Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

yeah man! murder is just a thought crime now.

Let's be clear, attempted murder is a thoughtcrime. ;)

No, considered murder is a thought crime. Attempted murder involves actions.

I was being sarcastic.

> 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?!

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?

> A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person.

Are you suggesting that there are advanced AI botherbots out there just looking for other entities, presumably flesh and blood, as prey?

No, I am not suggesting that.

>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.

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.

they've got a wide variety of physical evidence like the fake IDs shown

I'm old enough to remember when a fake ID meant you wanted to buy beer.

Well, you see, terrorists..

People looking to get into a bar don't get half a dozen different identities from multiple nations and states.

1) He was arrogant and thought that they would never get that close to him. or He thought that keeping notes offline in an analog format would be safer than keeping digital copies.

Also consider that for all the Trade Craft Bin Laden practiced to stay hidden. He was sloppy when it came to the computer drives and notes he kept in his house.

There's an observation from the FBI that applies to people caught for child pornography: it turns out that usually most of them have disk encryption software installed, but don't actually use it (i.e. you find a whole bunch of unencrypted stuff that's still completely illegal just in a folder somewhere).

The main thing to remember about crime is that it's not rational - the risk/reward payoff is absurdly lopsided, so to some extent every step of the way you have to engage in little fictions to convince yourself you won't ever get caught - because if you took stringent precautions, you'd have to acknowledge that if you ever need to use them it probably still means you're going to jail for some amount of time.

There's a certain commonality there. It didn't matter whether any of Bin Laden's hard drives were encrypted; he was dead when we found him and he knew it.

Likewise, from a practical stand point once the Feds came knocking at DPR's front door the jig was up. While the extra evidence will no doubt add a couple of nails to the coffin when this finally goes to trial, chances were that if he was tracked down at all, there would be enough evidence to convict him on that paper trail alone.

Chances are this is just the standard "it's a lot harder to commit a perfect crime than you think it is." But it might also not be irrational to focus exclusively on not getting caught, and not worry so hard about all the extra evidence that will be scooped up with you.

very true

"But it might also not be irrational to focus exclusively on not getting caught, and not worry so hard about all the extra evidence that will be scooped up with you." - The Walter White Crime Strategy

You really think "my client is too smart to have made any of these mistakes it must all be a government conspiracy" is going to fly as a defense?

1) The drive was very likely encrypted. The FBI deliberately waited until he was using the laptop in a public location, and tackled him so they could explore the drive while it was still logged in. As to why he wrote everything down in a diary, or didn't plan for that eventuality...seems to be a combination of hubris, inexperience, and naivety.

2) Yes. They can be authenticated by the officers who took them. The officers merely state that they tackled Ross in the library, and that they personally photographed what was on the screen, and that the image you see is said photograph. You are of course correct that they could be fabricated, but that's up to his defense attorney to argue, and for a jury to believe is enough to constitute "reasonable doubt" in their collective minds.

3) Again, evidence does not have to be perfect. Everything you argue applies to any kind of evidence. What's to say the witnesses testimony wasn't coerced? The letter forged? The rules of evidence come into play here, as well as the jury's role in deciding what to believe. That said, it's certainly an interesting issue, and it would be great if there were stronger chain-of-custody and verification rules for digital evidence collected from a seized hard-drive, for example.

Specifically in response to number 3: I contend that it is easier to coerce a machine than a witness, that forged bits can be perfectly identical whereas forged letters might not.

Machines need to be held to different standards for different reasons. If we lend them a greater veracity than is appropriate, how unforgiving might such an error be?

We live in a world of statecraft through malware with Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu. We live in a world where international telecommunications companies enable global eavesdropping and interception at the carrier-grade level.

You cannot discount the idea that his entire machine might have been compromised all the way down to the firmware, to elicit highly specific programmable responses choreographed in real time. That much is is honestly unlikely, and unrealistic, but in theory, the possibility is there.

Consider that he may have been a useful idiot. A patsy. That he was framed, does the physical evidence and circumstantial evidence seal off that path of doubt? How advanced could the Silk Road's administrators actually be? Could they have crafted such malware, to root kit his laptop and lead investigators to a fall guy, and then temporarily close up shop if he goes down?

I don't think that's what happened, but when a laptop is a key piece of evidence that a case may hinge on, The first thing I think of is how much control I honestly have over my own laptop.

Fabricating bits is not the same as fabricating other evidence. Machines are different.

As for your points #1 and #2, yeah, I'll agree that those are valid points and that sounds pretty damning, and I'll give it up on those.

>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?

Because they wouldn't matter one iota.

Either they would get him with his computer on, and read them off of memory, or the court would have forced him to give the password -- or face even harsher sentence based on all the other evidence.

It is just like any evidence. You look at the people that are certifying it and decide if it is plausible that they are all lying.

(aimed mostly at 3.)

One very plausible answer is the government wanted to demonize him so there'd be less of an uproar of support against their actions.

An uproar from whom?

I don't know honestly, though you don't think it's possible the government would try to demonize someone in order to gain public support?

They certainly would, Martin Luther King Jr. would be one good example.

But I think they have public support in this case. Most people would be disgusted to know that Silk Road ever existed and would be happy it's gone.

But more relevant, perhaps, I don't believe that public support really matters here either way. DPR isn't a hero to many people, demonizing him isn't likely to affect popular opinion, or have any relevant political merit.

Trying to secure a conviction might be another matter, but even then I would think they would be certain that they had a solid case to begin with. I can't imagine they would fabricate evidence without anything concrete to back it up. It's not as if this is all they have, they would be insane to just toss some photoshops in to 'sweeten the pot' as it were.

So you have no real strong reason why the government would demonize him in this case, which is sufficient evidence to prop this hypothesis all the way in your mind to "very plausible"? Wonderful.

It is very reasonable this is something the government would do. There are loads of historical accounts of intelligence/military agencies doing this. It's mainly called propaganda.

This is a real-life chewbacca defense if I ever heard one.

Ha. That made me laugh. The point is if you make someone look extremely evil, more "normal" people are less likely to show any support or sympathy towards them, right? Some who might have been neutral about a black market where you can buy drugs (that the government deems illegal) who would have supported the person who owned/managed it, whereas now I imagine they'd be less likely speak up.

Right, but that's like arguing the government clearly controls the weather, because of how convenient it would be for them if they could.

You're just saying, "Well I could see them setting him up" and hoping that counts as evidence.

So, you're trying to twist my words into saying "this is what is happening and I am claiming it to be true" - however what I'm saying is that it's a reasonable possibility - I am not saying there is proof behind it or that it's a real occurrence.

How do we know it is a reasonable possibility? We have zero evidence to suggest it is the case.

Probability is based in part on logic using past occurrences as references - and not the present moment or determining conviction.

what "past occurrences" of the government fabricating evidence in a federal trial lend weight to the probability of their doing so in this case?

You've cited propaganda and the NSA lying to congress as as possible evidence, but I believe this to be specious, unless the premise is that the government merely lies about everything, and fabricates evidence just because it can. You might as well suggest that because soldiers kill people in Muslim countries, and postal employees are also Federal employees, that postal workers are probably killing Muslims on their routes. Just because you connect a bunch of dots doesn't mean you've actually found a pattern.

But surely those people are perfectly well aware that such a black market is deemed illegal and that they can still be arrested for selling, buying and using.

He's not being made to look any more evil than anyone else accused of attempted murder and running a criminal syndicate.

Facilitating the sale of drugs is quite different than if he's accused of trying to (successfully or unsuccessfully) kill 6 people - which is much more extreme, no?

Cartel bosses, gang members and drug dealers have been known to have their perceived enemies killed to defend their money, territory or evade capture. Let's not pretend that 'facilitating the sale of drugs' at that scale is an necessarily nonviolent business.

And besides, what does the government have to gain that's worth the risk of damaging their case if its discovered they fabricated evidence?

RIght, so it's an easy assumption to accept - and no assumptions being made. And do you really think the government level / agency that is in charge of justice would have any level of 'clearance' towards the agency that would be fabricating evidence? The NSA has been lying to congress for years, as an easy example.

While I believe a conspiracy like that is possible, I don't believe it to be plausible for the simple fact that DPR isn't worth the risk. The government doesn't need to paint drug dealers or black market operators in a bad light, and unless they fabricated their entire case against him, they probably have ample evidence to put him behind bars even if these screenshots were to be thrown out (supporting evidence for the attempted hits don't rest on those after all, they'll have logs and testimony as well.) They've already broken Silk Road and everyone already knows they can attack the deep web, and that Tor and Bitcoin aren't perfect bulwarks against the State.

All good points. This is why neither you, nor any other programmer, is likely to sit on a jury in a trial relating to computer crime.