If you haven’t read journalist Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind Silk Road , now is the time to immerse yourself in the riveting page-turner. Published in May 2017, the conversation that Bilton has fast reignited on a global scale is all about the underbelly of the Internet.
American Kingpin opens with Homeland Security Officer Jared Der-Yeghiayan intercepting an unmarked single pink pill in 2011. The suspicion surrounding the package builds up to a full-fledged manhunt for the creator of the highly-encrypted marketplace Silk Road and the ultimate arrest of Ross Ulbricht. Despite that, unlike a lot of other crimes, Bilton says, “The dark web is the dark web; there’s no way to put it in a bottle.”
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Decentralised sites such as those in the dark web claim to hand power back to people online; power in the form of communication, currency and archiving. But it’s power of a different kind. Bilton talks of a recent report released by Tor, upon which Silk Road operated, “One of the founders of Tor stated he was shocked to learn that 95% of websites on the anonymity network are now used for nefarious purposes.”
Possibly due to its shifting nature, understanding the infrastructure of the darknet is almost impossible for the regular person who does a day job and goes to bed at night. It is possible to comprehend what goes down there, though. Bilton explains: “When the Internet came along, the public imagined it would be this happy, Utopic place, but the reality is quite different: Russia used it to hack the US elections, Donald Trump uses it to incite violence on Twitter, driverless cars can be used to drive into people, and hackers are now using Bitcoin to hold companies and hospitals ransom and demanding vast amounts of money before they turn the power back.”
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Law enforcement agencies pull down these websites that operate at high stakes, but they are easily accessible to those in the know, especially the young, with illegal transactions of every sort being the norm. Silk Road, for instance, featured sinister products, such as dismembered body parts and the services of a hit man.
Two lives, one face
Notions of ‘the double life’ first sparked the idea for the book, when Bilton was residing in Glen Park in San Francisco around the time Silk Road got taken down — and then found out that Ulbricht was his almost-neighbour. Ulbricht’s Libertarian beliefs reflected upon drug laws in America as tyrannical, and perhaps that’s largely what shaped his idea for Silk Road; he viewed the world as a place that should operate without coercion or aggression.
How mediated we are by technology is the big joke of it all, according to Bilton, “What Ross managed to do is lead two lives and make them unbelievably different. He was a very sweet and kind kid. Then you have Dread Pirate Roberts, his alter-ego, who was capable of making really ruthless decisions about potentially having people killed and selling body parts on the Internet.”
At the time of his arrest, Ulbricht’s net worth lay at $28.5 million dollars, while Silk Road’s was $1.2 billion, conveying the amount of international activity the site had amassed in its four years of existence. To this day, Bilton still mulls over whether Ulbricht deserves the double-life sentence; while he led a double life, he didn’t have an active hand in anyone’s death, but he did have an intention to kill those in his way. He simply sums up, “I do believe that Ross’ sentence intended to send a message — whether or not that works, remains to be seen.” In fact, a look at silkroaddrugs.org shows that Ulbricht’s conviction has led to an increase in the sales of products on darknet sites.
A tech-idemic
Bilton’s vividly-detailed journalism (he writes for Vanity Fair and used to be a columnist at The New York Times ) brings you to a unique frontier, the kind, like all good journalism, shows you two sides of a story, while also showing that the power struggle is far from over.
Bilton speaks in great detail of just how much Ulbricht changed the lives of pretty much everyone in the narrative — from his college girlfriend to the members of law enforcement agencies. The resulting power-play is intriguing, as Ulbricht and the authorities use Silk Road as a litmus test of their abilities. Chilling vividness is achieved through Bilton’s hundreds of hours of interviews with everyone impacted by Ulbricht — from childhood friends to those holding the highest position in the government. The narrative is almost cinematic in nature, while showing how tectonic shifts in the way crime operates and engulfs young people, do change the world, and not always for the good.