YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Tarbell

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224
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2022-11-22
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2022-11-22
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  1. “Within your agency or other federal agencies have an open investigation that if you expose your case or took down your case would hurt their case or the other case.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So there was a deconfliction meeting that happened in DC. I didn't happen to go to that meeting, but Jared went, this is before I ever knew Jared. And we have like televisions where we can just sit in a room and sit in on the meeting. But it's all secured network and all that. So we can talk openly about secure things. And we sat in on the meeting and people just kept saying the term sweat equity. I've got sweat equity, meaning that they had worked on the case for so long that they deserve to take him down. And by this time, you know, no one knew about us, but we told him at the meeting that we had found the server and we have a copy of it and we have the infrastructure. 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 deconfliction.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “No The murders never went forward because there was some stuff, problems in that case. So there was a separate case in Baltimore that they had been working on for a lot longer. And so, you know, during the investigation, that caused a bunch of problems because now we have multiple federal agencies case against the same thing.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “We changed over time, you could see it in his writings that he changed like so People argue back and forth that there was never murders on Silk Road when we were doing the investigation to us there were six murders. So there was the way we see him at the time was Ross ordered people to be murdered. People stole from him and all that. It was sort of an evolution from, oh man, I can't deal with this. I can't do it. It's too much. To the last one was like the guy said, well, he's got three roommates. It's like, oh, we'll kill them too.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “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 couldn't give up that control to anybody, apparently.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, we were able to get all three done. Yeah, and the one guy, one of the guys, the main guys I sent to Iceland, man, he was so smart. Like, I sent another guy from the FBI to France to get that part, and he couldn't do it. So the guy in Iceland did it from Iceland. They had to pull some stuff out of memory on a computer. It's live process stuff. I'm sure you've done that before, but.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The business I formed, that's what I did. I hired only smarter people than me. And I'm not that smart, but I'm smart enough to know who the smart people are.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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 the day after the arrest? No, but I could sense it. Like I went like three or four days without sleep when I was out in San Francisco to arrest Ross. I had sent three guys to Iceland to, so it was a three-prong approach for the 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.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think my views on the case have changed over time. I mean, it was my job back then. So I just looked at it as of, 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. The president of the 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 attorney general and the president announcing the rest of this big thing and you wouldn't have seen me.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “No, I mean, there's some electronic surveillance that find Ross Albrock living in a house, and is a computer at his house attaching to, does it have Tor traffic at the same time that DPR's on? Another big clue. Matching up timefr”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “There was another guy, an IRS agent, that was part of the team, and he used a powerful tool to find his clue. He used the world of Google. He simply just went back and googled around for Silk Road at the time it was coming up and found some posts on 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. Albric at gmail dot com in my world. That's a clue.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Jerry Deagan was a partner, he was a DHS agent, worked for HSI Homeland Security Investigations in Chicago. He started his Silk Road investigation because he was working at O'Hare and a weird package came in. Come to find out. He traced it back to Silk Road. So he started working a Silk Road investigation long before I started my case. And he made his way up undercover all the way to be an admin on Silk Road. So I was talking to Ross on a Jabber server, a private Jabber server, private chat communication server. And we noticed that Ross's time zone on that Jabber server was set to the West Coast. So we had Pacific time on there. So we had a region, 124th of the world was covered of where we thought we might be.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, I don't think he was a mastermind of setting up an infrastructure that would protect his online business because keeping chat logs, keeping a diary, putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be. Bad decisions”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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 of VPN to connect to the Iceland server, there was a Bitcoin vault server that 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 big mistake on Ross's part is he had the backups for everything at a data center in Philadelphia. Put your infrastructure in the United States I mean, again, let's not make a playbook, but, you know”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I hear you. And, you know, we live in a world where, well, I live in a world where I had to tell you exactly when I arrested someone, I had to write a 50-page document of how I arrested you and all the probable cause I have against you and all that. Well, you know, bad guys are reading that. They're reading how I caught you and they're changing their way they're doing things. They're changing their MO. You know, they're doing it to be more secure. We tell people how we're monitoring what we're surveilling. We're going to lose that. I mean, 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 we're monitoring the U.S. government's monitoring everything. Big techs monitoring everything. They're just monetizing it versus possibly using it against you.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Absolutely. You know, you could abuse it. I think during the part of the Snowden leaf, saw that two NSA guys were moderating their girlfriends. And there's rules in place for that. Those people should be punished for abusing that. But how else are we going to hear about terrorists that are in the country talking about birthday cakes? And that was a case where that was the trip word that we're going to go bomb New York City's subway.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “People don't think they're a target. That message definitely has to get out there. I mean, if you have a voice, you're a target. The place you work, you might be a target. Your husband might work at some place because now people are working from home. So they're going to target you to get access to his network in order to get in.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I mean, I'm not big government type guy, you know, so, you know, even that sounds weird coming from a government guy for so many years. But there's rules in place for a reason. I mean, he put, you know, some of our best capabilities. He made them publicly available. It really kind of set us back in the, and this is in my world at all, but the offensive side of cybersecurity, right?”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “There's ways of being a whistleblower, and there's rules set up on how to do that. He didn't follow those rules. I mean, they I'm red, white, and blue, so you”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I mean, I've been asked before who does he get out of prison first or does Snowden come back into America? I don't know. I have no idea.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “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.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “You can then pull that. Yeah, great evidence and stuff. Yeah, a lot of evidence here's a sale of this much heroin because Ross ended up getting charged with czar status on certain things. And it's a certain weight in each type of drug and that you had like, I think it was four or five employees of your empire and that you made more than $10 million. And so it's just like the Narco traffitters get charged with or anybody out of Columbia.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Can't make one mistake. All it takes is one mistake of keeping it. But yeah, I mean, not only do you have to be whatever you put in a chat log or whatever you put in an email, it has to hold up and you have to stand behind it publicly when it comes out, but if it comes out 10 years from now, you have to stand behind it. I mean, we're seeing that now in today's society.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Everything. He kept them all. That's another issue if you're running a criminal enterprise. Please don't keep. Again, I'm not making a guidebook of how to commit the perfect crime. But every chat he ever had and everyone's chat, it was like going into Facebook of criminal activity.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Sorry, to add to that, I mean, the European internet cable goes through there, so across to Greenland, then down through Canada and all that. So they have backbone access with cheap energy and free cold weather.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Because the energy is free and it's cool. So you have a lot of servers going on there. Server farms, you know, the energy comes up out of the ground, geothermal. And so then it keeps all the servers nice and cool. So why not keep your computers there at a cheap rate?”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, it's so new. I mean, that's so, you know, our rivers have been going through here for millions of years and flattened everything out and all that. These are new land being carved by these rivers. You can walk behind a waterfall in one place. It's the most beautiful place I've ever been.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Everything, man. It was a different world. It was insane how great Iceland is. And so we went back and we rented a van and we took friends and we drove around the entire country. Absolutely, like a beautiful place. Reykjavik's nice, but get out of Reykjavik as quick as you can and see the countryside.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So I went to Iceland for the anonymous case. Then I went to Iceland for the Silk Road case and I was like, oh shit, all cybercrime goes through Iceland. It was just my sort of thing. And I was over there for like the third time and I said if I ever can bring my family here. Like so there's a place called Thingavar and I'm sure I'm fucking up the name that Icelandics are pissed right now. But it's where the North American continental plate and the European continental plate are pulling apart and it's being filled in with volcanic material in the middle. And it's so cool. One day I'll be able to afford to bring my family here. And once I left.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, you fly over there, so you go. If you've ever been to Iceland, if you've never been, you should definitely go to Iceland”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, that's the one that we said. Yeah, I wouldn't tell you if it was. It's on the internet. I mean, the internet has their conspiracy theories and all that.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Are the only reason I found Hector Monsigar? I mean, the one time his VPN dropped during a fox act. And he says he wasn't even hacking. He just was sent a link and he clicked on it. And in 10 million lines of logs, there was one IP address that stuck out.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Maybe five or six hours over a two day period. I knew DPR because I read his words and all that. I didn't really know Ross. There was a journal found on his computer and so it sort of kind of gave me a little insight. So I don't like to do a playbook for criminals, but I'll tell you right now don't write things down. There was a big fad about people like, remember kids going around shooting people with paintballs and filming it. I don't know why you would do that. Why would you videotape yourself committing crime and then publish it? Like if there's one thing I've taught my children, don't record yourself doing bad things. It never goes well.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “He liked the idea of it growing. He liked the idea. I mean, I think it started off as sharing this idea, but then he really did turn to like, I am the captain of this ship, and that's what goes. And he was making a lot of money. And again, my interactions with Ross was about”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “But, you know, Ross started counting his dollars. I mean, he really kept track of how much money he was making, and it started, you know, getting exponential growth. I mean, if he would have stayed at it, he would have probably been one of the richest people in the world.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “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”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Hopefully, I have a little protection. I'd only mention to her when we were in bed to have that marital connection. But who knows? I mean, she's going to question why the Ferrari is outside and things like that.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I couldn't have made it past two days. I don't like loneliness. I mean, my wife's away. I probably call her ten, twelve times a day. We just talk about things. I just, you know, something crossed my mind. I want to talk about it. And I'm sure”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “L Imagine being trapped in something like that where your whole world focuses on that and you can't tell people what you do all day.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I don't think anyone trusts anybody, you know. I mean, I think Ross had his advisors of trust, but outside of that, I mean, he required people to send their ID for their trust. People stole from him. There was open cases of that. It's a criminal world. You can't trust anybody.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yeah, low hanging fruit, I guess. I guess that's what it is. I mean, I would have bought, I mean, even Ross bought fake IDs off the site. He had federal agents knock on his door. Then he got a little cocky about it.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I mean, it was all just chatter. It was just, you know, because, like I said, Jared was on the inside, so we saw some of it from the admin sides. And Ross had a lot of private conversations with the different people that he advised him. But no one knew each other. I mean, 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 believe that it was? But fast forward, they were all real IDs. All the IDs that we found on Ross's computer as the admins were the real people's IDs.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “All done in Bitcoin. You couldn't. You had escrow accounts. You came in and you put money in an escrow account and the transaction wasn't done until the client got the drugs or whatever they had bought. And then the drug dealers had sent it in. There was some talk at the time that the cartel was starting to sell on there. So that started getting a little hairy there at the end.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So it was when we finally got looking through the books and the numbers came out as 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.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “One of the first things Hector told me after we arrested him is that Havey Unit was a secret service agent. And I was like, oh shit, just because he kind of lived that lifestyle, he'd be around for a bunch of days and then all of a sudden gone for three weeks. And I try to get more out of Hector early on in that relationship. I'm sure he was a little bit guarded, trying to social engineer me. Maybe he wanted that, oh shit, this law enforcement involved in this. And not to say, I mean, I was over my head with that case just in the amount of work that was going on. So to track them all down, plus the 350 hacks that came in about just military institutions, you know. Himit, I could had em all, you know, maybe that's the perfectionist in me.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “There's what's known in public and what was known because side with Hector. And he was sort of like the set things up guy. So if Lolsek had their hackers, which was Sabu and Kayla, and they had their media guy, Sky Topiary. He lived up in the northern end of England. And they had a few other guys, but Avy Unit was the guy that set up infrastructure. So if you need a VPN in Brazil or something like that to pop through”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “It's funny. You know, I'm, you know, fast forward in our story. I'm very good friends with Hector Monster of the Sabu, the guy I arrested. And he tells stories of what he did in his past. And I'm like, that actor, you know, you know, but then I listen to your episode with Brett Johnson, and I was like, this guy stealing money from the U.S. government and welfare fraud and all this 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.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Don't, I mean, I feel like I have a fairly high ethical bar that I have to put myself on. And I don't think I have a problem with it. I would love to listen to it.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “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-truths. And you kind of, if they're good, they can keep that story going for long enough. If they're not, you know, you kind of see the relief in them when you finally break that wall down.”

    2022-11-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source