Evidence the government will present in the Silk Road trial | Hacker News Reader

Evidence the government will present in the Silk Road trial

dailydot.com

35 pointsjtreminio28 comments

This is all you need to know:

After federal agents put Ulbricht in handcuffs, they say they had his machine still logged into Silk Road’s backend. He was working on user support tickets when it happened.

And this little ditty:

Being allegedly signed into Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts, signed into the Pidgin instant messenger app as Dread Pirate Roberts, and chatting with Cirrus (there’s that name again) will all be important as the prosecution attempts to solidify the links between Ulbricht and Dread Pirate Roberts.

GAME. SET. MATCH - government. Any hacker knows the last thing you want to have happen is having the feds nab you while you're still logged into a session. No encryption, no quick nuke command. This is the worst possible scenario and the Feds caught him with his pants down.

The only way he's going to get out of this is on a technicality, and that is extremely unlikely. If he does get off they have the attempted murder charges. He's looking pretty finished before the trial even starts.

Does this leak taint the jury?

>>> Does this leak taint the jury?

Nope.

The attorneys will ask potential jury members during the selection process if they have been following the case in the papers. If the have, it may be grounds for challenging a person to serve on the jury for this specific case if they have a pre-determined view about Ulbricht's guilt or innocence.

The process is total chess match since both sides want to get people who are sympathetic to their client or their cause. You should watch the movie "Runaway Jury". In the meantime, here's a quick overview of the jury selection process works:

http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/how-are-poten...

(Assuming this is a leak from the prosecution, which is not entirely clear)

Does this leak violate his right to a fair trial by fabricating grounds to disqualify many potential jurors who would be sympathetic to him?

If it doesn't (which seems probable), would a severe enough leak of this kind do the above?

>>> Does this leak violate his right to a fair trial by fabricating grounds to disqualify many potential jurors who would be sympathetic to him?

Nope.

This is because during the jury selection process or "voir dire" each side has a set number of "Peremptory Challenges" which either side doesn't need a reason, they just say, "Jury Member #23 - Peremptory Challenge" and they will be removed no questions asked.

The other kind of challenge is called "Challenge for Cause" of which either side has an unlimited number of. This is where one side will challenge a juror based on certain criteria like "implied bias" or "actual bias". At this point the attorneys have to present their arguments to the judge and the judge makes the final call on whether the juror will be dismissed or kept.

Once each side has exhausted both sets of challenges, you normally have enough people to fill a jury with several alternates.

Because of how fair the process is it means the odds of getting people who are sympathetic to him have an equal chance of getting on the jury, just as there are of getting people who think hackers are the worst people on the planet. This is why its such a chess match. Each side is trying to get enough jurors to sympathize with their client, or the tip the balance in their favor based on the questions they are allowed to ask in order to uncover any kind of bias, or certain beliefs they have which would make an attorney think they will likely support their client and see him as innocent.

>>> If it doesn't (which seems probable), would a severe enough leak of this kind do the above?

Not until after the jury has been set.

Then the judge has to determine if there are enough leaks, and how damaging to the trial they will be. The judge can also sequester a jury which means they won't get any news of the case. Remember how awful the leaks were in the OJ Simpson case? Judge Ito knew it was going to be a circus and sequestered the jury right away. The paper the jurors got each day had all the OJ stories cut out, and they weren't allowed to have a tv or magazines or anything which would inform them about what was going on outside the courthouse with the case. They just moved between the courthouse and their hotel where they were staying the entire trial.

Of course you can also opt for a change of venue before a trial starts and before jury selection to try and get a jury better suited for your client. Some of the more high profile cases where this has happened:

1 - Rodney King Case. The appeals court granted a change in venue from LA to the neighboring Simi Valley because of the "saturated media". Simi Valley just happened to be an affluent white community. Is it any wonder the cops were acquitted in record time??

2 - Oklahoma City Bombing - The attorneys for Timothy McVeigh successfully argued for a change of venue because they felt there was a substantial prejudice in OK City against McVeigh and felt there was no way he would get a fair and impartial trial. It was granted because of the amount of coverage and the stories in the press "demonized" both defendants. The venue was changed to Denver Colorado. McVeigh was still found guilty despite the change of venue.

3 - Boston Marathon Bomber - A judge recently denied a change of venue to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev saying the although the media attention was significant and ongoing, but said Tsarnaev's defense attorney's failed to prove how it would prejudice a fair and impartial jury. His trial is set to start in Sept. of 2015.

Only criminals that the government doesn't give a shit about get off on technicalities.

Those that they've got a hard-on for, well, for them they don't even have to have a rational theory of the crime, nor does the crime need to be a crime.

Is there any sort of phone app or comparable tool that will act as a dead man's switch and automatically log you out if you get more than a couple feet from your computer?

A lot of the guys I know run TAILS (https://tails.boum.org/) on a USB stick. They say if the cops bust them, all they have to do is rip out the stick and they're safe since TAILS encrypts all your files.

How accurate their statement is, I don't know.

Maybe they're running some sort of daemon that wipes RAM when the USB is pulled out, it's still possible to get the data if the OS hasn't shut down. I wonder if something like that exists. From the TAILS docs:

"Moreover, an attacker having physical access to the computer while Tails is running can recover data from RAM as well. To avoid that, learn the different methods to shutdown Tails rapidly." -- https://tails.boum.org/doc/advanced_topics/cold_boot_attacks...

EDIT: Seems tails does have such a daemon (https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/shutdown/index.en.htm...) so if it completes shutdown, the RAM should have been overwritten and unreadable.

Holy crap, it shuts down when you yank the USB drive out? That's a great idea and somehow seems extremely cyberpunk to me. I'll have to install TAILS just to try that.

Treadmills have dead man switches that you attach to your clothing, so that if you misstep and are pulled backwards the treadmill immediately stops. Perhaps TAILS drives should have similar lanyards attached in case you get tackled. A front-facing USB port would be perfect.

Which is also the point of using a whole SWAT team to arrest a hacker.

This is a pretty poor write up.

"The government's argument is that, as the site's alleged administrator, Dread Pirate Roberts, anything that occurred there is his fault."

The government's argument is that Ulbricht, as the alleged administrator of the site who was not only fully aware of what was happening, but was designing and tailoring the site to facilitate illegal behavior, courting dealers/criminals to the site, and profiting from the illegal activity he facilitated, so he was engaged in a criminal conspiracy. "Anything that occurred there is his fault" is a ludicrous misrepresentation of what an accusation of criminal conspiracy means.

Also with that pile of evidence, esp. finding him logged in as the admin. while arresting him, it's looking completely unlikely that Ulbricht would not be found guilty, esp. with the completely inept/absurd responses by the defense team.

Yup.

This is like some of the torrent/pirate sites, where the ordinary safe-harbor type of defense would be "Who? Us? We had no idea people were doing that sort of thing!" and gets shot down by "Yeah, you were designing and advertising it specifically to enable that sort of thing, attract people who would do that sort of thing, and talked at length about how your site was entirely for doing that sort of thing."

> but was designing and tailoring the site to facilitate illegal behavior

So if I have booths built at my nightclub that make it easier for dealers to sell smack without others being able to see...

It's a crime to build furniture?

How is that sane?

We're at the point in the drug war where it's such an unspeakable and incredible failure, that the government feels empowered to twist laws or even make them up on the spot to get the rare PR victory (that will of course mean no real world change).

It's sick.

No, the crime would be making it easy to deal smack in your nightclub. And then taking a cut of the sales.

How is that a crime in the philosophical sense, but more importantly, which statutes actually make this illegal and what is their legal wording?

There's no such thing as a 'crime in the philosophical sense.' If you're asking whether dealing drugs as a business should be illegal, that's irrelevant to the question of whether or not it is.

In the practical sense, federal and state statutes clearly consider dealing in certain substances to be a crime. Asking for a citation for that is absurd as you only need consult the source of your outrage with America's drug laws, as referenced in the grandparent comment, for evidence that such laws exist. That Ulbricht did so from a website for bitcoins doesn't make it any less of a crime than if he'd done it from a streetcorner, or a dark booth in a nightclub, regardless of whether or not makes him more sympathetic to the Hacker News crowd.

But, if you want to read the actual indictment against Ulbricht, here it is: http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/February14/Ros...

But he wasn't dealing.

And as far as this one...

>There's no such thing as a 'crime in the philosophical sense.

If there is no such thing, then nothing is right or wrong, and laws are just obstacles to get around however you can, for as long as you can. That seems a strange principle to propose.

He was facilitating and taking a cut of the profits from dealing. That was the crime, and it's on the books as a crime.

You might think this is unjust, if you frame laws as just vs. unjust it's much more clear than talking about 'crime in the philosophical sense' which is not a normal way of discussing law.

Fair enough.. he just ran a business where other people did the dealing, and he made a profit from the sales. Still pretty clearly a criminal conspiracy, at least on paper.

And when I said there's no such thing as crime in a philosophical sense, I meant that what one believes about the ethics of a law doesn't actually apply to its execution. Ulbricht hasn't been charged with crimes against philosophy, and a belief that drug laws are immoral isn't a legally credible defense.

You can make the argument that what Ulbricht did shouldn't be illegal, but I don't believe it's possible to make a credible argument that running the Silk Road site wasn't actually breaking any laws.

> Fair enough.. he just ran a business where other people did the dealing, and he made a profit from the sales.

Like every seedy motel that caters to hookers.

And yet, no one thinks this is a crime... because renting rooms isn't a crime.

>Ulbricht hasn't been charged with crimes against philosophy

From the looks of it, they're trying to offer evidence of crimes he hasn't been charged with to push a gullible jury towards an unjust verdict. Hell, for all the press release propaganda we've heard about murder-for-hire, where are those charges?

Have you ever known an honest prosecutor to hold off on murder charges for which there is evidence, or to leak it to journalists that someone's a murderer when they won't even bother charging them with such?

This smells.

> You can make the argument that what Ulbricht did shouldn't be illegal,

I'm not making that argument. I'm making the argument that they can't figure out what to charge him with, and so they're twisting the laws and the trial process to convict him anyway.

>Like every seedy motel that caters to hookers. And yet, no one thinks this is a crime... because renting rooms isn't a crime.

At this point it seems you're being purposely obtuse.

Prostitution is a crime (except in a couple of places) and "catering to hookers" is also a crime when you're renting rooms to prostitutes or their clients specifically to facilitate prostitution, as a business, commonly known as "running a brothel."

But again, you seem to choose to employ metaphors which completely disregard intent.

How would you know they're prostitutes?

If you can perform the same action and have it not be a crime, but for your inner thoughts, whereas if you do think those thoughts the action is then a crime, then we're what we're really talking about is thoughtcrime.

Doesn't that bother you slightly?

> as a business, commonly known as "running a brothel."

We're not talking about brothels, but specifically about a sort of motel that you must be familiar with if only hypothetically. They use the floorplan of those shitty 1970s motels, there's no parlor, no madam who points at the girls and tells you to pick out one, and often enough an antagonist relationship between the owners and the hookers.

These are real places, they aren't rare, and trying to shift the conversation to something else earns you no credit for honesty.

Renting rooms to hookers is no crime. Motel clerks aren't deputized by the state to perform law enforcement and even if they were it's the hooker's crimes that are illegal, not the hooker herself. She still has a right to rent a room.

> But again, you seem to choose to employ metaphors

Wasn't a metaphor at all. Are you so dimwitted that you can't tell?

The vast majority of crimes have included mental state elements as well as conduct elements for quite a long time (strict liability crimes -- the only kind that don't include mental state elements -- are a much smaller set.)

Thoughtcrime is not any crime that includes a mental state component, thoughtcrime is a crime that is thought alone (specifically, politically unorthodox thought alone) as a crime.

I think the majority of HN commentators would agree that buying drugs is not a crime in the philosophical sense. This is about crime in the legal sense though. And facilitating drug sellers and buyers (with furniture, or with websites and escrow systems) is definitely criminal conspiracy in the legal sense.

To move back to the philosophical sense, it seems apparent that Ulbricht ordered the murders of at least 2 people, so I don't have a ton of sympathy for him. If it weren't for that I would probably be rooting for him (though I'd still agree he has little legal ground to stand on).

So if I have booths built at my nightclub that make it easier for dealers to sell smack without others being able to see...

If you advertised it as "NoMoreNicksLeft's House of Smack Dealing, totally anonymous drug-dealing booths, reasonable rates, guaranteed privacy and security for all your drug-dealing needs"... then I think you can see where the issue is.

And the issue with Silk Road is largely that it was explicitly designed to cater to, and advertised as catering to, illegal activity.

> then I think you can see where the issue is.

Like Goldman Sachs owning a classified service that caters to sex traffickers? Alright feds, let's see some heads roll.

If you worked with the smack dealers, set up a space explicitly designed for drug transactions, and then took a cut of the profits then that would be a better analogy, and you'd definitely be guilty of criminal conspiracy.

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