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Comment by snowy | Hacker News Reader

I am a foremost Internet expert on this sort of thing..........As an expert in such topics as sniffing passwords.........As an expert, I know the Tarbell declaration is gibberish. As an expert reading the configuration and logs........

HA!

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I was quoting from the original article http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/10/reading-silk-road-configur...

Which has since been changed to http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/silk-road-lawyers-poke-ho...

It is somewhat comical, but he's not lying. At least he's not hiding the fact that he's arguing from authority (his own).

Arguments from authority might be a bad thing on internet fora where everyone is assumed to have infinite time (and ability) to dig into details. In society as a whole, and especially in the courts, however, these arguments are a useful short-cut.

There is nothing inherently wrong with making judgments based on one's expertise. That's pretty much what expertise is good for.

It may help to rewrite those in your head to, "as an experienced systems administrator who knows how these particular config files work" or perhaps "how config files work in general".

These are all questions of basic fact and they are all easily testable.

What do courts do when this situation comes up? Do they play warring experts, when (at least) one side definitely wants to perform a test, because they are confident that their interpretation is correct?

(ed: 'questions of basic fact' like, whether a server with this configuration is hittable from non-allowed IPs)

That's the judge's job to figure out what the truth is. If needed I've heard a court can hire their own impartial expert.

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