Alright, well, everyone, good morning.
00:04
So I’m Carl Miller,
00:06
and I spent years watching people
trying to have someone murdered.
00:08
They thought they were doing it in secret,
00:16
but they weren't.
00:19
So the year was 2020.
00:21
COVID had descended
00:24
and just like everyone else,
I was spending a lot of time online.
00:26
But I was going on a bit of the internet
00:30
that I think probably fewer people here
have actually been on:
00:32
the darknet.
00:35
A bit of the internet that,
thanks to clever technology encryption,
00:36
basically ensures your anonymity.
00:40
And rumors have swirled
around the darknet for years
00:42
that you could buy anything
on the darknet.
00:46
That you could buy drugs,
00:48
you could buy guns,
that you could buy uranium.
00:50
And also that you can buy murder,
00:53
on websites like this.
00:57
This is what the website looked like
01:00
when I first laid eyes on it
all those years ago.
01:01
I mean, it looks like
a website from the 1990s.
01:05
It looks like someone trying
to make clip art as scary as possible.
01:07
But the offer that the website
makes is a serious one.
01:12
This website is saying,
"Hey, we're the Mafia,
01:15
and now you can deal directly with us
thanks to the darknet."
01:19
So you go on to this part of the internet,
01:22
you load in your alias,
01:24
you type in the message,
01:26
and then it says you can directly transact
to have someone killed.
01:28
And so it was that in 2020,
01:34
a hacker that I was working with,
a man called Chris Monteiro,
01:37
he was looking at this website.
01:41
He was probing it, he was scanning it.
01:44
He was seeing what he could learn.
01:46
And then in discovery, which changed,
01:48
I think, both Chris and my life forever,
01:50
momentously, Chris found
a little vulnerability
01:53
with the way in which this website worked.
01:57
A kind of little technical
gap, if you will,
02:00
that he could kind of,
in a weird way, wiggle through
02:02
and get into the back end of the website.
02:05
And there Chris could see
all the kill orders being placed.
02:09
He could see names, addresses,
pattern-of-life information,
02:14
bitcoin payments
02:19
and all the messages
trying to have someone killed.
02:20
So he phoned me.
02:24
So suddenly these were flying in.
02:27
These are, by the way,
the literal actual kill orders
02:29
we're intercepting on the site.
02:32
I'm not mocking up anything today.
02:33
These are all real.
02:35
So suddenly we were seeing
02:36
that there was a hit to kill
someone in Amsterdam.
02:37
"A simple, easy person,
but high risk of putting me in jail."
02:40
They paid almost 2,000 dollars.
02:43
There was a hit to kill someone
in Paris for 1,000 dollars.
02:45
A person that needs to go away,
02:47
her apartment needs to be set on fire.
02:49
A large order to kill someone in Slovakia.
02:51
"I need you to take down
one guy," they say.
02:54
14,000 dollars.
02:56
There was an order in Hyderabad, in India.
02:57
There was an order in Berlin
02:59
to kill someone
probably working from home,
03:01
21,000 dollars for that one.
03:03
Now some of these kill orders
were short and curt and clipped.
03:05
Others were long,
03:11
offering lurid justifications
as to why it was the right thing
03:13
that this person had to die.
03:17
And others still, they would log in
almost every day,
03:18
almost providing real-time updates.
03:20
Oh, the target's just left the house.
03:22
This is the car they're driving.
03:24
This is how they're going to get to work.
03:26
But put together,
03:28
we called all of these
orders the “Kill List.”
03:29
It is the single most grotesque,
disgusting, horrible,
03:33
frightening thing I've ever
had to read in my entire life.
03:38
And it was getting longer all the time.
03:42
So I did what any sane person would do.
03:45
I phoned the police.
03:47
And so it was in the middle of COVID,
03:49
the first two strangers
that I'd seen for months
03:51
were two somewhat nervous
uniformed police officers
03:54
from the Metropolitan Police
stood in my kitchen,
03:57
and I laid it all out for them.
04:00
I took them through the website,
04:01
I took them through the hacks,
I showed them the orders,
04:03
we'd drawn this diagram
of how the website worked.
04:05
And they looked at it
04:09
and they looked at me
and they looked at each other
04:11
and they were unfortunately,
genuinely quite concerned I was insane.
04:13
(Laughter)
04:17
And it's a bit of a longer
story, but ultimately,
04:19
the Metropolitan Police decided
04:21
not to take up an active
investigation in the site.
04:23
But we knew we couldn't step away.
04:25
Like these people,
04:27
these people whose images we could see,
04:29
who we knew where they lived,
these people being targeted,
04:31
they might be in terrible danger.
04:33
You know, they might not know
that someone out there,
04:35
on the darknet, was trying
to have them killed.
04:38
So we took a decision.
04:40
Maybe the most difficult
decision I've ever had to make,
04:41
certainly professionally.
04:44
And the decision was that I would go
04:46
and reach the people
on the Kill List myself.
04:48
Directly.
04:51
That I would tell them
that someone was trying to kill them.
04:52
And so we sculpted a script.
04:56
We worked with a psychologist,
04:57
we worked out how we would try
and soften the blow
04:59
of being told that someone
was trying to kill you,
05:01
and I had to also emotionally
brace myself for this, I dreaded it.
05:04
The idea that I was about to throw
this emotional hand grenade
05:08
in someone's life,
it was absolutely awful.
05:11
Anyway, this is the call.
05:13
(Audio) No, I don't want any information.
05:15
I'm trying to give you information.
05:17
Person 1: I don't care.
05:19
No, sir.
05:21
Carl Miller: OK, well,
thanks for your time anyway,
05:23
do give me a phone back
if you'd like more information.
05:25
This is the second call.
05:29
(Call 2) Would we be able to arrange
a time to be able to talk to you
05:32
at greater length about that?
05:36
Person 2: No, no, thank you,
thank you, thank you.
05:37
CM: OK.
05:41
So you don't ...
05:43
(Line breaks)
05:45
Hung up on me.
05:46
I mean, I wasn't an emotional hand grenade
05:48
going off in these people's lives,
05:50
I was awful, I mean, no one believed me.
05:52
You know, I spent a week,
05:54
the story was so unbelievably fantastical.
05:55
Darknet assassins, you know, kill orders,
05:57
that I just kept getting
hung up on for a week.
06:00
So we knew we needed to evolve
our strategy and quickly.
06:02
So we got local journalists on the scene.
06:05
They believed us to go
06:07
and directly meet the people
on the Kill List face to face.
06:09
And the first place we tried to do this
was to reach a woman called Elena,
06:13
here in Zurich,
on the outskirts of Zurich.
06:17
I spoke to the local journalist,
06:20
she drove up to where Elena was living,
06:21
she took a deep breath,
06:24
she got out her car and knocked
on Elena's front door.
06:26
And five minutes
turned into 10, 10 into 15.
06:28
And then at last, after an agonizing wait,
06:31
there was Elena on a Zoom call,
06:34
a woman whose face
I'd only seen on a kill order,
06:36
was there speaking to me.
06:39
And this was the warning I delivered her.
06:41
(Audio) Sorry, there's no easy way
of really saying this.
06:44
We've come across some information
06:47
which might mean that someone
06:48
had put some information
regarding you on the site.
06:50
Elena: I'm actually not really surprised.
06:53
CM: Really? In what way?
06:56
Elena: I'm having an ugly divorce.
06:57
It's going on for about three years now.
07:00
So ...
07:03
And, you know, there's money involved.
07:05
Quite a lot of money.
07:08
And my husband ...
07:09
Actually doesn't want to pay it, so ...
07:14
You know, I'm not really surprised.
07:17
CM: She took it unbelievably well.
07:20
(Laughter)
07:22
Now an important thing to know
is that it wasn’t just messages
07:24
going into the site.
07:28
The shadowy people
running the site were also replying.
07:29
Some of these conversations
would go back and forth
07:32
for weeks or months,
and we could read all of those as well.
07:34
And what we realized
when we were reading all of those
07:37
was that if there were hitmen out there,
07:40
these were the most incompetent hitmen
on the face of the planet.
07:42
They kept losing their weapons,
or they kept getting lost.
07:46
It would build up to the hit,
07:48
and suddenly the target
would be too well protected
07:50
they'd have to pull out,
new teams have to come in,
07:52
and every single time
the price would go up.
07:55
It became really obvious that there
were no shadowy hitmen out there.
07:57
The site had no interest
in killing any of these people.
08:00
They were just trying to extort
as much money as they could
08:03
from the people placing the orders.
08:06
But the people placing the orders,
08:07
they, of course, did not know that.
08:09
They were deadly serious
08:11
when they were trying
to have these people killed.
08:12
And nowhere was that lesson starker
than actually with Elena herself.
08:15
So after we spoke to Elena,
we spoke to the police.
08:19
And sometime after that,
08:21
the Swiss police did arrest her husband.
08:23
And only then did we realize
08:26
that he'd been renting
a secret room next to her flat.
08:28
And in this room there was a flip knife,
08:33
a telescopic baton, a submachine gun,
08:37
a Glock 9mm pistol,
08:40
an AK-47, zip ties, a black bin bag,
08:41
black rubber gloves,
GPS trackers, lock picks.
08:46
That was a lesson to us if we needed it.
08:51
The people writing these orders
could be just as dangerous
08:53
as any darknet hitman.
08:57
So who are these people?
09:00
Who are the people writing these orders?
09:01
Who is paying 2,200 dollars here
09:03
for a five-foot-five male
with blue eyes to be killed?
09:06
Who?
09:08
This is who's doing it.
09:10
She's Kelly Harper.
09:12
Kelly Harper is a go getter,
hospital administrator,
09:14
one-time college sweetheart
of the target of the order,
09:18
who'd been locked with him
in a bitter, years-long custody battle
09:21
that had raged across the courts
and the schools and the hospitals
09:24
of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
09:28
Who's paying 16,000 dollars
to have a couple removed?
09:30
Someone that they don't
"quite see eye-to eye-on something with,"
09:33
which sounds like
the understatement of the century.
09:37
(Laughter)
09:40
This is a man that's done that,
Christopher Pence.
09:42
Forty-year-old Microsoft
IT security technician.
09:44
The biological father of 11 children.
09:49
The adoptive father of five more children.
09:51
A deeply religious man, actually,
09:54
who from a large, solitary house
in a valley in Utah,
09:56
secretly plotted
to have the biological parents
10:01
of his five adoptive children killed.
10:04
This order didn't want
the target actually killed.
10:08
This order wanted the target kidnapped
and forcibly addicted to heroin.
10:10
The orderer went by
the darknet moniker "Scar 215,"
10:16
and they actually laid out
a bonus structure.
10:21
So "an additional 10,000 to permanently
withdraw all court motions.
10:24
An additional 10,000 to keep
her mouth shut and tell no one.
10:28
The husband does not
know this is happening,"
10:31
writes the order.
10:34
Any guesses?
10:36
The husband definitely did know
this was happening.
10:38
This is a husband, Dr. Ronald IlG.
10:40
A neonatologist, a doctor,
10:43
A man who ran a clinic for vulnerable
women with addiction issues.
10:45
A man who went from a poor
rural upbringing in Oregon
10:50
to a senior city clinician,
10:53
and a man obsessed with controlling
all the people in his life,
10:55
especially the women.
10:58
A man so devoid of contrition,
10:59
that after his conviction,
11:01
he's been trying to sell
the book rights to his life
11:03
by describing it as "50 Shades
of Gray" on steroids.
11:05
And it wasn't just here.
11:08
This was a "Sports Direct"
love triangle in Milton Keynes.
11:10
This was a woman trying to kill
her two parents in Canberra, Australia.
11:14
We saw orders in Nevada,
11:18
we saw orders in Tampa,
11:19
we saw orders in Spain,
11:20
we saw orders in Italy.
11:21
We saw orders almost everywhere.
11:23
Now we started working
in secret with the FBI,
11:25
and we were passing all
of our orders to the FBI.
11:29
To give you a sense of the scale,
11:31
over the years that we were doing this,
11:33
we disclosed 175 paid-for
11:35
kill orders around the world.
11:39
Thirty-two arrests so far,
11:42
28 convictions so far,
11:44
around 180 years of prison time
has been sentenced
11:46
as a result of the investigation so far.
11:49
There's probably more to come.
11:51
(Applause)
11:54
Thanks.
11:58
And in case anyone's wondering,
12:01
no, we're not still doing this.
12:03
So there's a whole other
investigation that we did
12:05
into the people running the site.
12:07
It turns out very likely that they were
a group of Romanian cyber criminals.
12:09
And some years ago,
12:13
they were then arrested
in a rash of raids across Romania.
12:15
We were then locked out the site.
12:18
And yet convictions have continued
that we had nothing to do with.
12:20
And that is the only reason
I can stand on this stage today
12:24
and tell you about any of this.
12:27
This is, by the way, not a story
12:29
I really thought I would ever be
on a stage and able to tell anyone about.
12:30
So it's a spectacular moment for me
12:34
to be able to finally, kind of,
talk to the world
12:36
about what we were doing
all those long years ago.
12:38
But where are we left with?
12:40
That's, I think, the final idea
I want to leave us with.
12:42
What does all of this
actually really mean?
12:45
When I first started doing this,
12:48
I thought the kinds of cases
that we were going to be dealing with
12:50
were going to be to do
with maybe organized crime,
12:54
big drug deals gone awry.
12:57
And I think the reality is somewhat
more unsettling than all of that.
12:59
What this website seems to do,
13:05
in the eyes of the orders, at least,
13:08
is to make taking out a hit on someone
13:10
convenient and clean and safe and easy,
13:13
whereas it was once difficult
and dangerous and scary.
13:17
It's essentially lowered the barriers
to entry to ordering an assassination.
13:22
And I think that that brings us
face-to-face with something
13:27
that is quite disconcerting.
13:30
The people on this list, the Kill List,
13:33
and the people that put them there
13:35
are normal people.
13:38
The perpetrators
are basically normal people.
13:40
They have jobs, they have friends.
13:42
They go about living their lives
just like you and I, you know,
13:44
and they were going about
holding all of that down
13:47
basically at the same time
13:50
that they were plotting in secret,
constantly, coldly often,
13:51
to have someone killed.
13:55
I think that if there's one thing
that unites them all,
13:57
it was often intimate partner violence,
by the way, spiraling out of control.
14:00
And I think the one thing
that unites them all
14:04
is a desire for control,
14:06
a need to have it,
14:07
an inability to lose it.
14:09
Control of a thing,
14:10
control of a relationship, of a family,
14:12
and a willingness ultimately,
of course, to kill, to get it back.
14:14
But I think that's where we are.
14:19
And if there's one thing
14:21
that I've come away
from this whole lurid,
14:23
crazy journey, really thinking:
14:26
we might all be just a little bit closer
to being on a kill list
14:28
we might like to think.
14:33
Thanks very much, everyone.
14:35
(Applause)
14:36
歌词与翻译
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重点词汇
开始练习
| 词汇 | 含义 |
|---|---|
|
murder /ˈmɜːrdər/ B2 |
|
|
internet /ˈɪntərnet/ B1 |
|
|
technology /tekˈnɒlədʒi/ B2 |
|
|
anonymity /əˈnɒnɪməti/ C1 |
|
|
rumors /ˈruːmərz/ B1 |
|
|
drugs /drʌɡz/ B1 |
|
|
guns /ɡʌnz/ B1 |
|
|
vulnerability /ˌvʌlnərəˈbɪləti/ C1 |
|
|
scanning /ˈskænɪŋ/ B2 |
|
|
intercepting /ˌɪntərˈseptɪŋ/ B2 |
|
|
orders /ˈɔːrdərz/ B1 |
|
|
payments /ˈpeɪmənts/ B1 |
|
|
intercepting /ˌɪntərˈseptɪŋ/ B2 |
|
|
grotesque /ɡroʊˈtesk/ C1 |
|
|
disgusting /dɪsˈɡʌstɪŋ/ B2 |
|
|
horrible /ˈhɒrəbl/ B2 |
|
|
frightening /ˈfraɪtnɪŋ/ B2 |
|
重点语法结构
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