Silk Road, the world's largest online marketplace for drugs and other illegal goods, was largely shrouded in secrecy until Wednesday, when the FBI announced the arrest of the site's alleged administrator, Ross William Ulbricht, who went by the name of "Dread Pirate Roberts."
Many unanswered questions surrounding the case remain, but details of Ulbricht's arrest are starting to surface. The feds took him into custody on Tuesday at 3:15 p.m PT, while he was in the science fiction section of the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library. "Six to eith agents" in plain clothes came quietly into the library, one by one, sitting down around him, according to library spokesperson Michelle Jeffers, who says the agents didn't catch the staff's attention, they did not perceive them as anything other than library users."
See also: Exclusive: Inside the World of a Silk Road Drug Dealer
At the time of arrest, Ulbricht was reportedly using his computer, speaking with a cooperating witness about Silk Road.
Staff at the library, who didn't recognize Ulbricht as a frequent patron, didn't notice anything strange until they heard a crashing sound, which they thought was somebody falling. When they went to investigate, they realized the source of the commotion was the FBI agents "standing him up to put him against the window to arrest him," Jeffers told Mashable.
But an FBI spokesperson told Mashable that Jeffers' account regarding the arrest "is false." The spokesperson also refused to confirm the number of agents "for trade craft secrets."
Both Jeffers and the FBI agree on one thing, however: Ulbricht did not resist the FBI, and the arrest was carried out without incident.
It's reasonable to assume that the FBI was tailing Ulbricht and waited for him to log into his computer before making a move. The reasons behind this hypothesis are clear: If your laptop is encrypted seized when turned off, the feds can't access any data — it's all scrambled. However, when your computer is turned on, the FBI can read your information, even if it's password-protected or the drive is encrypted.
This solves various potential issues. If the laptop hard drive is encrypted, it's unclear whether a suspect is compelled to hand over the decryption key to the authorities. This might infringe his right against self-incrimination, enshrined in the Fifth Amendment.
In fact, this sticking point is highly contested and not many legal cases involve the issue. Prosecutors have repeatedly argued that defendants should decrypt their computers in order to let authorities access them, as Wired has reported in the past, and a federal appeals court ordered a defendant to decrypt his laptop last year, despite her claim that she had a right not to do it.
Ulbricht appeared for a detention hearing at a federal court in San Francisco on Thursday morning, where he did not consent to detention, according to Department of Justice spokesperson. He will have another hearing on Friday at 9.30 a.m. PT.
In the meantime, a separate indictment (.PDF), filed in a Maryland district court, accuses Ulbricht of asking an undercover agent to kill a Silk Road employee.
Image: Raul Arboleda/AFP/Gettyimages