I think that's the most interesting part. Obviously not just everyone would have the knowledge that he would log in as DPR from a coffee shop a few hundred feet from his apartment, but they could still place him as a strong suspect based on his posts as altoid that identify himself and mention Silk Road. Something that even the FBI didn't do.
I tried to use google to find his post as altoid to no avail. Maybe it was taken down.
- Altoid identifies as Ross Ulbricht: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5...
(Looks like the NYT got mixed up about which post was deleted)
Silk road was always going down, one way or another.
https://www.nikcub.com/posts/analyzing-fbi-explanation-silk-...
The FBI argument was 'leaky CAPTCHA'. The defense argument was that the application was hacked. The most likely scenario is an info leak or debug page as Ross was known to live edit/debug the application.
This evidence wasn't tested in court on 4th amendment grounds since the defense didn't demonstrate ownership of the server: