#340 – Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road
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What is Silk Road and its significance?
The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cybercrime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Ulbricht, the leader of Silk Road, the billion-dollar drug marketplace. And he tracked down and arrested Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu, of LulzSec and Anonymous, which are some of the most influential hacker groups in history. He is co-founder of Naxo, a complex cybercrime 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 cybercriminals who have been caught, and perhaps the cybercriminals who have not been caught and are still out there.
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It's the best way to support this podcast. We got True Classic Tees for shirts, Inside Tracker for bio-monitoring, ExpressVPN for privacy, BetterHelp for mental health, and Blinkist for non-fiction. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting. But if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by True Classic Tees. High quality, soft, slim fitted t-shirts for men. They also make other menswear staples like polos, workout shirts, and boxers. But I have a lot of their black t-shirts. That's my main go-to. I'm not exactly sure why. But there's a certain kind of comfort in having a great t-shirt that all looks the same.
Having many of them. So it removes that extra little decision in your life. So you can liberate your mind to focus on the more difficult decisions in your life. So it's just this reliable thing I can count on. Either I wear a suit or I wear a true classic t-shirt. That's it. That's all I need to worry about. Life is simple. And there's a kind of minimalist aesthetic to a black t-shirt that just brings out the best in me. Makes my soul sing. I think it's also in part a programmer aesthetic, engineer aesthetic. I'm not exactly sure. But I do know that a lot of programmers I hang out with often wear black t-shirts. So I'm not sure what that's about. That could also just be in general a guy thing. I'm going to have to get some data on that.
Anyway, go to trueclassic.com and enter code Lex to get 25% off. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. Your lifestyle decisions should be made based on data coming from your own body. I can't wait until the day that we have high bandwidth signal coming from the body at a frequency that is exceptionally high. So we have this short-term and long-term data about what's going on inside our body, just raw data. So machine learning algorithms can just interpret that data to make decisions based on. I mean, to me, that is such an exciting world of creating systems that are able to truly listen to our body. There's experiences I have by going to doctors.
I think the job of a doctor is so difficult. They get just few little inklings into the symptoms you provide. There's some data they can collect. They can do MRIs and all that kind of scans. It's not a high-resolution picture of what's going on in your body. Now, if you're the average case for a particular condition or disease or a particular issue you're having in your life, yeah, fine. But a lot of us are not the perfectly representative average case. In fact, most humans aren't. And so it makes sense that we should be looking at that specific person to make decisions for that specific person. Anyway, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash flex. This show is brought to you by ExpressVPN.
I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. This conversation talks a lot about Tor, which is a super extreme way to protect your privacy on the internet. Now, that's like advanced stuff. The basic stuff that everybody should be doing is a VPN.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Silk Road and its significance?
0:00–35:32
2
How did the FBI track down Ross Ulbricht?
35:32–43:09
3
What are the ethical implications of using Tor for cybercrime?
43:09–57:16
4
How did the Silk Road operations impact law enforcement strategies?
57:16–1:33:25
5
What are the implications of the FBI's relationship with Facebook?
1:33:25–1:34:35
6
How does the culture in tech companies influence their operations?
1:34:35–1:37:27
7
What led to Hector Monsegur becoming an informant?
1:37:27–1:39:25
8
How can individuals protect themselves from cyber threats?
1:39:25–3:02:52
Speakers
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