Guns, drugs, murder, sting arrests—it's all there in the story of the Silk Road. The new documentary Deep Web, out today on Vimeo and iTunes, doesn't skimp on the good stuff. Picture hackers squatting in central London while sending out manifestos over stolen Wi-Fi, and corrupt cops stealing Bitcoins.

The Silk Road was an online marketplace used primarily for illegal drugs—high-test cannabis, but also heroin, MDMA, and crystal methamphetamine. It started in the summer of 2011 because of two tools: Tor and Bitcoin. Used together, they allowed for anonymous, untraceable transactions, and for hacker dissidents' libertarian ideals to be realized in the extreme.

Here's how it worked. Tor is software that allows users to access internet networks that users can anonymously visit and anonymously host. Normally, when you visit a site likePopularmechanics.com, the servers hosting that site (and any entity keeping an eye on that server's traffic) can see where the users are coming from and what's being exchanged. Using Tor, the originating user's data gets encrypted, then sent through a spread of five to ten or more proxy servers. That means it's hard as hell to find the origin of the signal since the last relay server is the only one visible when it connects to the ultimate destination. (For further explanation, this video is a good primer.)

Then there's Bitcoin, an online currency. Unlike Facebook tokens or PayPal, there's no central entity keeping a ledger of the values exchanged between Bitcoin users. There's no central reserve, not even a central server, because transactions are tracked peer-to-peer. The encrypted exchanges mean there's no regulation except for user reviews, eBay style.

At the center of this controversial system and all the libertarian ideas it represents, is Ross Ulbricht, who was in his late 20s when all of this began. He was the founder of the marketplace, and is assumed to be the human behind the username Dread Pirate Roberts (as the doc explains, the name comes from from The Princess Bride). Senator Chuck Schumer, who was the vocal leader of goverment efforts to shut down the Silk Road, started the campaign that led to government task forces hunting for Ulbricht. Then, in October 2013, undercover agents traced him to a library in San Francisco, and arrested him.

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Mentions of Ulbricht (or, more likely, another user assuming the Dread Pirate Roberts moniker) ordering torture and murders of Silk Road users lead to a court case that demonized him as a defendant. Watching footage of him, seeing his childhood photos, and listening to his parents be interviewed, it's hard to not feel sad for him, and angry at the prosecution. It gets worse when you hear explanations of document dumps, which left his attorney with little time to prepare for the court date. Beyond Ulbright's specific case, the Silk Road brings up serious questions about the state, privacy, and justice. Neill Franklin, the director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, says, "If Baltimore moved from street corners to online services…Oh my God, do you know how many fewer shootings we would have every year?"

If you're into this so far, I won't spoil the ending (even though it's been news for months) because the film provides great suspense. What's especially important about the result is that it emphasizes how technology always outpaces the judicial system. Specifically, it's hard to figure out how the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) applies to the digital world. You end up inevitably sympathizing with Ulbricht and the cause for which he's martyred, a sentiment familiar to anyone who saw the story of Aaron Schwartz in The Internet's Own Boy. Both subjects' dissent appealing and seriously rebellious, expressive of basic ideas that most of us choose to overlook when we agree to Terms and Conditions. As Cindy Cohn from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says in the movie, "An observed life is not a completely free life."

It's hard to not feel sad for him, and angry at the prosecution.

The director is Alex Winter. That's right, the actor who played Bill in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Oh, and Keanu Reeves narrates. Seriously. That might make this enterprise sound silly, but Winter and the producers did an exceptional job of rounding up not only passionate dissidents but law enforcement officials involved in the case, ultimately presenting a spread of perspectives. It's harder to hate the agent who lured Ulbricht when you see him on screen.

If you want a story of digital crime and punishment in the 2010s, and some background to help demystify these headlines, Deep Web is now available on iTunes and Vimeo.

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