Actually, an IRS agent found Google search results that tied him to Silk Road:
"That search led him to a thread on bitcointalk.org called 'A Heroin Store.' One of the posts there was from a user named 'altoid' who gave instructions on how to access Silk Road.
'You guys have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?' altoid wrote. 'It’s kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com. I don’t think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff. They basically use bitcoin and tor to broker anonymous transactions.'
Once Alford had the username, the rest was as simple as clicking around. In a separate thread, altoid posted that he was looking for an IT pro. 'If interested, please send your answers to the following questions to rossulbricht at gmail dot com.'
That’s all Alford needed to get a warrant to gain access to that email. By comparing the data found in the email to the data found on Ulbricht’s laptop, the government has created an even more convincing argument that Ross Ulbricht is, in fact, Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts."
It's not legal to spy on citizens. Assuming the NSA (and likely not the FBI) held illegally seized data, it still wouldn't be admissible as evidence in a trial.
This was countered, above, in the states own motion.
Basically, 1.) that's not how they did that, 2.) even if it was, it wasn't illegal, as they did not know at the time of the search that the server belonged to a citizen and 3.) Ulbricbht hasn't even admitted the server was his so how could we have violated his rights if the server didn't belong to him in the first place?
People keep wanting to insist the government did something illegal here, but as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that speaks to that.
It actually requires neither. As many lawyers have pointed out in various threads, the defense team could have claimed the server was Ulbricht's property before trial, and had the motion failed, denied so during trial - so long as he never testified.
I suppose it is slightly weird, but it kinda makes sense from a "lawyered!" perspective.
He was possibly the first person to ever post about Silk Road. A few months later, that same user is recruiting for a "lead developer in a venture backed bitcoin startup company" conveniently avoiding specifics. If you recall, they also seized a package sent to Ulbricht containing nine fake IDs with different names in July 2013 (he was arrested three months later). Cumulatively, that's probably enough to merit suspicion/the issuance of a warrant to search his e-mail.
There is literally nothing unusual about "conveniently avoiding specifics" in a tech recruiting post. It's not even a tiny bit suspicious.
He may or may not have been the first to post about Silk Road on Bitcointalk, or anywhere for that matter, but that seems awfully thin ground for getting a warrant.
I'm surprised HN seems to be in favor of such action.
If someone is the first to post about a particular site specializing in illegal transactions, and it's publicly determinable that they were, before that, soliciting for developers familiar with the kind of infrastructure the site would need, and, that person also is the intended recipient of a package of false identity documents, and...
...things add up and produce enough cause to get a warrant. Given the analysis from opsec people, it's not surprising that there was eventually a warrant and an arrest and a trial; given that he was leaking so much information about who he was and what he was doing, the surprising thing is that the feds didn't catch him even sooner.
> He made the post mentioning Silk Road on Jan 29, 2011.
which was apparently the first mention. So, as far as the agent could tell, this was the first person to mention Silk Road on the open Internet. That's what's reasonable.
(Also, from a pure Bayesian POV, the fact that it nailed DPR on the very first try goes a lot towards demonstrating its relevance. NB: this parenthetical is not a legal argument; otherwise you could justify any search that turns up evidence.)
Along these lines, someone once tried to convince me that governments should be allowed to use evidence no matter how they get it. He basically proposed that police could go into someone's house to search without a warrant, but if they didn't find anything then the police could be prosecuted, which makes them only do it if they have a really strong reason to think they'll find something. It was a surprisingly good argument for something that many people would instinctively flinch away from.
Anyway, my answer was that if the police really had such strong suspicion of someone and they were right, they've got to have enough to get a warrant anyway, which is similar to what you're saying.
Also if they expected to face prosecution were they not to find anything, you might expect them to often 'find' things whether they were there or not...
To you, there might be "literally nothing" suspicious about it, but when that user's previous post on the forum discussed Silk Road, likely for the first time ever, a law enforcement officer, having few leads to go on, might feel inclined to investigate that individual further. Again, there's also the tiny detail about a package with nine fake IDs being sent to Ulbricht in July 2013. DHS agents confronted him about it around that time: "The photos also matched his Texas driving license, which the DHS investigators asked to see. All of this happened around the same time that Dread Pirate Roberts was discussing obtaining fake IDs on Silk Road, the FBI affidavit said. The FBI put the final piece of the puzzle in place by pulling Ulbricht's Texas driving license and comparing it with the license that Ulbricht showed the DHS. The numbers matched. At this point, it must have considered that it had enough evidence." http://www.coindesk.com/ross-ulbrichts-silk-road-head-smacki...
You can't just look at the individual bits of evidence in isolation to determine whether there was probable cause, you have to look at it all together.
There's nothing suspicious about the recruitment ost, but it does contain his contact details. There is somethin gsuspicious about the 'have you heard about this great new site' post - a classic come-on - but it lacks identifying information about the author. One post provides the probable cause, the other supplies information about where to pursue further information.
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.
He sure did it awful quickly, the site also credited "- Silk Road Staff" at the bottom of the message. Then there's downtime messages from time to time, it seems rather unlikely that MK is DPR but there very well might be something behind this. The domain wasn't registered to John Smith, it was registered in the name of a company that Mark Karpeles owns and pointing to Mark Karpeles name servers.
But their argument is that Ulbricht founded Silk Road of his own accord, then handed it to the "real DPR" months later. (Only to have it handed back to him just in time to be arrested!)
That's really bad reasoning on the part of the investigators. Registering a .org domain name similar to the name of your secret underground site is a stupid and completely pointless thing to do.
Both Ulbricht and Karpales are known for doing stupid and pointless things, though (hiring fake hitmen with hilarious emails, and writing ssh servers in php, respectively).
I completely relate to what you're saying, and I'm sure a lot of us here are burdened by the painful feelings you've expressed. Thank you for sharing. I think the primary cause is the 24/7 news cycle bombarding us incessantly with negative and depressing information. It's extremely unpleasant to bear, particularly when you're sensitive or vulnerable to the sufferings of humanity. I've found it's best to take vacations from it all--to tune it out completely for intervals--and focus entirely on work or the things you love. If you perchance have trouble avoiding news sites or social networks, as I have in the past, I've found an extension like StayFocusd to be really helpful (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...)
Thanks for the reply, I do agree its the negativity everywhere being thrown at us, it really takes a toll on people who really care about these things.
I already do avoid news sites and news papers when possible, thanks for the advice and the extension recommendation
Looks like many servers are still using an earlier version of Mailman that included a "security feature" of storing passwords in plain-text and e-mailing them to you in a welcome message after you confirm a subscription. See https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
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edit: A new tweet referencing the article: "WikiLeaks release said CIA managed to bypass encryption in mobile apps by compromising the entire phone"