I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

https://words.motel.is/i-thought-i-was-designing-for-spacex-i-was-actually-designing-for-the-silk-road-4b4b64834868#.9gelegsu1

by JunkDNA • 10 years ago

346 129 10 years ago

words.motel.is

themodelplumber3• 10 years ago

The Silk Road reference--is he saying he was working for Chinese interests? Where was the sensor data coming from?

I understand it's probably a painful story to tell, but a lot of little details are missing here, and they'd probably help both the author's friends and new readers like me understand what happened.

phpnode3• 10 years ago

He's talking about the Silk Road marketplace - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

themodelplumber3• 10 years ago

Thanks, so it sounds like the SpaceX pitch was just the client wanting to build up a really cool cover story while he worked on(?) Silk Road in secret. Right?

elastic_church• 10 years ago

Silk Road 2.0, Not Ross Ulbricht's but a different Dread Pirate Roberts

sandworm1013• 10 years ago

The lawyer was correct. If you have reason to suspect the FBI is watching you, they already have what they need. The men-in-black routine is meant to alter your behavior, to cause you to do something rare like empty an account or contact a distant friend. This was federal investigation 101.

Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.

jawns• 10 years ago

I would love to hear more about this. Both you and the lawyer in the story recognize it as true, but is this something you're taught ... or learn officially ... or learn unofficially?

sandworm1013• 10 years ago

Exact procedures are of of course classified, but talk to enough people under investigation, read enough warrant affidavits, and you learn the patterns. They haven't changed much over the decades. They still dress in 1950ish black suits with sunglasses, at least when they want people to recognze them. This is a culture no different than any other corporation. They all dress to look like the boss/oldest man in the room.

FBI agents follow the trial lawyers credo "never ask a question you don't already know the answer to". They dont ask for a meeting until they know enough to dominate the conversation. Thats why they watch nearly everyone they ever deal with.

Actual footage of a low-level FBI agent engaged in semi-covert activities. Note the suit, haircut and body language (Ex-soldier, doesn't know a thing about the tech he is standing amongst). He stands in the middle of the action because he thinks that makes him part of the process, but all he can really do to help is close the cage door. This is a very junior agent out doing unimportant grunt work. He doesn't even have a partner with him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqX4oJWV-Ws

zodPod• 10 years ago

Is there a book or something that I can read to get this type of insight? I'm interested in this stuff!

themodelplumber3• 10 years ago

I have a PI friend (retired) who pretended to be a cable guy as one of his go-to methods, even had a van with the right paint job. In that context, what you're saying sounds about right--why would you make yourself more obvious if you didn't have to?

Archio• 10 years ago

What would be the point of photographing the driver?

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Annoying them.

neaden• 10 years ago

I think the idea is. Step 1: FBI agents watch you without you realizing it. They find out what you normally do. Step 2: The FBI agents do something obvious so you know they are watching you. In this case, taking your picture. Step 3: The FBI agents then watch you to see what you do next. Do you go to an unusual bank to take out money? Run out and buy a burner phone and make weird calls? etc.

downandout• 10 years ago

Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but they might actually "love that" if their objective at that point of the investigation is to alarm you and see what you do. It's an acknowledgment that they have indeed alarmed you.

defen• 10 years ago

You don't have to be the target under investigation in order to take photos of G-Men.

sandworm1013• 10 years ago

I can actually do them a favour. That agent doesnt like sitting there all day. He was assinged to intimidate. Mission acomplished. By photographing him you acknowledge the message and he can be assigned to sonething else. Moving the nonverbal conversation along might actually trigger them to make a formal, polite, approach.

A lone FBI agent wont be happy, but he wont break cover be reacting. He will just drive away.

hrayr• 10 years ago

This is a nice ShowHN with a cover story. I'm not questioning the validity, just finding this amusing.

wongarsu3• 10 years ago

The story is good, the app really isn't worth mentioning. It's little more than a slighlty nicer version of a paper prototype of the basic UI.

ufmace2• 10 years ago

I'm not doubting the story, but it doesn't seem to fit together much the way that it's told here. Exactly who was he really working for, and what was his "friend"s relationship to them?

All I can really say is maybe you should be extra skeptical when somebody talks about working for a "big name" company, like SpaceX, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. If you're never reading or writing emails from a company.com email address, going to company's actual public website, going for interviews or meetings at an actual company office, then maybe you should look really closely at who you're really working for.

griffinmb• 10 years ago

He was working for "Defcon" or Blake Benthall (his roommate in the story). Defcon was running Silk Road 2.0 after the second "Dread Pirate Roberts" left.

Blake had been working for SpaceX, and left to work on Silk Road. This is his HN account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb

qz_• 10 years ago

That's crazy. Is he in prison now?

emodendroket12• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277371

Prophetic.

lukealization2• 10 years ago

Here's his Reddit account too. https://www.reddit.com/user/blakeeb

I was contacted by Blake (as a SpaceX employee) when he worked for SpaceX saying how much he appreciated my work (related to reddit.com/r/spacex).

ufmace2• 10 years ago

Thanks, that's interesting. Sounds like Blake's story could be much better than this one. We can only wonder how many thousands of HN readers have read these DarkNet stories and thought they could make one secure enough to withstand an FBI investigation.

sbierwagen• 10 years ago

Why did the silk road want a data visualization app?

The "live demo" in the linked github doesn't seem to be very "live", in that it seems to be totally static. The post talks about "drawing correlations" but all it does it make a graph. http://sciview.herokuapp.com/#/data-sets/0

CoryG89• 10 years ago

Why did the silk road want a data visualization app?

Telemetry, analytics, data visualization, and things like AB testing would probably work just as well for a dark web market as they would for Amazon. It's all about the money.

As for why they felt they needed to create their own specific tool for this specifically, I'm not sure.

busterarm• 10 years ago

Because it's virtually all SaaS these days. Can't exactly use some hosted service when you're running an illegal business over Tor.

And it takes less time and is safer to write the software yourself than to do a full code audit of any self-hosted solution. Plus that would usually involve business contracts, etc.

krick2• 10 years ago

You want to believe it, because it would be a more exciting story. But if I wanted you to make me an analytic app for the Silk Road, I would tell you I want an analytic app for a marketplace. Which will be selling toys or whatever. Amazon 2.0. Not a fucking spaceship.

It wouldn't be very plausible even if this guy was a programmer, asked to make some generic analytics engine for a spaceship (because things rarely are truly completely generic). But this guy is a designer. You do not hire a designer, because drawing a picture for UI is some secret knowledge available only to them, but because it requires spending your time thinking about this specific problem and picking pretty colors. So if I wanted to make some app without telling designers about the real purpose of the app, I wouldn't really need a designer at all. I would hire a programmer and ask him to make me another Salesforce, with exactly the same GUI.

drops• 10 years ago

It's not the final version, looks like he only finished working on the design. He didn't work on it for too long, I guess.

hughes• 10 years ago

It doesn't even make a graph, it simply shows a graph-like SVG image file

vinhboy• 10 years ago

Is it possible he was really working a SpaceX project as a subcontractor of a contractor? I do that sometimes. Give my work to someone else to do because I am too busy working on something else.

lukealization2• 10 years ago

SpaceX tend to keep their work internal due to concerns regarding both intellectual property and munitions laws (ITAR).

welder• 10 years ago

He hints at the end that 30 FBI agents kicked down his door, then says nothing more. Way to leave us hanging!

cocktailpeanuts2• 10 years ago

Wait for the next season of... Mr. Robot!

pzh2• 10 years ago

On the plus side, the OP had plausible deniability. I wonder whether he could've been considered an accomplice or liable in any way, or not knowing who he was working for completely exonerated him.

pfarnsworth• 10 years ago

This story is completely unintelligible. I have no idea what this story is about, where does it say he was designing for Silk Road? Did he say he was talking with DPR or something?

johansch2• 10 years ago

It's a weird-ass story the writer likely concocted to save his ass.

degenerate• 10 years ago

This. If he is ever charged he will point back at this article as "proof" of accidentally complicity.

kneel• 10 years ago

Oooh, this makes sense now.

He skimped hard on the details.

mawburn• 10 years ago

...thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. I kept backtracking thinking I missed something. It's reads like a random stream of thoughts.

jordache4• 10 years ago

horrible story.. i guess anyone can write on medium and the nice layout makes it somewhat legitimate looking. It could have very well been a rant on IRC

stiva• 10 years ago

This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.

wheelerwj2• 10 years ago

what gave you that impression?

I sent the following email (below) shortly before receiving the previous one (above).

untog• 10 years ago

I assume you mean about the credibility? We don't know those e-mails are real. A journalist handling the story would contact the relevant parties to confirm the account given.

csomar• 10 years ago

Really? I actually like it this way. Journalist tries to make it intriguing and longer. But that doesn't change the events or make them more interesting. I guess I just like simple and straightforward.

giarc• 10 years ago

Except for the fact that he was working on data sets of oil pressure and speed sensors, but somehow that was for silk road.... maybe I didn't follow it, but I don't understand what he was doing.

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

But this story wasn't simple or straight forward. If someone challenged me to draw up a simple timeline of events, I wouldn't be able to. I'm not even sure who he was directly reporting to while doing the work for Silk Road, or to whom he sent the final "I quit" email, or what he was doing for them at all.

nommm-nommm4• 10 years ago

It was exactly the opposite of simple and straightforward. I had to read it several times to ever understand what was happening and there is still giant pieces missing. One thing doesn't follow from the next and the whole thing is just confusing and disjointed.

Normally I wouldn't waste my time on such nonsense but it was an interesting story so I really wanted to understand it. It's a great story.

He also didn't mention that it wasn't the original Silk Road, which is pretty significant information.

nebulous1• 10 years ago

Ha. I was going to write a very similar comment. It's a really interesting situation, but the story as told is incomplete and lacking in really obvious parts, such throwing out "30 FBI agents kicking down the door" but not giving anything concrete. Was he there at the time? Was he even still living there? If so, it seems to go directly against his lawyer's "[you will] never hear from the FBI".

gandutraveler• 10 years ago

Agree. Would have been a great story on NewYorker or Wired like this one https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

toyg• 10 years ago

He might fear that too many details could result in renewed interest from the FBI. Sure, they have it all already... or do they?

josephjrobison• 10 years ago

Now it's out there, though. This can be the V1.0 of the story and although it won't be breaking news if written professionally, it can be a great investigative piece still!

daniel-levin• 10 years ago

I agree. This would be awesome if it was written up like the Paul le Roux story on The Atavist [0]. That was gripping. I'd be so excited to read the next piece each week. I want to hear the rest of this story.

[0] https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind

the_hangman2• 10 years ago

I thought you were just being petty until I tried to read it. There is so just much context switching without any clues at all to the reader, it is really jarring.

gthtjtkt2• 10 years ago

Edit: Turns out the headline is completely made up. This was in the comment section:

So was “Sciview” actually some sort of analytics app for Silk Road, with the “sensors” representing some other Silk Road metrics? Or was BB truly freelancing for SpaceX while administering Silk Road?
AUTHOR: Excellent question, I don’t know.

So he has no idea if he was just a subcontractor or if he was doing work for Silk Road. If I had to bet on this, I'd guess the friend subcontracted a project to him for easy cash (or because he was in over his head) and the Silk Road stuff was completely unrelated.

What would Silk Road do with such an application anyway?

bduerst• 10 years ago

Not sure, but Silk Road obviously couldn't rely on traditional third party web analytics, even though they still needed to identify and fight spammers/fraud.

There's also a lot of open-source solutions for things like this (PiWik, AWStats) so, as you said, the author probably was involved in the outsourcing a different project for someone in L.A. But then why would they try to disguise the sample as rocket sensor data?

I also don't think you can go this long with living and working with someone, notice the major purchases/parties (with outstanding invoices from SpaceX), and not get a hint about what's going on. If there were so many parties, what did they think when none of the coworkers from SpaceX showed up to one? Or his roommate's Linkedin profile shows something else other than SpaceX?

stephenhuey3• 10 years ago

He had worked for SpaceX in the past. The blog post author omitted many details, probably because 2 years ago this story was so heavily documented by every major publication you can think of (BBC, NY Times, IB Times, Wired, Ars Technica) that he felt his audience would know the details.

stephenhuey3• 10 years ago

Don't recall if I ever met the author of this blog post personally, but his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. I was thousands of miles away from SF but it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX as an internal tool. He always juggled lots of projects and besides this SpaceX idea, I remember him telling me 2 weeks before the arrest about another unrelated project he was trying to get a team together for so he could apply to Y Combinator. Never once did I hear anything hinting at involvement with the Silk Road, but he always talked about a million ideas at once. Anyone who knew him for long knew that he traveled a lot for years and years (back in 2010 he was the first person I knew who jumped on Jet Blue's special offer of a month of unlimited travel for only $600), so the author would've realized that was routine if he knew him for long. I do find the author's story very plausible.

notahacker• 10 years ago

Lots of plausibly lucrative subprojects also make a good cover story and/or attempt at money laundering for someone running a drug trading platform.

Seems more likely that this was his intention (or, as you say, he genuinely thought he might be able to flog it to his ex-employer) rather than getting design work for part of the back end for the Silk Road. If he wanted an analytics package for his trading platform, surely he'd have just told the blog post author he was subcontracting an analytics package for a very boring company under NDA's trading platform rather than trying to disguise his design brief as curiosity-inducing stuff like metrics for rocket launches?

gthtjtkt2• 10 years ago

his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. . . it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX
I do find the author's story very plausible.

Aren't these statements completely contradictory?

On the one hand, you say it was a SpaceX project. But later, you say that the author is correct (meaning it was a Silk Road project).

So... which is it?

cocktailpeanuts2• 10 years ago

I think this is a great story to tell buddies when grabbing a drink, but not really good for posting online which will last forever.

Maybe if the project was actually functional and high quality, but it's just a half baked project that doesn't even work.

Furthermore, there's no proof that what he worked on was actually silk road. Even looking at the screenshots it says nothing about silkroad, looks actually like a spacex project.

Like others said, I think his main motivation is to post it for the record, so if one day he disappears, people know where to track him down.

shitgoose• 10 years ago

so, who do you have on your resume, SpaceX or Silk Road?

yeukhon• 10 years ago

I wonder if SpaceX will recruit him after the publicity.

jnpatel• 10 years ago

The author's title seems misleading, since in the post's comments Thomas acknowledges how he's not sure if his design was being actually used for Silk Road or if his leaseholder really was freelancing for SpaceX.

joshstrange• 10 years ago

I honestly have no clue how this is voted so high on HN right now, I assume it's just the title people are voting on. It makes no sense, jumps around and no flow. I had to re-read parts multiple times and I still have no clue what is going on.

clay_to_n2• 10 years ago

As bad as the writing style is, I still found the story interesting. The bits of info about working with his friend are juicy, even if the title is overblown and there's not much meat to the post.

minus7• 10 years ago

If you take a look at the code on Github you quickly realize it's complete bullshit, a bit of hardcoded data [1] and one file of backend code that looks like it was copied from somewhere [2].

[1] https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/public/javascr...

[2] https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/routes/api/v1/...

weaksauce• 10 years ago

I mean there is not much there... odd that the author thinks this would be used by spacex like it's close to being done.

TrevorJ• 10 years ago

He doesn't claim it was a finished product

wongarsu3• 10 years ago

But he talks about an ongoing business relationship. He probably spend a lot of time that isn't obvious in the code (requirements, interface design, software design etc.), but we can only see code that anyone could have coded within one hour. That's substantially less than what I would have expected from the article.

the_hangman2• 10 years ago

Wow, this is utter shit. There is literally nothing here.

No wonder he was going 70+ days without being paid.

ukyrgf2• 10 years ago

This makes for an awkward cupcake ceremony where you’re not sure whether to smile or to laugh.

"I don't know whether to smile or laugh" isn't a very powerful expression.

nommm-nommm4• 10 years ago

What does it mean?

ukyrgf2• 10 years ago

A common idiom is "not know whether to laugh or cry", which usually means a situation is extremely bad. I don't really know how that applies to having a birthday party a week after you announce you're quitting, though.

jpeg_hero• 10 years ago

Do a FOIA request and get your FBI file. Could be interesting confirmation

jordache4• 10 years ago

Wtf? Why would spacex utilize a freelancer front end Dev / designer to develop a one off crappy custom soln for data analysis? When much more robust, performant, established solutions exist?

Also space x is not a green start up, why would they still lack the ability to visualize and analyze data?

The author obviously failed to ask himself this obvious questions.

I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road

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