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In 2013, Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, was arrested and imprisoned. After the court trial, he was convicted of drug trafficking, aiding and abetting the distribution of drugs via the Internet, computer hacking and money laundering, and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Although it has been 7 years since his arrest, Ross is still "active" on social media, trying to gain more support and seek a reduced sentence.
"Cryptocurrency" is another topic that Ross is concerned about besides expressing his feelings in prison. Although he is behind bars, Ross once predicted that "3,000 is not the bottom, and 100,000 is not the top" for Bitcoin. In June this year, he also published a long article detailing his thoughts and prospects on the DeFi protocol MakerDao.
But 2,500 days of isolation have separated this hacker, who once founded the Silk Road and created a dark empire, from the front line of the encryption industry.
In fact, even hackers who used to be able to move freely on the Internet had to face the dilemma of being completely "disconnected from the Internet" after being arrested and imprisoned for their crimes. Years of prison life eventually made them completely ignorant of the changes in the outside world. Strangeness and alienation were basically the feelings of this group after they were released from prison.
It is understood that Ross's tweet was not posted directly by him, but indirectly "passed on" by his family or friends. If Ross is still likely to be released from prison, then what Jesse McGraw experienced today is probably what he will experience tomorrow.
Not long ago, a hacker named Jesse McGraw (also known as GhostExodus) who had been in prison for ten years published a long article after his release, expressing his unfamiliarity with contemporary society and the terrible impact of ten years in prison on him. Not only did he not understand how to use a touch-screen smartphone, but even the Windos system he was familiar with had become so difficult to use after multiple iterations that the former founder of a hacker organization had no idea where to start.
However, after a preliminary understanding of this new world, his deep-rooted "hacker sensitivity" made him realize the difference of Bitcoin. At the end of the article, he specifically listed the emergence of Bitcoin as the first thing that made him excited.
After Jesse McGraw was released from prison, he published an article detailing his experience in prison. Through this article, we can roughly imagine the similar experiences of hackers like Ross in prison after being arrested for crimes. The following is Jesse McGraw's self-narration, and the original link is at the end of the article.
The world is no longer what I remember it to be.
I was arrested for installing a botnet and a commercial remote access program on some hospital systems, including a critical SCADA (monitoring) system. I became the first person in modern U.S. history to be convicted of sabotaging an industrial control system. Although it may seem like a long time ago to many people, it feels like yesterday to me.
Ten years of nightmare
It's hard to understand what it means to be a prisoner in the United States. Currently, there are about 2.3 million people imprisoned in this free land. Prisons do not provide prisoners with very convenient Internet access. If you want to get information, you can only read or watch newspapers, magazines, publications or TV programs approved by the prison.
Of course, most inmates do have access to computers, but the prison-provided computers have a special access control program that charges inmates 0.05 cents per minute to use them, and emails can only be sent to approved contacts. However, hackers don't get along well in federal prisons, and contacting the public through the prisoner information system is not a privilege I have.
In the summer of 2011, I wanted to appeal. But because of the restrictions, I couldn't even contact a lawyer, so I privately reached an agreement with another prisoner to let me use his computer so that I could send and receive emails.
But we were eventually discovered. The prisoner was arrested by the prison's Special Investigations Department (SIS) because of a series of unusual activities on his computer information account. My sister mentioned my name in her reply email, so SIS also knew that I was behind this series of activities.
Not only did this cellmate not explain the situation, he also turned against me directly. He said that he didn't know I was using his account and that his account was hacked by me. Jesse McGraw submits form annually to request restoration of email privileges
After that, I was detained in an administrative segregation unit for 13 months without due process (Note: Ross Ulbricht himself said that he was also detained in a dark and special segregation room), and the case was also turned over to the FBI. Some people call these facilities "black sites" because they completely cut off the people who are detained from the media, visitors, and lawyers, and no one knows what is happening there.
Life in prison was miserable. I was allowed to take showers three times a week and was confined to an 8x10 square meter cell with no air conditioning, no fans, and no adequate ventilation. One summer, the temperature in my room reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit (about 51 degrees Celsius). There was no evidence to support the accusation made by the cellmate against me. I hoped to return to a regular cell, but that did not happen.
Can you imagine that for more than a year I had no access to any information about the current era?
Step out of the time machine and return to real society
After serving a long prison sentence, I felt like I had stepped out of a time machine when I witnessed the development of technology upon my release.
I felt left behind by time, expelled from the development of new technologies and the development of global society. As a hacker, I was the founder and leader of a hacker group called "Electronik Tribulation Army". I used to keep up with the latest gadgets, developments, and social technology trends, and I used to reverse engineer malware, perform incident response, and hack into almost anything that no one paid attention to.
Of course, I read about new technologies in newspapers and magazines during my time in prison, but at the end of the day, I was now an outsider to the things I once knew. If you describe this as a teacher becoming a student and just having to relearn, that would be an understatement.
Examples of this mismatch are everywhere. For example, I recently received a new Dell Inspiron laptop, and when I opened the familiar packaging and touched it, it felt like meeting an old friend in a foreign land, but when I booted it up, I was greeted by Windows 10. For me, it seems like the Windows 7 beta was released just yesterday. I know nothing about Windows 10 and have no idea how to use it. It has a new file system, but I'm not curious about how it works. All I want to do is restore my Windows XP to the original dual-boot option of Ubuntu Linux and Backtrack 3.
Windows has a better say than me in the system control: I can no longer operate this system smoothly and smoothly as before, and now I hate it. I spend hours searching on Google for how to solve this or that problem, but often come back with no results. I challenge this annoying system again and again, and I am defeated again and again.
There were other things that were hard for me to accept, like having to ask my 12-year-old daughter what a #hashtag was, which was so embarrassing, and she said to me, “Aren’t you supposed to be a hacker or something?” That was the final straw.
A lot has changed in these ten years.
In my time, hiring hackers was considered taboo, but now anyone can hire hackers, and even white hat hackers can get bonuses for discovering vulnerabilities, which is a source of legal income and has made white hat hacking a profession. Hackers are even portrayed in Hollywood movies, books, and video games. Hackers such as "Mr. Robot" are portrayed as heroes on American TV networks, no longer stereotypical cyber villains.
A world I no longer feel connected to
While I was still clinging to the familiar things of the past, the world was moving forward by leaps and bounds. In fact, I also observed some things outside of this exciting new world:
Like Bitcoin, which is supposed to be the world's first cryptocurrency, but I'm still not sure how to get or use them . Smartphones appeared in 2007 and began to replace flip phones two years later. When I saw smartphone ads on TV, I yelled at the TV, "This is the stupidest thing! Who wants to put greasy fingers on the screen?" But I was wrong. Everyone would do it, including me. For example, President Obama signed an executive order to urgently control the Internet, and the Internet's "kill switch" was born. This was also a big deal .
For the Internet world I once knew, with the arrival of Arab Spring, social consciousness began to turn to the use of tools such as Tor and encrypted communication platforms to maintain anonymity on the Internet, and end-to-end encrypted communication began to become popular . The social networking site Myspace fell into the abyss, ending the era of building personal file creation as I knew it, and utilitarianism seems to have become the default concept in today's world.
Banking Trojans such as ZeuS, SpyEye, BlackHole and BackSwap have also become popular. As more and more devices are connected to the Internet, the available IPv4 addresses are expected to be exhausted soon.
The WikiLeaks movement broke out after Private First Class Chelsea Manning leaked a large number of sensitive State Department cables. The hacker group Anonymous became an important player in supporting the movement; Edward Snowden later became a whistleblower, leaking 9,000 to 10,000 top-secret NSA documents to reporters, exposing a massive spy program called Prism. The U.S. government is still engaged in espionage, and it always will be.
Big advertisers are collecting all kinds of data on users for content marketing purposes. I have stolen user data before. I know it is illegal, but if it wasn’t, I would probably send them an ad or two.
Facebook and Google are already ingrained in the daily activities of Internet users. Smartphones and cars are becoming increasingly popular. When all interconnected devices are wirelessly connected to a command and control device, it is undoubtedly a battlefield for hackers. Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa may be a witness to a murder. These AI software are always listening and recording your life.
Uncertain future
For me, having just been released from prison, it was like stepping into an uncertain future.
I no longer see meaningful human interaction, and in a society that is distracted by likes, selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, I often feel frustrated trying to find my place in this new world because I haven't "evolved" with the world. I feel like I'm somewhere outside of time, waiting on the other side of a mirror, and I don't know when I will be released and reintegrated into society. I no longer understand the world in front of me. The copyright of this article belongs to BlockBeats. If you need to reprint it, please include the link to this article: https://www.theblockbeats.com/news/19055 BlockBeats reminds that according to the document "Risk Warning on Preventing Illegal Fund Raising in the Name of "Virtual Currency" and "Blockchain"" issued by the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission and other five departments in August 2018, the general public is requested to look at blockchain rationally, not blindly believe in the exaggerated promises, establish correct monetary concepts and investment ideas, and effectively enhance risk awareness; any clues of illegal and criminal activities discovered can be actively reported to the relevant departments. |
