Wired - June 2015

HOW GEORGE , LUCAS LITTLE DIY EFFECTS SHOP CHANGED MOVIES FOREVER 40 YEARS OF ILM

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INSIDE THE

STARRING: GEORGE LUCAS, STEVEN SPIELBERG, KATHLEEN KENNEDY, J.J. ABRAMS ...

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FACTORY

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PLUS: THE EPIC SAGA OF SILK ROAD, PART 2: THE FALL THE DEADLY GLOBAL WAR FOR SAND GADGET LAB: POWER DRILLS!

jun 2015

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rebel alliance

... RIAN JOHNSON, MICHAEL BAY, RON HOWARD, GUILLERMO DEL TORO ...

PLUS: HOW TO STOP SEXISM IN VENTURE CAPITAL EXOSKELETONS! LASERS! POWER WHEELS! ROBOT SMACKDOWN WHY WE LOVE CORY BOOKER

... LYNWEN BRENNAN, GORE VERBINSKI, COLIN TREVORROW, AND DUNCAN JONES

A SELECTION OF TREASURES FROM THE ILM VAULT IN SAN FRANCISCO, PHOTOGRAPHED FOR WIRED BY DAN WINTERS

FORGET THE INDUSTRIAL AND THE LIGHT, THIS IS GOING

TO HAVE TO BE MAGIC. OTHERWISE WE’ ARE DOOMED.

—GEORGE LUCAS

learn more at microsoftcloud.com

Microsoft Azure enables Respawn Entertainment to run the massive universe of Titanfall, delivering a real-time experience unlike anything that’s come before. This cloud turns data into excitement.

This is the Microsoft Cloud.

DRINKS ARE

ON THE HOUSE.

This one’s on us. And the next one, too. Now in Delta Comfort+,™ you get free premium drinks. This, along with perks like plenty of legroom, Wi-Fi, and more.

No wonder more people choose Delta than any other airline.

Delta Comfort+ seating is offered on Delta’s two-cabin aircraft, subject to availability. Features differ according to flight type/destination/aircraft. Must be 21 or over for alcoholic beverages; please drink responsibly; beverages offered on flights > 250 miles. Wi-Fi not available on all flights and subject to Gogo terms of use. Terms and conditions apply. To review full terms and conditions, please visit delta.com/comfortplus

FEATURES

70

INSIDE THE MAGIC FACTORY An oral history of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects powerhouse that changed entertainment forever.

BY ALEX FRENCH AND HOWIE KAHN

82

90

94

The Rise & Fall of Silk Road, Part 2

Q&A: Senator Cory Booker

Ross Ulbricht’s journey from drug kingpin to convicted criminal.

The New Jersey lawmaker is trying to drag the Senate into the 21st century, one tweet at a time.

The Deadly Global Sand Wars A look at the surprising, illegal, and bloody battle over one of Earth’s most plentiful resources.

BY JESSI HEMPEL

BY VINCE BEISER

BY JOSHUAH BEARMAN

JUN 2015

DAN WINTERS

Steven Spielberg, photographed on March 2, 2015, in Burbank, California.

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CONTENTS

54 Coming to You Live From Inside This Frigidaire

23.06 8

The Network What’s happening in the WIRED world

16 This Issue From the editor’s desk

19 Comments Reader rants and raves

ALPHA

The future of online video is boring. Hooray!

62 Gearhead: Podcaster Pro-level equipment to ensure your diatribes are crystal clear

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

64 Benchmark: Duct Tape

GADGET LAB

66 I Don’t Need a Monster Truck Give me a city-friendly ride that’s big enough for my projects

BY JOE BROWN

57 Fetish A hex wrench set for professional cyclists and bike geeks alike

58 Head-to-Head: Drills Black & Decker 20V Max Lithium Cordless vs. Milwaukee M18 1⁄2-Inch Compact Brushless

ASK A FLOWCHART 114 As an Elected Official, What Tech Should I Use?

23 Moneyballs Racehorses with the winningest offspring

ON THE COVER

24 The Water Warden

Photographed for WIRED by Dan Winters

Trine Thorvaldsen keeps fish farms on lockdown

FORGET THE INDUSTRIAL AND THE LIGHT, THIS IS GOING

28 Zapped To spark lightning, launch rockets

30

WIRED

TO HAVE TO BE MAGIC. OTHERWISE WE’ ARE DOOMED.

—GEORGE LUCAS

Cities: Paris

Learn the French approach to waste management, take your pick of 143 museums, and try a Corsican sausage

36 Sweet Spot Diabetes patients are getting new options for managing blood sugar

43 The Guide: Robots A SELECTION OF TREASURES FROM THE ILM VAULT IN SAN FRANCISCO, PHOTOGRAPHED FOR WIRED BY DAN WINTERS

ELECTRIC WORD 47 Lessons From the Ellen Pao Trial Sure, she didn’t win, but the real loser is the venture capital industry

BY DAVEY ALBA

52 Mr. Know-It-All On Uber seating etiquette

BY JON MOOALLEM

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ON THE INSET : 1.

Imperial TIE fighter miniature, Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977) Vader’s lightsaber hilt, Star Wars: Episode IV 3. Imperial stormtrooper helmet, Star Wars: Episode IV 4. The Ark of the Covenant, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 5. DeLorean DMC-12 time machine 1:5-scale model, Back to the Future (1985) 6. Kuwahara BMX bicycle miniature, E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982) 7. “Jetsam” alien robot puppet, *batteries not included (1987) 8. Slimer animatronic helmet, Ghostbusters II (1989) 9. Millennium Falcon miniature, Star Wars: Episode IV 10. Alien arm, Signs (2002) 11. C-3PO life-size rod puppet, Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) 12. Y-wing miniature, Star Wars: Episode IV 13. Boba Fett helmet, Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 14. Davy Jones life-size fiberglass casting, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) 15. Igoe’s pod miniature, Innerspace (1987) 16. Blue fairy model, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) 17. Plaster lifecast of actor Jim Faye 18. Messiah command module 1:7-scale miniature, Deep Impact (1998) 19. Imperial all-terrain armored transport (AT-AT) stop-motion miniature, Star Wars: Episode V 20. Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber hilt, Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983) 21. Indy’s leather whip from the Indiana Jones movies 22. Sandcrawler remote-controlled miniature vehicle, Star Wars: Episode IV 23. Darth Vader’s helmet, Star Wars: Episode IV 2. Darth

JUN 2015

THE NETWORK

WEB

WHO TO FOLLOW

Dry Spell California is in the midst of a historic drought, and its implications stretch like tributaries—across not just the Golden State but the entire US. WIRED’s ongoing drought coverage, led by science writer Nick Stockton (@stocktonsays), explores the water crisis, from causes to solutions. www. WIRED .com/ tag/california-drought

ON THE WEB:

Game On Gamers descend on Los Angeles in June for the annual E3 show. This year’s blockbuster questions: Will Halo 5 be as impressive as Microsoft hopes? What will save Sony’s holiday season now that Uncharted 4 is delayed until 2016?

Follow WIRED’s Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) on Twitter, and track the latest at E3 on WIRED.com.

ILM Visual Effects @ilmvfx

Star Wars @starwars

Ron Howard @realronhoward

Colin Trevorrow @colintrevorrow

Cory Booker @corybooker

Ellen Pao @ekp

Jon Mooallem @jmooallem

Seth Kadish @vizualstatistix

WIRED’s Angry Nerd @angrynerdwired

ON THE WEB: www.WIRED .com/ entertainment

EMAIL

Brian Reitzell soundcloud .com/smalltown supersound/

VIDEO

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International Space Station @iss

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The Latest and Greatest in Gear At WIRED’s Gadget Lab, tech-obsessed writers and editors review the latest products, including lust-worthy wearables, laptops, and mobile devices. They also show you how to get the most out of your technology, whether it’s streaming audio or phone photography apps.

ON THE WEB:

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FOLLOW US @WIRED

video. WIRED .com/series/gadget-lab

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JUN 2015

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (DROUGHT); JOSH VALCARCEL/ WIRED (MACBOOK)

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THESE DAYS, ALL POLITICS IS TECHNOLOGICAL

T

he other day, a few of us at the office were talking about the ramp-up to the 2016 presidential election. Like the onset of holiday shopping, our presidential election season seems to arrive earlier—with more sound and fury and less signification— every cycle. As we sat in the newsroom batting around polls and policies, wired’s business lead, Marcus Wohlsen, made a particularly astute observation: Amid the sorry state of American political discourse, one of the last bastions of rational, interesting conservative thought and dialog is venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Twitter feed (@pmarca). ¶ Marcus is absolutely right. Scrolling back through Andreessen’s tweets, I’m reminded of the spirited coffee klatches I witnessed growing up as the child of lefties in conservative West Texas. Thoughtful. Pointed.

Respectful. His tweets, links, and retweets form a whole greater than the sum of their 140-character parts: techno-libertarian tweetstorm as cogently argued policy manifesto. ¶ If only Andreessen weren’t so rare in this respect. It’s not hyperbole to say that we are living through one of the most dysfunctional, polarized, and narrow-minded eras in US political history. But that makes 2015 the perfect time for what Silicon Valley calls disruption. For example, did you know that the US Senate doesn’t allow the use of cloud-based services by its members? Or that those same senators are prevented from using social media analytics tools—even to measure constituent sentiment? Crazy, right? The attempt to drag our esteemed representatives into the 21st century is what got senior staff writer Jessi Hempel interested in talking to US senator Cory Booker (page 90) about some of the reforms he and fellow senator Claire McCaskill—a 0

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BEN WISEMAN

SCOTT DADICH Editor in Chief

number of accounts that follow U.S. senator Cory Booker on twitter

1.55M

social media ace—have proposed (more accessible XML databases of the Congressional Record, people!). This isn’t about letting senators get WhatsApp accounts; it’s about changes that would lead to better government.

At wired we get excited about work being done by folks like Booker, and we’re gearing up to include more of their stories in our pages and on wired.com. We realize that politics tends to be divisive. But it’s important. Think of it this way: Politics is just social change made manifest. And this publication has always and unapologetically taken a strong position on questions that matter in a connected world. Big issues like climate change or the use of stem cells no longer turn on scientific theory; they are matters of public policy. Meanwhile, technology is assuming a central role in major political issues ranging from digital security and Common Core pedagogy to gender inequality and cryptocurrency.

With Silicon Valley companies engaging with Washington as never before, and with almost every major policy issue being, at heart, a scientific or technological one, wired will be a place to contextualize those stories. You’re going to notice our pages and screens starting to resemble those West Texas political debates I grew up with—polite, respectful, and substantive, with an eye toward figuring out not just who’s saying what but who’s right.

@ S DAD ICH

JUN 2015

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE

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COMMENTS

@WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM

HEARTS AND MINDS

Friends. Scandal. Desperate Housewives. These are the weapons in a fight against oppression. For April’s cover story (“Flash Mob”), senior writer Andy Greenberg went underground with the dissident groups trying to overthrow North Korea’s totalitarian government. Their strategy: Smuggle in USB drives loaded with Western media. Kang Chol-hwan, the defector in charge of the North Korea Strategy Center, believes this effort to introduce North Koreans to the outside world could help free the country within a decade. So the next time you nod off to a rerun of some cheesy American sitcom—i.e., tonight—remember that, halfway around the globe, that same show might be powering a revolution.

RE: “FLASH MOB”

“I JUST ORDERED KANG CHOLHWAN’S MEMOIR, THE AQUARIUMS OF PYONGYANG, Q FROM THE LIBRARY.” Disco Dream on WIRED.com

ing’ something that doesn’t even exist yet. I’m sure he will deliver the game eventually, but he’s going about it the wrong way. Why not deliver a good product on schedule, with fewer features, and then improve it with revenue from an actual proven game?”

CC on WIRED .com

RE: “LOST IN SPACE”: WILL THE CROWDFUNDED VIDEOGAME STAR CITIZEN EVER COME OUT?

“As a fellow developer, I feel that Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts is falling into the pit of ‘scope creep.’ He keeps adding features and ‘improvJUN 2015

“Chris Roberts has built some of the best games I’ve ever played, so why not trust him to do it again? I spent $100 and have no regrets. They push out so much info, and the ride is amazing. I really don’t care when it’s finished.” merciful on WIRED .com

RE: “FLASH MOB”

“Amazing article.

I grew up in Bulgaria when it was still totalitarian and communist (albeit not as bad as North Korea), and I can personally vouch that these kinds of tactics work. I remember my grandfather secretly listening to Voice of America on his shortwave radio when I was little. He would tell us about how different life was in the West and relay news about the Soviet Bloc and our own government that was completely covered up within Bulgaria. One example: When Chernobyl happened, large amounts of radioactive fallout made it to Bulgaria. The state media (the only kind there was) said nothing.” zenador on WIRED .com

“Is there something that ordinary Americans can do to reach North Koreans? Could YouTube videos of our everyday lives, maybe with a specific tag, be included with USB drives and other materials sent into North Korea?”

TwilightNewsSite on WIRED .com “Interesting that this article appears in the same issue as ‘Lost in Space.’

Imagine if that $75 million were spent on USB drives smuggled into North Korea instead of on a videogame. Maybe crowdsourcing can be used to bring democracy to a country like North Korea.

You never know.”

Mitch Shapiro via email

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COMMENTS

@WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM

RE: “TOXIC”: CHINESE FACTORIES CONTINUE TO ENDANGER THEIR WORKERS

“People talk, but no one is going to spend more money to buy something that isn’t made in China.”

NooYawker on WIRED .com “I was in Tianjin a few weeks ago at a bicycle frame factory. The workers were applying stickers to the frames in a small room with barely any ventilation, and they had no masks on.

I wouldn’t have stood in there for more than 10 minutes.”

Farnworth on WIRED .com “Sad that this story will probably just get censored over in China.” mothproof on WIRED .com

RE: “FROM HERE TO BEER”: ONE MAN’S QUEST TO REENGINEER LEGENDARY BREWS IN HIS KITCHEN

“I made a heather ale sour once by mistake. Ground my grain in the brew room. Bacteria-laden dust settled out for a month afterward.

Some of it got into the fermenter.

I was going to throw it out, but I’m a cheap bastard. So I let it sit for three years. This was long enough for the sour beer craze to hit, and I gave one of my connoisseur friends a taste. He loved it. So I

bottled it, and now it’s in big demand among the beer nerds.

Never give up! Never surrender!”

Red_cted on WIRED .com “Given what we’re learning about the microbiome, might meds one day come in beer form? Wishful thinking?”

Matthew Arnold (@mattarnoldrx) on Twitter

that there are many women in science?

What if we just presented ‘people’ of science and showed as many women as men?”

Susan Erla Hale on WIRED .com

RE: “DAMN! THE TORPEDO!”: A FATHER-SON TEAM RE-CREATES A HISTORICAL CONCEPT CAR

“What these guys are doing is so awesome. I applaud their design and engineering skills. Wish I had a job as cool as that! Keep up the great work, gentlemen.

Along with Preston Tucker, car designers Alex Tremulis and Harley Earl are my heroes. Keep their memories alive!”

RexTemperis on WIRED .com

RE: “EX MACHINA”: Q&A WITH DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND

“We see AI as dangerous because movies taught us so. But then again, like sex, murderous AI sells. I see no basis to fear that computers will want to wipe us out should they become sentient, whenever that happens.”

Full Metal Pizza on WIRED .com

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RE: “IT’S TIME TO SHUT UP ABOUT MARIE CURIE”: THERE ARE SO MANY OTHER FEMALE SCIENTISTS

“When I was growing up in the ’70s you only saw posters of the male inventors with the one woman. It stands to reason, then, that girls would look at science and see it as a field for men. What would happen if we started showing girls

“In my class of more than 60, the only female scientist that students could name was Jane Goodall.”

Adam Ward (@wardhydrolab), assistant professor at Indiana University, on Twitter “I would like to see the same article about fine arts.

How many people can recall a great female painter or sculptor?”

Carioca32 on WIRED .com JUN 2015

A WATCH SO SMART THAT IT CAN TELL YOU THE TIME JUST BY LOOKING AT IT.

THE RUNWELL. IT’S JUST SMART ENOUGH.™ SMART ENOUGH THAT YOU DON’ T NEED TO CHARGE IT AT NIGHT. SMART ENOUGH THAT IT WILL NEVER NEED A SOF T WARE UPGR ADE. SMART ENOUGH THAT VERSION 1.0 WON’ T NEED TO BE REPL ACED NE XT YE AR , OR IN THE MANY DECADES THAT FOLLOW. BUILT BY THE WATCHMAKERS OF DETROIT TO L AST A LIFETIME OR LONGER UNDER THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE SHINOL A GUAR ANTEE.

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$16

PITY THE OWNERS OF WICKED STRONG. The Thoroughbred drew a sucky gate position and finished fourth in the 2014 Kentucky Derby, then tied with California Chrome for fourth place in the Belmont Stakes. No Triple Crown for him! On the other hand, his breeders would have paid a mere $35,000 for his mama to have a date with Hard Spun, his papa—a steal when you consider that stud fees can climb into the six-figure range. When superstud Tapit taps that, for example, he commands $300,000, and you can see why people pony up: His offspring earned a total of nearly $17 million in 2014. For bargain hunters, City Zip’s the sire to hire—his fee is a steal at only $40,000, but his offspring brought in a total of $11 million last year. —Seth Kadish

JUN 2015

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CARL DE TORRES

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ALPHA

the main way that humans get their seafood fix. But fish aren’t cattle; they don’t turn passive when cooped up. So Trine Thorvaldsen is studying how to keep farmed fish from going on the lam. A labor health and safety expert, Thorvaldsen has been working for a Norwegian research institute, trying to figure out why her country loses around 200,000 captive salmon per year. (These escapees can wreak havoc on their wild brethren, polluting gene pools and spreading pathogens.) Her discovery: Often it’s not the fault of the increasingly complicated fish-farming gear but the people using it. “There was one instance in which fish were being pumped from one cage to another, but the workers didn’t realize there was no net to keep them,” Thorvaldsen says; by the time anyone noticed the mistake, 13,000 salmon had swum away. A more common error is for service boats to tear containment nets with their cranes or propellers. ¶ Thorvaldsen, who has interviewed farmers and analyzed reams of escape reports, believes that one key to reducing the number of “fishbreaks” is for the aquaculture industry to make its tools more user-friendly—she points out, for example, that crane operators need a better way to monitor how their joystick-controlled tools perform underwater. But Thorvaldsen also wants farm managers to ease up on workers. Aquaculture involves some delicate moves, like manipulating weighted tubes that maintain the shape of underwater cages. “We’ve had a lot of workers say, ‘We are under a lot of pressure: We have to do things fast; we have to deliver the fish when the boat’s there,’” Thorvaldsen says. Her changes might help fix all that—which should satisfy everyone but the fish. —Brendan I. Koerner

AQUACULTURE IS FAST BECOMING

THE WATER WARDEN KEEPING FISH FARMS ON LOCKDOWN ANDREA GJESTVANG

Recent Notable Fishbreaks Gulen, Norway (April 2014) 120,000 salmon A fire burned away part of the net.

Bantry Bay, Ireland (February 2014) 230,000 salmon Storm-damaged cages caused the single biggest fish escape in Irish history.

Hinchinbrook Channel, Australia (February 2011) 100,000 barramundi Cyclone Yasi destroyed a fish farm.

Loch Earn, Scotland (July 2007) 30,000 rainbow trout The fish fled through approximately 20 net holes created by nibbling otters.

PANOS PICTURES

ALPHA GEEK

JUN 2015

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ALPHA

PSYCHOLOGY

FEELING MOODY PIXAR TURNS EMOTIONS INSIDE OUT

MONSTERS, TOYS, CARS—Pixar’s protagonists are often nonhuman.

In the studio’s latest movie, though, the main characters aren’t even physical beings. The central players of Inside Out, due out in June, are emotions—Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger, and Disgust—inhabiting a young girl’s mind and brought to life by a murderer’s row of voice talent like Amy Poehler and Bill Hader. But while casting was a breeze, picking the emotions wasn’t. (Schadenfreude was an early contender.)

Turns out there’s no consensus on how many emotions there actually are—so director Pete Docter and his team turned to an expert they’d worked with before. ¶ Early in the movie’s five-year production, Docter invited psychologist Paul Ekman to brief the crew on the nature of emotions. According to Ekman, who has had a long and sometimes controversial career, there are seven emotions with universal facial signals—those that ended up in the movie, plus contempt and surprise. For story purposes, Docter needed simplicity; five, he says, was “just enough for dissension and entertainment.” ¶ Ekman applauds the movie for teaching kids and parents alike about emotion—that understanding, he says, allows us to “choose what we feel, rather than being controlled by our emotions.”

Months it took for Then again, if we could choose what we feel, we wouldn’t Docter and his team cry so much during Pixar movies. —Caitlin Roper to finish Inside out

“IPHONE AND REGISTRATION, PLEASE” While services like Apple Pay aim to obsolescencize your credit card, another piece of plastic should start worrying about its home in your billfold: the driver’s license.

In June, Iowa is expected to become the first state to test a digital license accessed via smartphone. ¶ Think back to your last airport adventure. Chances are you checked in for your flight using a boarding pass on your phone. Every day, TSA agents scan the licenses and passports of 1.8 million travelers using a device called an E-CAT, made by a company called MorphoTrust— which not coincidentally also makes hard-copy licenses for 42 states, including Iowa. So put all that tech together

(as MorphoTrust has) and you have a digital driver’s license, complete with authentication and real-time updates. ¶ “The license has a live connection back to the DMV,” MorphoTrust’s Jenny Openshaw says. “That’s actually more secure than something you can leave anywhere.” In the works: biometrics, like “skin texture analysis” that lets the licensee choose a patch of their skin as verification. Eventually a moving headshot— think Harry Potter— and more covert watermark-like validations could also come online. ¶ This summer’s pilot program is limited to Iowa Department of Transportation employees, but 20 other states have expressed interest.

So a license app may be inevitable.

Just keep your phone charged.

—Mike Olson

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JUN 2015

ALPHA

METHODS

LIGHTNING, FOR OBVIOUS reasons, is hard to study. But Martin Uman and a team of scientists at the University of Florida have a rig that enables them to make their own bolts of electrical power on demand. Their method: Head for a storm and send up a rocket on a string. ¶ To trigger the lightning bolts, Uman and company attach 4-foot-tall hobby rockets to a 2,300-foot spool of Kevlar-covered copper wire connected to a strike rod—or whatever they want the lightning to hit. As the rockets launch toward the thunderstorm, the wire unspools and a positive electrical discharge radiates 3 to 6 miles upward beyond the wire in a jerky zigzag. ¶ Once the positive current makes it to the clouds, it stops flowing for an instant. Then a negative charge shreds back down, hitting the strike rod. A current runs back upward, and that creates the bright flash known as lightning. So, now that they control where lightning will strike (and can even leave stuff out there to get hit), researchers can gather data about the physics of zaps as well as info about how lightning affects the materials it strikes. ¶ Uman’s team has found that lightning isn’t powerful enough to break the casing on most nuclear waste containers, so whew on that front. The next big project for the university’s lightning crew is a nutso-sounding, Darpa-funded study that uses lightning to learn about the propagation of radio waves used for submarine communications. After that? May we suggest a DeLorean with a flux capacitor? —Neel V. Patel

1

3 2

▲

1M

The Lightning Machine 1. Rocket tubes 2. Insulating fiberglass launch supports 3. Electronics box for measuring current

frames per second: speed of the camera used to document the strikes

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JUN 2015

COURTESY OF THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR LIGHTING RESEARCH AND TESTING, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA; ILLUSTRATION BY L-DOPA

BOLTED DOWN TO SPARK LIGHTNING, LAUNCH ROCKETS

ALPHA

POPUL ATI O N OF PAR I S: 2 ,24 9, 9 75 I N 2014 // 29 . 3 M I LLI ON P E OP LE V IS IT E D PA R IS IN 2 0 1 3 // N E A R LY 1 IN 5 JO BS IN T H E C IT Y A R E IN T H E TO U R IS M IN D USTRY // AMERICANS ARE THE BIGGEST FOREIGN TOURIST GROUP, WITH MORE THAN 1 . 6 M IL L IO N H OT E L C H E C K- IN S IN 2 0 1 3 // T H E E IF F E L TOW E R W E IGH S 1 0 , 1 0 0 TO NS

WIRED CITIES

JUNE IN PARIS JETS, WINE & WATERSLIDES

Do Climb aboard the 543-ton Argonaute, a French navy submarine (that’s traveled enough distance to circle Earth 10 times) at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, the biggest science museum in Europe. Aquaboulevard de Paris is Europe's biggest urban water park: 11 huge slides, plus 43,000 square feet of beach lined with more than 30 straw huts imported from Mauritius. Take a serene stroll along an abandoned section of La Petite Ceinture, a railroad built in the 1800s, now brimming with more than 200 species of plants.

PARIS IS HOME TO 143 MUSEUMS // THE LOUVRE, OPENED IN 1793, RECEIVES 10 MILLION ANNUAL VISITORS

“Théâtre du Châtelet is one of Paris’ major cultural spots, with its original 19th-century auditorium. It offers an eclectic mix of performances, ranging from vocaloid (computerized) opera to ballet.”

—Yves Guillemot, CEO and cofounder of videogame company Ubisoft, based outside Paris

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M u s e u m s a n d M i c h e l i n -rated restaurants fill Paris like crème in a profiterole, but in June the City of Light boasts of something loftier: the coolest, newest aircraft in the world. The 51st Paris Air Show will cover 2 million square feet of airfield—and the skies above—with the latest jets, choppers, and drones. “A lot of business deals are signed during the show, so the most important decision makers in the aerospace world come to Paris,” says Patrick Guérin, communications director for the French aerospace industry association. Le Bourget airfield is the center of the action and, appropriately, where Charles Lindbergh landed after the first solo air crossing of the Atlantic. —Bryan Lufkin

See Peruse the curiosities at the 184-year-old Deyrolle, one of the world’s leading taxidermy institutions.

Displays range from polar bears and peacocks to cabinets filled with beetles and black widows. Learn about Earth’s most romantic city’s waste management system

at the Paris Sewer Museum. It snakes through 500 yards of 19th-century tech, made-to-ordure.

Cruise the architectural spectacle of La Défense, the city’s skyscraper hub, home to 1,500 corporate headquarters and 40,000 tech employees.

JUSTIN MEZZELL

Eat Sample Corsican wines and sausages at Le Wagon Bleu, housed in a 90-yearold car from the Orient Express. Visit Meltdown Paris, the world's first e-sports bar, where patrons sip cocktails and enjoy free access to games like Starcraft 2 and League of Legends.

Dine in the dark at Dans le Noir?, a “unique sensory and human experience” where visually impaired servers deliver meals in a pitch-black room.

JUNE 2015

One man, one engine.

One unrivaled drive.

Introducing the all-new 2016 Mercedes-AMG GT S.

Mercedes-Benz has reached a new era in performance, innovation and sportiness. Introducing the all-new 2016 Mercedes-AMG GT S. Handcrafted by a master engine builder, the 4.0-liter 503-hp bi-turbo V-8 engine is an engineering masterpiece, and truly the embodiment of the “one man, one engine” AMG philosophy. This, along with its ultra-light space frame and optimal weight distribution, makes for the most dynamic driving experience ever. The 2016 Mercedes-AMG GT S — designed for the open road, engineered to dominate the racetrack. Visit MBUSA.com/GTS

2016 Mercedes-AMG GT S shown in Solar Beam Yellow metallic paint with optional equipment. ©2015 Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC

For more information, call 1-800-FOR-MERCEDES, or visit MBUSA.com.

ALPHA

SLEEP

LEXICON

make architecture as flexible as office furniture, allowing it to morph as business opportunities change.

Orbis spike n. / ' r-bis 'spīk /

JARGON WATCH

1.

NIGHT LIGHTS BETTER Z'S IN SPACE IT’S HARD TO GET a good night’s sleep in orbit. Astronauts on the Inter-

national Space Station see a sunrise every 90 minutes or so, which leads to some seriously messed-up internal clocks. Sleeping pills help a bit, but now scientists think they can game circadian rhythms more naturally—and effectively—with new light bulbs. ¶ Sleep is regulated in part by melatonin, a hormone the body produces when the eye detects darkness. “Light is the most important cue for resetting the clock,” neuroscientist Steven Lockley says. In a replica of the ISS crew quarters, photobiologists installed color- and brightness-adjustable 2.

LEDs, and volunteers came in for light baths at different intensities.

The results: The lower the light, the more melatonin in volunteers’ 3. blood, potentially improving their sleep. ¶ Now research▲ ers are testing how different wavelength combos affect alertness. Red-shifted light allows sleep, and bluish light LEDs in a replica of the ISS crew wakes you up, so the next question is whether astronauts quarters were tuned to three can sleep better and then perform better with wavelengthcolor blends: blue controlled illumination. By 2016, NASA plans to install for alertness (1), a pinkish light for the bulbs in the real crew quarters—and its astronauts pre-sleep (2), and a can get some well-deserved shut-eye. —Rebecca Boyle neutral control (3).

0

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HARRY GOULD HARVEY IV

The point in time when humans first dominated the planet, proposed as a “golden spike” in the geological record.

The Orbis spike— orbis means “world” in Latin—occurred in 1610, when New World colonization caused global temperatures to drop.

senolytics

geckovescence

n. pl. / sē-n -'li-tiks / '

n. / ge-kō-'ve-s ns / '

A new class of antiaging drugs. Senolytics selectively kill off senescent cells, which naturally accumulate with age and contribute to the aging process by excreting harmful proteins.

Elderly mice treated with senolytics show improved cardiovascular function and bone strength.

The self-propulsion of water off of gecko skin. When water collects on a gecko’s back, tiny hairs cause droplets to merge and jump off. The process removes microbes, so now scientists plan to artificially replicate geckovescent skin to create self-cleaning and waterrepellant surfaces.

—JONATHON KEATS

crabot n. / 'kra- bät / '

jargon@WIRED .com

A robotic crane that reconfigures modular office buildings on demand. Proposed by Google for the company’s new Mountain View campus, crabots will

JUN 2015

PROMOTION

BUSINESS CONFERENCE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

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ALPHA

MEDICINE

Inhaled Insulin Huffing insulin is better than shooting insulin: Patients use a pipelike device from Afrezza to inhale a microfine insulin powder.

Availability: It’s on the market now.

One Drop Glucose Meter Razorfish cofounder Jeff Dachis started One Drop to redesign what he calls “one of the most unloved products on the planet.” Now you’ll feel like Jony Ive when you check your blood sugar.

Availability: Download the app now to share readouts from the ugly meter you have. The slinky new model should ship in 2016.

BLOOD SIMPLER NEW DIABETES TECH

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A mild electrical current forces subdermal glucose to the skin’s surface.

Sensors in the sticker, developed by the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego, measure the resulting electrical charge. Then algorithms translate it into a glucose reading.

Availability: It’s noninvasive, so this project should have less to worry about from the FDA than others might.

2017 … maybe.

OLIVER MUNDAY

Virtue

Vice

Beards

A sensor rings the periphery of the lens, a joint project between Google and Alcon, reading tear fluid and sending a signal to a tiny circuit that translates it into a glucose level. Finally, Google eyewear people actually want.

Availability: Up to a decade away. y

Vice Newscast (What to Expect)

JUN 2015

CHARTGEIST CONTRIBUTORS: MONICA KIM, JON J. EILENBERG

Depictions of Women

Daring reporting

Shocking images

A quarter-sized monitor sticks to the

PROBABILITY

Green M&M (commercial)

Taylor Swift (@taylorswift Instagram feed)

Mindy Kaling as Disgust (Inside Out)

Laverne Cox as Sophia (Orange Is the New Black) REALISM

Donald Trump super PAC

Mom jeans comeback

Two new Riff Raff albums

Entourage movie

LEVEL OF NOT WANTING

Things We Don’t Want

Temporary Tattoo Sensor

Smart Contacts FreeStyle Libre Flash Glucose Monitoring System

MORE THAN 200 MILLION PEOPLE on the planet are subservient to the same invisible overlord: their blood glucose. High, low, just right? For many of these diabetics, it’s a medical Goldilocks game that entails four or more blood-test finger pricks a day and a jab in the thigh with a needle full of insulin at mealtimes. But new tech heading to market could ameliorate this bloody y awful mess. —Larissa Zimberoff

CHARTGEIST

skin and hooks a tiny semi-invasive sensor juuussst underneath.

Wave a digital reader over it to know if you’re trending high or low.

Availability: Coming soon. Europeans are using it, and US trials are complete.

Available at Swatch stores nationwide store.swatch.com

ALPHA

TELEVISION

composer Brian Reitzell (pictured) was unsatisfied with a scene in which a teacup shatters, then rewinds back together. The key, it turned out, wasn’t your average swell of strings. “I needed to break two sake bottles to add texture,” he says, “and then I swirled around chunks of broken glass in a bucket.” For someone who frequently maxes out Pro Tools with 256 distinct tracks of sound, it’s just another day at the office. ¶ Reitzell’s eerie, ever-present soundtrack is as much a part of the show’s success as Mads Mikkelsen’s disquieting performance as Hannibal Lecter. Most series have occasional light scoring accompanied by recognizable songs; Hannibal is nearly wall-to-wall ambient compositions. Reitzell, 49, who has also worked on numerous films and even the videogame Watch Dogs, needs to create about 40 minutes of music for each episode; that means working 12-hour days, six days a week, for two weeks—for each of the 13 episodes per season. ¶ The third cycle, which begins in June, continues the show’s winking culinary theme with episodes named after Italian courses. (Nothing as obvious as “Fava Beans and Chianti”—more like “Antipasto.”) For his part, Reitzell embraced Mediterranean influences, citing Francis Lai’s Live for Life and composer Ennio Morricone. More instruments will also make it into the mix, from a 100-year-old celesta to a Albums that have been Renaissance-era organ. But it’s not all high art—Reitreleased of Reitzell’s zell recently recorded the melodious sound of bouncmusic from ing Ping-Pong balls. Delectable. —K. M. McFarland Hannibal

4

GROOMING BY MIHO SUZUKI/ARTISTS AT WILHELMINA, USING PRODUCTS BY TOM FORD FOR MEN

MUSIC TO EAT BY THE SOUND OF HANNIBAL

WHILE IN A RECORDING session for the latest season of NBC’s Hannibal,

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AMANDA DEMME

JUN 2015

ADV E RT I S E ME N T

TWENTY YEARS AGO, drivers in most countries had two main choices for fueling their vehicles: gasoline or diesel. The latter wasn’t an ideal option: Diesel burned dirty, ran loud and tendered a sluggish performance.

Today’s diesel engine is smoother, quieter and more fuel-efficient—miles1 from its clunky, cacophonous ancestor. The global movement toward clean diesel is on the rise, and Volkswagen is leading the way with six TDI® Clean Diesel models that get 40 highway mpg or more.*

1. Your mileage will vary and depends on several factors, including your driving habits and vehicle condition. *Based on EPA estimates for 2015 TDI clean diesel manual transmission models. Jetta TDI: 31 city/46 hwy mpg. Passat TDI: 30 city/44 hwy mpg. Beetle Coupe TDI: 31 city/41 hwy mpg.

Beetle Convertible TDI: 30 city/40 hwy mpg. Golf TDI: 30 city/45 hwy mpg. Golf SportWagen TDI 31 city/43 hwy mpg.

ADVE RT ISE ME NT

AS DRIVERS BEGAN looking for alternatives to thirsty gas engines, some turned to hybrids, and a few to electrics, but the performance of those engines did not live up to their gasoline counterparts. And even though ultra-low-sulfur diesel—otherwise known as clean diesel—was being phased in during the 2000s, the old perception of diesel as dirty, loud and smelly persisted.

The reality is that clean diesel now represents an ideal balance of usable power and environmental consciousness.

Volkswagen is leading this pack as the #1 selling diesel car brand in America,2 offering a range of vehicles that don’t trade fuel efficiency for power. So even though Volkswagen’s TDI Clean Diesel models can make up to 20% fewer trips to the pump compared to their gasoline counterparts, you can be confident that with more than 230 lb-ft of torque3 at your disposal, you won’t be left behind on the freeway.

going the distance

( with up to)

814

765

667 594 594

mi tank 44 hwy

mi tank 29 hwy

mi tank 46 hwy

mi tank 43 hwy

mi tank 45 hwy 4

Passat TDI

Touareg TDI

Jetta TDI

Beetle TDI

Golf TDI

2. Based on IHS Automotive, Polk U.S. new total registrations for CY 2014 for VW competitive body styles (Sedan, Coupe, Hatchback, Convertible, Station Wagon, SUV) – Excludes Vans and Light Trucks. 3. 2.0L TDI Clean Diesel car engin transmission and a 18.5 gallon gas/fuel tank. Touareg TDI: 765-mile range on 29 mpg highway EPA estimates for a 2015 Touareg 3.0L TDI, 8-speed automatic transmission and a 26.4-gallon fuel tank. Jetta TDI: 667-mile range on 46 for a 2015 Beetle TDI Clean Diesel 2.0L with manual transmission and a 14.5-gallon fuel tank. Golf TDI: 594-mile range on 45 mpg highway EPA estimates for a 2015 Golf Coupe TDI Clean Diesel 2.0L with manual transmission and a

A DV E RT I S E ME N T

10 20 reduction in carbon emissions from clean diesel vs. gasoline engines due to diesel s superior engine efficiency .

97

less

odor causing

sulfur than in years past. 5

ne torque is 236 lb. –ft. 3.0L TDI Touareg engine torque is 406lb. –ft. 4. Passat TDI: 814-mile range on 44 mpg highway EPA estimates for a 2015 Passat 2.0L Clean Diesel, with a 6-speed manual mpg highway EPA estimates for a 2015 Jetta 2.0L Clean Diesel, with a 6-speed manual transmission and a 14.5 gallon gas/fuel tank. Beetle TDI: 594-mile range on 41 mpg highway EPA estimates a 13.2-gallon fuel tank. 5. Based on EPA data. See www.fueleconomy.gov for details.

They satisfy your right foot and your left brain.

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With the Touareg that gets up to 765 highway miles per tank and five other turbocharged models that get 40 highway mpg or more,† there’s one for everyone. Isn’t it time for German engineering?

vw.com

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ALPHA

ROBOT ROBOT THE GUIDE

VS.

T WENTY-FIVE ROBOTS WILL COMPETE in the $3.5 million Darpa Robotics Challenge Finals in June. But it’s not 25 different models attempt-

ing tasks like evading obstacles and operating search-and-rescue equipment: Seven entrants are using the bulky but strong Atlas, developed by Boston Dynamics. And two are using the easier-to-modify Hubo, developed by Rainbow Co. and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. For the rest, it’s a mix of other modded bots and from-scratch builds. May the best tin man win. —NEEL V. PATEL

1

AT L A S

A laser scanner and two stereo cameras can identify tools and obstacles.

Robots like the 5' 6" Hubo move using electric motors, which are energy efficient.

But hydraulic actuators provide more strength for bigger frames— like on the 6' 3" Atlas.

The factorybuilt Hubo can lift up to 130 pounds using both arms.

HUBO

The unmodified robot has only one camera, but the team from the University of Nevada– Las Vegas tweaked theirs (shown) to have three.

Hubo can turn 180 degrees at the waist to see behind it.

The DRC Finals require all robots to carry their own power supply, creating an energy challenge for the heavyset Atlas, which weighs 400 pounds including its battery pack.

Sensors inside the legs and feet detect the position of each foot on the ground and how much pressure is on it.

JUN 2015

Hubo has a three-fingered grasp, while Atlas has universal mounts that allow for swappable hands.

Power wheels allow it to drop down on its knees and zip around.

The standard Atlas can walk 4 mph—pretty fast for a bipedal robot.

If Hubo skates on its knees backward, its toes can work like a snowplow to push debris out of the way.

ISRAEL G. VARGAS

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ALPHA

I, Robot Builder

1

In the most automated country on Earth, Tomotaka Takahashi and his army of cute yet cutting-edge humanoids are supercharging the robotics industry. Since he founded Tokyo-based studio Robo Garage in 2003, his tiny creations (usually around a foot tall) have climbed a 1,700foot cliff in the Grand Canyon, scuttled 300 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto, and been launched to the International Space Station to study how bots can help humans endure isolation. When Takahashi was in elementary school, he fell in love with the classic Astro Boy manga. “At that time, I thought about becoming a robot-building scientist,” he says.

Diminutive and doe-eyed, his devices’ kawaii look is intentional. Takahashi thinks the more approachable a machine looks, the more people will want to interact with it. His next project is a communication robot he describes as a smartphone that grew hands and feet. “Most people do not use Siri, even if it is smart enough,” he says. “We hesitate to talk to a square phone.” But apparently we’ll confide anything to a cute robot. —Bryan Lufkin

Appearance. Robot design isn’t just decoration, Takahashi says, it’s essential—it’s what motivates us to interact with them. His inventions are neither chrome boxes nor creepy quasi-humans; they’re small—cyclists, dancers, and storytellers.

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Movement. Bypassing the uncanny valley isn’t enough. Takahashi believes bots should be agile and lifelike to be more engaging.

His designs have done everything from climbing ropes to playing soccer.

Communication. Once a bot has disarmed users with cuteness, a real, twoway interface between man and machine is crucial.

Prime example: Takahashi’s 2-pound Kirobo speaks Japanese and in 2013 engaged in the first humanrobot conversation in space with the first Japanese commander in ISS history.

Curiosity

20

Amount invested

18

Number of companies funded

$160M

$140M

16

14

$120M

12

$100M

10

$80M

8

$60M

6

$40M

4

$20M

2

2009

Useful

2010

Hubo

2011

2012

Mapping our newest beepyboopy friends.

2013

2014

Atlas

Spot

Bot Matrix

The First Time I Felt True Compassion for a Robot

$200M $180M

5

4

Venture capital investors put almost $170 million into robotics startups last year, and 2015, which saw $90 million invested in just the first quarter, is poised to be bigger still. —JASON KEHE

BigDog

Roomba

Pepper

PaPeRo

Kirobo

by Ian McWilton Rapiro My wife makes fun of me for carrying the Roomba up to my home office during the day, but he keeps me company.

When he’s not feeling well, I suffer along with him. When his infrared receiver broke, the poor little guy went blind. He was just crashing around the living room, unable to see the IR “gates” we had set up. He tried to escape out the back door. And then, saddest of all, he couldn’t find his way back to the dock and eventually ran out of juice just a few feet from home. —as told to senior editor Sarah Fallon, the wife

0

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Adorbs

Terrifying

Paro Aiko Chihira

AIBO Diego-san Leonardo Pleo Useless

JUN 2015

COURTESY OF BOSTON DYNAMICS (ATLAS, SPOT); COURTESY OF DARPA (HUBO); COURTESY OF TOMOTAKA TAKAHASHI (TAKAHASHI ROBOT, KIROBO); ALAMY (ROOMBAS, BIGDOG); COURTESY OF NASA (CURIOSITY ROVER); COURTESY OF NEC (PAPERO); GETTY IMAGES (PEPPER, AIBO, PLEO, AIKO CHIHIRA); AISTJAPAN/ WENN/NEWSCOM (PARO); COURTESY OF MIT (LEONARDO); ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE HILTON; SOURCE (DROID ROUNDS): NATIONAL VENTURE CAPITAL ASSOCIATION

2

Droid Rounds

3

Takahashi’s Top 3 Tips for Bot Design

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CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK (PAO)

THE ARGUMENT

Ellen Pao may have lost her lawsuit, but the trial exposed just how bad the diversity problem in venture capital really is—and the industry would be crazy not to fix it.

BY DAVEY ALBA JUN 2015

MATT DORFMAN

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ELECTRIC WORD

SEXISM

JOHN DOERR WAS VISIBLY TENSE. The 63-year-old billionaire venture capitalist probably never imagined he would be sitting in a witness stand facing down the woman he once thought of as his surrogate daughter. The longtime king of Silicon Valley—seats on 80 boards, lead investor in Google, Amazon, and Netscape—was there to defend his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, against charges of gender discrimination brought by onetime protégé Ellen Pao. Doerr argued vehemently that he supported women in his industry. ¶ Then Pao’s attorney played an audioclip of Doerr speaking onstage in 2008 in front of hundreds of fellow venture capitalists. The lighter voice of a less troubled man filled the courtroom. If you look at the founders of Google or Amazon or Netscape, Doerr’s recorded voice said, “they all seem to be white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford, and they absolutely have no social life. When I see that pattern coming in—which was true of Google—it’s very easy to decide to invest.” ¶ As Doerr testified, my head throbbed. I’d been covering the Pao-Kleiner trial for close to a week and would end up spending the next month in court. But no other testimony would distress me in quite the same visceral way.

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Davey Alba (@daveyalba) a)) is a staff writer for WIRED. RED. RED She reported d on the Ellen Pao trial for WIRED.com.

IN THE EARLY 20th century, innovative technologies were mostly funded by wealthy families or hatched in the research departments of larger corporations. But in 1946, the environment started to change. Georges Doriot founded the American Research and Development Corporation to encourage investment in businesses run by soldiers returning from the war. And modern venture capital was born.

The industry picked up steam after the passage of the Small Business Investment Act in 1958, which gave tax breaks to private investment companies. Four big venture firms formed in the 1960s—Davis & Rock, Draper Gaither & Anderson, Sutter Hill Ventures, and the Mayfield Fund. They preferred California for the federal research dollars flowing into its universities and the talent flowing to Silicon Valley’s founding companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor.

But even as the industry grew, it remained small and clubbish. In 1969, venture capital’s all-male fraternity would meet at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco for lunch. The 1970s would see the emergence of the personal computer, and venture capital firms began to crop up near Stanford on Sand Hill Road—Silicon Valley’s Wall Street. In 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was founded and instantly became the world’s largest venture capital partnership.

Gene Kleiner had worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, and Tom Perkins had come up under David Packard at HP and had also been a favorite student of Doriot at Harvard. Other firms on venture capital’s A-list today were founded around the same time as Kleiner. All came out of the same small—and of course all-male—network.

JUN 2015

GLUEKIT; TYPE: MATT DORFMAN

Doerr may have voiced support for women from the stand—“Almost always, women are better leaders than men,” he asserted—but his platitudes contrasted jarringly with the reality on the ground.

How bad is it? In 2014, only 6 percent of partners at venture capital firms were women, according to a much-cited Babson College study. The figure is not only minuscule but also represents a decline from 10 percent in 1999.

(Kleiner Perkins does a little better; 20 percent of its partners in 2014 were women.) Not only are venture capitalists not employing women, they’re feeding tech’s gender gap overall. VC firms strongly influence the makeup of the executive teams at the companies they invest in.

And between 2011 and 2013, companies with a female CEO received only 3 percent of total VC dollars invested, the study found.

In other words, the world’s single largest demographic, women, has virtually no voice in an industry that is supposed to be inventing—or at least financing—the future. This isn’t merely wrong. It’s stupid. Venture capital isn’t just discriminating while cutting itself off from women’s talent, smarts, and insight. It’s denying itself a huge hunk of unclaimed business—which makes venture capital’s vaunted meritocracy pretty unmeritorious.

ELECTRIC WORD

SEXISM

A pattern was emerging. Friends backed friends and worked with people they knew. Success bred success, and the massive amounts of money served as the only justification VCs needed to keep doing business the same way.

By the 1980s, changes in the law allowed pension funds to start pouring billions into venture funds. That carried into the venture-fueled dotcom bubble of the 1990s. In 2000, VCs saw their biggest year by far, investing more than $105 billion before the bubble burst. But while the crash forced a reckoning that led the industry to pull back, the culture itself didn’t change. Now, as Silicon Valley experiences another boom, that culture is at work again, as shrewd investments in the “white male nerds” prized by Doerr have turned into the Facebooks and Ubers of the world. The same pattern recognition that has always fueled the venture capital industry still works, it seems. So why would it ever change?

HERE’S ONE GOOD REASON: According to Nielsen, women’s purchasing power ranges anywhere from $5 trillion to $15 trillion annually. VCs should scramble to make their industry hospitable to the very partners who

ANGRY NERD

G RE AT N E W S: The Transporter franchise is getting a reboot! r Wait, sorry, did I say “great”? I meant “completely superfluous.” How does an action franchise that started at mediocre OOTS! and headed south from there merit a do-over? And it’s not just The Transporter; this year alone, Poltergeist, Terminator and Fantastic Four are all getting reheated in the cinematic microwave. Where’s the institutional memory, Hollywood? Just look at the utterly meh revisits of Robocop Total Recall, which dishonor the sainted names of Paul Verhoeven and Philip K. Dick.

At least Poltergeist’s producers had the good sense to wait 33 years to sully the original; Superman got a film reboot seven years after his last cinematic outing, and 2017’s Smurfs project will somehow be a reboot of a CG franchise that last stank up theaters TWO YEARS AGO. As Gargamel might say, “Are you smurfing kidding me? Which i rapacious son of a Smurf had the smurfs to hit restart on that pile of smurf?” Thankfully, I have a fix: stiff taxation for re-creation! If producers are so bent on saving money that they’ll dress Vancouver up as New York City, maybe a 10 percent Previously Used Nomenclature Surcharge could scare them into at least changing the screenplay title.

Not that I’d ever do it with my own masterpiece, The Genius Who Ushered WIRED a Glorious New Dawn of Cultural Enlightenment. That’s just sweet, concise perfection.

I’M KNOCKIN’ REB

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could give them an edge in scooping up those trillions of dollars. But instead it’s still women who need to perform the careful adjustments to make working in the industry work for them.

One anxiety those women have is that by speaking up about discrimination they may discourage other women’s ambitions. Joanna Weidenmiller, founder of the San Francisco– based tech recruiting company 1-Page, says women entrepreneurs trade war stories of dyeing their hair from blond to brown and choosing more modest outfits to avoid being labeled with sexist stereotypes. She says she’s been asked how she expected to climb the corporate ladder in heels and was advised to hire “a nerdy-looking guy in a hoodie.” But Weidenmiller still wants women to enter the industry. That’s the only way, she says, it’s ever going to change.

Yet even as the industry proclaims its desire to change, its rigidly enforced idealism discourages frank discussion of the problem. After Pao’s trial ended, I sought out dozens of women working in venture capital to get their take. I ended up speaking to just eight. One told me stories of casual sexism that echoed many of Pao’s own anecdotes during the trial. But, she said, “I would never want my name attached to them.”

And with that sexism comes ignorance: Brit Morin, founder and CEO of crafts site Brit + Co, says that as an entrepreneur she has gotten used to the fact that most investors are men— and that many won’t understand her business without some hand-holding. It’s frustrating when the response she gets from male investors is that they first need to show the products to their wives or daughters. “It would be much easier for me to get my job done if there were more female partners who understood the business rather than having to overcommunicate the idea to male partners,” she says.

But when it comes to its own way of doing business, the venture capital industry has little appetite for disruption. It hates to think that the same old Silicon Valley solutionism can’t be applied to its diversity problem. By its own definition, venture capital has become the incumbent, an industry too hamstrung by its culture to change, despite the obvious business opportunities. And so others are going to seize those opportunities. Women are breaking away to start their own firms, to build their own networks, to do what the mainstream industry today won’t—or can’t.

“A lot of the time there’s another, faster way to achieve culture change,” says Theresia Gouw, who along with Jennifer Fonstad shocked the industry when they announced they would be leaving their big firms to launch Aspect Ventures last year. “If you want to change something that’s not being addressed in the best way in the market, you go out and start your own company. What Jennifer and I saw here was an opportunity.” An opportunity that oldschool venture capital, stuck in its old-school patterns, is still myopic enough to miss.

0

ZOHAR LAZAR

JUN 2015

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ELECTRIC WORD

MR. KNOW-IT-ALL

the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—the ASPCA. He began operating America’s first horse ambulance, along with a specially built horse-lifting harness-and-gurney contraption, so he could medevac injured animals off the street. (Bergh, recognizing the irony of a horse-drawn horse ambulance, gave those ambulance-pulling horses their own in-house vet staff.) Eventually, Bergh’s society opened an elaborate horse emergency room on New York’s East Side. An injury that required surgery? The ASPCA had your horse covered— and all free of charge. Often, the society treated animals whose owners couldn’t possibly afford similar health care for themselves.

How did New Yorkers respond to this show of empathy and justice for horses? They did not like it one bit. As one writer put it, Bergh’s organization “came into existence amid a very storm of disapprobation, with rumbling jeers and imprecations from the vulgar and debased.” And it’s easy to understand why.

Compassion can be threatening. It was easier for everyone to keep regarding those snorting, hairy beasts as whippable and beatable and generally beneath our sympathy—as soulless engines instead of living beings.

Fast-forward 150 years. Mercifully retiring the last few remaining carriage horses in New York was a signature promise of mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign. Meanwhile Martha Stewart recently penned a hostile letter to the mayor after the mysterious death of an 18-year-old carriage horse named Tickles. (“I, along with thousands of New Yorkers who are concerned for the city’s horses, eagerly await answers,” she wrote.) Here are reputable people at the top of civil society, advocating for the rights of horses. The fringy, ludicrousseeming Berghian view of urban horse welfare isn’t so fringy and ludicrous anymore.

I realize horses no longer drive us around.

But your question suggests we are hurtling toward a similar crisis of conscience with the new breed of creatures that do. What kind of consideration do we owe these Lyft and Uber drivers? Are they, in fact, less than human?

Are they more than horse? And how much less or more, exactly?

These are moral questions, in all their aspects—just as they were for Bergh. And yet I think they are actually far easier to answer.

Because no one ever paid a horse 20X surge pricing—no one paid the horses at all. Sit wherever you want.

Q:

Should I get in the passenger seat or the backseat of a Lyft or UberX? Is it elitist to sit in the back?

BY JON MOOALLEM

“This is a matter purely of conscience; it has no perplexing side issues. It is a moral question in all its aspects.” ¶ So said Henry Bergh, a wiry radical with greasy hair and a walrus mustache, in a speech to New Yorkers in February 1866. Bergh was trying to call attention to the plight of the many “mute servants of mankind.” He was talking about animals, and particularly the glum, huffing horses that pulled carriages and streetcars full of people around the city while being mercilessly whipped and bludgeoned by the men holding the reins. ¶ Bergh was single-minded and belligerent about his cause, not just delivering impassioned, spittle-spraying speeches but walking the streets of New York, day and night, like a half-crazed vigilante, instigating vicious shouting matches with any drivers he spied abusing their horses. When he realized horses were frequently driven to the point of dehydration, he went around the city installing drinking fountains for them too. ¶ Soon, Bergh founded the American Society for

A:

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JUN 2015

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ELECTRIC WORD

CLIVE@CLIVETHOMPSON.NET

of the 20th century, shooting and distributing video was so expensive that people used it mainly for profitable, high-stakes purposes: TV, movies, instructional video. When digital cameras and YouTube made it cheap, people began shooting things that previously would have seemed wasteful or silly: reaction shots, unboxing videos, extended cuts of puppies sleeping. The future of online video was never The Sopranos. It was Warhol’s Empire, eight hours of the Empire State Building.

Sure, livestreaming will create hit shows and celebrities that resemble those in traditional broadcasting. It already has. Twitch.tv, a site where you can broadcast yourself playing videogames live, has 1.5 million broadcasters, many of whom have audiences so big that they get sponsors and do it for a living.

But the other 99 percent—the long tail of users—are streaming to a tiny handful of people (a median of two, according to one study). Those tiny groups aren’t an economic powerhouse. They aren’t celebrities. They’re something more consequential: a cultural shift. They’re creating a new form of socializing, using Twitch to hang out and shoot the breeze, across state lines or even time zones, with videogames as the glue. Even the folks who made all this software didn’t see it coming. “It’s an emergent behavior,” Twitch VP of marketing Matthew DiPietro says.

You can see similarly unexpected smallgroup behavior on Meerkat. “We had one woman teaching a workout, and as people typed questions she’d alter her workout,” Meerkat community director Ryan Cooley says. “The people watching the show are basically cocreating it.” Houston programmer Adam Wulf streamed himself for two weeks while coding an iPad game. On average, only 10 people were watching at any given time. But, Wulf says, knowing they were there improved his work. While “talking aloud” through a problem, he’d hit on a cool new solution, and the pressure to perform made him more decisive. “People were watching, so I wanted to get it done—I got better at cutting out features and paring it down,” he says.

These are audiences so small that they redefine niche. It’s not something of interest to a small number of people—it’s an uncountable number of somethings of interest to an infinite number of people, mundane in the aggregate but individually compelling.

Not one fridge—but all of them.

Fridgewatching The future of online video is awesomely boring.

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

WHEN THE STREAMING apps Periscope and Meerkat went live earlier

this year, a strange trend emerged. People started broadcasting the contents of their fridges. ¶ Yes, their fridges. They’d stand in their kitchen and tour through their milk and odd leftovers. And when they weren’t peeking inside their fridge, their viewers would demand they do so, using hashtags like #showusyourfridge. (Even NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield felt the pressure during a livestream, when people in his audience typed, “Tell us about space fridges!”) ¶ Whenever a new tool comes along, high tech pundits write hyperoxygenated riffs on What It All Means. They’re fascinated by high-stakes money questions. So the questions about livestreaming were mostly about fame and profit. Will people use it to create new forms of celebrity stardom? Will they upend news-gathering or political campaigning?

Will they pirate movies in real time? ¶ Nope. They’ll use livestreaming in the same way every new technology is used—to do things that nobody expects. Things like #showusyourfridge. ¶ The real significance of a new medium isn’t in how already-famous people use it or how businesses use it. It’s in the mundane uses. You’d think we’d have learned this lesson by now. When a new form of communication suddenly becomes cheap and easy, people don’t merely copy the stuff on TV and in Hollywood. They do new things. Weird things too, which violate previous ideas about aesthetics and utility. ¶ For most

ZOHAR LAZAR

JUN 2015

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Capital Creates The Next Episode ¼¯«¾ ¯¸¾¯¼¾«³¸·¯¸¾ ¯¸¼³­²¯½ ¹¿¼ ­¿¶¾¿¼¯ʧ ²¯¸ ¯¾ǧ ³Â Á«¸¾¯® ¾¹ º¼¹®¿­¯ ¹¼³±³¸«¶ º¼¹±¼«··³¸± «¸® ¯Âº«¸® internationally, Morgan Stanley helped secure the funds. ²¯ Ǥ ¸«¸­³¸± ²¯¶º¯® ¯¾ǧ ³Â ¬¯­¹·¯ ¾²¯ Á¹¼¶®ʤ½ ¶¯«®³¸± ¸¾¯¼¸¯¾ ¾¯¶¯À³½³¹¸ ¸¯¾Á¹¼μʧ ¯¾ǧ ³Â ²«½ ±¼¹Á¸ ¾¹ ·¹¼¯ ¾²«¸ ·³¶¶³¹¸ ½¾¼¯«·³¸± ·¯·¬¯¼½ ³¸ ¸¯«¼¶Ã ­¹¿¸¾¼³¯½ «¸® ­²«¸±¯® ¾²¯ Á«Ã Á¯ Á«¾­² ʧ ¼¹· ¾²¯ Á¼³¾¯¼½ʤ ¼¹¹· ¾¹ ù¿¼ ¶³À³¸± ¼¹¹·ʦ Á¯ʤ¼¯ ²¯¶º³¸± °¿¸® ¾²¯ ­¿¶¾¿¼¯ ¾²«¾ ·«μ¯½ us think, question and feel more. Capital creates change.

Netflix has grown to over 57 million streaming members in nearly 50 countries, as disclosed in its SEC filing on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2014. © 2015 Morgan Stanley. CRC1122255 04/15

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“Only technology can give everyone the opportunity to learn.”

S U G ATA M I T R A , S CHO O L I N T HE CLO U D

T H E R E ’ S N O T I M E L I K E T H E P R E S E N T T O S H A P E T H E F U T U R E. NOKIA AND WIRED took the maketechhuman conversation to Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology, Newcastle University in the UK. Mitra is best known for his SOLE (Self-Organized Learning Environments) experiments in India, which proved that kids will teach themselves—and each other—if only given access to computers. Mitra has since started School in the Cloud, an online learning platform that puts Mitra’s theory into global practice.

“Our minds are our greatest strength and our gravest danger,” says Mitra. “We need to understand the mind, the brain and consciousness. We need to find out not just how we learn, but why we learn. In that lies our purpose.”

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I DON’T NEED A MONSTER TRUCK Dear automakers: Sell me a city-friendly ride that’s big enough for my projects.

I used to own a pickup—a Toyota SR5 from the early ’90s, back when you could still get something smaller than the Leviathans stalking around new-car lots today. While I was out of town, I lent the truck to my friend Jonny. He crashed it into a taxi while I was on my first date with the woman I would marry a couple of years later. ¶ The insurance company totaled it, and I bought the most similar thing I could afford: an old SUV with a rusty bumper. It did what I needed. You could jam a sheet of plywood in the back, and its unfussy interior seemed impervious to the grime-caked tools I regularly threw into it. The lady and I took our first road trip in that old 4Runner, and then I sold it to Jonny’s brother when I moved to New York City to live with Christine. ¶ We’ve since moved to California, and I want my damn pickup back. I mean, not that truck; it’s in heaven. But I still want a rig I can use to haul stuff around. Now that I have less time and a little more money, though, I’d like something that always starts and doesn’t need you to blip the gas pedal to get it into third gear. ¶ We recently got a new vehicle—an Acura RDX, which is a small and anodyne SUV that’s as inoffensive as a chocolate chip cookie. It’s 0

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TAVIS COBURN

fine, but it’s soulless. I had wanted a truck, and Christine, who learned to drive in an old F-150, would have been cool with one too.

So what stopped us? Even the smallest of the latest “small” trucks are huge, and we live in a city. The modern equivalent of my old pickup is bigger in every dimension: more than a foot longer and 1,600 pounds fatter. It occupies the same space in Toyota’s product line, but it’s not for the same person.

A new Tacoma hauls more, pulls more, and stands up to more than my dear departed ride did. It also hauls more, pulls more, and stands up to more than a regular person needs. I’m not a ranch hand, I’m a yuppie carting my hobbies around.

So there I am: making runs to Lowe’s, laying down blankets in the back of the compromise-mobile, wondering why nobody makes a small small truck anymore.

The answer, of course, is that companies do; they just don’t sell them in the US. The Fiat Strada, available in Europe, where safety and emissions standards are similar to those of the US, is a full 3 feet shorter than a fresh Tacoma. And it looks like an angry tapir-bot—totally the style I’m going for. Come on, automakers, there’s a market here!

Or maybe not: “In 1994, small trucks were 8 percent of the US auto market. As of last year, they were 1.6 percent,” says Mike Levine, communications manager for Ford Trucks, whose 2015 Ranger is small, capable, dope-looking, and not for sale in America. But I just need something for lugging around old motorcycle parts, garden supplies, and half-ass home-built furniture.

“People who want a compact vehicle that can haul have a lot more options,” Levine says, and it’s true: You can get a minivan or a crossover like I did. So it makes sense for companies to focus on capable trucks for ranchers—after all, more than half of this country’s 2.3 billion acres are used for agriculture.

It’s still a bummer, though, and the number of very shiny pickups on the street makes me feel notalone in wanting a truck that won’t see the hardest duty. This is not market research, I know, but come on! Attention automakers: Please sell your small trucks in America.

And while I’m pleading, can you make one of them electric?

Email joe@wired.com.

JUN 2015

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40 Years of ILM 070 | The Rise & Fall of Silk Road, Part 2 082 | Q&A: Senator Cory Booker 090 | The World’s Deadly Sand Wars 094

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Inside the Magic Factory by

Alex French and Howie Kahn

The definitive oral history of ILM, the special effects powerhouse that revolutionized moviemaking and changed entertainment forever.

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photographs by

Dan Winters

A miniature model of the Death Star II from the production of Return of the Jedi (1983).

1977 1980 1981

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No one wanted Star Wars when George Lucas started shopping it to studios in the mid-1970s. It was the era of Taxi Driver and Network and Serpico; Hollywood was hot for authenticity and edgy drama, not popcorn space epics. But that was only part of the problem.

the way ILM has put tentacles into pirate beards, turned a man into mercury, and dominated box office charts with computergenerated dinosaurs and superheroes. What defines ILM, however, isn’t a signature look, feel, or tone—those change project by project. Rather, it’s the indefatigable spirit of innovation that each of the 43 subjects interviewed for this oral history mentioned time and again. It is the Force that sustains the place.

1.

Origin Story “Forget the Industrial and the Light— this is going to have to be Magic.” ag c

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As the young director had conceived it, Star Wars was a film that literally couldn’t be made; the technology required to bring the movie’s universe to visual life simply didn’t exist. Eventually 20th Century Fox gave Lucas $25,000 to finish his screenplay—and then, after he garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination for American Graffiti, green-lit the production of Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as Taken From the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. However, the studio no longer had a special effects department, so Lucas was on his own. He would adapt, and handily: He not only helped invent a new generation of special effects but launched a legendary company that would change the course of the movie business. ¶ Industrial Light & Magic was born in a sweltering warehouse behind the Van Nuys airport in the summer of 1975. Its first employees were recent college graduates (and dropouts) with rich imaginations and nimble fingers. They were tasked with building Star Wars’ creatures, spaceships, circuit boards, and cameras. It didn’t go smoothly or even on schedule, but the masterful work of ILM’s fledgling artists, technicians, and engineers transported audiences into galaxies far, far away. ¶ As it turns 40 this year, ILM can claim to have played a defining role making effects for 317 movies. But that’s only part of the story: Pixar began, essentially, as an ILM internal investigation. Photoshop was invented, in part, by an ILM employee tinkering with programming in his time away from work. Billions of lines of code have been formulated there. Along ALEX FRENCH (@frenchalexm) and HOWIE KAHN

(@howiekahn_) wrote the oral history of The Right Stuff in issue 22.12.

Lucas had been toying with the idea of what he called a “space opera–fantasy thing”—and had even hired artist Ralph McQuarrie to sketch out some of his ideas—but he was hamstrung by technical constraints.

George Lucas (founder):I knew it was going to move very fast, with lots of pans and this giant space battle at the end. Only in those days, you couldn’t do that. I thought, “We’d better figure it out.” It was destined to be my undoing.

Dennis Muren (creative director): Fewer movies were being made. Occasionally studios would make effects films: an Earthquake here, a Towering Inferno there. But there was no future.

Steven Spielberg (director, producer): George said, “I’m going to figure this out one month at a time.”

Lucas: We hired a handful of people—a lot of young kids, basically. Very few of them had worked on a feature film.

John Dykstra (VFX supervisor): I got a call from George and we met at a bungalow on the Universal lot. He wanted Star Wars to feel like it was shot with a World War II gunsight camera, to have that sense of intimacy with the action.

Lucas: I wanted to set up shop in San Francisco, but there was no film processing lab, so John insisted we stay in Los Angeles. We found an industrial warehouse space in Van Nuys, next to the airport.

Steve Gawley (model maker/supervisor): There was no interior; our walls were two-by-fours, Visqueen stapled onto them. Every once in a while we’d get crazy with the music—the big record was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours—and you’d have to turn it down because the walls were plastic.

Lucas: We had about 45 people working for us. The average age was 25 or 26.

Charlie Bailey (creature and model maker): Everybody there was an industrial designer or architect or engineer.

Gawley: Across the street was a military surplus store. We bought a lot of used, obsolete things there to use in our models because we were trying to stretch the dollar.

Lucas: We were working on the articles of incorporation and we said, “What are we going to call this thing?” We were in an industrial park. They were building these giant Dykstraflex machines to photograph stuff, so that’s where the “Light” came from. In the end I said, “Forget the Industrial and the Light—this is going to have to be Magic. Otherwise we’re doomed, making a movie nobody wants.”

Dykstra: The warehouse was probably 1,300 square feet and smelled like a gym locker.

It was hotter than hell. If you lit a model with 6,000 watts, you could get to 130 degrees. p supervisor): p ) Somebody found a big Lorne Peterson ((model maker,, model shop

STAR WARS THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK DRAGONSLAYER STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN . THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL THE DARK CRYSTAL POLTERGEIST RETURN OF THE JEDI TWICE UPON A TIME S AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM I: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK THE NEVERENDING STORY THE EWOK ADVENTURE STARMAN THE GOONIES COCOON BACK TO THE FUTURE EXPLORERS MISHIMA AMAZING STORIES S: THE BATTLE FOR ENDOR YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES OUT OF AFRICA ENEMY MINE THE MONEY PIT LABYRINTH GENERAL CINEMA TRAILER HOWARD THE DUCK REK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME CAPTAIN EO THE GOLDEN CHILD STAR TOURS ARRY AND THE HENDERSONS THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK INNERSPACE EMPIRE OF THE SUN *BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED EK: THE NEXT GENERATION WILLOW STAR TREK ATTRACTION WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT CADDYSHACK II R: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM COCOON: THE RETURN ST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

GROOMING BY AMY LAWSON/ARTIST UNTIED

THE ‘BURBS SKIN DEEP BODY WARS MICKEY - EISNER SPOT TUMMY TROUBLE FIELD OF DREAMS ES AND THE LAST CRUSADE GHOSTBUSTERS II THE ABYSS CK TO THE FUTURE PART II ALWAYS ROLLER COASTER RABBIT AKIRA KUROSAWA’S DREAMS HE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO K TO THE FUTURE PART III DIE HARD 2 GHOST THE GODFATHER: PART III

When George Lucas set about assembling his own special effects shop, it didn’t have a name or a mission—beyond making Star Wars happen.

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MICKEY’S AUDITION SPACE RACE ARACHNOPHOBIA THE DOORS SWITCH BACKDRAFT HUDSON HAWK THE ROCKETEER TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY HOOK STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN ALIEN ENCOUNTER ALIVE DEATH BECOMES HER

1993

Dragonslayer, 1981

1994

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water tank, and we filled it with cold water. We’d dip in during break time.

Dykstra: At the surplus store, we got an escape slide from a 727. You’d put a little Wesson oil and water on there—it made for a hell of a good Slip ’N Slide.

Gawley: Sometimes in the afternoon we’d duck out with our bag lunch and three golf clubs. In an hour we could knock out six or seven holes, but we ran in between.

Peterson: We also got an oxygen tank. I’d think, “God, it doesn’t seem to do anything, just kind of smells different.” But after, people in the hallway would ask me, “What are you smiling about all the time?”

Gawley: The studio finance people thought we should shut down. They called us the country club.

Dykstra: Our reputation wasn’t stellar, because we were breaking a lot of rules. But at the same time, we were there at 3 o’clock in the morning when those studio guys were asleep in their beds.

Peterson: The shots were not happening very fast.

Dykstra: It was an impossible number of shots for an era in which none of the equipment or the processes that were used to produce the film existed. It was overwhelming. It took almost a year just to get the camera going.

Lucas: The budget for the whole movie was $9,999,999.

The visual effects budget was $2 million. The camera was probably going to cost $400,000.

Dykstra: We built cameras using all kinds of weird technology. We built computers. We designed and built our own electronics from scratch.

Gawley: The track for our camera was probably about 3 or 4 feet wide and 40 or 50 feet long.

Dykstra: It was nice of them to name the camera after me, but it was obvious that every one of those guys made some contribution to the system that became known as the Dykstraflex.

Peterson: George was disappointed when he came back from filming in England.

Lucas: Those guys didn’t quite understand the critical nature of making a movie. You can’t be a day late;

“We built cameras using all kinds ds of o weird e d technology. ec o ogy We built computers. We designed and built our own electronics from scratch.”

it just doesn’t work. It all fits together into a giant mosaic. All the pieces have to fall together.

Spielberg: I saw the film in a rough cut. No effects, just black-and-white World War II newsreel footage George had cut in to show where the star wars were actually occurring.

Lucas: We had 800 shots to get through. They’d spent a year and a million dollars and had one shot—a cannon going boom, boom, boom. I said, “OK, at least we’re on our way.” This was in August 1976. The film came out in May 1977.

2.

A New Home “We’re here to do stuff.”

The movie was an immediate hit—but Lucas left for a Hawaii vacation soon after it premiered, so he didn’t realize the scope of the phenomenon until friends called him a week later. When he returned, he decided to finally relocate his budding effects shop to Northern California. Not everyone would make the move with him, it turned out—including John Dykstra.

Lucas: Before that I was completely burned out, so I didn’t really care. But then I began to say, “Gee, I could do the sequels.” We got a place in San Rafael and started moving.

Gawley: Twenty people moved up. Our assignment was to set it up again.

Spielberg: On Kerner Street.

Bailey: The sign, which we kept from the business that was there before, said Kerner Optical. But we were under siege. There were people going through our dumpsters at night. Guys would pose as flower deliverers just to get inside.

Cary Phillips (research and development supervisor): Kerner was an absolute dump. But it was infused with this sense of “we’re here to do stuff.”

Kathleen Kennedy (cofounder, Amblin Entertainment): Jerome’s Chocolate Chip Cookies was behind us. The smells would just waft in.

Muren: John was completely different from George. Skilled at the electronic side but sort of a let’s-wing-it type.

Dykstra: I wasn’t interested in going to San Francisco. I wasn’t invited.

Muren: I hadn’t heard from George and other people had, so I called his producer, Gary Kurtz. He’d been afraid to talk to me about it because he thought I was in alliance with John. And I said, “I’m not. I’d love to come.”

Peterson: 40 years later …

Spielberg: The person with the most Oscars alive today is Dennis Muren.

J.J. Abrams (director, producer): Working with Dennis is like playing guitar with Paul McCartney. You can’t believe you’re getting to collaborate with him.

Muren: The Empire Strikes Back was the hardest film I’ve ever worked on. We had to train people to do work that we barely knew how to do.

Lucas: The big challenge on Empire was Yoda. We knew how to fly spaceships; the thing we didn’t know how to do was have a 2-foot creature make you believe that it was a real live thing and not just a Muppet.

Ron Howard (director, producer): I remember going over to the old warehouses he’d rented, and what they were doing on Empire was jaw-dropping. I felt absolutely like the kid who’d gotten into Santa’s workshop at the North Pole.

Spielberg: It was just a great place to hang out: mad sound scientists, mad visual scientists, and in between shots we’d go set off M-80 firecrackers between buildings and shake up the whole neighborhood. I was in my early thirties, and it was the most fun playground I had ever been to.

03.

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FIRE IN THE SKY JURASSIC PARK LAST ACTION HERO RISING SUN THE METEOR MAN MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY MALICE THE NUTCRACKER SCHINDLER’S LIST THE HUDSUCKER PROXY FORREST GUMP MAVERICK THE FLINTSTONES WOLF BABY’S DAY OUT THE MASK RADIOLAND MURDERS DISCLOSURE STAR TREK GENERATIONS IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED CONGO THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD CASPER JUMANJI THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT SABRINA

04.

CIAL EFFECTS (AN IMAX FILM) TWISTER MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DRAGONHEART ERASER THE TRIGGER EFFECT SLEEPERS STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT 101 DALMATIANS DAYLIGHT MARS ATTACKS! ARS TRILOGY SPECIAL EDITION E LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL MEN IN BLACK CONTACT SPAWN STARSHIP TROOPERS THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL FLUBBER AMISTAD DECONSTRUCTING HARRY TITANIC DEEP RISING MERCURY RISING DEEP IMPACT SMALL SOLDIERS SAVING PRIVATE RYAN SNAKE EYES REACH THE ROCK MEET JOE BLACK CELEBRITY JACK FROST MIGHTY JOE YOUNG THE LAST DAYS

06.

07.

05.

(1) 1:5-scale model of the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future (1985); (2, 4) whip and Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); (3, 7) articulated puppets of Jetsam and Carmen from *batteries not included (1987); (5) miniature of Igoe’s pod from Innerspace (1987); (6) 1:7-scale miniature of the Messiah command module from Deep Impact (1998).

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OCTOBER SKY THE MUMMY STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE WILD WILD WEST THE HAUNTING DEEP BLUE SEA BRINGING OUT THE DEAD SLEEPY HOLLOW THE GREEN MILE MAGNOLIA SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS GALAXY QUEST SWEET AND LOWDOWN MISSION TO MARS THE PERFECT STORM THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE SPACE COWBOYS POLLOCK PAY IT FORWARD THE PLEDGE SWEET NOVEMBER THE MUMMY RETURNS PEARL HARBOR A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

01.

02.

03.

06.

01. GARY RYDSTROM (SOUND DESIGNER AND DIRECTOR) 02. LYNWEN BRENNAN (ILM PRESIDENT) 03. AARON MCBRIDE (ART DIRECTOR) 04. BRICE CRISWELL (SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER) 05. JOHN KNOLL (CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER) 06. ALEX JAEGER (ART DIRECTOR) 07. MAIA KAYSER (ANIMATION SUPERVISOR) 08. SCOTT BENZA (ANIMATION SUPERVISOR) 09. LORNE PETERSON (MODEL MAKER, MODEL SHOP SUPERVISOR) 10. CARY PHILLIPS (R&D SUPERVISOR) 11. STEVE GAWLEY (MODEL MAKER/SUPERVISOR) 12. CHRISTIAN ALZMANN (ART DIRECTOR) 13. J.J. ABRAMS (DIRECTOR, PRODUCER) 14. JEFF WHITE (VFX SUPERVISOR) 15. BILL GEORGE (VFX SUPERVISOR) 16. CHARLIE BAILEY (CREATURE AND MODEL MAKER) 17. DENNIS MUREN (CREATIVE DIRECTOR) 18. BEN SNOW (VFX SUPERVISOR)

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“It’s fascinating to watch people who are as much investigators and scientists as they are artists.”

—J.J. Abrams

GROOMING BY AMY LAWSON/ARTIST UNTIED, LOUISE MOON FOR BUMBLE AND BUMBLE (ABRAMS)

The Abyss, 1989

2002

Bill George (VFX supervisor): With the stained glass man, there were some really amazing things that gave you an insight into where computer graphics were heading.

3.

2003

The Computer Age “I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. It blew my mind.” mind.

2004

2005

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Given Lucas and Spielberg’s friendship, ILM had a strict policy to never turn away the director’s projects, so the years after Empire were full of Spielberg productions. That era also saw the beginning of ILM’s switch to digital effects.

Lucas: We did Raiders and then E.T. That’s when I realized we could actually make a go at a real company, not just working on Star Wars.

Muren: We made it through two years without a Star Wars film. I think we did five films in that time.

Dragonslayer was when we managed to make stop-motion animation look more real than it had before, by putting blurs on it.

John Knoll (chief creative officer): The dragon looked like it was alive. How were they doing that?

Muren: We had a miniature dragon Phil Tippett had made, and we programmed it at slow speed instead of having an animator moving one frame at a time.

We got a Technical Achievement Award for that.

We called it “go motion.” A lot of people still think it’s the best dragon that’s been done.

Ed Catmull (president, Pixar): George wanted to bring high technology into the industry, so I got a call out of the blue with the opportunity of a lifetime.

Lucas: I started what I called the computer division: Ed, Alvy Ray Smith, and a whole bunch of MIT guys Ed knew. We brought them in and put them in a building next door to ILM. ILM didn’t want anything to do with them.

Catmull: I joined in July of ’79. I worked in George’s office for the first several months because he was off shooting Empire in London.

Lucas: I gave him a list of things I wanted to build: a digital editing system, a sole-purpose graphics computer. It was a visual computer—the Pixar.

The first thing we ever did with it was a little piece from Star Trek II, when they convert a barren planet into a fertile one.

Catmull: The goal was to get it so you could mix computergenerated images in with live action. The more momentous sequences in that sense were actually in Young Sherlock Holmes and The Abyss.

Spielberg: John Lasseter created the shot in Sherlock, which was the Knight Templar jumping out of a stained glass window in a church and attacking the priest.

It was clear that CG could help make magic—but while Lucas saw the Pixar computer as the way to make Yoda sword-fight, Catmull and his team wanted to use it to create animated movies. Ultimately the two divisions parted ways: ILM kept the team’s technology for its own use but sold the computer division to Steve Jobs as the company Pixar. Meanwhile, ILM’s stature and reach continued to grow; the company not only strengthened the Star Wars empire with Return of the Jedi, it also handled the specialeffects shots for Back to the Future, Cocoon, The Goonies, and many other ’80s favorites.

James Cameron (director, producer): ILM was the establishment, the big-bucks guys up on the top of the hill. If you were a big studio and you were doing a giant movie, you went with ILM. Bailey: With Howard the Duck, we went through a huge R&D project finding the right feathers. A lot of us put in more than 100 hours a week. Each feather had to be very carefully trimmed with surgical scissors—there are people credited as “featherers.”

Lucas: Someday, I hope, Marvel will make a new version of Howard the Duck, and you’ll see it could be a good movie. A digital duck will make that thing work.

Knoll: If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew—my shift was from 7 pm to about 5 am. In my free time I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately it developed into Photoshop.

Muren: Somewhere around the time before we made Ghostbusters II and Willow, it seemed like we really hit a wall. CG had been floating around as this carrot: It was promising all this stuff for like 10 years but wasn’t really delivering on it.

Howard: But what a transformation we had to do for Willow.

Lucas: In the script, a goat morphs into all kinds of animals and finally into an elderly woman.

Howard: I expected it to be done the way werewolf transformations had always been done, with prosthetics and dissolves and cutaways. Dennis Muren wandered into our story conference one day and said, “I think we could do the transformations a little more seamlessly. It wouldn’t be shot incamera, it would be in the computer.” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. It blew my mind.

Colin Trevorrow (director, Jurassic World): When I was a kid, my dad brought me to Kerner Optical to be an extra in Ghostbusters II. I’m not sure if I recognized how special it was at the time.

Cameron: Set the clock forward to 1988. I’m starting to do The Abyss. There was one sequence in that film that I imagined but couldn’t figure out—the pseudopod sequence, the big water weenie that comes through the ship and makes faces. CG was completely unproven. We didn’t know how it could be integrated with film.

Catmull: Pixar, as a new company, bid against ILM to do the effects for The Abyss.

But Cameron gave the job to ILM, probably wisely, because if it didn’t work with the computer then he knew they could do it some other way, whereas we only had one way of approaching the problem.

Cameron: Dennis Muren was curious and excited and wasn’t at all how I thought the ILM guys would be. He helped produce this soft-surface character: flowing, rippling, very complex. It became a pivot point in the history of visual effects.

JURASSIC PARK III PLANET OF THE APES HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE THE MAJESTIC

01.

03.

04.

IMPOSTOR THE TIME MACHINE E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL: 20TH ANNIVERSARY BIG TROUBLE STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES THE BOURNE IDENTITY MINORITY REPORT MEN IN BLACK II K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER SIGNS BLOOD WORK PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE STAR WARS BOUNTY HUNTER HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS GANGS OF NEW YORK

02.

TEARS OF THE SUN THE HUNTED DREAMCATCHER THE HULK TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN 11’9”01 – SEPTEMBER 11 (SEGMENT USA) ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD TIMELINE STUCK ON YOU PETER PAN

05.

ALONG CAME POLLY TWISTED HIDALGO VAN HELSING THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK THE BOURNE SUPREMACY THE VILLAGE SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS

06.

ARE WE THERE YET? SON OF THE MASK THE PACIFIER EROS THE AMITYVILLE HORROR XXX: STATE OF THE UNION STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D HERBIE: FULLY LOADED WAR OF THE WORLDS THE ISLAND JARHEAD CHICKEN LITTLE RENT HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE MUNICH CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2

07.

EIGHT BELOW MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT POSEIDON PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST LADY IN THE WATER THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 3D ERAGON

(1, 2) Prototype animatronic heads for the Scoleri Brothers from Ghostbusters II (1989); (3) fiberglass mold to create a foam Roger Rabbit for on-set reference; (4) foam E.T. model used for chest-illumination shots; (5) miniature of the alien spacecraft from Cocoon (1985); (6) life-size fiberglass Davy Jones for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006); (7) prototype animatronic head/performance helmet for Slimer from Ghostbusters II.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END EVAN ALMIGHTY TRANSFORMERS HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX RUSH HOUR 3 LIONS FOR LAMBS NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS TOUCHING HOME THERE WILL BE BLOOD

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THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES IRON MAN SPEED RACER INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL THE HAPPENING THE LOVE GURU WALL-E MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA TWILIGHT THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX

2009

Terminator 2, 1991

2010

2011

4.

Band of Outsiders “We did whatever the fuck we wanted.”

2012

2013

2014

2015

> > > > > > > > > > > >

The Abyss, as Cameron puts it, was “a first date” with ILM. The second date would be Hollywood’s biggest-ever gamble on computer graphics. Enter a handful of mad geniuses with rock-star reputations.

Cameron: Terminator 2 was the most expensive film ever made at that point, and it all hinged on this liquid metal guy. So now we’re making, essentially, one of the two main characters of a $100 million movie a CG effect. That was really scary.

Stefen Fangmeier (VFX supervisor): The graphics department was small, and the spirit was pioneering.

These days you can buy all this off-the-shelf software, but back then we invented everything as we went.

Cameron: Spaz Williams and Mark Dippé helped solve these problems.

Mark Dippé (VFX producer): We did whatever the fuck we wanted, and because we were from ILM, people gave us respect.

George: Steve Williams had a motorcycle and played hockey, and all the guys who came in behind him wanted to be Steve “Spaz” Williams. Spaz and Mark Dippé weren’t nerds with glasses working on computers. They were these unusual, freaky guys coming up with new technology and really brilliant ideas.

Steve “Spaz” Williams (VFX supervisor): I used to serenade the machines with my bagpipes so they wouldn’t crash.

Dippé: We made so much noise that they put us in an old sound-mix bay with soundproof doors. We called it the Pit. Williams: We used to blast Beethoven and Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death.

Alex Jaeger (art director): You would go down this really steep stairwell—down into this little dark, windowless room.

2016

2017

Transformers, 2007

Dippé: Robert Patrick, who played the T-1000, agreed to come be our puppet. He had to stand there, like being crucified, while makeup artists carefully painted all these lines on him so we could re-create everything on the computer. We digitized his face! It was so painful, but he was totally game. He went all the way, man.

Fangmeier: There’s that scene after the truck crashes and the T-1000 emerges— we wanted to have the flames reflecting off the alloy skin as the T-1000 walks through them.

Gary Rydstrom (sound designer and director): When the T-1000 goes through the doors in the mental institution? Turns out that if you hold a can of dog food upside down, the sound of that cylinder slowly coming out of the can is the perfect combination of mud, metal, and suction. That sound effect cost 75 cents.

Cameron: It always seemed like it was in the last 5 percent of the process that it came together. You’d see these wireframes, there was always this feeling like, “My God, we’re never going to get this.” And then you’d go from a wireframe to a gray surface. And you’d think, “Well, it’s kind of getting there.” And then?

You’d just be shitting yourself.

5.

The Digital Divide Grows “Stop-motion as a process is extinct.”

Just as T2 work was wrapping up at ILM, another Spielberg production came through the doors, this one involving dinosaurs. As much as The Abyss and T2 had advanced the cause of CG effects, Jurassic Park would become a watershed moment—the demarcation between the days of antiquity and the byte-sized future.

Williams: Dennis Muren took us across the street for lunch and said that there was this huge job coming in from Spielberg—something with dinosaurs.

Phil Tippett (founder, Tippett Studio): After Empire, I’d started Tippett Studio.

Jurassic Park was a co-venture between Tippett and ILM. Jim Morris (former ILM president): Phil was gonna do the dinosaurs with stopmotion, and we were gonna composite them into the plates with the actors.

Williams: We said, “Why don’t we just fucking build the whole thing in CG?” The authorities here told me not to bother trying. But we knew digital was capable of this shit.

Dippé: We didn’t have the go-ahead. Spaz and Stefen and I were fearless fools.

Fangmeier: We went to the Oakland Zoo and filmed elephants and rhinos just to see how that kind of skin folds.

Williams: I was riding my bike and I ran into a guy from Tippett’s department. He says, “What are you working on?” I say, “I’m building the T. rex.” And he goes, “What the fuck are you talking about? We’re doing that!” He almost got physical with me.

Tippett: I’d done a lot of studying with dinosaurs—I’d made a stop-motion dinosaur film—so I had totally boned up on the latest paleontological ideas.

Dippé: The CG dinosaur was accidentally shown to Kathleen Kennedy [one of Jurassic Park’s producers].

Williams: I finished a CG demo on Sunday night, and the next day Muren and Kathleen Kennedy came walking in and the T. rex walk cycle was playing on a big monitor. She stops and goes, “What’s this?” I say, “I’m just messing around, just working on stuff.”

Dippé: After Kathleen saw the test, the decision was CONTINUED ON PAGE 104

CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC STAR TREK TERMINATOR SALVATION TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE JONAS BROTHERS: THE 3D CONCERT EXPERIENCE SURROGATES AVATAR IRON MAN 2 THE LAST AIRBENDER I AM NUMBER FOUR THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE RANGO BEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES SUPER 8 RMERS: DARK OF THE MOON COWBOYS & ALIENS HUGO SSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL THE ULTIMATE 3D BATTLE RED TAILS THE AVENGERS BATTLESHIP CLOUD ATLAS PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 IDENTITY THIEF G.I. JOE: RETALIATION PAIN & GAIN THE GREAT GATSBY STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS NOW YOU SEE ME THE LONE RANGER PACIFIC RIM RED 2 WORLD WAR Z SAVING MR. BANKS R.I.P.D. ELYSIUM NOAH LONE SURVIVOR ICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER MERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION LUCY GE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES E PARK: ULTIMATE ENERGY UNBROKEN SELMA AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON JURASSIC WORLD TERMINATOR GENISYS AGENT 47 ANT-MAN TOMORROWLAND TY: THE GHOST DIMENSION SPECTRE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS

Orgrim, an orc from director Duncan Jones’ upcoming film Warcraft (2016).

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WARCRAFT THE REVENANT SILENCE CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR DOCTOR STRANGE STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII *OTHER PROJECTS MAY BE IN PRODUCTION BUT HAVE YET TO BE ANNOUNCED

By 2012, Ross Ulbricht’s online drug bazaar had grown into a worldwide empire.

In part 2 of our exclusive account, the Feds are closing in.

THE

RISE & FA L L OF

SILK R OA D

BY JOSHUAH BEARMAN with additional reporting

by Joshua Davis and Steven Leckart

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TOMER HANUKA

Part II

“I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.”

—home/frosty/documents/ journal/2012/q1/january/week1

1

Thor

The descent was stunning. Chris Tarbell, a special agent from the New York FBI office, was in a window seat, watching a green anomaly in a sea of blue as it resolved into Iceland’s severe, beautiful landscape. On approach to Keflavík International Airport, he could now see the city of Reykjavik coming into view. And just beyond that, perched on the edge of a moss-covered lava field: the massive matte-white box that housed the Thor Data Center. That’s why Tarbell and two US attorneys had come all this way.

Thor was the home of a computer with a very important IP address, one that Tarbell and his FBI colleagues had discovered back in New York—the hidden server for a vast online criminal enterprise called Silk Road.

They’d been working on this case for months, as had federal agents across the country, in a wide-ranging digital manhunt for Dread Pirate Roberts: the mysterious proprietor of Silk Road, a clandestine online marketplace that functioned like an anonymous Amazon for criminal goods and services. Silk Road investigations had been launched by Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the DEA office in Baltimore, where an agent named Carl Force had been working an undercover identity as a Silk Road smuggler for more than a year.

Tarbell and his team—known as Cyber Squad 2 (or CY2 for short and “the Deuce” for fun)—were relative newcomers to the case. The other agencies had dismissed the FBI, partly because of interagency bluster and partly because the traditional agents

who thought casework was all guns and grime and grit had no respect for the eggheads from cybercrime. But in the midst of this enormous law enforcement effort— mostly fruitless so far—Tarbell and CY2 had found the first promising lead in the case.

Cybercrime agents spend a lot of time at their desks, and it was exciting to be in the field. Down below they could see Iceland’s fierce geology, all jutting rock built up from the water by volcanoes. Beneath the surrounding ocean are the massive cables that make the country an important location for web traffic; the island is nearly equidistant between North American and Europe, and its forbidding geography and climate reduce cooling costs and provide free geothermal power. One of the attorneys told Tarbell about Iceland’s tectonic forces—the North American and Eurasian plates, slowly tearing

open a growing chasm. Really puts you in your place, Tarbell thought.

Once on the ground in Reykjavik, Tarbell and the lawyers met with their counterparts and explained why they’d come.

Silk Road had eluded law enforcement for almost three years because it ran on Tor, a kind of cryptographic camouflage that made it nearly impossible to see the site’s users, vendors, or servers. Until Tarbell made a chance discovery.

His investigation had started entirely at his desk with virtual gumshoe diligence, poking around Tor’s IP publishing protocol and spending time on Silk Road looking for chatter about the site’s security. His lucky break came from a thread on Reddit: A user posted a warning that Silk Road’s IP address was “leaking”—visible to other computers. Dread Pirate Roberts (or DPR, as he was often called) had been alerted

ROSS PUT ON A B R A V E F A C E .

BUT BEHIND THE SCENES, SILK ROAD’S S U C C E S S BROUGHT C O N S T A N T C R I S I S FOR ITS CREATOR.

Part 1 of this story on the Silk Road case appeared in issue 23.05; read it online at W I R E D .com/silkroadpart1.

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to the problem by a user but ignored the warning. Silk Road’s success was making DPR arrogant. He had let down his guard, confidently telling colleagues that the site would never be found.

Tarbell threw data at Silk Road, hoping to see the leak. He entered usernames with bad passwords (and vice versa) and pasted data into input fields—all the while using regular old freeware to analyze network traffic and collect the IPs communicating with his machine. Then he tested those. On June 5, 2013, after staring at IP addresses for hours, Tarbell pasted one of them—193.107.86.49— into a browser and suddenly there it was: the Silk Road Captcha field. He showed it to fellow agent Ilhwan Yum and to Tom Kiernan, the civilian computer technician who formed the technical backbone of the cybersquad.

This was what the team had been waiting for: a misconfiguration somewhere on the site that revealed the real IP address of Silk Road, which Tarbell proceeded to trace all the way to the state-of-the-art facility in Iceland.

Tarbell had been to the island nation once before and knew some of the officials at the meeting. There was an Icelandic prosecutor present—Tarbell was mildly distracted by how attractive she was, with her fitted skirt, secretary glasses, and hair in a bun—and an attaché from the US embassy. It’s a delicate thing, making requests of another government—a US attorney had written up an official letters rogatory petition, requesting that Iceland honor the bureau’s investigative requests—but the Icelandic authorities were accommodating, and the meeting was over in an hour. Not long thereafter, an Icelandic police detachment entered the immaculate foyer of the Thor Data Center.

What kind of data center has a foyer? The kind that also has a gleaming glass front and a spotless floor and houses the world’s first zero-emission supercomputer. Cybercrime forensics often means untangling wires from machines stuck in some basement.

Thor looked like the future. Past the foyer’s key card entry was a former airplane hangar in which sat a double-high shipping container, bright blue with silver ducts, full of servers. Inside were three rows of blades lined up floor to ceiling, flashing with blue lights. There was a chill in the air and the thrum of a thousand fans, all powered

by Vulcan forces from the rock below. The Icelandic authorities found the correct box

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A USER CALLED FRIENDLYCHEMIST WAS B L A C K M A I L I N G DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS. ANOTHER USER VOLUNTEERED TO TAKE CARE OF THAT THREAT— F O R A F E E .

and discovered that it had a mirror drive, a duplicate set of contents. They pulled the mirror, returned to Reykjavik, and handed the drive to Tarbell. And just like that, he was holding Silk Road in his hand.

Even on first glance the site’s volume was surprising: On July 21, 2013, around the time Tarbell landed in Iceland, DPR’s account received 3,237 transfers totaling $19,459, which would give DPR an annualized income of more than $7 million. The data center also kept system logs for six months; they could see all the other computers that had recently communicated with this machine. It was an investigative windfall.

After returning to New York, Tarbell started unspooling the electronic threads that led from the Iceland machine to computers around the world. They looked at traffic recorded for port 22—the encrypted connection where admins log in—and discovered several non-Tor IPs: a backup near Philadelphia, a hosting proxy server in France, a VPN in Romania.

On the wall of the CY2 computer lab, Tarbell mounted an 8-foot sheet of plotter paper and constructed the classic crime investigation visual, with a skein of lines mapping the complicated relationship of leads and evidence. But rather than the traditional godfather surrounded by his capos, this chart centered around a server in Iceland and a sprawling cryptographic computer network.

Tarbell was a visual thinker; he liked to see the connections. One of those connections was to an IP address that was the last

known login to the Silk Road VPN. Next to it Tarbell drew a question mark. A subpoena revealed the IP’s physical location: Café Luna, Sacramento Street, San Francisco.

2

Joshua Terrey

When Homeland Security agents showed up at Ross Ulbricht’s front door in San Francisco, his new roommates were surprised.

They thought the quiet guy from Texas who’d just rented their extra room for a thousand bucks was named Joshua Terrey.

The agents must have found that interesting, since Joshua Terrey wasn’t one of the nine names they’d found in a stash of fake IDs at the Canadian border customs office, all directed to this address and featuring Ross Ulbricht’s picture.

Ross had moved into this house after leaving Austin, where he’d grown up as a smart kid from a suburban family with an adventurous streak. Ross was handsome, charming, and always an overachiever, studying physics and engineering on scholarships. But he’d abandoned lab work to pursue an idea that brought together his technical smarts, entrepreneurial spirit, and newfound libertarian social philosophy: Silk Road. He’d come west,

to the Mecca of startups, where he managed his powerful operation in secret.

Even though Ross had only recently moved into this sublet in West Portal, a neighborhood of single-family homes and strollers, he’d scored the master bedroom.

His roommates thought that the guy named Josh, who had answered their Craigslist ad, was a currency trader. They did think it was weird that he had no cell phone, paid in cash, and was always on his computer.

Neither friends nor family had any idea that Ross had a secret alter ego: Online he was Dread Pirate Roberts. Nor did they suspect that the young man who ran what began as a politically motivated black market had become the leader of a criminal organization, a ruthless operator who had decided to kill one of his employees as retribution for theft (and as a sacrifice necessary to protect his political objectives).

If Ross was nervous about being discovered when the Homeland Security agents interviewed him, he didn’t show it. He did not tell them he’d bought the colorful array of fake IDs so that he could covertly rent additional servers to deal with Silk Road’s exploding scale and security challenges.

The IDs were high-quality counterfeits, holographic features and all. But now they were in the hands of the Homeland Security In issue 15.05, JOSHUAH BEARMAN (www. epicmagazine.com) wrote about the CIA mission to rescue six Americans during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The article was the basis for the movie Argo.

agents at the front door. Ross was polite but knew he could refuse any questions.

Before the agents left, Ross did volunteer that “hypothetically” anyone could have shipped drugs or fake IDs to him via a website called Silk Road. A strange thing to mention—and duly noted by the agents— but they weren’t there to talk about Silk Road, whatever that was. The agents left and took the fake IDs with them.

Ross was spooked by the visit. He moved again a short time later to another sublet, in the city’s Glen Park neighborhood, but decided to use his real name. One of his new roommates, Alex, liked Ross right away because he was charismatic and easy to talk to.

And, Alex observed, Ross’ focus was impressive. He wasn’t the type of guy to procrastinate watching cat videos on his Samsung 700z. He didn’t smoke or drink much, although he sometimes played his djembe, a west African drum and one of his few possessions. He never brought friends over and seemed not to have a single memento. Nor did Ross get mail.

“Sometimes,” one roommate said to Alex, “I feel like Ross is hiding from someone.”

Still, they couldn’t have guessed that Ross, the new guy in their cheap share who liked giving hugs and hanging out shirtless, was sitting on their garage-sale furniture with that Samsung on his lap presiding over a criminal empire.

3

Uneasy Lies the Head

“Money is powerful,” DPR wrote to the Silk Road faithful, “and it’s going to take power to effect the changes I want to see.” By that time, DPR was a millionaire many times over, but those resources, he told his followers, were for the revolution. Freedom, after all, needs financing.

DPR had founded Silk Road as a digital instantiation of the libertarian ideal: a frictionless marketplace where everyone had freedom as long as it didn’t impinge on someone else’s freedom. For DPR and

the community that grew around him, Silk Road was about more than contraband; it was a movement. As Silk Road quickly grew, DPR’s pronouncements became more grandiose. He wrote that “every single transaction is a victory” in weakening the “thieving, murderous” state. What began as a belief in free choice came to sound like revolutionary dogma.

It made for ambitious business plans. DPR wanted to expand his liberty-fueled brand into an empire, with his own Silk Road– affiliated bitcoin exchange, credit union, and encrypted communication service.

Buoyed by quick success, DPR shared the heady enthusiasm of the licit startup world.

Whereas he’d once considered selling Silk Road for $1 billion, he told a reporter in a rare, encrypted chat interview that Silk Road was worth 10 figures, maybe 11.

But behind the scenes, Ross faced constant crises. There were technical problems, management issues, a quickly changing marketplace, and the volatility of bitcoin. There were scammers on the site. And even as Silk Road made more money, the cost to maintain it rose. Ross, feeling besieged from all sides, recorded his efforts in a log.

04/03/2013 Spam scams have been gaining traction. Limited namespace and locked current accounts.

Blackmail too was a problem. Hackers had figured out how to launch denial-ofservice attacks on Silk Road, and DPR was forced to pay “protection” to the tune of $50,000 a week. In May 2013, hackers shut down the site for a week, and many users wondered if it was the work of a competitor. Atlantis, a new Tor-based illicit-goods bazaar, had just launched with a slick YouTube trailer and a group chat with reporters in which a spokesperson named Heisenberg offered the serious burn that Atlantis was the “Facebook to [Silk Road’s] MySpace.”

05/02/2013 Attack continues. No word from attacker. Site is open, but occasionally tor crashes and has to be restarted.

DPR’s own staff was growing, although it was hard to find reliable subalterns. Batman73—a dealer named Peter Nash in Aus-

tralia—was a cokehead. Inigo ran the site’s book club, which DPR appreciated, but was the kind of guy who lived part-time on a boat, smoked a lot of weed, and was as organized as that lifestyle might suggest. DPR liked Libertas, though, and Smed was solid, offering rapid-response technical support.

05/03/2013 Helping smed fight off attacker. Site is mostly down. I’m sick.

The burden of leadership was getting to DPR, and his fluctuating moods played into the theory that the moniker was actually operated by multiple people. DPR encouraged this perception. In an interview with Forbes, he said that he was actually the successor to Silk Road’s creator. It worked. On Silk Road it became great speculative sport to decipher the many facets of DPR, with users believing they could even detect when the different DPRs took the reins.

“You are a busy guy. Actually I think you are going to kill yourself,” said a friendly message sent to DPR by a Silk Road vendor named Nob. “Take a vacation.” DPR believed that Nob was a Puerto Rican cartel middleman named Eladio Guzman, but he was in fact DEA agent Carl Force. Force had spent more than a year developing his undercover identity on Silk Road in an effort to get close to DPR. They’d become confidants, spending nights chatting at such length that DPR trusted Nob when he needed enforcement muscle.

It was Nob whom DPR hired to kill his employee, Curtis Green. Force then coerced Green into faking his own death as a ruse.

Force was surprised to see DPR’s moral collapse up close, but then again, he’d seen this kind of thing before, during his younger DEA years in undercover. He too had experienced the temptations that came with a double identity. In fact, his secret life as a hard-partying operator had nearly destroyed his regular life. He’d left all that behind and recommitted himself to Christ.

The Silk Road case was his first undercover role since those days, and it was a big one.

Because of his tenure online as Nob, Force was able to carry out the supposed “hit” on Green, setting DPR up for a murder conspiracy indictment while at the same time cementing their relationship. Nob and DPR had become comrades-in-arms.

Now Nob wanted to capitalize on DPR’s apparent struggle. “You need a contingency plan,” Nob wrote. Force hoped that the mounting paranoia would eventually allow him to orchestrate what DPR would believe to be an escape—right into the arms of the DEA. DPR confided his worries about “LE,” or law enforcement, not realizing that he was talking to the DEA. That might have been a lapse in judgment in a realm that was full of speculation about narcs and informants.

But DPR wanted to believe his friend Nob. Silk Road, after all, was built on DPR’s confidence system. And besides, he was lonely.

“I have no one to share my thoughts with,” DPR posted to the wider Silk Road community at one point. “Security does not permit it, so thanks for listening.”

05/26/2013 Tried moving forum to multi .onion config, but leaked ip twice.

DPR had also gotten lazy with his operational security. That diary he kept was a bad idea, for starters. Growing vanity had become a weakness. DPR’s self-taught programming was catching up with him as well, leaving holes in Tor’s invisibility cloak. And yet he would tell his admins there was nothing that could get traced back to them. When one user with a technical background private-messaged DPR to warn him that he should know the precise physical location of his servers, DPR brushed it aside. The tipster warned that the servers could be copied easily.

Don’t worry, DPR said. The servers are secure.

4

Lab1a

Back in New York, Kiernan was busy recreating the entire Silk Road system in their lab. Once it was configured, Tarbell and his team could access the system as superusers—seeing Silk Road as DPR— and learn the site’s mechanics, commu-

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ROSS THOUGHT H E W A S I N V I N C I B L E .

HIS HUBRIS HAD ONLY GROWN, EVEN AS W A R N I N G S I G N S FLASHED ALL AROUND HIM.

nications, and structure. It was thrilling, of course, to fire it up for the first time.

They wondered what they would see. Tarbell could immediately appreciate DPR’s sense of industry, how hard he worked to expand and manage the site under incredible duress. Tarbell thought: I guess he’s really earning that commission.

It was impressive. Especially because Tarbell could tell that DPR was not a professional programmer. The server was a “noisy box,” clearly the work of an autodidact, a coding palimpsest that invited eventual discovery. The pseudo code was full of comments describing various technical experiments that were often run on the live server. Kiernan and Yum found the private messages, the forums, a bitcoin escrow account (from which DPR extracted his cut

every Saturday night), and the main bitcoin server showing all vendor transactions.

They spent a lot of time in the lab, which they dubbed the War Room. It felt like college finals week in there, every day. The group would churn through Silk Road material, bringing lunch in from the deli downstairs and getting loopy by the afternoon, when Tarbell would call for a seltzer break and dance around with the bottle, singing the mellow gold classic “Afternoon Delight.”

Over time the jokes got weirder, like when Yum put up a sign in the War Room that said: Lab1a. To the delight of the cybersquad, no one in the computer-illiterate realm of the FBI noticed that this was also leetspeak for some sensitive lady parts.

While Yum and Kiernan worked on the machines, Tarbell combed through 1,400

pages of DPR’s chat logs so as to really understand him. DPR was different things to different people, sometimes solicitous and businesslike, other times volatile and narcissistic. Eventually, he embraced murder as a necessary business practice.

Reading through DPR’s correspondence, Tarbell was surprised to find evidence of more hired assassinations, this time a response to blackmailers. It was a complicated scenario, but what Tarbell put together was that a user called FriendlyChemist was blackmailing DPR. Another user called Redandwhite, claiming to be a member of the Hells Angels, agreed to kill the blackmailer and, soon, others. For a handsome fee, of course.

DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS 3/27/2013 23:38 In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn’t mind if he was executed … I have the following info: Blake Krokoff Lives in an apartment near White Rock Beach Age: 34 Province: British Columbia Wife + 3 kids

Always the businessman, DPR first invited the Hells Angels to become vendors on Silk Road, suggesting that Redandwhite “read the wiki and forums.” Then the two got back to the cost of murder. Hit men apparently get a commission, according to this Hells Angel, if the target owes money. And if you want it to look like an accident, rates go up.

A “clean hit” would cost about $300,000 (travel expenses included). DPR had sticker shock. After all, he’d only paid $80,000 for the Curtis Green hit. They haggled.

DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS 3/31/2013

Don’t want to be a pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you quoted the best you can do?

REDANDWHITE 3/31/2013 11:16 I’m sorry, but we can’t do anything for that price. Best I can do is 150 and even that is pushing it.

8:59

In the interest of a “business relationship to be” the Hells Angels agreed to $150,000, or 1,655 bitcoins CONTINUED ON PAGE 106

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Photographed on April 14, 2015, in Washington, DC.

THE ANALY TIC S BAN INADVERTENTLY PRE VENTS L AWMAKERS FROM IDENTIF YING VOTERS’ PRIORITIES. Every sector of society looks at digital analytics in a productive way. Limiting my ability to use them is just unacceptable. And by the way, Congress conducts polls using traditional methods. No one is using social media analytics as a substitute for that.

2 feet of snow on Newark, New Jersey, just after Christmas in 2010, Cory Booker, who was then mayor, carefully monitored the storm from his Twitter account. He responded to tweets from residents, and he mobilized city workers. And when resident Linda H. (@msxmasbaby) tweeted, “Is there NE city volunteers 2 dig some1 out? I’m going 2 have medical procedure done,” he showed up with a shovel. That’s the way Booker rolls. He was early to social media and has made prolific use of it (47,500 tweets and counting) to connect with voters.

So when he arrived in the US Senate in 2013, he was dismayed to discover just how out of place he was when it came to his techforward approach to government. The legislative body seemed stodgy and alarmingly behind the times, even by government standards, he says. “When they told me I couldn’t sit on the Senate floor

WHAT EL SE WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHANGE ?

with an iPad—that the technology wasn’t even permitted—I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.” To that end, he has recently teamed up with Missouri senator Claire McCaskill to ask for seven reforms. These include streamlining the requirements for email newsletters, letting Senate offices use analytics services to track social media, and adapting the Congressional Record to a more accessible XML format. There’s no telling how likely they are to succeed. But this heavy lifting won’t require a snow shovel.

—Jessi Hempel

WHY NOW ?

I am very respectful of the Senate’s important traditions, but it also has to keep up with the times.

WHAT C AN’T YOU DO THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO DO?

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BEC AUSE THE Y AT TEND SENATE HE ARINGS AND DE VELOP REL ATIONSHIPS WITH COMMIT TEE MEMBERS ?

A lot of things!

WHAT’S THE DE AL WITH THE SENATE BAN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ANALY TIC S TOOL S, WHICH COULD HELP SENATORS SURFACE ISSUES FROM CONS TITUENTS ?

Right now, if I ask my constituents questions on social media, it’s treated as if it’s a poll. And that’s just ridiculous.

THE SENATE JUS T WANTS TO PRE VENT MEMBERS FROM USING ONLINE POLLING A S A C A MPA IGN TOOL . BUT

A football player and class president, Cory Booker completes bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Stanford.

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We’re not providing information to the public in a format that is useful.

Lobbyists, for example, are all the more powerful because they have information that citizens generally don’t.

Right. We should be upset about that. There should be easily searchable databases of the Senate’s business. If you live in New York City, you can go into a restaurant and use an app that gives you complete transparency about the health record of that restaurant. It’s there because the Bloomberg administration released the bulk data from its health department, which innovative people used to make apps.

We are not doing that, but just imagine if we did.

You could have an app that alerts you every time legislation that’s important

Finishes law school at Yale, having already studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

to you is being marked up in committee and when it makes it to the floor for a vote—and what poison pills might be slipped into it.

DO YOU THINK THE AMERIC AN PUBLIC IS MORE TECH -SAV V Y THAN THE GOVERNMENT GIVES IT CREDIT FOR? I don’t think there’s that conscious critique going on.

There are no digital natives in the Senate. There are Gen Xers like me who are starting to pop up, people born around 1970, who have a lot of experience using these tools.

As mayor, when I gave more tools to my constituents to make their city better, they leaned into that. Residents knew if they tweeted me about a pothole it would be addressed. It became a powerful tool for me to make my city offices accountable.

WHAT PROMP TED YOU TO JOIN T WIT TER?

YOU A SKED THE SENATE TO APPROVE BUYING TARGETED ADVERTISING ON THE WEB SO THAT YOU COULD COMMUNIC ATE MORE EFFEC TIVELY WITH CONS TITUENTS. SO IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE A SPECIFIC GROUP OF PEOPLE AWARE OF A TA X BRE AK, YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO CONNEC T WITH THEM MORE CHE APLY AND QUICKLY THROUGH FACEBOOK ADS THAN IN A LETTER, IS TH AT CORREC T ?

Yes, that tool would allow Senate offices to more effectively reach people who need government services.

Sending letters to constituents is a waste of taxpayer dollars and it’s not as effective at targeting the ones who actually need the service.

THE SENATE DOESN’T ALLOW CLOUD BA SED SERVICES EITHER, RIGHT ?

This is an example of where the Senate is not just behind the rest of the nation, it’s

GETTY IMAGES

A woman named Sarah Ross got Ashton Kutcher to call City Hall. I thought I was being punk’d. Kutcher explained the potential for someone on a localgovernment level to increase their level of service, and he

thought it could help change the world’s view of Newark.

Urban spaces are so often disrespected by traditional media—talk show hosts always make fun of cities. One night Conan O’Brien, who was then host of The Tonight Show, criticized Newark.

I recorded a short response video and posted it to YouTube, bragging about Newark, and then I basically said, “By the power vested in me by the city of Newark, I hereby ban Conan O’Brien from Newark Airport.” My last line was: “Try JFK, buddy.”

Conan responded on his show by banning me from the Burbank airport. The kerfuffle grew so big that Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, told us in her own video, “The time has come to make peace.” Conan and NBC ended up giving $100,000 to a Newark charity.

My point is, when we embraced social media, we took more control of the Newark narrative. We increased responsiveness toward residents. We drew more of our constituents in to participate in government and improve our cities.

behind the rest of the government. Cloud-based services are less expensive, more secure, more efficient, and faster. The Department of Defense uses the cloud.

ARE THERE OTHER ARE A S WHERE GOVERNMENT ISN’T KEEPING UP WITH TECHNOLOGY ?

We have an FAA that is slowing down the exploration of drone technology. We have other offices that, because of their slow movement, threaten the next wave of innovation. Our patent office has a backlog of applications in the hundreds of thousands.

WHAT COULD POLITICIANS LE ARN FROM THOSE IN TECH? AND WHAT COULD TECHIES LE ARN FROM POLITICIANS ?

I want more of my colleagues to understand the limitless potential technology offers us to deal with a lot of our enduring challenges as a democracy. On the flip side, the growing cynicism about government among tech innovators is not helpful.

In fact, it’s hurtful. People like Ben Franklin, the great innovators of their time, were directly involved in shaping their government.

Innovators reimagine our world in so many areas.

We need them to help reimagine what government can and should be.

JESSI HEMPEL (@jessiwrites) is senior staff writer at wired.

Starts political career as a city council member in Newark, New Jersey.

Becomes mayor of Newark, promising to reduce crime and encourage economic development.

@corybooker sends first tweet, plugging an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show.

Wins US Senate seat in a special election to replace the late Frank Lautenberg.

photographs by Adam Ferguson 0 9 4

The killers rolled slowly down the narrow alley, three men on a single motorcycle. It was a little after 11 am on July 31, 2013, the sun beating down on the modest residential buildings lining a backstreet in the Indian farming village of Raipur Khadar. The smells of cooking spices, dust, and sewage seasoned the air. The men stopped the bike in front of the orange door of a two-story house.

Two of them dismounted, eased open the unlocked door, and slipped into the darkened bedroom on the other side. White kerchiefs covered their lower faces. One of them carried a pistol.

Inside the bedroom Paleram Chauhan, a 52-year-old farmer, was napping after an early lunch. In the next room his

wife and daughter-in-law were cleaning up while Paleram’s son Ravindra played with his 3-year-old nephew.

Gunshots thundered through the house.

Preeti Chauhan, Paleram’s daughterin-law, rushed into the bedroom, Ravindra right behind her. Through the open door they saw the killers jump on their bike and roar away.

Paleram lay on his bed, blood bubbling out of his stomach, neck, and head. “He was trying to speak, but he couldn’t,” Preeti says, her voice breaking. Ravindra borrowed a neighbor’s car and rushed his father to a hospital, but it was too late.

Paleram was dead on arrival.

Despite the masks, the family had no doubts about who was behind the killing.

Civilization is literally built on sand. It’s been a critical component of construction since ancient times. In the 15th century an Italian artisan figured out how to turn it into the transparent glass that made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped

For a decade Paleram had been trying to get local authorities to shut down a powerful gang of criminals headquartered in Raipur Khadar that had for years been robbing the village of a coveted resource, one of the most sought-after commodities of the 21st century: sand.

That’s right. Paleram Chauhan was killed over sand. And he wasn’t the first, or the last.

drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution (also, affordable windows). Sand is an essential ingredient in detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips, and buildings; every concrete structure is basically sand and gravel glued together with cement.

Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year.

But not just any sand: Desert sand, shaped by wind rather than water, is too round to bind together for construction.

In fact, only sand worn by water will do. And the worldwide construction boom of recent years—all those mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to

by Vince Beiser Beijing—is devouring unprecedented quantities. Extracting it is a $70 billion industry. In Dubai enormous landreclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper construction have exhausted all nearby sources, so insatiable builders now look elsewhere for their supply.

Exporters in Australia are actually selling sand to Arabs.

As land quarries and riverbeds become tapped out, sand miners are turning to the seas, where ships vacuum huge amounts of the stuff from ocean floors. As you might expect, this all wreaks havoc on ecosystems. Sand mines in the US are blamed for beach erosion, water and air pollution, and other ills from the California coast to Wisconsin’s lakes. India’s Supreme Court

The Sand and the Fury Computer chips.Glass.Concrete.

Theworld is built on sand. Mess with the mafias that control it and you could pay with your life.

recently warned that riparian sand mining is undermining bridges and killing birds and fish all over the country. But regulations are scant, and the will to enforce them is lacking.

Sand mining has erased two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those former islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory. The city-state has created an extra 50 square miles in the past 40 years and is adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer. The environmental damage has been so extreme that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all restricted or banned exports of sand to Singapore. flip-flops wield sledgehammers and shovels to push sand and gravel into clattering, smoke-belching sorting machines.

“Those who have permits to dig for sand have to pay for land restoration,” says Nyoman Sadra, a former member of the regional legislature. “But 70 percent of the sand miners have no permits.” Even companies with permits spread bribes around so they can get away with digging wider or deeper pits.

But nowhere is the struggle for sand more violent than in India. Battles among and against sand mafias there have reportedly killed hundreds of people in recent years—including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people like Paleram Chauhan.

The area around Raipur Khadar used to be mostly agricultural— wheat and vegetables growing in the Yamuna River floodplain. But Delhi, less than an hour north, is encroaching fast.

Driving down a new six-lane expressway, I pass construction site after construction site, new buildings sprouting skyward like the opening credits of Game of Thrones made real. Besides countless generic shopping malls, apartment blocks, and office towers, a 5,000-acre “Sports City” is under construction, including several stadiums and a Formula 1 racetrack.

The building boom got in gear about a decade ago, and so did the sand mafias.

“There was some illegal sand mining Activist Paleram Chauhan and the bed where he was killed by three masked assassins.

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Workers wash stone before it gets crushed into sand at an illegal mine near Raipur Khadar.

As a result, the global black market is booming. Half the sand used for construction in Morocco is estimated to be mined illegally; whole stretches of beach there are disappearing. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters got his start stealing sand from public beaches. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favors in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.

On Indonesia’s island of Bali, far inland from the tourist beaches, I visit a sand mine. It looks like Shangri-La after a meteor strike. In the middle of a beautiful valley, surrounded by jungle and rice paddies, is a 14-acre pit of exposed sand and rock. On its floor, men in shorts and

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VINCE BEISER (@vincelb) wrote about biometrics in India in issue 19.09.

before,” says Dushynt Nagar, head of a local farmers’ rights organization, “but not on a scale where land was getting stolen or people were getting killed.”

The Chauhan family has lived in the area for centuries, Paleram’s son Aakash says. He’s slim, with wide brown eyes and receding black hair, wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and flip-flops. We’re sitting on plastic chairs set on the bare concrete floor of the family’s living room, a few yards from where his father was killed.

The family owns about 10 acres of land and shares some 200 acres with the whole village—or used to. About 10

years ago a group of local “musclemen,” as Aakash calls them, led by Rajpal Chauhan (no relation—it’s a common surname) and his three sons, seized control of the communal land. They stripped away its topsoil and started digging up the sand deposited by centuries of the Yamuna’s floods. To make matters worse, the dust kicked up by the operation stunted the growth of surrounding crops, according to a complaint Paleram and other locals filed.

As a member of the village panchayat, or governing council, Paleram took the lead in a campaign to get the sand mine shut down. It should have been pretty straightforward. Sand mining is not permitted in the Raipur Khadar area at all, because it’s

close to a bird sanctuary. And the government knew it was happening: In 2013 a federal fact-finding team found “rampant, unscientific, and illegal mining” all over the district.

Nonetheless, Paleram and other villagers couldn’t get it stopped. They petitioned police, government officials, and courts for years—and nothing happened.

Conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the miners to stay out of their business—or are involved in the business themselves.

For those who don’t take the carrot of a bribe, the mafias aren’t shy about using a stick. “We do conduct raids on the illegal sand miners,” says Navin Das, the official in charge of mining in the district. “But

it’s very difficult because we get attacked and shot at.” In the past three years, sand miners have killed at least three police officers and attacked many others, as well as officials, journalists, and whistle-blowers.

According to court documents, Rajpal and his sons threatened Paleram and his family, as well as other villagers. Aakash has known one of the sons, Sonu, since they were kids. “He used to be a decent guy,” Aakash says. “But when he got into the sand business and started making fast money, he developed a criminal mentality and became very aggressive.” In the spring of 2013, police arrested Sonu and impounded some of his outfit’s trucks. He was soon out on bail.

One morning Paleram rode his bicy-

The broad, murky Thane Creek, just outside Mumbai, is swarming with small wooden boats on a recent winter morning. Hundreds of them are anchored together, hull to hull, in a ragged line stretching at least half a mile. The creek’s banks are lined with

cle out to his fields, right next to the sand mine, and saw Sonu. “He said, ‘It’s your fault I was in jail,’ ” according to Aakash.

“He told my father to drop the issue.”

Instead Paleram complained to the police.

A few days later, he was shot dead.

Sonu, his brother Kuldeep, and Rajpal were arrested, but all of them are out on bail. Aakash sees them around sometimes.

“It’s a small village,” he says.

Sand-mining boats work illegally on Thane Creek in Maharashtra, India. Divers scoop up sand from the creek bed with a bucket; the crew hauls it to the surface.

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An illicit sand-dredging operation near Mumbai.

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HAS USED MORE CEMENT IN THE PAST 3 YEARS THAN THE U.S. DID IN THE ENTIRE 20TH CENTURY // 58 PERCENT OF WORLD CEMENT PRODUCTION USED IN CHINA IN 2012 // 2. 5 MILLION TONS OF SILICA SAND EXPORTED FROM AUSTRALIA IN 2012–2013

1974 // 570 MILLION TONS OF SAND IMPORTED TO SINGAPORE SINCE 1994 // 56.4 MILLION TONS OF INDUSTRIAL SAND AND GRAVEL USED IN THE U.S. IN 2013 // 72. 3 MILLION TONS OF INDUSTRIAL SAND AND GRAVEL USED IN THE U.S. IN 2014 // CHINA

40 BILLION TONS OF SAND AND GRAVEL USED WORLDWIDE EACH YEAR // 657 MILLION TONS OF CONSTRUCTION SAND AND GRAVEL SHIPPED FROM THE U.S. IN THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF 2014 // 50 SQUARE MILES OF LAND CREATED IN SINGAPORE SINCE

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Indian workers crush stone into sand at an illegal mine near Raipur Khadar.

mangroves, towered over by apartment blocks. There’s a faint tang of salt in the air from the nearby Arabian Sea, mixed with diesel from the boats’ engines.

Each boat carries a crew of six to 10 men. One or two of them dive to the creek bottom, fill a bucket with sand, and return to the surface. Then two others, standing barefoot on planks jutting from the boat, haul up the bucket with ropes.

Their lean, muscular physiques would be the envy of any gym rat if they weren’t so hard-earned.

Pralhad Mhatre, 41, dives about 200 times a day, he says. He’s worked the job for 16 years. It pays nearly twice what the pullers get—about $16 a day. Mhatre wants his son and three daughters to go into some

other profession; he thinks the Thane will soon be mined out. “When I started, we only had to go down 20 feet,” he says. “Now it’s 40. We can only dive 50 feet. If it gets much lower, we’ll be out of a job.”

Rivers are excellent places to find sand. The stuff can be made by glaciers grinding up stones, by oceans degrading seashells, even by lava chilling and shattering upon contact with air. According to the Udden-Wentworth size scale, the most common geologic standard, sand is grains of any hard material between 0.0625 and 2 millimeters in diameter. But nearly 70 percent of all sand is quartz.

Time and the elements eat away at rock, above- and belowground, grinding off grains. Rivers carry those grains, accumu-

lating them in their beds, on their banks, and where they meet the sea.

Quartz—a form of silicon dioxide, also called silica—is one of the most common minerals on Earth. That’s good, because silica is unbelievably useful. Mixed with cement, water, and gravel, it makes excellent concrete. “Quartz is one of the hardest materials around, and the angularity of its grains makes them lock together well,” says Michael Welland, a geologist and author of Sand: The Never-Ending Story. “And there’s a hell of a lot of it.”

In the wild, quartz always comes mixed with other materials—iron oxides, feldspar, whatever prevails in the local geology. (Quartz is transparent; beach sand is yellow-brown, owing to a coating of

iron-rich clay.) For refined commercial products, you have to filter that stuff out or start with a high silica content. The sand of France’s Fontainebleau region, for instance, is upwards of 98 percent pure silica. Europe’s finest glassmakers have relied on it for centuries.

Corning operates the world’s largest ophthalmic glass production center in Fontainebleau; for lenses, the sand needs to be refined to 99.7 percent silica.

Electronics-grade silicon is refined to at least 99.999999999 percent purity— nine nines after the decimal. As Welland writes, that’s one atom of not-silicon among a billion silicon atoms.

The day after my trip to Thane Creek, Sumaira Abdulali, India’s foremost cam-

paigner against illegal sand mining, takes me to see a different kind of mine. Abdulali, 54, is a decorous, well-heeled member of the Mumbai bourgeoisie, gentle of voice and genteel of manner. For years she has been traveling to remote areas in a leather-upholstered, chauffeur-driven sedan, snapping pictures of sand mafias at work. In the process she’s had her car windows smashed and been insulted, threatened, pelted with rocks, pursued at high speeds, and punched hard enough to break a tooth.

Abdulali got involved when sand miners started tearing up a beach near Mumbai where her family has vacationed for generations. In 2004 she filed the first citizen-initiated court action against

Thane Creek’s sand will soon be mined out.

“If it gets much lower, we’ll be out of a job.”

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Construction in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Any building that needs concrete needs sand.

from the bottom with diesel-powered pumps. The banks are dotted with piles of sand, which men are loading onto trucks.

Back on a main road, we find ourselves behind a convoy of three sand trucks.

They rumble, unmolested, past a police van parked on the shoulder. A couple of cops idle nearby. Another is inside taking a nap, his seat fully reclined. This is too much for Abdulali. We pull up alongside. An officer who appears to be in charge—his khaki uniform has stars on its shoulders—lounges in the van, shoes off. “Didn’t you see those trucks carrying sand that just went past?” Abdulali asks.

“We filed some cases this morning,” answers the cop genially. “We’re on our lunch break now.”

Back in Raipur Khadar, after I finish talking with Paleram Chauhan’s family, Aakash agrees to show me and my interpreter, Kumar Sambhav, the land the mafia has taken over. We’d rented a car in Delhi that morning, and Aakash directs our driver to the site. It’s hard to miss: Across the road from the

Some time later I ask a local government official about this. “The police are hand in glove with the miners,” says the official, who asks me not to name him.

“When I call the police to escort me on a raid, they tip off the miners that we are coming.” Even in the cases he’d brought to court, no one was convicted. “They always get off on some technicality.”

FIG. 2

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AQUAT IC SA ND

DESERT SAND

Sand for construction is largely quartz, though marine sand can also consist of coral, shells, lava, and other minerals.

Unlike aggregates from rivers and streams, marine sand must be washed to remove salt, which would compromise building quality.

Land quarries and riverbanks were once the main sources for sand. As these sources run out, dredgers turn to coastlines and the sea.

Desert sand grains tend to be smaller and more uniform.

Weathered by wind, desert sand is too round and smooth for the grains to bind together in concrete.

A Typology of Sand

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sand mining in India. It made the newspapers, which brought a flood of calls from others who wanted to stop their own local sand mafias. Abdulali has since helped dozens file court cases while keeping up a stream of complaints to local officials. “We can’t stop construction. We don’t want to halt development,” she says in British Indian–accented English.

“But we want to put in accountability.”

Abdulali takes me to the rural town of Mahad, where sand miners once smashed up her car. Sand mining is banned in the area because of its proximity to a protected coastal zone. Nonetheless, in the jungled hills not far outside town, we come to a gray-green river on which boats, in plain view, are sucking up sand

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village center is an expanse of torn-up land pocked with craters 10 and 20 feet deep, stippled with piles of sand and rock. Clusters of men are smashing rocks with hammers and loading trucks. They stop to stare at our car as we drive slowly past on the rutted track running through the mine. Aakash points out a heavyset guy in jeans and a collared shirt: Sonu.

A short while later, deep inside the site, we get out to snap pictures of a particularly huge crater. After a few minutes Aakash spots four men, three of them carrying shovels, striding purposefully toward us. “Sonu is coming,” he mutters.

We start making our way back to the car, trying to look unhurried. But we’re

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too slow. “Motherfucker!” Sonu, now just a few yards away, barks at Aakash. “What are you doing here?”

Aakash keeps silent. Sambhav mumbles that we’re just tourists as we all climb into the car. “I’ll give you sisterfuckers a tour,” Sonu says. He yanks open our driver’s door and orders him out. The driver obeys, obliging the rest of us to follow suit. Aakash, wisely, stays put.

“We’re journalists,” Sambhav says.

“We’re here to see how the sand mining is going.” (This conversation was all in Hindi; Sambhav translated for me afterward.)

“Mining?” Sonu says. “We are not doing any mining. What did you see?”

“We saw whatever we saw. And now we’re leaving.”

“No, you’re not,” Sonu says.

The exchange continues for a couple of tense minutes, until one of Sonu’s goons points out the presence of a foreigner—me. This gives Sonu and his crew pause. Harming a Westerner could bring them a lot of trouble. We grab the opportunity to take off. Sonu, glaring, watches us go.

The case against Sonu and his relatives is grinding its way through India’s courts. The outlook isn’t great. “In our system you can easily buy anything with money—witnesses, police, administrative officials,” a legal professional close to the case tells me, on condition of anonymity. “And those guys have a lot of money from the mining business.”

Aakash keeps in touch with investigators and has tried to get India’s National Human Rights Commission to take an interest. His mother pleads with him to drop the whole thing, especially since her other son, Ravindra—the main witness in the case—was found dead by some railroad tracks last year, run over by a train, apparently.

India is taking steps to get sand mining under control. The National Green Tribunal, a sort of court for environmental matters, hears citizen complaints about illegal sand mining. The government has enlisted India’s space agency to provide satellite imagery to monitor river mining. Villagers have blocked roads to stop sand trucks, and

pretty much every day some local or state official declares their determination to combat sand mining. Even the new magistrate of Raipur Khadar’s district confiscated dozens of sand trucks and made several arrests this year. But India has hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal sand-mining operations.

And the world’s population is growing.

People want housing, offices, factories, and malls, as well as roads to connect it all. “The fundamental problem is the massive use of cement-based construction,” says Ritwick Dutta, a leading Indian environmental lawyer. “That’s why the sand mafia has become so huge.” Economic development as we know it requires concrete and glass. It requires sand.

Inside the Magic Factory CON TIN UED FROM PAGE 81

made to show it to Steven. Dennis brought it down to LA and projected it for Steven at Amblin.

George: They had the T. rex chasing the raptors.

Lucas: The test blew everybody away. People cried.

Spielberg: The fluidity of the running cycles was such that there was no comparison—even with go-motion. I just said, “Well, stop-motion as a process is extinct.”

Trevorrow: I had a friend who worked at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, and the night before Jurassic Park came out we sat in the middle of this empty, massive movie palace and had a special screening all for ourselves. I went in as a somewhat jaded 15-year-old who thought he knew how everything worked, and I came out as a kid marveling at the adventure that we were all taken on.

6.

Flooding the Zone “Once you had digital, there was no end to what you could do.”

“It was like a giant switch was thrown overnight,” Ed Catmull says about Jurassic Park’s effect on Hollywood. CG began to spread everywhere, with movies being green-lit on the strength of a single test shot. Projects once thought impossible became possible—and for Lucas, that meant his long-imagined but never-realized Star Wars prequels.

Lucas: I never thought I’d do the Star Wars prequels, because there was no real way I could get Yoda to fight. There was no way I could go over Coruscant, this giant city-planet. But once you had digital, there was no end to what you could do.

Bailey: When the CG started up, we all panicked.

It was like, “Oh my God, these guys can put us out of business in about a year.”

Tippett: It was catastrophic for me. All my skill and craft was thrown out the window. There was no way I was going to work on a computer.

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Bailey: But then they generated so much more interest in special effects that we got even more work.

Tippett: That necessitated bumping me upstairs, operating more in an animation supervisory capacity.

Williams: The technology was in its infancy, and we had a chance to shape it—but that became fucking Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Aaron McBride (art director): I didn’t think much of Casper at the time, but it had the first digital star character of a feature-length film.

Kennedy: ILM did a proof-of-concept shot for Twister. The minute we took that shot into the studio and they saw it, they said, “Done. We want to make it.” We didn’t even have a script yet!

Ben Snow (VFX supervisor): We probably got up to around 100 staffers by Casper [1995] and Twister [1996]. Doing Dragonheart [1996], it got to 200. By the time we did Star Wars: Episode I [1999], we’d gotten up to a thousand.

George: By the third prequel, almost all of the environments and everything were all done on the computer.

Muren: For Phantom Menace, George wanted us to produce 2,200 shots in a year and a half.

And you just think, there’s no way you can do it. And then he says, as he usually does, “Well, just think about it,” and he walks out.

Knoll: People don’t give George the credit that he deserves. The work he did on the prequels enabled a kind of filmmaking that has kept the industry alive.

Jaeger: The company grew to more than 1,200 people.

Gretchen Libby (executive in charge of business development and global strategy): We had to create new spaces for people to work.

We brought in triple-wide trailers.

7.

The Bay Effect “It was nuclear-level screaming.”

In the early 1980s, a teenager named Michael Bay had a summer job at Lucasfilm, filing artwork. Two decades later he would become ILM’s most … hands-on collaborator.

Spielberg: Michael Bay is the most demanding special effects director ever. When we do the Transformers movies, Michael lives at ILM with them. He just goes up and camps out there.

Michael Bay (director, producer): They’re always thinking about story, that’s what I like about ’em. It’s not just paint-by-numbers there.

It’s a very involved shop.

Jaeger: I’ve worked on seven of his films now.

It’s come to the point where he asks for me, like, “Make sure Alex takes a look before you guys

send it out.” But on Pearl Harbor I was just “the guy.” I didn’t have a name.

Bay: Pearl Harbor was the first time I worked with ILM. Jaeger: At the beginning of the process he came at us like, “I want to see real explosions, real planes, real ships.” We built a 35-foot-long battleship with teak decking, but as the model was getting prepped, we developed a computergenerated version.

Bay: We filmed 20 real planes, but we would’ve never been able to do the shots without making those digital planes.

Jaeger: In one scene where we fly over the USS Hornet, there’s supposed to be a whole deck full of B-25 bombers. We only had two on the real aircraft carrier. We sat down with Michael and said, “Pick out which one is the real plane and which ones are the CG planes.” And he’s like, “I was there, I shot this.” He probably looked at it 10 times, and he’s like, “Well, the first one’s gotta be real because you wouldn’t put a fake one first.” “Nope, it’s CG.” Bay: After Pearl Harbor, George Lucas wrote me a note saying we’d raised the bar at ILM. Phillips: There is a Michael Bay incident that looms large in our culture. We’d gotten the original concept art for Optimus Prime, and we started building a model.

Bay: A lot of artists worked on Optimus’ face.

Getting it right was very important. But it’s like a bad face-lift. And I’m there meeting with the artists and we can’t figure out why it doesn’t look right.

Phillips: One of our technical directors—the artist who designs how parts move relative to each other—is a guy named Keiji.

Bay: Keiji wasn’t even on Optimus’ face, but he had a meltdown.

Keiji Yamaguchi (technical animator): I wanted Optimus Prime to look like a hero, but he didn’t, and I exploded. It was very gentle; I wanted the transformation to be huge, like a wrestler in a sumo ceremony. I said, “You’re insulting the Japanese idea of animation.”

Phillips: Nobody talks to Michael Bay like that.

Bay: I just smiled and I’m like, “Oh my God, I want you to do Optimus Prime.” So he took it and fixed the face. And he also was the genius who helped us figure out how to take these 10,000 parts and make them transform.

Jeff White (VFX supervisor): It’s equal parts technology and artistry.

Wayne Billheimer (VFX executive producer): The second Transformers was my first real working relationship with Bay. I went into a couple of early preproduction meetings with him where I began to get what was going on: “I’m going to shoot it, I’m going to give it to you guys, and you guys are going to have to come up with some stuff. It’s going to be brutal.”

Bay: It has gotten heated a few times. Directors like me love our crew and we love the people we work with, but we push ’em and push ’em and push ’em.

Billheimer: There was a point toward the very end of production when he lost it. He had just come from a screening with Jerry Bruckheimer and didn’t have a complete third act. He called me, screaming: “I just saw a movie that I can’t fucking release!” It was nuclear-level Bay screaming. All I could do was scream back at him. There was a good five minutes of screaming along those lines. The next day he goes, “That was a fun little yell yesterday.”

Bay: They never let you down.

Billheimer: He gets very hot very fast, and very sweary, which is always entertaining.

Phillips: He’s a tyrant. He’s a nonstop string of obscenities. He’ll berate you and tell you you’re an idiot. But he always makes your shot better.

Billheimer: And the movie makes a billion dollars.

8.

Raising the Bar “The technological doorway to the future has been crossed.”

In 2005 the company moved from San Rafael to the Presidio of San Francisco. Its legacy is well cemented, but as effects houses continue to send work overseas, ILM increasingly seems like a rarity in its world. Age has also brought maturation: Decades and many Oscars removed from its Animal House–like beginnings, ILM has sought to bring more women into its ranks of artists and engineers. Yet its ambition—like its innate enthusiasm—remains unchanged.

Gore Verbinski (director, producer): ILM does cost a little bit more, but they’re like the namebrand pharmaceutical: They’re willing to find the cure. ILM has an R&D department.

Colette Mullenhoff (research and development engineer): There are five women in R&D today. At one point I was the only one.

Lynwen Brennan (president, ILM): I was so happy to see Colette get a standing ovation at the Sci-Tech Awards a few months ago. That’s really huge.

Verbinski: It’s like Xerox PARC or Imagineering in its heyday.

Brennan: Am I happy that there is still this gender bias within the industry? No. But I am happy to see it’s changing. I just think it’ll take a while.

Scott Benza (animation supervisor): Nobody can understand from a financial standpoint how this made sense for us, to buy some of the most expensive land in the state right here in the Presidio. But it was George’s desire to create a state-of-the-art facility in a beautiful place

for the people that work here.

Muren: We’re in a national park. It’s crazy.

White: I can see the Golden Gate Bridge from the office. I drive over it every day, and I see it get destroyed a lot in our movies. If a monster is coming, it’s coming here first.

Muren: The other effects houses are still working in an industrial park somewhere, because the margins are so low on doing this work. A lot of companies have gone out of business.

Roger Guyett (VFX supervisor): Digital Domain has struggled on. Rhythm & Hues filed for bankruptcy. CafeFX went out of business.

Phillips: There were three times in my 20 years here that I’ve almost soiled myself looking at a challenge we were going to take on. The first was the concept art for Star Wars: Episode I. The second time was Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Brice Criswell (senior software engineer): We needed to create some type of procedural algorithm that could describe the different emotional states of the tentacles.

Verbinski: Davy Jones’ tentacles were a very big struggle.

Criswell: What it turned into was a system that was useful for all sorts of things, like doing the destruction simulations in Avengers.

Joss Whedon (director, Avengers: Age of Ultron): ILM really has been our introduction to the everything-is-possible version of fantasy filmmaking.

Christian Alzmann (art director): The sleightof-hand tricks that they use are just mindblowing. Lorne Peterson would tell me how he made foam rocks behave like real ones on Wild Wild West and I’d almost get a nosebleed from trying to process the physics in his head.

Phillips: The third time I almost soiled myself was seeing the concept art for the film we’re working on now, Warcraft; it’s the most amazing work we’ve done in the 20 years I’ve been here.

Duncan Jones (director, Warcraft): I think we recently rang the bell on having less than a thousand shots to go. That was a good thing to hear.

Guillermo del Toro (director, Pacific Rim): When I visit it’s always work-related, but we’re all raised on pop culture and Cinefex magazine and Cheetos.

Rian Johnson (director, Star Wars: Episode VIII): When I was in high school, somebody gave me a copy of this ILM coffee table book called The Art of Special Effects. I almost burned my house down because of that book. del Toro: We geek out about Hammer horror films. We go model shopping in San Francisco.

I always come out with 20 or 30 models.

Johnson: My friends were doing a Back to the Future parody, and I decided I was going to recreate the tire trails behind the DeLorean. Genius that I am, I soaked strips of paper towel in gas-

oline and laid them out in a line behind this big model car of the DeLorean that I’d built in my parents’ garage. I don’t remember how I got the fire out, but I almost destroyed my family’s house. And now I’m doing Star Wars. That’s how you do it.

Maia Kayser (animation supervisor): My first exposure to ILM was watching Jedi with my dad.

Then I started here as an apprentice working on Attack of the Clones—and now I’m working on Star Wars again. It has a special meaning 30 years after that first time.

Muren: For every show I’ve done, I have convinced myself the work was obsolete. That was an intentional thing. If there’s another film out next summer, I don’t want to be reminded of the last one, even if the theme’s the same. It’s up to me to find some way to make that different.

Trevorrow: Harsh top light has often not flattered the dinosaurs, but in Jurassic World they’re very naked and out in the open—it took that encouragement from Dennis for us to be willing to let these dinosaurs have sunlight hit their skin and not add any additional effects to mask them. It helps the movie feel intensely real.

Lucas: The technological doorway to the future has been crossed. We went from the silent era to the sound era, and now we’ve done it again.

Now that we’re digital, I assume we will stay digital for at least 50 years.

Muren: I don’t know what the next one is, if there is another one. Everyone says hologram.

I say, “Show me.”

Lucas: Everybody says, “Oh, you’re going to replace actors.” You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act.

They’re a computer, for God’s sake.

Abrams: If you think back to what was done in the Star Wars films, it unbridled people’s imaginations. That of course fueled the business at ILM because they were being approached more and more to keep raising the bar.

Doug Chiang (executive creative director, Lucasfilm): Everybody has that attitude of “no one has ever done it, but let’s do it.” Why not?

If there’s going to be a first, let’s be the first.

Abrams: Every time you work on a project, they will have just learned something based on the project that preceded you. It’s fascinating to watch the evolution of a group of people who are as much investigators and scientists as they are artists.

Spielberg: I always thought that if ILM had run the space agency we’d have colonized Mars by now.

Lucas: Every one we did there was a moment— whether it was the very first one or the very last one—there was a moment where they said, “This is impossible, we can’t do this.” And I said, “That’s my job. My job is to make you do the impossible.”

Silk Road CON TIN UED FROM PAGE 89

at the time. “Good luck and be safe” was DPR’s sign-off. The next day they debriefed.

REDANDWHITE 4/1/2013 22:06: Your problem has been taken care of …

Rest easy though, because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.

DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS 4/2/2013 00:55 Excellent work.

Tarbell had never seen anything like it.

Here was a date- and time-stamped record of an entire criminal conspiracy as it unfolded.

Turned out, Redandwhite told DPR, the blackmailer they killed was working with another guy known on Silk Road as Tony76, an infamous scammer. DPR didn’t hesitate to add him to the invoice. But Tony76 had housemates, and they were also involved.

Maybe. Probably.

Fine, DPR said. Get them too, and send photographic proof when the job is done.

Meanwhile, DPR and Redandwhite spent some time troubleshooting the Hells Angels’ new chat app and privacy plug-in (“Please upload some screenshots of the settings”) while also planning and pricing (“no bulk discounts”) the next set of executions.

DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS 4/8/2013

I see your problem, you need port 9150, not 9151 … hmm … $500k in btc (3,000 @ $166/btc) has been sent to: 1MwvS1idEevZ5gd428TjL3hB2kHaBH9WTL 18:50

A week later: REDANDWHITE 4/15/2013 10:11

That

problem was dealt with.

Tarbell had been reading DPR’s correspondence in reverse order, and it was a 1

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strange thing, winding DPR’s life backward, from willing executioner back into idealist concerned with individual happiness. Some libertarian utopia, Tarbell thought. Although he wasn’t exactly surprised. All systems are vulnerable to corruption. Like the Internet itself, Tarbell thought, which began as a wonderful free prairie until people took advantage of that freedom. That’s why, he thought, it needed a sheriff.

Up on Tarbell’s chart was an IP address with a name next to it: Frosty. This was an ID they’d found on the Iceland box. But they didn’t know what it meant until Yum and Kiernan cross-referenced it with some other evidence they’d collected. It turned out that the Silk Road servers had a login system that created one trusted computer for all the other machines, whose encryption keys all ended with frosty@frosty.

This meant that these computers shared one key friend, a single machine they could all talk to. Tarbell looked at his chart, festooned with a network topology. One of those nodes must be Frosty, and whoever sat at its keyboard was Dread Pirate Roberts.

As the case accelerated, Tarbell and his team started working long hours and weekends, jackets off, sleeves rolled up, long past the late dusks of summer. Tarbell actually loved that feeling on Friday at 5 pm when the air conditioner turned off automatically, the bullpen emptied and grew quiet, and he realized he’d been yelling all day but could now finally think.

Except that it was high summer. This being a federal building, the air-conditioning was on a timer. There’d be no circulation until Monday at 8:15 am. So by midday on Saturday, when the place was boiling, Tarbell would strip down to his underwear right at his desk.

The only room with constant air-conditioning was the lab, which had to be cooled because of the electronics. So one day, Tarbell and Yum made a desperate attempt to transport some of the chill to their desks using fans. It kind of worked. And there they sat in the middle of the FBI office, Tarbell sweating in his skivvies, with a football game on in the background and a series of fans stretching back to the well-cooled room where the ersatz Silk Road server hummed along, still keeping one key secret.

5

Glen Park Ross and Alex had become friends at the new house. Some nights they’d watch King of the Hill together, which reminded Ross of home, as it was a satire of a suburban Texas family like his own. Eventually Alex met that family when they all visited for a weekend. Ross’ parents seemed like nice folks who had raised a nice son. Settling into his room, Ross bought a few things to make life more comfortable: a lamp, a white leather couch from a garage sale, a standing desk for his Samsung. Online, however, things were less settled.

Across the country, Force, the DEA agent, was hoping to capitalize on DPR’s difficulties. He told DPR about “Kevin,” a supposed source of counter-intelligence on the growing Silk Road investigation. Nob explained that like all good cartel-affiliated players, he had “a guy on the inside,” a dirty Department of Justice employee on his payroll. Kevin, of course, was Force himself, and he had a lot of valuable information for DPR. Force told his supervisors that this informant game would make Nob seem omniscient and therefore more trusted. Citing Kevin, Nob fed DPR intel and predicted busts of Silk Road users and vendors. Things were getting dicey out there, Nob said. He pressed DPR on the need for a “30 seconds flat” escape plan, suggesting various itineraries.

DREAD: Can you explain to me why you chose this route?

NOB: Algeria does not extradite to the US. NOB: Second you don’t want to take a plane out of your mother country.

Ross had in fact taken some preparatory steps. He flew to Dominica, a tiny tax haven island in the Caribbean, and started an application for “economic citizenship.”

He tried to cultivate successors in case flight became necessary. DPR had created a special forum called Staff Chat for his elite admins, including Batman73, Inigo, and a newcomer called Cirrus. DPR told his admins how the pressure was getting to him, how he wanted time away. Even amid the rising chaos swirling around Silk Road,

DPR started taking days off, leaving daily operations to his lieutenants. Ross spent a weekend with his old flame Julia, a free-spirited and sensual young photographer he’d met at a drum circle in grad school.

She flew in from Austin, and it felt like old times for the two of them, but also different. Ross still lived frugally in the Glen Park house, wore a faded red sweater all the time, and cooked his paleo diet, but he seemed happier. They had lots of sex, went dancing, and roamed the city, ending up one day on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge rose beneath the lifting fog, catching the sun. Julia looked gamely over her shoulder at Ross and decided it was a good time to get topless. She rolled down her yellow sundress and Ross took photos. She didn’t care when a couple of hikers stumbled onto their soft-core pictorial. Ross stopped shooting and they ran off together, giggling, back toward the city.

Ross started spending more time with his housemates. One day he went to a nearby park with the girl who lived across the hall and hung out on the grass with her and her two long-haired Chihuahuas.

Marring the greenery, Ross noticed, was a piece of blue plastic stuck in a tree. A dedicated anti-litterbug, Ross climbed up to retrieve it. Back at the house he discovered he’d gotten a bad case of poison oak and needed plenty of calamine lotion for the spreading rash. He moped for days, still shirtless, but now bright red, standing out like a squad car’s flasher against his white leather couch.

6

($curl_error) The wheels of the federal government grind slowly but exceedingly fine. As Ross had written in his diary in 2011, when Silk Road came to the attention of the US Senate, he knew he had awakened “the biggest force-wielding organization on the planet.”

Two years later, Chris Tarbell was lying on his bed at home, with his wife, Sabrina, cooking in the other room and his kids tearing around the house so loudly he had to turn up his phone to hear the name: “Ross Ulbricht.”

Tarbell was on a conference call with the US attorney assigned to the case and

an agent from Homeland Security Investigations named Jared Der-Yeghiayan. DerYeghiayan was stationed at the customs office in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and had been finding retail-size drug parcels in mail on foreign flights, all carefully wrapped, with customer service slips and return addresses to StudyAbroad .com. This, Der-Yeghiayan discovered, was a vendor on a thing called Silk Road.

Der-Yeghiayan familiarized himself with the site and learned Silk Road well enough to bust a low-level admin named Cirrus and persuade her to cooperate, allowing him to take over her account. Now Cirrus was rising through the ranks, becoming a trusted insider. Tarbell invited Der-Yeghiayan to New York to work with CY2.

Another new agent from the IRS, Gary Alford, had joined the conversation that day. As it happened, he’d been in Tarbell’s War Room earlier—Alford and the US attorney were working on a separate bitcoin case—and he’d taken a quick look at the chart. “Oh, that’s funny,” Alford said. He had worked with a different agency on Silk Road for a bit. “I had a lead in San Francisco,” he told the team. “I’ll look it up.”

He did and then explained to everyone what he’d found. Some months earlier, Alford had figured that whoever had started Silk Road had tried to drum up interest on regular websites with likeminded audiences. He searched for Tor URLs around the time of the site’s first appearance and found a mention in a Shroomery.org forum on January 27, 2011, days after the Silk Road launch. A user named Altoid talked up this exciting new “service that claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online anonymously.”

Googling elsewhere for the username Altoid revealed a question about database programming posted on Stack Overflow, dated March 16, 2013, asking, “How do I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?” The email listed was rossulbricht@gmail.com. A minute later, that user changed the alias to Frosty.

The IRS didn’t know what any of this meant, so that’s where it ended. The info sat in a case file until dumb luck put Alford in Tarbell’s lab, whose wall was a map where all roads led to Frosty.

Der-Yeghiayan ran the name Ross Ulbricht through the federal database and found the

Homeland Security report on Ross’ fake IDs. A quick search for his last known address showed that he had lived half a block away from Café Luna, the San Francisco node on his chart (the site where an administrator had logged in to the Silk Road VPN).

Tarbell was ecstatic. Finally, here was the missing piece, the end of the digital trail.

Tarbell thought it was funny that these clues were sitting out in the open. In the end, one of the best law enforcement tools was Google. It seemed clear that Ross had no idea Silk Road would become such a success and was careless early on. And in the era of informational perpetuity, you only have to be careless once.

A quick tour through Ross’ social media presence revealed a digital portrait with an incredible likeness to Dread Pirate Roberts’.

His LinkedIn profile was full of the same libertarian rhetoric. On YouTube he’d favorited videos from the Mises Institute, the political touchstone beloved by DPR. On Google+ (where his profile described him as “spunky, funky, not so chunky”) he asked, “Anyone know someone that works for UPS, FedEx, or DHL?” In the lab, Kiernan found code on the Silk Road server that matched lines posted by Ross on Stack Overflow.

“We found the guy,” Tarbell told his department supervisor the next day.

They put in a request to the surveillance team to send two agents to San Francisco, to get eyes on Ross. They watched him, in that house he shared with Alex, working late on encrypted wireless. Sometimes he headed out with his laptop, like practically everyone else in San Francisco, and occupied a café table to work with coffee at his side.

An electronic wiretap on Ross’ email would require a court order—but at that point there wasn’t probable cause to search the account. So they decided to use the physical surveillance to see if they could line up Ross’ Internet usage with DPR’s activity on Silk Road. The activity matched; DPR and Ross were in lockstep. Every time Ross turned on his computer, DPR logged on to Silk Road. When he closed it, DPR logged out. Over weeks, the pattern was consistent.

At his house, in cafés, in the morning or late evening, Ross and DPR were electronically aligned. When DPR would say he was taking the afternoon off, physical surveillance would watch Ross going to the park with his housemate and her Chihuahuas,

lying on the grass, and getting poison oak by climbing into a tree to pull some blue plastic from the branches.

Tarbell started planning. This would be a complicated operation, seizing the site’s bitcoins undetected, taking control of Silk Road, and placing FBI people abroad—at the machine in Iceland and at another in France.

Tarbell was also worried they might accidentally tip off Ross. He even wondered why Ross hadn’t bolted already. Der-Yeghiayan, online as Cirrus, was in DPR’s inner circle and knew that he was feeling extreme pressure. Tarbell thought Ross was clearly smart enough to get out while he could. In fact, Force, as Nob, was actively encouraging DPR to flee. Force had been sidelined, but his final play was to convince the digital kingpin to meet him at some airport, under the guise of providing safe passage, and take him into custody. To juice DPR’s flight instinct, Force pointed out that were he to be caught, prison would not be a safe place.

NOB: You are like one of my family. But

I have to tell you that i have had several people killed who were sent to jail. It is very easy and cheap.

But Ross wasn’t going anywhere. His hubris had only grown, based on his belief in Tor and his own intellect. He thought he was invincible. Even as warning signs flashed all around him and the Feds loomed on the horizon, Ross told a potential employee that they would never get caught. “Realistically,” he said, “the only way for them to prove anything would be for them to watch you log in and do your work.”

On the evening of September 28, the FBI’s surveillance team watched DPR log off as Ross stopped working, closed his computer, left the house with his housemates, and headed for the beach.

7

Stay Positive It looked like a brochure for San Francisco living, a group of kids sitting around a campfire at Ocean Beach beneath a crescent moon, listening to their friend Ross play his djembe. This was the first weekend of Indian summer, that glorious time 1

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in San Francisco when everyone ventures outside and you can sit in the sand within sight of Golden Gate Park and listen to the dark waves crash on the shore. Alex opened champagne, and Ross drank Tecates and drummed along with a dude playing “Wonderwall” on a guitar in the distance.

Toward midnight, the soiree was interrupted by three cops who told them to kill their fire. No bonfires after 11, they said.

The group brought the party back to their house in Glen Park, drinking on the balcony.

The guys in the next house over were on their balcony too, sharing some sangria, and passed a glass to Ross. He picked up Clementine, one of his housemate’s Chihuahuas, and cradled her in his scarf like a baby in a sling, toting her around while still drinking. Ross was blotto—the only time Alex saw him drunk—and smiling.

“Let’s go inside and jam,” Alex said. And jam they did, with Alex on the piano, Ross knocking his djembe again, and some other friends singing. The music settled into a hypnotically repeating melody, as late night jams do, until everyone drifted back to their rooms or out the door. “Ha,” Ross said, hand on his drum. “I can’t keep time.”

Online, Ross’ stewardship of Silk Road was also off-balance. He recorded his troubles in his log. Law enforcement was trying to infiltrate the forums. Some big vendors were getting busted. He was hemorrhaging money, starting with a government seizure of $2 million that May from Mt. Gox, the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange, where some key Silk Road accounts were held. Unrelated, Redandwhite convinced Ross to give him $500,000 and then disappeared. Even his friend Nob was still making veiled threats about how easy he would be to kill in jail.

Amid the chaos, DPR did talk to Libertas, one of his most trusted admins, about taking over Silk Road in case of emergency, but he never gave him server access. As he tried to keep his fingers in the dike, DPR confided his worries to Cirrus, who by the end of September was briefing a massive FBI team in San Francisco alongside Tarbell and Kiernan on the looming arrest of Ross Ulbricht.

If Ross knew the noose was tightening, he didn’t show it. In the days after the Ocean Beach party, he worked at his standing desk and called Julia in Austin, telling her he was going to visit in November. She sent

him sultry photos, naked and dancing, as a preview. That Monday night, Ross wrote in his diary: “Had revelation about the need to eat well, get good sleep, and meditate so I can stay positive and productive.”

8

/Mastermind The dining room of the San Francisco Airport Marriott was nearly empty at 6 am on Tuesday, October 1, 2013, when Tarbell met Kiernan and Der-Yeghiayan for another mediocre breakfast. Tarbell hadn’t slept much since arriving in San Francisco two days earlier. He and his New York team were edgy, having been in position waiting on the right moment. There was, as usual, a bureaucratic complication. Silk Road was Tarbell’s case, but he and CY2 were visitors at the pleasure of the San Francisco FBI office, and it was their assistant special agent in charge who had, as cops say, “designed the arrest.”

In classic form, the local FBI wanted to mount a dramatic raid on Ross’ house. Tarbell didn’t like this idea. He was worried about repeating the mistake made during his first big cybercrime case, when they arrested a hacktivist named Jeremy Hammond in Chicago. There, a SWAT team charged into Hammond’s apartment throwing flash grenades, immediately alerting Hammond in the back room, who shut the lid of his laptop, encrypting it forever.

This kind of operation didn’t need SWAT, Tarbell thought. It required finesse. To prosecute a cybercrime you needed direct evidence, which centered around Ross’ machine. Tarbell wanted to get Ross in medias res, with “fingers on the keys,” as they say in the trade. Tarbell had read in DPR’s chats about how secure his system was, how one keystroke would erase it all. There was no margin for error. They needed complete surprise.

Still, the assault strategy remained in place. “Thank you for your input,” the local FBI supervisor had told Tarbell. “Now here is the plan.” There would be three SWAT teams, one for each floor of the house. They would hit at dawn, gaining “fluid entry.”

They couldn’t promise, but they would try to catch Ross while he was online.

“These are the fastest SWAT teams,” the supervisor said.

“But it doesn’t matter,” Tarbell said. “No one is fast enough.”

The arrest had been scheduled already, but Tarbell kept asking to delay so that they could catch Ross at one of his cafés. They’d seen him out working once but didn’t have “assets in position.” Tarbell was granted one delay, but that was it.

“Your equity is used up,” the San Francisco chief said. “No more favors.”

The SWAT assault was scheduled for 5 am on Thursday. The entire tactical force— dozens of agents—had gathered at an FBI cybercrime facility an hour south in San Jose, prepping their final review.

Tarbell didn’t make it to San Jose. He and Der-Yeghiayan stopped by the San Francisco federal court building to amend the search warrant for Ross’ house. Kiernan and another officer were still in San Francisco as well, near Ross’ house in Glen Park.

They had stayed in position, hoping, praying that Ross would come walking out that door with his laptop bag over his shoulder.

Tarbell decided to meet his team at Bello Coffee & Tea, a place Ross frequented just next to the Glen Park Branch Library. It was 1 pm. Sitting on the bench outside the café, Der-Yeghiayan went on Silk Road as Cirrus and saw that DPR was also logged in. Physical surveillance said Ross was still at home.

Tarbell worried that in this leafy patch of San Francisco, he and his completely cop-looking crew, sitting around one laptop, would stand out. The group scattered and tried to act casual. Der-Yeghiayan went to a nearby market but then noticed his computer was nearly out of juice. So he went back to Bello, only to find the place full, with no free outlets. Tarbell returned to the bench, getting a chance to do some more worrying.

Halfway across the Atlantic, Yum was with the Icelandic authorities, poised to enter the Thor Data Center and “escalate privilege” over the Silk Road marketplace and bitcoin servers. Then the team in France would take over Silk Road’s redirect server. Tarbell barely noticed the pleasant afternoon, instead staring at his BlackBerry, monitoring the constant scroll of messages tethering this whole delicate operation together.

At 2:45 pm, Der-Yeghiayan saw DPR log off. A few minutes later, Tarbell heard from surveillance: They had eyes on Ross leaving his house. He was wearing jeans and his red sweater and walking east. And carrying his computer. “He’s on the move,” they said.

Holy fuck! Tarbell thought. He’s coming.

CY2 scattered again, this time in a giddy panic, zigzagging for cover like in a game of hide-and-seek. Tarbell left Der-Yeghiayan, still holding his laptop, to head down the street in the direction of Ross’ house. He felt high from the adrenaline. He didn’t realize Ross was on top of their position. Tarbell was rereading Ross’ description from the surveillance team when he looked up and saw Ross heading directly toward him.

It felt like slow motion, coming face-toface with the man he’d been tracking for months, resolving him from digital obscurity into a real live person walking up Diamond Street. Tarbell worried he’d get made.

He was trying to act all Mister Undercover, but, Jesus, did he look like a cop. Ross walked right past him toward the café.

From across the street, Der-Yeghiayan saw Ross duck into Bello. This seemed promising; they’d been hoping he’d sit down somewhere and log on to Silk Road, giving them an opportunity for a red-handed arrest. But Ross quickly left. It was probably the lack of outlets, Der-Yeghiayan imagined, looking at his own computer, which now had only 22 percent battery power left. A scary number, as he had to be connected online to verify DPR’s presence. Ross walked into the library next door.

Oct 1, 2013 2:53 pm From: Chris Tarbell Subject: Re: Ross Ulbricht By email, Tarbell alerted his team. That message cc’d the whole operational group, which was midbrief, preparing for their raid, when they learned that the little squad of out-of-towners had ventured off-piste and cornered their man in the Glen Park Library. “We got him,” Tarbell said when his supervisor called from New York. “I’ll call you back in 10 minutes.”

With Der-Yeghiayan’s dying laptop, they watched Ross log on as DPR, then navigate into the marketplace, then the forum, then

the elite admin chat where Cirrus was waiting to say hello. Tarbell knew the chief down south had surely mobilized. Fifty tacked-out federal agents were racing up Highway 101.

The cavalry was coming, and Tarbell wanted to get Ross before sirens showed up.

Kiernan and another agent had been in the library when Ross walked in. He went right by them and continued unaware past the periodicals and reference desk, beyond the romance novels, and settled in at a circular table near science fiction, on the second floor. The other agent assessed the tactical landscape up there, which was tough: Ross was sitting in a corner, with a view out the window and his back toward the wall. There was no obvious approach.

It was Kiernan’s job to get Ross’ laptop, and it looked tricky. “Your sole job is to get the laptop,” Tarbell had drilled Kiernan. “Get the laptop. That’s why you’re here. Get the laptop. And keep it alive.”

Tarbell and Der-Yeghiayan joined the action in the library, taking a spot on the stairs at a landing. Der-Yeghiayan was alarmed at how fast his battery was draining, but he kept communicating with DPR, making sure he logged in to the admin panel. Tarbell peered over the last step but couldn’t see much. Somewhere in the stacks was the other agent, but Tarbell wasn’t sure where.

Everyone was communicating electronically, trying to coordinate, caught blind by the moment. Minutes ticked past. DerYeghiayan and DPR still chatted. His battery dropped further. Tarbell heard from the plainclothes surveillance team—they were in the library too. Tarbell didn’t know where exactly, because he didn’t know what they looked like. (Such is the very low profile kept by field surveillance.) A few miles away, the giant squad of SWAT teams was approaching San Francisco. All the local supervisors were in that armada, so technically Tarbell was in charge here on the ground. He took a deep breath and sent a message: “Let the guy run if you have to, but don’t let that computer close.” This was the moment. Tarbell didn’t know it, but the surveillance agents had designed a new arrest on the spot. He had no idea what would happen when he took a deep breath and told everyone: Go. What unfolded next was a piece of improvisational theater. At 3:14 pm, DPR was

typing away, writing to Cirrus. Just then, a middle-aged woman and man came toward Ross, ambling along in the kind of semihomeless shuffle you might often see in a San Francisco library. “Fuck you!” the woman yelled when they were directly behind Ross’ chair. As if they were a deranged couple about to fight, the man grabbed the woman by the collar and raised his fist.

Ross turned around for just a second, during which a hand reached across the table and grasped Ross’ Samsung. The petite, unassuming young Asian woman sitting across from Ross this whole time was, to everyone’s surprise, also an FBI agent. Ross lunged for his machine, a hair too late, as she turned like a quarterback for a quick handoff to Kiernan, who appeared out of nowhere— as instructed—to get the laptop. It took less than 10 seconds. From afar, Tarbell was astonished by the elegant choreography of the whole thing. It looked like the police procedural version of a tight jazz quartet.

While Ross was cuffed, Kiernan immediately sat down with Ross’ PC. It was open.

He could see everything. The machine ID was Frosty. Ross was logged in to Silk Road as an administrator under an account called /Mastermind.

Kiernan also saw that Ross was torrenting some television. Of all things, he was downloading a segment from the previous night’s Colbert Report—an interview with Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad. The series finale had just aired, and Gilligan talked about the central theme of the show, how ordinary people are capable of terrible things. It took just two years for Walter White to turn from good-natured science teacher to liar, murderer, and master of a drug empire. Had Ross not been arrested he would have watched Gilligan say that yes, of course, Walter was doomed from the start. And everyone knew it but him.

Tarbell stood with Ross for the first time, searched him, and put him into a surveillance van, where he read him his rights.

Ross showed only a slight quiver in his lip and asked to see the charges. Tarbell presented him the warrant for Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, aka DPR. The rest of the force started arriving, black Suburbans and SWAT vehicles with lights blazing. Soon there were uniforms every1

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where. Even though Tarbell’s improvised bust was a complete success, cops are cops, and the local FBI was fuming at Tarbell’s departure from protocol. He and his team, considered computer dorks back home in New York, had the strange satisfaction of being called “fuckin’ cowboys” by a swarm of guys bristling with gear and guns. Tarbell took it as a compliment. Then he put Ross in an FBI cruiser bound for the local jail.

Tarbell called Yum in Iceland to set that phase in motion. Yum shut down communication between the machine in the Thor Data Center and all the others around the world and then simply “changed possession” of the bitcoins by redirecting the digital pointers—this is how ownership of the currency works—from Silk Road to an FBI account.

And voilà: All your coins are belong to us.

In France they discovered a digital booby trap: To redirect the Silk Road site itself required a delicate data process that could shut the box down; if restarted, the server was programmed to delete its key, basically self-destructing. But the trap was discovered, and gingerly evaded, and the machine succumbed. Thereafter, the Silk Road welcome page read: this hidden site has been seized by the federal bureau of investigation. Within minutes, Reddit erupted. “Is this a joke?” someone posted, along with plenty of WTFs. The arrest was such a coup that the Justice Department wanted to publicize it.

They’d planned on staging a press conference in Washington, with attorney general Eric Holder himself, to make a strong statement about the government’s ability to take on cybercrime. But, as it happened, Ross was arrested on day one of the dramatic government shutdown, when one of his heroes, Rand Paul, along with other senators, held the federal budget hostage over the debt ceiling and forced Washington to go dark.

There would be no Holder, no press conference, no government at all to celebrate its defeat of this libertarian, lawless challenge.

The only public notice of Ross’ arrest was the release of the FBI’s initial 39-page complaint signed by Tarbell, cementing his new public persona as DPR’s digital Van Helsing.

In the car, Tarbell and Ross found themselves alone in the backseat. Tarbell had read so much about him, it was kind of like seeing an old pal. Tarbell talked about Ross’ life in a way that made it clear how much

he knew. Ross was talkative but cagey. He seemed relaxed, as if relieved. Not in being caught, but just being with someone who possessed his secret. In front of Tarbell, he could be both Ross and DPR. He admitted nothing to Tarbell, but after a natural pause in the conversation, Ross said, “I don’t suppose $20 million can get me out of this?” It might have been the most authentic moment in Ross’ life in more than two years.

“No,” Tarbell said. He couldn’t resist needling him. “Even if it could, what about this guy?” He pointed at the driver, another FBI agent. “Have to take care of him too, right? How much money do you have?”

Ross looked ahead as they weaved toward the jail.

In a van that doubled as a mobile lab, Kiernan worked forensics on Ross’ computer. He quickly found a mountain of evidence: a list of all the Silk Road servers and the names Ross had purchased them under, 144,000 bitcoins (more than enough to cover that $20 million bribe), a spreadsheet showing Silk Road accounting (including a capital-equipment entry for the purchase of that very laptop), and those diaries Ross kept, which detailed his hopes, fears, and foibles in operating a vast criminal conspiracy.

Kiernan also found a file called emergency .txt, with an unrealized escape procedure: Destroy laptop hard drive and hide/ dispose Hide memory stick Go to end of train Find place to live on craigslist for cash Create new identity (name, backstory) At Ross’ house, agents found a USB drive containing some Silk Road programming, but beyond that, little else. When Alex and the other roommates got home, they found the warrant on the coffee table.

Alex visited Ross in jail. He expected him to be shaken, but Ross was the same as always. He would soon be transferred to New York to face a seven-count indictment.

It was hard for Alex to believe that the new guy in the extra room, his pal, was also the guy described in that warrant. The thought of Ross being guilty of even tripping someone, much less ordering a murder, seemed unlikely. He was always such a chill dude.

9

All Rise Ross was arraigned in federal court in New York a few months later, still seeming pretty chill. He pleaded not guilty. Like Alex, Ross’ friends and family couldn’t believe the charges. They were first shocked, then incensed. There emerged a familiar refrain: Ross was such a nice guy. There must be some mistake. Ross’ lawyer, Joshua Dratel, a seasoned, high-profile defense attorney who took on tough cases, made the same argument. His letter asking for bail was a moving collection of testimonials on Ross’ behalf: “good role model,” “reputation for fulfilling his obligations,” “fearless embrace of making the world a better place for everyone.” But the judge, citing flight risk, denied bail altogether.

Online, Ross became a cause célèbre. The libertarian and cypherpunk communities naturally felt that their champion had been martyred. The charges were ginned up, they thought, retribution for Ross having the temerity to challenge the government itself. Many a Reddit thread overflowed with outraged chatter and meticulous analysis of what the community insisted was overreach, flawed evidence, or a frame job.

A solidarity site appeared: Freeross.org.

Ross and his attorney prepared a defense that basically amounted to “Wasn’t me.”

They chose to occupy that narrative gap of uncertainty made possible by the ambiguity of identity online. Dread Pirate Roberts was just pixels, they said. Everyone knew there were many DPRs, they argued, returning to the lore of Silk Road and the symbolism of the alias.

It was a powerful idea. In the months leading up to the trial, the defense created a speculative froth about the very nature of identity, suggesting that Silk Road was an ongoing mystery. After all, everyone loves a whodunit. The case became like a crowdsourced mystery theater, with so many potential question marks hidden in the numbers and code.

Then the trial started. And the conspiratorial mindset was no match for clear, hard, overwhelming evidence. The courtroom was packed with Ross’ family, supportive spectators, and press as the biggest cyber-

crime trial in years unfolded in the federal district court building in downtown Manhattan. But armed with hundreds of exhibits, the prosecutors for the US attorney’s office presented an efficient, detailed case.

They showed the diaries. Der-Yeghiayan explained how they caught Ross logged in as /Mastermind. They read aloud from DPR’s chats, stored on Ross’ computer, presenting the odd spectacle of gray-suited government lawyers addressing the court with choice narrations like “Squid gave me the support link, just let me know when I have access.” Outside, a vigil of protesters held signs, some reading free ross.

Ross, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was not charged with any murders. The case involving Green, which came out of Baltimore, was a separate indictment. (It is still pending.) The New York case dropped the five other murders after further investigation revealed that the whole thing was likely an elaborate catfish-as-blackmail scheme that snookered Ross out of a lot of money. But in all cases, the prosecution argued, Ross believed he was executing people, even receiving photographic evidence faked to prove it. For dramatic effect, the prosecutors read aloud selections of Ross’ conversations where he sounded like a heartless mafia boss.

It was a quick trial, 13 court days, faster than expected. Observers were surprised at the volume and detail of evidence, the kind you rarely see. To the end, Ross’ lawyer, Dratel, claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. (Like most criminal defendants, Ross himself didn’t testify.) Or rather, a qualified case of mistaken identity. Dratel caused quite a stir in his opening statements by admitting that Ross had indeed started Silk Road, but then quickly sold it off to some other unnamed figure. The attorney also claimed that Ross was later duped by this savvy character back into Silk Road to take the fall as the FBI closed in. To account for the vast sum of bitcoin wealth, Dratel explained that Ross was just a good currency trader. Then Yum took the stand to demonstrate precisely how Ross received all the bitcoin commissions from Silk Road during the entire tenure of Dread Pirate Roberts.

Ross’ family was surprised to hear the admission that he’d created Silk Road.

Reporters could see it on his mother’s face. Lyn Ulbricht was a sympathetic fig-

ure, a caring mother leading a vigil for her son. She was smart and articulate and had become a vocal public figure in support of Ross. Throughout the trial she maintained that the jury would set Ross free.

This was more than a mother’s love. Lyn, like many supporters, just believed Ross.

Which was understandable, to some degree, as Ross’ story was one of fluid identity. The prosecution said that Lyn’s good-natured son had turned into someone else. Lyn said that this someone, if he or she even existed, had been projected onto her son. Ross said nothing and remained a willing cipher, allowing everyone to project an identity onto him: To Alex, Ross was the cool new roommate; to Julia, a passionate lover and inspiration; to his family, the perpetual Eagle Scout; to Force, an unlikely friend in the night; to Tarbell, a smart kid defeated by his own arrogance. To the Southern District of New York US attorney’s office, Ross was simply the criminal conspirator Dread Pirate Roberts.

The likeliest reality is that Ross was all of those things. The open-minded seeker who conscientiously tried to pluck trash from a tree was Ross. As was the feverish visionary creating a virtual empire at any cost. Neither truth invalidated the other.

Ross and DPR can (and did) coexist.

Amid all the murder minutiae, it’s possible to lose sight of the young idealist who sat down and coded his way into history.

He was right about the war on drugs: It is a failure. And Silk Road was a perfectly natural response. There was a lot to like in the site’s original idea of an economically mediated utilitarian society. It is still easy to appreciate that Ross, the one who believed in choice and happiness. “Our basic rules are to treat others as you would wish to be treated,” Ross wrote as DPR on Silk Road.

But it didn’t take long for Ross’ programmed utopia to resort to programmatic violence. It’s an age-old story, the bloom and wilt of revolution. After tearing down the establishment’s walls, the new regime soon realizes the rubble would make a fine set of gallows. Just as Tarbell thought, all systems are the same. At the beginning of Silk Road, what Ross created was just a system. Then, at a certain point, it became his system—at which moment the system was doomed.

Silk Road offers a neat political parable for the rising libertarian tide in Washington

and the smug pride of today’s Silicon Valley, where self-appointed revolutionaries of all stripes believe their powers allow them to transcend traditional human boundaries, including their own mortality. In a way, Silk Road is the dark mirror of The Social Network, a wild technological success story taken to its logically extreme conclusion.

Force watched from afar in Baltimore.

Having lost his big career case, he acknowledged that the FBI “won fair and square,” and he had left the DEA by the time the trial started. But Force had a lot of sympathy for the guy he’d spent so much time with in latenight chats. As a man who was saved from the temptations of undercover work, Force believed that everyone was a sinner. He also identified with Ross. “I’m no different than him,” Force said. “It easily could’ve went the other way.” No one is either perfectly good or perfectly evil. People occupy a space right on each side of the line. And sometimes, without knowing it, you switch sides.

Force’s words rang truer than anyone knew. In an incredible twist, Force, along with a Secret Service agent on his team, was also indicted and arrested this past March for running an elaborate series of rackets and thefts on Silk Road. The 95-page indictment alleged that they stole bitcoins from Silk Road and other exchanges (the digital equivalent of keeping the suitcase full of cash after a dockside heroin bust); pocketed $50,000 from DPR for intel services from “Kevin”; laundered at least half a million of that (some of which made it to Panama); and served a false subpoena on a digital currency exchange when they questioned his transactions and froze his account. It was, in fact, when all this came to the attention of the Department of Justice that Force left the DEA. “In retrospect,” Tarbell said when he heard about the investigation of Force, “it’s as if you found out at the end of Breaking Bad that Hank was dirty the whole time.”

In retrospect, a lot of Force’s story takes on a different light. Ironically, he had warned DPR about the danger of double identity, but if this indictment is true he seems to have fallen prey to it himself. Force allegedly operated online not only as Nob but had also created several other identities and used them to blackmail DPR with law enforcement information for at least $100,000. Like Ross, Force must have believed in the secrecy of Tor. During the sting operation with Curtis 1

1

2

Green, Force even told Green he thought the Silk Road servers would never be found. But they were, and after they documented Ross’ misdeeds, they also revealed that it was Force and the Secret Service agent who had stolen $350,000 in bitcoins from Silk Road— the theft that led Ross to put the hit on Curtis Green. None of this emerged during Ross’ trial because Force’s case was at odds with the FBI investigation and part of a different indictment. But if true, Force’s fall mirrors the path of DPR. It was during the Green sting that Force took his first corrupt step, and DPR became a true criminal by ordering murder. Their simultaneous moral turns, so intertwined, reinforced the one theme that barely appeared during Ross’ trial: how easy it is to forget the solidity and consequences of the real world when you live online.

The jury in USA v. Ulbricht was out for barely four hours. And that included lunch.

They returned to the assembled courtroom and read the verdict: guilty on all seven counts. Ross’ family looked stricken. A sympathizer stood up and yelled, “Ross is a hero!” Ross was led from the court.

Outside, Dratel was set upon by reporters. He vowed an appeal. The press gaggle jockeyed for position and fired questions.

Some were bloggers who sided with Silk Road. As news spread online, partisans continued the fight, arguing over the identity of Ross and Dread Pirate Roberts, echoing what Dratel said to the jury in his closing statement: The Internet is a place of confusion, where nothing is what it seems.

Ross returned to jail, where, his mother liked to explain, he had been teaching yoga to other prisoners and doing a lot of reading. Alex sent him a printout of the short story “Man of the Crowd” by Edgar Allen Poe. Alex thought it seemed fitting, as the story is about a man in detective mode following someone he calls a “genius of deep crime” through the streets. But there is confusion in the chase. And a hint that the pursuer realizes that the man he’s after is, in fact, himself. Yet this other self remains beyond his grasp, “like a book that cannot be read.” As night falls, the man finally gives up the pursuit and watches the unknowable shadow disappear into the crowd.

This article includes reporting by Nick Bilton, whose book on the Silk Road case will appear in 2016.

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