Trailer for Silk Street.
Within the final decade or so of Ars, two pre-COVID information tales stand out to me because the “largest”—the type of stuff that captivates a common viewers within the second and can appeal to the eyes of Hollywood finally. The primary one occurred again in 2013, when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked categorised paperwork that confirmed the US had a secret surveillance program up and operating that even monitored US residents. To make the saga even juicier, Snowden finally needed to flee the nation for worry of authorized retribution.
The second story largely unfolded in that very same yr. A younger libertarian named Ross Ulbricht contemplated why in the US you could not buy medicine freely and brazenly on the Web via some type of one-stop repository like Amazon. Finally, his Silk Street web site sprang up and captivated the world… till federal authorities lastly closed in on Ulbricht in a San Francisco library in October 2013. The arrest led to an eye-opening trial and a life sentence for the pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts.
Snowden’s story finally received the Hollywood therapy, by way of the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour in 2014 and a fictionalized account starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt two years later. And although it took a bit longer (except we’re counting a made-for-TV documentary), the Silk Street odyssey has lastly made its function movie debut, too.
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