Right, so the whole 'probable cause' is built on one post about Silk Road. As I say, that seems an awfully thin reason to go digging in someone's email.
I couldn't care less one way or the other about Ulbricht or Silk Road. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as they say.
But I do think it's disturbing one moderately suspicious post is enough to have your privacy violated.
I don't disagree, but given the highly illegal nature of the business (whether or not it ought to be legal is a separate, political question; I'd say yes, but as the law stands something like silk Road is clearly not legit), and Ulbricht's post being the social origin of public awareness, how is it not suspicious? If you can't find any earlier sign of its existence, it's reasonable* to suspect the social origin coincides with the operational origin. Remember he also posted (under the same username, altoid) to the Shroomery (a website dedicated to the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms) and set up a wordpress page with the basics of access and an invitation to come and sell drugs through there: http://web.archive.org/web/20110204025853/http://silkroad420...
I would imagine the FBI asked Wordpress for their logged data about that, which could have provided them with additional circumstantial evidence.
* in the legal sense of being arguable via logic, as opposed to an inexplicable decision based on intuition or unthinking application of dogma.
I couldn't care less one way or the other about Ulbricht or Silk Road. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as they say.
But I do think it's disturbing one moderately suspicious post is enough to have your privacy violated.