
Feds say Silk Road suspect’s computer shows he (thought he) plotted 6 murders - llambda
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/feds-say-silk-road-suspects-computer-shows-he-thought-he-plotted-6-murders/
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shill
The link from his bookmarks bar.

[http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/why-hackers-
should-...](http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/why-hackers-should-be-
afraid-of-how-they-write-20130116-2csdo.html)

~~~
epynonymous
leet!

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nwh
He kept a written journal of this stuff? Truly must not have expected to be
caught, I can't imagine what world he was in inside his head to have believed
that. Given the status of the website, it was only going to be a matter of
time.

Fairly convincing looking fake Australian license though, wish there was a
better photo of it.

~~~
Pheno
I can't get over how he wasn't using full disk encryption.

~~~
anaphor
The way I see it there are a few possibilities:

1) He isn't the real DPR

2) He is the real DPR, but he's extremely inept and didn't get caught before
due to dumb luck

3) He isn't the original DPR, but an inept person who took over to take the
fall for the original DPR

4) He wanted to get caught?

~~~
nwh
There's nothing to suggest that anybody apart from him ever ran the site. The
screw ups on StackOverflow and Bitcointalk point to him and nobody else. He's
just someone who totally didn't prepare for his adversaries, who ultimately
didn't need to go to any great lengths to unmask him. I'm surprised nobody in
the general public managed to do it, quite honestly.

Just not as clever as he thought he was being, essentially.

~~~
hmsimha
> The screw ups on StackOverflow and Bitcointalk point to him and nobody else.

Ah, so the original DPR is a true master then :P

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mpyne
I'm extremely interested in who this 'redandwhite' guy is. It's still unclear
if the murders even occurred, but if no one got killed then this might be one
of the most effective cons (against DPR) I've ever seen.

~~~
coldtea
Isn't it obvious it was the friendlychemist?

friendlychemist: "Hey, I need $500.000 I owe to some bad guys. Give it to me
or I'll expose you."

silkroadguy: "Sure, can you get me in contact with the guys that you owe money
to, first?"

(He ...really expects somebody that owes money to bad guys will give their
address to someone he tries to blackmail????)

"redandwhite": "Hello, I'm the guy friendlychemist owes money to. Want me to
kill him? I can do it for, say, $500.000".

silkroadguy: "Seems legit. Go ahead".

"readandwhite": "Done! Here's a photo of me^H^H him dead."

silkroadguy: "Great! Here's the money!".

(time passes)

"readandwhite": "Hey, I found somebody else who steals from you. Four of them?
Want me to kill 'em? Wire some bitcoins".

silkroadguy: "Sure, wiring!".

I mean, is he dumb or what?

~~~
mpyne
That does seem the most likely explanation, yes.

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brianpgordon
> “Who he’s been portrayed as is so not him, it’s absurd,” Lyn Ulbricht told
> Forbes. “He’s one of the best people I know.”

Said every mother ever.

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scenicBulimic
So, as an armchair juror, 3 enourmous questions spring to mind:

1\. Why would a man, who allegedly built an extremely profitable empire using
robust cryptographic software, not have enough expertise to employ powerful
encypted countermeasures on his personal machine? Why wasn't his hard drive
encrypted? Why were there no plans to erase and destroy data at a moment's
notice, in the event that he gets arrested? Are we expected to believe that
his meticulous use of crypto-currency and onion routing go hand in hand with
maintaining a silly plain text journal of his comings and goings? That he was
simply naive to the idea that his local storage devices should not be a
meticulously guarded has his network presence?

2\. Are screenshots honestly a valid form of evidence? Consider that there's a
distinct lack of any sort of chain-of-custody for such evidence, and the fact
that it's trivial to fabricate screenshots, why should I believe that any give
screenshot can be regarded as authentic evidence?

3\. Screenshots aside, how can we honestly buy into any digital evidence
presented to us, when there's no assured certainty to its integrity? Consider
that one cannot even trust plaintext HTTP data to be safe from corruption by
MITM attacks. Given that large quantities of digital evidence can be
manufactured programatically, with relative ease, given the proper expertise,
how are we to trust a large volume of digital data as anything more than
artificially produced bits and bytes spat out by a machine? Logs? Logs, you
say? Who maintained these logs? What program created these logs? And if I can
possibly capture and replay a remote desktop session, doesn't it stand to
reason that I might be able to spice things up, and insert salacious tidbits,
and then programatically produce screenshots at will? So what if they have
gigabytes of data demonstrating such and such? What is the true measure of
authenticity when confronted by the fact that it's still just faceless bytes
sitting on a disk?

~~~
ceejayoz
The FBI appears to have seized a very large number of Bitcoins, posed as
hitmen killing someone on his behalf, and they've got a wide variety of
physical evidence like the fake IDs shown.

I doubt they needed to take the risky step of faking extra evidence here.

~~~
scenicBulimic
I'll readily entertain the possibility of tangible artifacts over some
bytestream any old day of the week. If he's busted with a bunch of fake IDs on
his person, I'd consider that to be evidence proper.

But anything transpiring in the netherworld of the internet needs to be taken
with a grain of salt, especially when no real-world violence erupted.

It may be possible that this is the guy. The evidence that rings truest in my
mind is that there was a real world cause-and-effect chain of events that
occured immediately after his arrest. The shit hit the fan, and the site went
down. Clearly, the real world arrest had a direct influence on the
availability of the website.

But given the DEA's predilection for parallel construction, and the NSA's
predilection for electronic dragnets, can we take the narrative of how they
came to bust the Ulbricht at face value? Even if he was breaking the law, was
he apprehended lawfully? Did they come into possession of this digital
evidence in a lawful manner?

If Ulbricht gets off on a technicality for the crime he's charged with, I
wouldn't lose sleep over it. He's being charged with the hypothetical
thoughtcrime of killing an internet persona (or two). To me, that feels like a
technicality to begin with.

If the people he killed never existed to begin with, then how can we be sure
that the evidence that supports these ideas was collected and not crafted?

He may be the real deal, the guy himself, responsible for The Silk Road. But
if you're going to put him away with that in mind, justice is not served
unless he's charged with the crime he's being punished for, and justified by
the true story of how they nailed him. I want to know what was truly so evil
about The Silk Road, such that it might necessitate some sneaky peaky, in
order to lock up the man responsible for it.

Maybe they achieve their goal of unmasking him, through this direct
relationship of arrest and then site outage, but does that mean we have to
swallow this murder-for-hire wrap too, no matter how flimsy it feels?

~~~
ceejayoz
> If Ulbricht gets off on a technicality for the crime he's charged with, I
> wouldn't lose sleep over it. He's being charged with the hypothetical
> thoughtcrime of killing an internet persona (or two). To me, that feels like
> a technicality to begin with.

I'm sorry, we're considering hiring a hitman and paying them large amounts of
money for what you believe to be a successful torture and execution as a
_thought crime_ now?!

~~~
scenicBulimic
A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied
to a real world person. He didn't have the capacity to visit this person in
real life. He couldn't have possibly been sure whether it was a real person or
not. He never met them, he never shook their hand, he couldn't have been sure
of where they lived, because they didn't exist to begin with.

Another screen name claims to have the ability to reach out and eliminate the
existence of this bothersome screen name. The only catch is that in order to
have one user id destroy another user id, you have to part ways with an
imaginary tally of digital crypto-currency.

This is not a case of high school classmates cyberbullying one another until
one commits suicide. There was never any real world interaction, nor could
there have been, because the target of the murder was always hypothetical. He
couldn't have known for sure who was responsible for ANY of the screen names.

In contrast, consider cyber bullying, where a classmate knows for a fact that
a given login assuredly represents a person they see everyday during class at
school, and which point they begin a campaign of deliberate harassment and
psychological warfare. One scenario involves verifiable individuals known to
eachother in the real world, and the other scenario (the silk road hit) does
not.

The drug trade and the bitcoin exchange for real money may portend that his
intent to defend the black market network could _potentially_ turn violent,
and that perhaps he was of a mindset _prone_ to acting as an accessory before
the fact and an accomplice to murder, but nevertheless, I still question the
reality of this sting operation, and what it may have actually represented to
Ulbricht himself, in situ. Did he honestly think anyone was getting killed for
bitcoins, if he never met them face to face? How can we know for sure?

~~~
coldtea
> _A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be
> tied to a real world person. He didn 't have the capacity to visit this
> person in real life. He couldn't have possibly been sure whether it was a
> real person or not. He never met them, he never shook their hand, he
> couldn't have been sure of where they lived, because they didn't exist to
> begin with._

You don't pay $500000 to kill a "sock-puppet".

Besides, the whole premise is BS, based on "internet isn't real life". As if
he arranged a kill on Second Life or something!

Well, newsflash, the internet is just a method of communication, like snail
mail and talking is. And it's connecting very much with the physical world.
When I order something from Amazon, it arrives on my doorstep, physically, and
4-5 people have worked on getting that to me.

~~~
scenicBulimic
Yeah, I get it. He ran a drug ring. A mail order drug ring on the internet,
with real world consequences. I get that.

What I'm saying is this: There was no murder-for-hire skull duggery, until the
sting provoked him into it. There were no murderous provocations without
federal law enforcement in the picture, conflating the whole scenario with
their invented personas that didn't exist.

That's the reality of what happened here.

They explicitly state that they taunted and coerced him, with fictitious sock
puppetry. I'm not inventing that. That really happened.

So we're being asked (as internet jurors) to convict this guy on what he
_might have done_ if placed in a similar situation by real people. We're asked
to throw him in jail because _maybe he would have_ done something like this,
eventually.

Except I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that he belived he was
dealing with more than one person on the internet. He may have suspected that
this was all an elaborate con game, architected by a single entity, and if he
did suspect that, he'd have been right. Except that the single entity in this
case was the FBI.

And bitcoin? $500,000 in _bitcoin_? First of all, that's a drop in the bucket
compared to the bitcoin wallet he allegedly had at his command. But really,
any exchange rate you'd like to apply here is as turbulent, and volatile, and
imaginary as whatever we pretend bitcoin is worth in general. It's a virtual
currency people are still grappling with. The concept of bitcoin wealth is as
absurd as internet fame. Yeah it seems to have real world effects, but how
long will it last, and do we take it at face value? If he went from nothing to
multi-millionairre _IN BITCOIN ONLY_ , almost over night, is that real money?
Did he try to give real money to a real internet hitman?

The federal government acknowleges bitcoin's existence, but even they don't
acknowlege it as a true currency. So when you boil it down, it's more like he
committed some hypothetical crime for $500,000 in semi-precious baseball
cards, or bottle caps or pogs. Bitcoin is regarded as a collector's item at
the moment, and little more. You could say he did it for $500,000 in ham
sandwiches, and you wouldn't be far off the mark. Maybe it's 7,500 KG of ham
sandwiches? Are they fresh ham sandwiches, stored in a refrigerator? Maybe
they're moldy ham sandwiches, _but what if they 're THE VERY HAM SANDWICHES
THAT CHOKED MAMA CASS TO DEATH???_

Maybe it's still quid pro quo, no matter how you look at it, but when you
bandy about dollar amounts, don't pretend like that's an objective value.

------
veb
From the comments (Silk Road Tales)
[http://antilop.cc/sr/](http://antilop.cc/sr/)

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epynonymous
most of the comments tend to say that he was stupid, but in some respects, i
think the guy was quite bold and somewhat intelligent if he was able to roll
something up this large over that long of a time period even if what he was
doing was highly illegal. sure he could have been smarter about some things,
but honestly, the fact that he got this far, this fast means that he was an
enterprising individual, just on the wrong track.

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Apane
Seems like a scum bag to me.

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npb32
This is like a movie

