Ross Ulbricht: the FBI agent who caught him and two calls for freedom

The agent who caught Ross Ulbricht and the two men who want him freed agree on more than their conclusions suggest: he created Silk Road, the murder-for-hire allegations never went to trial, and only a president can let him out. They disagree about what those untried allegations should count for.

Chris Tarbell, the former FBI agent who tracked down and arrested Ulbricht, says the case was built on ordinary mistakes. Silk Road combined Tor with cryptocurrency, which blocked the two things investigators normally follow, the IP address and the money. What identified a person was simple: a chat client set to Pacific time, early forum posts under the name Frosty signed with Ulbricht's own Gmail address, and a computer also named Frosty logging into backups in Philadelphia. Ulbricht kept chat logs and a diary. Tarbell does not think he was a mastermind.

Tarbell also insists the internet overlooks one part of the story. The FBI believed six murders had been ordered, and he says Ulbricht wrote in his diary about having people killed and paid large sums in Bitcoin. No one was actually killed, and the allegations were never pursued in court, which Tarbell attributes to a turf fight with a separate Baltimore investigation.

Michael Malice and Dave Smith each made a case for release on The Joe Rogan Experience. Malice, in July 2024, addressed President Biden's staff, arguing that Ulbricht is nonviolent and that there is no concern he would reoffend. Smith, the day after the 2024 election, appealed to Donald Trump to honor his promise at the Libertarian Party convention, noting that the murder-for-hire accusation was withdrawn and never led to a conviction, and saying that freeing Ulbricht would cost Trump no political capital. Joe Rogan objects that allegations which were never tried were still considered at sentencing; if prosecutors had the evidence, he argues, they should have tried him for it.

So the disagreement is this. Tarbell treats the allegations as real and as the missing piece of the public story. Malice calls Ulbricht nonviolent, and Rogan and Smith take the absence of a charge or conviction as what matters. They also describe Silk Road differently: Tarbell says it offered hacking tools and hacking for hire as well as drugs, and he remembers a father whose son died from drugs bought there after investigators knew they could shut the server down. "I still think about that father a lot," he says.

Tarbell does not join the calls for freedom, but he is not a simple opponent. He treated Ulbricht with compassion, bought him breakfast, and believes his libertarianism was sincere. "He was a human being," he says. He thinks the money broke him. He admits the takedown may have backfired, advertising Tor to millions, and says dark markets multiplied afterwards. On the drug war he calls the question above his pay grade.

What to do with it: separate what Ulbricht was charged with, which included narcotics conspiracy, money laundering and computer hacking conspiracy, from what he was accused of. Before calling him nonviolent, read what Tarbell says the FBI found. Before treating the murder allegations as proven, note that they were never pursued in court. Remember that Tarbell's account is the case agent's view and not a court's finding, and that Malice and Smith are advocates making a pitch to a president. Judge the person and the sentence separately. And take Tarbell's lesson from the investigation: anonymity tools fail through habits, such as a reused name, a personal email address, kept logs and a diary.