Back in July, we ran a profile of Hickory Street, the quaint, quiet alley featuring eclectic architecture from Webster to Van Ness.
We were unaware that just three days before our story ran, Homeland Security investigators had visited San Francisco, having identified Hickory Street as the home of an alleged online drug kingpin.
On Tuesday, FBI agents arrested 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht at a San Francisco library. Ulbricht was charged with operating Silk Road, an online narcotics marketplace. He was also charged with conspiring to commit murder, after he allegedly paid an undercover agent to have an employee killed when he suspected the employee might reveal his identity. (Ulbricht ran the site using aliases like "altoid" and "Dread Pirate Roberts".) The FBI contends that for the past year, Ulbricht had been operating the site from an apartment on Hickory Street. The location was revealed by Ulbricht's doing something pretty mundane: checking his Gmail. The FBI obtained records from Google to determine the IP address from which Ulbricht logged into his Gmail account during the first half of 2013. They then used records from Comcast to determine where that IP address was. According to the criminal complaint:
On Tuesday, FBI agents arrested 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht at a San Francisco library. Ulbricht was charged with operating Silk Road, an online narcotics marketplace. He was also charged with conspiring to commit murder, after he allegedly paid an undercover agent to have an employee killed when he suspected the employee might reveal his identity. (Ulbricht ran the site using aliases like "altoid" and "Dread Pirate Roberts".) The FBI contends that for the past year, Ulbricht had been operating the site from an apartment on Hickory Street. The location was revealed by Ulbricht's doing something pretty mundane: checking his Gmail. The FBI obtained records from Google to determine the IP address from which Ulbricht logged into his Gmail account during the first half of 2013. They then used records from Comcast to determine where that IP address was. According to the criminal complaint:
"[T]his IP address was assigned at the time of these logins to a certain address located on Hickory Street in San Francisco, California. The address is associated with... a friend of Ulbricht... whom Ulbricht went to live with when he moved to San Francisco in or about September 2012, according to a video posted on YouTube in which they both appear and make statements to that effect."Furthermore, the complaint alleges that Ulbricht accessed the Silk Road web server via a VPN that he logged into from "an Internet café on Laguna Street in San Francisco, California. This café is located less than 500 feet away from the Friend's address on Hickory Street regularly used by Ulbricht to log in to the Ulbricht Gmail Account." That would most likely point to Momi Toby's. The only other cafe on Laguna within 500 feet of Hickory is Samovar Tea Lounge, and they don't have wifi. Last night KTVU confirmed that Momi Toby's was the café Ulbricht used, and spoke with regular customers who confirmed having seen Ulbricht working at the café. "He's a normal, everyday guy," one customer told KTVU. "An average guy who was very unassuming." Ulbricht is currently being held in custody pending a bail hearing tomorrow. The Silk Road site, meanwhile, has been seized by the FBI and shut down.
