Summary:
A co-founder of transparency activism organization Distributed of Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) was a dark web drug kingpin who ran the successor to the infamous Silk Road marketplace and was later convicted of child abuse imagery crimes. The co-founder was Thomas White, who was prosecuted for administering the Silk Road 2.0 drug marketplace and for possessing images of child sexual abuse material. He decided to reveal his involvement in DDoSecrets to 404 Media after serving a five year prison sentence.

“I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I spoke out publicly against Ross Ulbricht's excessive sentence, [DDoSecrets] or anything similar, that I would spend much more time in prison,” he said. “Now I can freely speak again, it is important to use it or lose it. So #FreeRoss.”

The news provides more insights into the origins of DDoSecrets, which has filled the void left by Wikileaks to become the most significant site publishing massive data dumps at this time. The other co-founder is Emma Best, who for years has archived, cataloged, and distributed large amounts of hacked information online.

“Emma and I have been communicating for many years, and both know the difficulty in finding and verifying leaked material. It was a shared vision to make this process easier for people better placed than ourselves, to use the data to counteract the veil of secrecy protecting many bad actors in society,” White told 404 Media in an email in July.

In late 2013, after the FBI shut down the Silk Road and arrested its founder Ross Ulbricht, White took on the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0. Before that, he had offered money laundering services under the handle “StExo.” Along with another user called Defcon, who was later revealed to be former SpaceX employee Blake Benthall, White ran the second iteration of Silk Road. Multiple staff members from the original site joined as well, including one who turned out to be an undercover agent. White “was the boss,” Paul Chowles, a National Crime Agency investigator, previously told me.

“By nature, I'm a sysadmin—I didn't really enjoy or specialise in web design,” White said in a recent email to 404 Media. “The decision was made that he [Benthall] would take on most of the work for rebuilding the website, and I would focus more on marketing, media management, setting policies, staff management and generally steadying the ship.”

Security Officer Comments:
White was arrested in November 2014, but his case was kept largely underwraps at the time due to strict court reporting restrictions in the UK. When authorities raided his Liverpool flat, they discovered a laptop under his bed which contained 464 category A indecent images of children, the Liverpool Echo reported. Category A images are classified as the most severe. White had also told a Silk Road 2.0 administrator he wanted to set up a website for pedophiles “because there is money to be made from these people.” White claimed in an email to 404 Media that he was playing “devil's advocate” to Benthall in these discussions.

White also claimed the discovered child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) was related to a hosting service he was running. “Unfortunately, one person who used the service decided to put a load of CSAM on there. The VPS was shut down, I didn't offer him another one after that, and like an idiot I forgot the back-ups were on my laptop because I was too busy setting up SR2 [Silk Road 2.0],” he wrote in an email.

White said it was the following year that he started communicating with Best. At the time, White was using the handle The Cthulhu for various data archiving and leaking projects. “Emma was fantastic at diving into data and joining the dots, whereas I tended to forge connections into the hacktivist groups quite well,” White said.

Discussions started around creating a new transparency platform, especially as more people became critical of Wikileaks’ approach. Best and White talked “about the failings of the transparency ecosystem that existed then. WikiLeaks had lost a great deal of trust, information had begun to disappear. We agreed that at the moment there weren't sufficient leak platforms or archives, and Thomas pointed out that it was a matter of time before something new came along and needed a safe home,” Best said.

Eventually, DDoSecrets launched in late 2018. Best told 404 Media that White’s characterization as a co-founder is accurate.

“I learned some hard lessons from SR [Silk Road] about who to trust. Motivation was everything,” White added.

When launching DDoSecrets, White focused on a number of technical tasks, he said. Registering the domain, setting up the server, generating encryption keys. Regarding the domain, White said he suspects law enforcement and intelligence agencies knew of his involvement: “the intention was never to hide it from them anyway—the original [DDoSecrets] server was registered in my name.”

Regarding White’s charges, Best said “Everyone in DDoSecerts was made aware of it, and the only reason for not speaking about it publicly was OPSEC and to prevent legal repercussions against Thomas for legitimate work on a transparency project. When we concluded that risk had become negligible, we decided to let it be known.” Lorax Horne, an editor for DDoSecrets, said they learned of White’s charges when they got involved in DDoSecrets in 2019. “Emma disclosed them to everyone who was then involved,” Horne said.

Around this time, I published an in depth profile of Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0, based on extensive interviews with the dark web drug kingpin. At the time and since, I have refused to comment on the identity of that source. White has now agreed to acknowledge he was the person I profiled in that article.

In 2019, White was sentenced to five years and four months after he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, and making indecent images of children. White says he hasn’t been working on DDoSecrets at all while incarcerated.

Link(s):
https://www.404media.co/co-founder-of-ddosecrets-was-dark-web-drug-kingpin/