Unmasked: The Man Behind The Silk Road

by Andy Greenberg

A black market hidden in the dark reaches of the Internet, the Silk Road fed an insatiable demand worldwide for drugs, malware and worse. At the center of it all was a mysterious, charismatic figure calling himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, who championed his illegal bazaar as a bulwark against an overly intrusive government and a beacon for anyone committed to individual freedom and privacy.

Forbes published the first extended interview with the online drug lord, and since then we have covered the Dark Web market’s wild success and sudden shuttering when the feds apprehended 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht in the science fiction section of a San Francisco public library. Forbes was present for Ulbricht’s trial, which not only showcased the lurid crimes connected to the Silk Road but also offered a look at how crime, currency and commerce are evolving with the Internet. Look no further for an unparalleled tale of online secrecy, murders-for-hire, courtroom drama and corruption.

Genres: Crime, Nonfiction, True Crime

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 15, 2015

About the author

Andy Greenberg is an award-winning senior writer for WIRED, covering security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture. He's the author of the new book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. His last book was Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers.

The two books, as well as excerpts from them published in WIRED, have won awards including two Gerald Loeb Awards for International Reporting, a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, three Deadline Club Awards from the New York Society of Professional Journalists, and the Cornelius Ryan Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club. His first book, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Hacktivists and Cypherpunks Aim to Free the World’s Information, was named one of the top ten “greatest tech books of all time” by the Verge.

Before joining WIRED in 2014, Greenberg worked as a senior reporter for Forbes magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.

Reviews

[R.W. Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent for reportage--given much, or all, of the content was published as an extended magazine coverage of an ongoing investigation.

However, the book edition appears to have nothing added to tie it together and give it that finished appearance.

So, the upshot is this is neither novelistic (it never makes that claim), nor is it a "real" non-fiction book (I suppose it doesn't make that claim, either).

[Dennis Cahillane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This "book" is a compendium of the Ars Technica articles written about Silk Road and Ulbricht's trial. That's a good thing because the Ars Technica coverage was the best available. That said, like almost all tech journalism I found the analysis to be unfairly anti-innovation and anti-libertarian.

[Anish · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a collection of news articles.