Feds Say NSA "Bogeyman" Did Not Find Silk Road's Servers

Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 8, 2014 @02:14AM from the try-and-try-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes The secret of how the FBI pinpointed the servers allegedly used by the notorious Silk Road black market website has been revealed: repeated login attempts. In a legal rebuttal, the FBI claims that repeatedly attempting to login to the marketplace revealed its host location. From the article: "As they typed 'miscellaneous' strings of characters into the login page's entry fields, Tarbell writes that they noticed an IP address associated with some data returned by the site didn't match any known Tor 'nodes,' the computers that bounce information through Tor's anonymity network to obscure its true source. And when they entered that IP address directly into a browser, the Silk Road's CAPTCHA prompt appeared, the garbled-letter image designed to prevent spam bots from entering the site. 'This indicated that the Subject IP Address was the IP address of the SR Server,' writes Tarbell in his letter, 'and that it was "leaking" from the SR Server because the computer code underlying the login interface was not properly configured at the time to work on Tor.'"

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Re:With Tor you have expectation of anonymity... by sinij · 2014-09-08 02:24 · Score: 3, Informative

No you don't have expectation of anonymity anywhere, but with Tor breaching your anonymity is prohibitively expensive for most scenarios.
Re: Or so they say... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-08 02:42 · Score: 5, Informative

You need the link to wikipedia so the regular folk know what youre talking about
parallel construction
But there is nothing you, the citizen, can do about it.
Re: Or so they say... by irq-1 · 2014-09-08 03:29 · Score: 5, Informative

You need the link to wikipedia so the regular folk know what youre talking about
parallel construction
But there is nothing you, the citizen, can do about it.
Jury Nullification