[tor-talk] Silk Road taken down by FBI

[mirimir]

On 10/04/2013 12:44 AM, shadowOps07 wrote:

> Yeah, but the country doesn't have the release the log to the fascist
> police state just because "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty" is in place.
> They have the MORAL obligation to disregard the treaty. US is in no
> position to demand obligations from other countries. Rather, MLAT is a
> farce.

Well, then, he picked the wrong country for his VPN provider. He also
picked the wrong country for his hosting provider. And he didn't keep
himself anonymous enough from either one.

If we're going to be throwing blame around, I think that Mr. Ulbricht
deserves most of it. In my opinion, he misled perhaps a million people
into using his site. One could consider them fools, of course. They
provided names and addresses to drug dealers, and eventually to the FBI.
But is it fair to expect users to understand the technical and
operational challenges involved? I don't think so.

But, as much as I enjoy debating this, it has nothing to do with Tor ;)

> On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 7:58 PM, mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/03/2013 11:33 PM, shadowOps07 wrote:
>>
>>> Was the VPN located in the US? If not, then FBI doesn't have any
>>> jurisdiction outside of US.
>>
>> On p. 14 of UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf, there's reference to a
>> "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty".
>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 6:54 PM, Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 08:58:57PM +0000, mirimir wrote:
>>>>> So they did have the server before they knew who he was.
>>>>
>>>> Careful there -- while I assume they didn't lie in their affidavit, it's
>>>> quite reasonable to assume that they investigated all sorts of things,
>>>> all sorts of ways, and then afterwards chose to write down exactly the
>>>> set of facts that when lined up in the correct order makes it look like
>>>> a clean solid case.
>>>>
>>>> It's a slippery slope from there to 'parallel construction', but I think
>>>> it's standard practice to start with some leads and use them to find
>>>> more solid facts, and it's also standard practice to not mention all
>>>> your leads in your affidavit.
>>>>
>>>> To be more concrete, their job here is to link the guy to the website.
>>>> So if they had a pretty good idea of who the guy was, but not enough
>>>> evidence to bust him, it makes sense to me that they would go find one
>>>> of the servers, collect all the evidence they can from it, and hope
>>>> to find something specific that points back at the guy. And who knows,
>>>> maybe they did that several times before they found something they liked
>>>> enough to build a case from it.
>>>>
>>>> Your theory that "he was sold out by one of his administrators" also
>>>> fits fine here -- the administrators pointed to the guy but then they
>>>> needed to build a solid-looking case.
>>>>
>>>>> We also knew
>>>>> that he was sold out by his VPN provider. Hopefully, the identity of
>>>>> that VPN provider will come out soon.
>>>>
>>>> Why? So everybody can abandon that VPN and move to a different one that
>>>> also responds to subpoenas but hasn't been written about in a
>> high-profile
>>>> court case yet? :)
>>>>
>>>> --Roger
>>>>
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