Watch: Ross Ulbricht’s Mom Goes on the Record in Silk Road Doc Deep Web

Barring a last-minute plea deal, the trail of Ross Ulbricht—the man accused of running the online drug market Silk Road—begins tomorrow. For those interested in crime and privacy on the Internet, it could be one of the most important cases ever to go before a jury.

It’s also the subject of the upcoming film Deep Web, a crowdfunded documentary from Alex Winter, who previously chronicled the rise and fall of Napster in Downloaded. Like Ulbricht’s case, Deep Web has the potential to shine a light into the shadows of the Internet to show exactly what our rights could or should be in the largely anonymous and shrouded parts of the web.

“Some may argue that this is an exceptional case, involving drugs and dark corners of the Internet and is not relevant to the rights of the average citizen,” Winter says. “But the Silk Road case cannot be so easily dismissed.”

One of the major issues of the case against Ulbricht has been how, exactly, the FBI found the server that hosted the web site itself. The defense contended in pre-trial that if the government hacked into the Silk Road without a warrant to find it, Ulbricht’s Fourth Amendment rights could’ve been violated. The judge in the case threw out that argument—ruling that even if the FBI did hack the server, Ulbricht hadn’t proven the server was his in the first place. The Fourth Amendment issue, however, could come up again during the trial or in an appeal.

“The question of how the Feds found the Silk Road servers is a core issue at the heart of this case and any future cases involving the Dark Net, Tor, and beyond into all of our rights online,” Winter says. “As for the rest of us, the dismissal of the discussion around this search and seizure of private data has huge implications; setting a dangerous precedent moving forward in the digital age.”

Check out a Deep Web clip of Ulbricht’s mother, Lyn Ulbricht, and others—including WIRED’s Andy Greenberg—discussing the importance of the Fourth Amendment issue to the Silk Road case above. The documentary will air on Epix later this year.