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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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “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.”

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

  2. “Face would not be shut. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't publish a show for a while. They'd have to put a lot of trust in you that you are not going to, you're going to have to alter those tapes. I say tapes because it's old school. Exactly. I'm sure a lot of people just said that. Like, oh shit, this old guy just in tape.”

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

  3. “I was technically advising you I would say first off don't advertise it. The fewer people that you're going to tell that you're having this conversation with, the better. And yeah, you could do it in person or are you doing it in person?”

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

  4. “I would think so. I would think that someone could, I mean, someone who has been living a double life for long enough where you think they're not a criminal.”

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

  5. “He, whatever, you know, Kayla is the way ended up being 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, these guys are part of a hacking crew. They social engineer the shit out of each other. Just to build if one of them ever gets caught, they'll convince everybody else that they're a Brazilian ISP owner or something like that. And that's how I'm so powerful.”

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

  6. “One of the guys in Lulsek was a she was a 17 year old girl. And my source in the case, the guy at Sabu that I arrested and part of, we sat side by side for nine months and then took down the case and all that. He was convinced she was a girl and said he was in love with her almost at one point. It turns out to be a 35-year-old guy living in England.”

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

  7. “I mean, yeah, I mean, you were getting the low hanging fruit. I mean, we're getting the ones that can be caught. I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but the anonymous case, there was a guy named AV Unit. He still, I lose sleep over him because we didn't catch him. We caught everybody else. We didn't catch him. He's good though Pops up too once in a while on the internet and it pisses me off.”

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

  8. “Yeah, I mean, I definitely could see the way of doing that. And in this case, in our takedown, we use that. There was one of my partners, Jared Darry, and he was an HSI investigator, and he had worked his way up to be a system admin on the site. So that did gleam quite a bit of information because he was inside and talking to, you know, at that time, we know it is DPR or Dreadpirate Roberts. We didn't know who that was yet. But we had that open communication. And one of the things, you know, the technical aspects on that is there was a Jabber server that was, that's a communication type of communication server that was being used. And we knew that Ross had his jabber set to Pacific Time. So we had a pretty good idea what part of the country we was in.”

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

  9. “It's very difficult. People have come up with different techniques. There's been techniques to put out in the news media about how they do it. Running massive amounts of relays and you're controlling those relays. I think somebody tried that once.”

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

  10. “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 the more relays you have, the slower it is. I mean, that's one of the big drawbacks on Tor is how slow it operates.”

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

  11. “Let's say you want to go to a Dodon site, you'll put in the Dotunion you want to go to, and your computer will build communications with a Tor relay, which are all publicly available out there. But you'll encrypt it. You'll put a package around your data. And so it's encrypted. Can't read it. It goes to that first relay, that first relay knows about you and then knows about the next relay down the chain. And so it takes your data and then encrypts that on the outside and sends it to relay number two. Now relay number two only knows about relay number one. It doesn't know who you are asking for this. And it goes through there, adding those layers on top, layers of encryption till it gets where it is. And even the onion service doesn't know, except for the relay it came from, who it's talking to. And so it peels back that, gives the information, puts another layer back on. And so it's layers like you're peeling an onion back.”

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

  12. “Yeah, this one had the potential of being a big one, you know, because I think Silk Road was like the sixth on the list for that case, but we all knew that was sort of the Golden Ring. If you could make the splash that that onion site was going down, then it would probably get some publicity. And that's part of law enforcement is getting some publicity out of it that, you know, that makes others think not to do it.”

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

  13. “We were looking to open a case against Tori because it was a problem. All the cases were closing because Tori. So we went on Tor. That we targeted. We were looking for nexuses to hacking because I was on a squad called CY2 and we were like the premier squad in New York that was working criminal cyber intrusions. And so, you know, any website that was offering hackers for hire or Hacking tools for free, you know, or paid services. Now we're seeing ransomware as a paid service and phishing as a paid service. Anything that offered that. So we opened this case on, I think we called it. So you have to name cases. One of the fun thing in the FBI is when you start a case, you get to name it. You would not believe how much time is spent in coming up with the name. You know, in case he goes by, I think we called this onion peeler because of the”

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

  14. “I agree. I agree. But, I mean, we haven't had a voice like we've had until recently. I mean, anyone that has a Twitter account now can speak and become a news article. You know, my parents didn't have that voice. If they wanted to speak out against the government or do something, they had to go to a protest or organize a protest or do something along those lines. We have more of a place to put our voice out now.”

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

  15. “I completely see your point, and I agree with it. I mean, but on the other side, people criticize the government of these freedoms, but I mean, tech companies talk about destroying your privacy and controlling what you can say. I realize they're private platforms and they can decide what's on their platform. But, you know, they're taking away your freedoms of what you can say. And we've heard certain things where maybe government officials were in line with tech companies to take away some of that freedom. And I agree with you. That gets scary.”

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

  16. “I mean, nobody wants to give up their privacy. I say that. I say no one wants to give up their privacy. But, I mean, I used to have to get a search warrant to look inside your house. Or I can just log onto your Facebook and you've got pictures of all inside your house and what's going on. I mean, it's not, you know, so people like the idea of not giving up their privacy, but they do it anyways. They're giving away their freedoms all the time. They're carrying watches that gives out their heartbeat to a weight of companies that are storing that. I mean, what's more personal than your heartbeat?”

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

  17. “I mean, the child exploitation is a specific example for it. It's easy for me to sit here and say child exploit child porn because no one listening to this is ever going to say that I'm wrong and that we should allow child porn because some people utilize it in a bad way, should it go away? No, I mean, I'm a technologist. I want technology to move forward. People are going to do bad things and they're going to use technology to help them do bad things”

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

  18. “So, part of my time in the FBI was working on child exploitation, kitty porn, as they call it, that really changed my life in a way. And so anything that helps facilitate the exploitation of children fucking pisses me off. And that sort of jaded my opinion towards Tor because of that, because it helps facilitate those sites.”

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

  19. “Tor was originally invented by the US Navy so that spies inside countries could talk to spies and no one could find them. There was no way of tracing them. And then they released that information free to the world, so Tor has two different versions of ways it can be utilized. There's dot onion sites, which is like a normal website, a dot com, but it's only found within the Tor browser. You can only get there if you know the whole address and get there. The other way Tor is used is to go through the internet and then come out the other side if you want a different IP address. If you're trying to hide your identity. So if you were doing like, say, cybercrime, I would have the victim computer and I would trace it back out to a Tor relay. And then because you don't have an active connection or what's called a circuit at the time, I wouldn't be able to trace it back. But even if you had an active circuit, I would have to go to each machine physically live and try to rebuild that, which is literally impossible.”

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

  20. “I can already tell you what you're going to tell me When you're at college, you wrote a paper and you're connected to the person that started”

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

  21. “To know your family a little bit, you know, and come back Of guys I was with was like, let's find the next big challenge. And that's when we were finding case closed, it was Tor. Case closed, it was Tor. Let's take a look at Tor and let's see what we can do. Maybe we'll take a different approach. And Silk Road was being looked at by other law enforcement, but it was taking like a drug approach where I'm going to find a drug buyer who got, you know, Drugs sent to them in the mail, and let's arrest up. Let's go up the chain. The buyers didn't know their dealers. They never met them.”

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

  22. “So we had arrested a guy named Jeremy Hammond, and he hid himself. He was a hacker, and when we arrested him, it was the second time he had been arrested for hacking. He used Tor And so that kind of brought us to a point. The FBI has a computer system where you look up things. Look up anything. I could 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. You'd be like, oh, this is Tor and just stopped. We didn't go and get any further. So, you know, we had just had this bigger rest of Sabu and took down Anonymous. And sometimes in the FBI, Used to 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 Few month”

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

  23. “We did get the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that happened. I mean, all the records were there. I don't remember big debates. I mean, there was a clear leadership. And that was the final decision. The CEO of”

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

  24. “It went back and forth. I think there were guns on there, and he tried to police it. He told himself, the captain of the boat, so he had to follow his rules.”

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