How the Feds Took Down the Silk Road Drug Wonderland
wired.com
wired.com
They did not identify the server by some advanced technical hacks against tor. They used simple basic police methods and arrested an administrator with the use of an undercover agent posing as a drug seller. The administrator purchased a kilo of cocaine, and by doing so, gave his home address to the undercover agent. After interrogation, they gained user credentials that even included DPR's private messages.
This could have easily been a episode script for the wire.
Either (a) the dragnet surveillance isn't doing what it's supposed to or (b) there's another reason for the spying.
And yes, I could be accused of whipping on the NSA no matter what, that in my view, they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. So what? Even if I don't have "standing", and the NSA is doing "legal" things, and the 3 Prong Test for Violations of Privacy hasn't been met, the NSA is still doing things that until recently were considered grossly unamerican, a violation of the principles that made the USA different than commie Russia.
Beyond that, so what? The publicly stated goal of the dragnet surveillance is preventing the crime of terrorism. If "back to the basics" police work found out Dread Pirate Roberts, then why the "anti-terrorism" justification for dragnet surveillance? Dread Pirate Roberts and the Silk Road Web Site actually worked at hiding themselves in a technical, engineering, fact-based manner. From what we read, terrorists do not. At least some of them use "Islamic cyphers" and do other superstitious things in an attempt to conceal themselves.
Why not concentrate on basic police work rather than massive surveillance?
But ultimately, the real reason of intelligence? Look at it this way: the US is sitting at a poker table with Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and so on. Some of the other players might be our friends--Britain and the US have a deal that we'll share each other's winnings and cover each other's losses. But nonetheless, everyone at the table is playing to win. And everyone at the table is trying to sneak a peek at everyone else's cards. This is why the distinction between spying on Americans and spying on foreigners is such a big deal--if you spy on a Japanese industrialist, you get to see some of Japan's cards, and that helps in the game. But there's no reason to spy on your own country because you already can see your own cards. If you're spying on your own people, maybe your intentions are not what you purport them to be.
>If you're spying on your own people, maybe your intentions are not what you purport them to be.
Considering that a non insignificant portion of SIGINT is contracted to companies owned by a handful of private equity firms, I would say that the poker table has more participants who are not nation states who are all vying for their own interests as you say.
Spoken like a true gentleman. Thank you for acknowledging the rhetorical fig leaf that covers the immodesty of dragnet surveillance.
It possible that this wasn't such a cut and dry case of police work, and instead the police were handed leads that came from the NSA work.
An other equally plausible would be that the silk road was a false flag operation, run by a undercover unit. Nothing points in that direction either, but hey, it "could be" right?
From Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...):
> The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. [...]
> After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."
> The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."
> A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.
> "It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.
Given how they talk about parallel construction, it certainly sounds like it's not an uncommon technique, so do you think it's so implausible? I'm not going to say they did or didn't use it, because the simple fact is that I don't know, but given that "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day" that is "decades old, a bedrock concept," it doesn't seem too implausible that they would use it in such a high profile and important case.
But in the mean time, one should not jump to it directly when more simpler explanations are available. Using undercover cops to entrap drug sellers is even older, and even more common method than parallel construction. It also extremely simple and effective.
I would also suspect, that entrapping a first time offender, an 47 year old administrator who sells drugs anonymously on-line from his home, to not be very hard. Especially if the undercover cop could impersonate flawlessly established "trusted" drug sellers by taking over their accounts, as it seems to be in this case.
All points toward parallel construction as an something that might had been, but in this case, is less likely to actually have happened.
One could argue that the entire NSA program was such a conspiracy theory until Snowden.
Spying on political activists and leaders, foreign as well as US citizens.
Spying on diplomats and trade negotiators.
Spying on international commerce.
Doing industry espionage, for the benefit of US companies.
Protecting embarrassing information from being leaked, including covering up crimes.
Targeting political important targets, even those with no significant threat to national security. Megaupload might be an example.
Lastly, the cold war showed NSA the importance of good spy network, and might be maintained for the purpose of maintaining one.
What's interesting is that the article itself noted the difficulty that the LE investigators perceived when running this case.
Normally they get a specific suspect or possible set of suspects in mind and then get specific warrants to find the evidence needed.
In this case the "proof" was right in front of them on the Silk Road front page but they had no suspects (or alternately, an infinite set). So even in this case "simple basic police methods" are insufficient to be mechanically applied; it was a probabilistic investigation, at best, in this case.
With a few less slip-ups by Silk Road users we may very well not be discussing these arrests at all, except perhaps for the Silk Road admin who accepted delivery. But that alone needn't have fingered DPR, he helped tighten the noose himself with his later actions.
And some of the other arrests, like the vendor "NOD" included some rather fortuitous circumstances. Like random inspections over a day or two just happening to pick up multiple packages with the same handwriting.
If Tor was compromised, you can bet they'd take ever measure possible to prevent leaking that information. That'd include making sure they have very solid, plausible, cover stories. But yes, it does look reassuring that all the arrests seem to based off of basic police work and simple mistakes.
Probably for one of the same reasons that anybody buys cocaine. Either because they like cocaine, or (judging by the amount), because they want to make lots of money selling cocaine. Making money on transaction fees doesn't mean you don't want more money.
A year ago I would have said that DEA using "parallel construction" to hide the origin of intelligence was just a paranoid conspiracy. Today I'm not sure I'm being paranoid enough.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
So much for the absolutely inane "it was all a face-saving ruse" theory of the murder-for-hire scheme.
The details on the first "hit" weren't known before, were they?
And it still doesn't invalidate the logic behind it some people were proposing: Given the prior that the USG will do harm to SR users and dealers, is it less harm to kill one person that is going to give information to the USG? (Again, that logic only works if you take the assumption that the USG is acting immorally and will impose a large amount of suffering onto many others.)
Additionally, most people believe lethal force is justified in cases of defense. It's not a huge jump of logic to view these hits as defense.
uh, wat?
The dude was a drug dealer protecting his criminal empire. If I'm robbing a bank and shoot a cop who is going to shoot me, is that also defense? So I should be charged for the original crime but not for killing the cop? Because that's pretty much what your argument sounds like to me.
As to the specific example: If someone is trying to shoot you, no one would wonder why you shoot back. The bank robber would be held responsible because it's his action of robbing the bank that started the whole mess.
If you were sitting peacefully in your home, and someone broke down the door and started firing, you'd be quite justified in returning fire. (Even legally, depending on state, AFAIK.)
Folks sympathetic to DPR are more likely to view him in the second category. He was peacefully minding his own business running a marketplace when someone threatened him, his buyers, and his vendors. These folks are likely to view access to medicines as a moral action, and thus DPR and people involved with SR to be people doing the right thing, despite an oppressive government
Oh and if the state does it legally its not murder.
Defense against risk of death or grievous bodily harm. Which is not at all what's being discussed here, even if we agree to slant the scenario completely from the POV of DPR. But yet you still manage to find that murder might be acceptable here.
Remember that the pure libertarian utopia is supposed to make things better by permitting individual liberty against the oppression of the state. It's not supposed to make things worse (i.e. to easily permit murder-for-convenience), nor to keep things the same (as otherwise why change at all).
And don't be idiotic by trying to equate "kidnapping of my family to be put into slavery" with "oh no this guy might give an accurate statement about myself to someone important!".
It was known from the day that DPR was arrested that there were two "hits" that had been arranged, including many of the details (not all the details described here, but including that a Baltimore-area LE was the undercover agent for one of them).
Federal agents say the use of Tor and Bitcoin were major obstacles for them and that investigating the site was “uncharted territory” that involved a reversal of their usual investigative methods. Instead of starting with probable cause against a specific suspect who is already identified and then obtaining a search warrant to collect more evidence, the investigation of Silk Road involved collecting evidence from the site first and then trying to identify individuals.
Sure it is "uncharted territory" in terms of the technology for maintaining anonymous identities, but shouldn't most investigations start with evidence of the crime and an empirical investigation into who could have committed it, rather than starting with suspects and trying to link them with the crime? Maybe I am naive, but sounds like dodgy criminal investigation methodology to me...
However, given the story told so far, it's actually pretty straightforward to identify the founder of the Silk Road based on a few of his missteps.
This cannot be stated enough.
I'm sure there is occasional abuse, but I'm also sure that most investigations start with an examination of the available evidence to look for leads about who committed the crime.
This might surprise you, but there are very often situations where the police and the public are remarkably aware of the facts of the crimes being committed, but unable to do anything about it. Drugs fall into this category. Everyone knows that "that's where the deals go down" and "that's where they count the money", but that's only because we're not completely stupid. Proving direct culpability, on the other hand, is an entirely different story, as is proving the culpability of people who matter. (Street level dealers, for instance, are pretty interchangeable: one gets shot, you get someone else to do his job. Ain't no thing.)
If you find a druggie on a corner, it's not exactly a stretch of the imagination to recognize he's probably guilty of possession. It's also sort of pointless to prosecute him, since the actual issue you're fighting is lots of people taking particular drugs, which means what you care about are the people managing the city-wide operation. You want evidence of that crime? That's also the druggie on the corner. Half of whom can tell you exactly who it is who manages the city-wide operation. None of which are willing to take the witness stand to accuse him in a court of law. Because he knows that he goes right back to that corner the next day and not only does he no longer have someone bringing him drugs, but he's also get a bullet in his head for the trouble.
If you want a visceral primer, watch The Wire.
That is a complete non sequitur.
Actually, if you really want people to stop using drugs, arresting and imprisoning users is the single most effective technique yet known. It's especially effective against the middle class white population that consumes most drugs in the USA, but it works against poor minorities and addicts, also.
And if you want to stop dealers, arresting and imprisoning retail dealers is the most effective technique. It clears the ones that work in public or sell to strangers out quite quickly.
Arresting the kingpins or traffickers is totally ineffective at reducing drug use or reducing drug availability. If reducing public harm were a priority, the kingpins and traffickers could be ignored. Once the users and retailers are imprisoned, the bosses are out of business, anyway.
And if you do catch the kingpins and traffickers, your efforts are completely ineffectual. There are always more kingpins in line to get rich quickly and easily. Decades of police targeting kingpins has only seen increases in drug availability. In fact, the faster you turn them over, the more violent the whole business becomes.
The reason police agencies target kingpins and traffickers is because the purpose of the war on drugs, from the point of view of police administration, is to seize cash to fund police operations. There is no law enforcement justification for such a policy, merely an agency budgeting justification.
Agreed. I'm not remotely a fan of the war on drugs or its consequences for the prison-industrial complex or the militarization of the police.
The real root is really shitty legislation based on shitty moralizations based on shitty philosophical grounds, the absurd nature of how the police are funded, and the ridiculous political reality of law enforcement offices. It's such a multifaceted problem that I'm unwilling to try to tackle it myself.
But all of this was just a handy example for why wishing for an "empirical investigation" is not necessarily the right way to go about things.
Amazingly prescient for something written in 1979.
Its much less about your politics than it is your credulous insinuation that illegal search and seizure is not taking place because searches "need" probable cause to be effected.
The purpose of parallel construction is to create an artificial heritage for evidence collected without probable cause. This is done by finding probable cause for a search that you will then claim uncovered evidence that was in fact previously discovered during the course of an illegal search.
The lawyer, doing his job, will ask where the evidence came from and what the probable cause was for that search. He will be lied to, and told that the evidence was discovered during the course of the second 'investigation' (the existence of the first investigation, the real investigation, will be kept a secret.)
For a simple example of how this would work, imagine a naive police officer acting on his own: The police officer, spurred on by prejudice, breaks into several homes in a neighborhood looking for evidence of a grow op. He finds one such operation, but since his search was illegal nothing he found can be used in court. He then gets the bright idea to leave the police station an 'anonymous' tip. That tip is then used to justify a search warrant, which is then used to reveal the presence of a grow op.
That situation is trivial and the "anonymous tip" is immediately cause for suspicion. Things get much hairier when you add more participants, and make them reasonably intelligent.
TL;DR: The entire point of parallel construction is that the defenses lawyer can do his job, but it won't matter.
Now, I haven't followed the US law or police news closely, since my interest is at most academic, but my picture of parallel construction is that you first use unreliable/inadmissible sources to construct a picture of the situation, then using that general knowledge to locate actual admissible evidence.
So the cop might use inadmissible sources to know there's an person of interest somewhere. But he still needs admissible evidence to demonstrate probable cause if he wants to enter and use results of this second search to be useful. Otherwise he's exactly in the situation of the 'naive' cop from your example, where he can only say 'anonymous tip', doesn't have a record for that, and his 'real' investigation gets dismissed.
What you seem to be describing is taking inadmissible evidence and then somehow inserting it into results of a legal search - i.e. planting evidence. That's not a new idea, I guess, but is it really so common, and how is that caused by parallel construction?
Meanwhile, we're no closer to understanding how "parallel construction" could have been helpful in this case, which is the question the thread purports to answer.
ie, I would use illegal means to obtain proof that you have convicted a crime, then I would use parallel construction to provide a legal explanation for how I obtained the proof.
iee, parallel construction is what they use when they did not have probable cause.
I am having trouble believing that you do not understand that? what am I missing?
I am not sure how you are so confident that the NSA was not at all involved in this capture, and that parallel construction was therefore entirely unnecessary.
When reading that article, and various other sources, one thing that stands out is that even after arresting an administrator - which did lead to various other arrests - they still had no direct link or identification for Ulbricht.
Ulbricht was careful enough that although the police were apparently communicating directly with him, and arresting a number of others that were more directly involved, there was no way for them to locate or identify him.
Note, that this remains true even after he believes that one of his contacts has murdered someone on his behalf. He maintains the firewall between himself and that contact.
Frankly, that is fairly impressive, he must have been a careful man.
Suddenly they find a link buried in the forever webs between a nickname he uses and his actual name and bingo, they have him.
Now, it entirely could have gone down like that. It is completely plausible. Most likely the link was there all along, just waiting for someone to stumble on it.
BUT, that is rather the point of parallel construction, isn't it? to bridge the gap between the information they have and the information that they can present in court, in a totally plausible way.
I am not claiming the truth to be one way or the other, who knows (hell, who cares in this case), but I am claiming that to disregard the possibility and maintain that it is absurd is to ignore the fact of parallel construction and the fact of its frequent use.
[1] "The seizures included $2.9 million from a Dwolla account that was controlled by a U.S. subsidiary of Mt. Gox and $2.1 million seized from two Wells Fargo accounts, one controlled by the same subsidiary, the other by Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles."