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Feds Say NSA "Bogeyman" Did Not Find Silk Road's Servers
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.'"
Two words: parallel construction.
Back in 2006 it was already out that the NSA was sharing information with the FBI among others:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
With multiple leaders of the U.S. intelligence apparatus having been caught lying under oath, we'll never know. One of the techniques is for the NSA to pinpoint something then the FBI look at the target and find something else they can label as the "reason" they found out about it.
At this point, because of our government's shortsighted decision's (Bush/Obama) to pursue and institute a surveillance state (ala East Germany), we'll never know what the story was here and have to take any claim from the Feds with a huge dose of skepticism.