The Deep Web documentary has the following subtitle: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road. It deals about the Silk Road website and the illegal arrest of his alleged owner. What is largely referred to as “the deep web” is not the dark hole of the internet, it’s only that part not indexed by privacy-invading tools like Google or Bing. The documentary has been written and directed by Alex Winter.
Deep Web documentary poster image
[source: unless stated, all pics are from The Collider website]
Silk Road
The “Silk Road” website used to be a market for drugs, accessed only via Tor network. The only used currency was bitcoin, which is more untraceable than any other payment form. One could anonymously buy heroin, LSD, cocaine, and other illegal items.
Silk Road website screenshot
The website was cracked by the FBI, which consequently arrested the 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht while he was logging into an admin account of Silk Road. It happened in October 2013, in a public library in San Francisco.
Deep Web documentary is wonderfully narrated by Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter’s former co-star. By the way, Alex Winter used to be an actor, but in parallel, he already made two successful documentaries, Deep Web being one of them. He is still working on other projects as a writer, producer, and director. Someone said that Reeve’s narration provides some Matrix resonance, but the script is less rigorous than it should be for such a complex subject. Deep Web really doesn’t need it — it stands on its own as a fascinating look at the story of The Silk Road. I think that Winter hasn’t had enough access to the file, and the film was built around the extremely useful interviews with key characters, like Andy Greenberg, from Wired, or Ulbricht’s own parents, Kirk and Lyn Ulbricht.
Andy Greenberg
Wired writer Andy Greenberg, who had at one point communicated with the Dread Pirate Roberts (who may or may not have been Ulbricht at the time), wrote a series of excellent articles about The Silk Road and Ulbricht’s case, and also was a consulting producer for the documentary. Greenberg is both thorough and thoughtful in discussing the information, and he (like the documentary’s overall tone) is more interested in the story itself than any revelation of absolute truth.
Deep Web documentary pundit, Andy Greenberg
In 2012, Greenberg published a pretty welcomed book about politically motivated information leaks: “This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information”.
A noteworthy appearance is made by the anarchist developer Aamir Taki.
Deep Web Aamir
He is considered a hacktivist more than a brilliant web developer who is a bitcoin project pioneer and who said that it is easy to make money and retreat on a sunny island to linger, but it’s better to make money and leave a mark on the world. He was listed by Forbes as one of the most prominent young entrepreneurs, but because he wasn’t establishment-oriented, he didn’t take Zuckerberg’s road.
Aamir Taki in Bratislava – December 2012
[source: wikipedia.org (I could use a screenshot from the Deep Web documentary, but this picture is clearer, as much as I dread to consider Wikipedia as a reliable source. Luckily, I know the looks of Aamir)]
Taki is a modern freedom fighter and an open source promoter. In 2015 he went to the Syrian Kurdistan and enrolled in YPG (People’s Protection Units) to fight against ISIS in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, a community government system focused on direct democracy. The system has been described as pursuing “a bottom-up, Athenian-style direct form of democratic governance” – cf. David Romano, a Middle East Politics Professor at Missouri State University – contrasting the local communities taking on responsibility versus the strong central governments favored by the great majority of states.
In this model, the proper state becomes less relevant and people govern through councils. Its program immediately aimed to be “very inclusive” and people from a range of backgrounds became involved: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Syrian Turkmen and Yazidis (from Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi religious groups).
What is relevant in here is that they wanted to use bitcoin as the second currency along with the Syrian Pound.
Today, Aamir Taki is leveraging blockchain technology to help the Catalan independence movement.
Ross Ulbricht and the Deep Web Documentary
The FBI said that Ulbricht, a former science and engineering grad student, was Silk Road’s mastermind, operating under the title Dread Pirate Roberts (a name taken from the novel and film The Princess Bride). He was charged with money laundering, computer hacking, and drug trafficking and attempting to procure murders, though the murder charges were later dropped.
Ross Ulbricht
“How the founder of the Silk Road made millions on his illegal startup on the Dark Web” is a click-bait article’s title based on a book written to approve the DEA, IRS, Homeland Security and the FBI’s joint operation to apprehend Ulbricht and to send him behind bars for life.
“In less than two years, a Dark Web marketplace created by a twenty-something libertarian from Texas had generated more than $1.2 billion by selling drugs, weapons, and cyanide online.” This is that piece of trash’s subtitle, written by a brainwashed “journalist” gal featured in The Atlantic, VICE, Vox, Playboy and “other publications“. Based upon one view, and one book which was written by another member of the establishment’s paean chorus, a certain Nick Bilton. His book bears an explosive phantasmagorical title: “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road.”
“Bilton, who has been a reporter for years, said that he often encounters discrepancies in the recalling of an event by different sources. Yet for the Silk Road story, he could draw on evidence from social media, digital photos, GPS signals, and weather reports to know what, exactly, was happening in the story—without ever being told“. [an extract from that same superficial gal’s article]
I am speechless. Bilton apparently knows a lot of facts about Ulbricht [from Social Media and GPS signals, go figure…], he claims that when a discussion about selling body parts on Silk Road was made, he approved that “as long as it is consensual.” Where has Bilton got this kind of data, since actually nobody proved that Ulbricht is the “Dread Pirate Roberts“?
The trial, held in Brooklyn, N.Y., in January and February 2015, attracted Internet-freedom protesters and was closely followed by bloggers. Ulbricht’s defenders claimed the handsome, intelligent, former Eagle Scout (he resembles Robert Pattinson) was an idealist and a martyr who saw the creation of an almost unregulated Internet market as an act of freedom, unshackling humanity from the tyranny of taxation and government control.
Ulbricht’s anarchist-libertarian philosophy was actually what has eaten the FBI and the authority itself. In parallel, one FBI agent (I’m sure he wasn’t acting alone), was found guilty of stealing $820,000 worth of bitcoin. On December 7, 2015, US District Judge Richard Seeborg sentenced former federal agent Shaun Bridges following his conviction on money laundering and obstruction charges in August, same year, leading to a prison term of 71 months. Bridges admitted to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of the virtual currency bitcoin during the investigation into the online underground marketplace Silk Road.
Prosecutors say the website generated approximately $213.9m in sales before being shut down. Where did “more than $1.2 billion” came up from?
Alex Winter and the Deep Web Documentary
Winter wanted his documentary to provide another perspective on a story one is hearing from the official channels, at the time, of course.
Film maker, writer and producer Alex Winter
[source: indiewire.com]
“The story that’s going to have legs down the road is the salacious one—the Internet is Breaking Bad,” Winter says. “I just don’t care about that story at all. I don’t think that’s actually true to what happened.” (from an interview on Wired, prior to the documentary being aired on TV, on Epix).
In the same interview, taken by Ariel Zambelich for WIRED, Winter says the media coverage on the Silk Road was wildly off-base: “drugs, guns, and hitmen“. When he started talking with the people involved with Silk Road (“vendors, engineers, sellers, administrators, people who helped with scaling“), he found out that this was operated just like any large tech company, only one couldn’t find any of that in the mainstream media.
The official media sing in chorus that Ross Ulbrich is not Edward Snowden, nor Julian Assange, so he doesn’t deserve to be elevated to the same moral level as them. Also, the Deep Web documentary is superficial and inconclusive. They wonder why it is so hard to understand that a smart, well-meaning zealot can rationalize activities that are dangerous, criminal and wrong?
All in all, even the official media recognize: certainly, the FBI case has a rotten smell. There’s the mystery about how the agency obtained Ulbricht’s identity.
Deep Web Documentary – Trailer
I stick with Alex Winter and Andy Greenberg on this subject, Deep Web documentary is an alternative to what you watch when it’s shown by the entity who wants to manipulate your opinion. As with other major subjects, doesn’t matter if it is “right” or “wrong”, you have to be the one to judge that.
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