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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It probably wouldn't have mattered, because the overwhelming majority of the evidence in the trial came from Ulbricht's laptop, which the USG searched both under a warrant and incident to Ulbricht's arrest --- an arrest for which they had some probable cause prior to the SR server search. There's also a doctrine of "inevitable discovery" with implications here as well.

The prevailing wisdom about this case seems correct: what shattered Ulbricht's legal defense was his utterly slipshod OPSEC.

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But they only found Ulbricht because of the server AFAIK.

What was their probable cause before the server search?

Ulbricht was a suspect prior to the search.

Could you source that? Not saying it's wrong, but I don't remember it.

There is no source on that because it isn't true[1].

Ulbricht was found via the server - all evidence that came as a result of that (including the laptop) would have been dismissed if a 4th amendment appeal was successful.

The only evidence found outside of the server chain was the posts to the Shroomery and Bitcointalk - and as the link in grandparent comment points out, this is not sufficient probable cause for a search warrant (and a search warrant on the Gmail in any case would still not have linked Ulbricht to DPR sufficiently)

[1] right in the second paragraph of article linked in grandparent comment:

> The arrest of Ross Ulbricht got its start when the FBI somehow discovered the real location of the Silk Road server in Iceland.

and

> Every shred of evidence except for two “hey, I found this site” posts derives solely from the server seizure.

For some reason I can't reply to ikeboy directly. Is there a nesting limit for comments on HN?

Anywho, you can do the search that got him caught yourself.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A+bitcointalk.org+ross...

The relevant result is now #2, but used to be #1 (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-google-search-that-took...)

He had deleted the original comment, but someone had replied and copied the text. He subsequently posted an ad for job postings with the same username and his personal email address (I think rossulbricht@gmail.com).

Basically, he was about as sloppy as it gets if you're running a criminal drug enterprise. Also, his confidant, Variety Jones/Cimon, hinted that he had done some research on Ulbricht and found some stuff. He was absurdly cocky about evading law enforcement. Makes you wonder if he has some kind of psychological disorder.

HN has a timed limiter for nested replies that grows in length depending on nested depth, mainly to stop flame wars. You have to wait a few minutes or take the hint that the thread is getting too deep.

Not true, you can reply immediately at the direct link to a comment.

Interesting workaround, but that doesn't make what I said untrue does it? It just sounds like they put the MVP in and never completed the functionality.

Actually, an IRS agent found Google search results that tied him to Silk Road:

"That search led him to a thread on bitcointalk.org called 'A Heroin Store.' One of the posts there was from a user named 'altoid' who gave instructions on how to access Silk Road.

'You guys have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?' altoid wrote. 'It’s kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com. I don’t think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff. They basically use bitcoin and tor to broker anonymous transactions.'

Once Alford had the username, the rest was as simple as clicking around. In a separate thread, altoid posted that he was looking for an IT pro. 'If interested, please send your answers to the following questions to rossulbricht at gmail dot com.'

That’s all Alford needed to get a warrant to gain access to that email. By comparing the data found in the email to the data found on Ulbricht’s laptop, the government has created an even more convincing argument that Ross Ulbricht is, in fact, Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts."

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/silk-road-trial-irs-special-a...

So just discussing Silk Road was enough to get a warrant to look at his email?

There's nothing at all suspicious about the tech recruiting post. It's the same thing everyone here has seen 10,000 times. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5...

He was possibly the first person to ever post about Silk Road. A few months later, that same user is recruiting for a "lead developer in a venture backed bitcoin startup company" conveniently avoiding specifics. If you recall, they also seized a package sent to Ulbricht containing nine fake IDs with different names in July 2013 (he was arrested three months later). Cumulatively, that's probably enough to merit suspicion/the issuance of a warrant to search his e-mail.

There is literally nothing unusual about "conveniently avoiding specifics" in a tech recruiting post. It's not even a tiny bit suspicious.

He may or may not have been the first to post about Silk Road on Bitcointalk, or anywhere for that matter, but that seems awfully thin ground for getting a warrant.

I'm surprised HN seems to be in favor of such action.

You can't just look at the individual bits of evidence in isolation to determine whether there was probable cause, you have to look at it all together.

To you, there might be "literally nothing" suspicious about it, but when that user's previous post on the forum discussed Silk Road, likely for the first time ever, a law enforcement officer, having few leads to go on, might feel inclined to investigate that individual further. Again, there's also the tiny detail about a package with nine fake IDs being sent to Ulbricht in July 2013. DHS agents confronted him about it around that time: "The photos also matched his Texas driving license, which the DHS investigators asked to see. All of this happened around the same time that Dread Pirate Roberts was discussing obtaining fake IDs on Silk Road, the FBI affidavit said. The FBI put the final piece of the puzzle in place by pulling Ulbricht's Texas driving license and comparing it with the license that Ulbricht showed the DHS. The numbers matched. At this point, it must have considered that it had enough evidence." http://www.coindesk.com/ross-ulbrichts-silk-road-head-smacki...

Lack of leads is no excuse to start digging in people's privacy.

The fake ID thing seems to have occurred after the warrant was issued, so I'm not sure I see its relevance.

The suspicious part isn't really that he was avoiding specifics, it's that he was looking for an it professional in a bitcoin startup company.

If someone is the first to post about a particular site specializing in illegal transactions, and it's publicly determinable that they were, before that, soliciting for developers familiar with the kind of infrastructure the site would need, and, that person also is the intended recipient of a package of false identity documents, and...

...things add up and produce enough cause to get a warrant. Given the analysis from opsec people, it's not surprising that there was eventually a warrant and an arrest and a trial; given that he was leaking so much information about who he was and what he was doing, the surprising thing is that the feds didn't catch him even sooner.

He made the post mentioning Silk Road on Jan 29, 2011.

He made the post looking for a developer 9 months later, on October 11, 2011.

And as I mentioned below, the fake ID issue seems to have come up after the email warrant was issued, so it wasn't a factor there.

> He made the post mentioning Silk Road on Jan 29, 2011.

which was apparently the first mention. So, as far as the agent could tell, this was the first person to mention Silk Road on the open Internet. That's what's reasonable.

(Also, from a pure Bayesian POV, the fact that it nailed DPR on the very first try goes a lot towards demonstrating its relevance. NB: this parenthetical is not a legal argument; otherwise you could justify any search that turns up evidence.)

Along these lines, someone once tried to convince me that governments should be allowed to use evidence no matter how they get it. He basically proposed that police could go into someone's house to search without a warrant, but if they didn't find anything then the police could be prosecuted, which makes them only do it if they have a really strong reason to think they'll find something. It was a surprisingly good argument for something that many people would instinctively flinch away from.

Anyway, my answer was that if the police really had such strong suspicion of someone and they were right, they've got to have enough to get a warrant anyway, which is similar to what you're saying.

Also if they expected to face prosecution were they not to find anything, you might expect them to often 'find' things whether they were there or not...

There's nothing suspicious about the recruitment ost, but it does contain his contact details. There is somethin gsuspicious about the 'have you heard about this great new site' post - a classic come-on - but it lacks identifying information about the author. One post provides the probable cause, the other supplies information about where to pursue further information.

Right, so the whole 'probable cause' is built on one post about Silk Road. As I say, that seems an awfully thin reason to go digging in someone's email.

I couldn't care less one way or the other about Ulbricht or Silk Road. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as they say.

But I do think it's disturbing one moderately suspicious post is enough to have your privacy violated.

I don't disagree, but given the highly illegal nature of the business (whether or not it ought to be legal is a separate, political question; I'd say yes, but as the law stands something like silk Road is clearly not legit), and Ulbricht's post being the social origin of public awareness, how is it not suspicious? If you can't find any earlier sign of its existence, it's reasonable* to suspect the social origin coincides with the operational origin. Remember he also posted (under the same username, altoid) to the Shroomery (a website dedicated to the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms) and set up a wordpress page with the basics of access and an invitation to come and sell drugs through there: http://web.archive.org/web/20110204025853/http://silkroad420...

I would imagine the FBI asked Wordpress for their logged data about that, which could have provided them with additional circumstantial evidence.

* in the legal sense of being arguable via logic, as opposed to an inexplicable decision based on intuition or unthinking application of dogma.

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