some grief you busted my balls a little bit for talking about love a lot what do you think they're all love in The Human Condition I think it's the greatest thing I think everyone should be searching for and if you don't have it find it get it as soon as you can um I love my wife I really do I had no idea what love was until my kids were born my son came out and um this is a funny story he came out and uh you know I just wanted to be safe and be healthy and all that and I said to the doctor I said uh 10 and 10 doc you know 10 fingers ten toes everything good and he goes ah Nine and Nine I was like what the fuck I said oh this is gonna suck though okay we'll deal with it and all that uh he was talking about the app in the car cord or some scoring about breathing and color and all that and I I was like oh shit but no one told me this um but so I'm just sobbing I couldn't even cut the umbilical cord like it just fell in love with my kids when I saw them and and that to me really is what love is like just for them man and and I see that through your career that love developed which is awesome the the the the the being able to see the humanity in people I didn't when I was young the the foolishness of Youth yeah you know I I needed to learn that lesson hard I mean you know when I was young in my career it was just about career goals and you know and resting people became stats you know you arrest someone you get a good stat you get out of boy you know maybe you know the boss likes you and you get a better job or you get you move up the chain it took it took a real change in my life to see that Humanity and uh I can't wait to listen to this into your talk was just uh probably hilarious and insightful um given the life of the two of you lived and given how much you've changed each other's lives um I can't wait to listen brother and thank you so much this is a huge honor to your amazing person with an amazing wife this is an awesome conversation you're a huge fan I love the podcast glad I could be here thanks for the invite so uh exercise in the brain too it was great a great conversation and the heart too right oh yeah yeah you got you got some tears there at the end thanks for listening to this conversation with christabel 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 and hope to see you next time