Comment by conductor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conductor | Hacker News Reader

So, DPR was identified because Ross made really amateur level mistakes for a man in his position:

1. Was using the same pseudonym in several places.

2. Was advertising the Silk Road. He asked people what do they think about it: "Let me know what you guys think." [1, page 25] - this just suggests that he is connected with it.

3. Used his name (then changed to the same pseudonym he was using in other places) to ask a question about how to connect to Tor using Curl in PHP. He just could ask how to connect to a SOCKS5 server using Curl in PHP whatsoever avoiding mentioning the Tor.

4. Was not using Tor in public WiFi network at cafe.

5. Was giving interviews, long interviews. FBI could correlate his style of writing with what he writes under his own identity.

6. The most grave mistake: he posted his personal Gmail account using his pseudonym (which he was using to advertise the Silk Road) in the Forum asking for a "IT pro in the Bitcoin community" [1, page 26].

[1] - http://cryptome.org/2013/10/fbi-silk-road.pdf

Number 3 was huge because the stackoverflow answer was used on the site nearly as-is:

Based on forensic analysis of the Silk Road Web Server, I know that the computer code ... includes a customized PHP strip based on 'curl' that is functionally very similar to the computer code described in Ulbricht's posting on Stack Overflow, and includes several lines of code that are identical to lines of code quoted in the posting.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road...

That code-identicality alone doesn't necessarily mean much: lots of people come later and will use the public question/answer code in their own work. (Only together with the other pseudonym correlations, it means more.)

Right, it wasn't just the fact that the code was the same; it was that he initially posted those questions under his real name.

Absolutely none of this is evidence of his guilt, it's all just very loose circumstantial suggestion. If this is all it takes to convince people of someone's guilt in a huge criminal case, we're all doomed.

Circumstantial evidence has sometimes been enough for "beyond a reasonable doubt" in many cases over the past hundred years. I guess we were doomed since before then?

"Probable cause" is all you need for a warrant. With the warrant you secure the "beyond any reasonable doubt" evidence.

No, the financial transactions will prove his guilt. This is for finding him in the first place and getting the necessary warrants. Also, note that this evidence is for the indictment, which is what it takes to bring the charge, not a full statement of the case at trial.

He certainly did make mistakes. I wonder if the next Silk Road will be open sourced? If it is, and its author becomes hors de combat, the one after him will have an easier base from which to start.

The actual site and system seems rather simple. The other Tor merchant sites I've seen look much better than SR. The real issue is trust (both in the site and vendors), and open source won't help there.

> The actual site and system seems rather simple

I daresay it is. But even a simple web site hakes time and effort to build. And getting security right is always non-trivial.

> The other Tor merchant sites I've seen look much better than SR

You may well be right; I've never used any of them.

> open source won't help there.

If building a new darknet ecommerce site was a simple as:

    sudo apt-get install silk-road

don't you think there'd be more of them? The lower the barriers to entry, the sooner someone will build something the authorities can't shut down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com