Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empirefiles. TV.

It's hard to imagine life without the internet, But for a technology so pervasive in our lives,

we know surprisingly little about how it works,

or more importantly, how to protect ourselves in the digital space

in the age of mass surveillance and data mining.

Out of the periphery of most online users,

there's a vast hidden space in the ether used by hacktivists,

drug dealers, and anyone else who wants to remain anonymous.

It's called the Dark Web, a subsect of which filmmaker Alex Winner explores in his new

documentary, Deep Web. The film focuses on the philosophy and trial of the Silk Road, a black

market using Bitcoin cryptocurrency hosted on the Darknet.

Adopted from the famous drug route across Asia, the Silk Road was created by young computer

prodigy Ross Albreit, who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts.

Ross started the Darknet project with the intention to radically confront the power establishment

by circumventing the drug war, but ended up being made a public example of, given a double

life sentence without the possibility of parole.

With such an unprecedented punishment, obviously there was more to the story.

Alex Winner, also an actor and privacy advocate, attended Ross Ulbock's trial.

Winter's a long-time internet activist who has documented government persecution of web pioneers

in multiple films, including downloaded about Napster, relatively free about Bear Brown,

and now Deep Web, exploring the many precedents set by the Silk Road case.

I sat down with Alex Winter to discuss more about the Deep Web, the Silk Road, and why encryption

...