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Silk Road Lawyers Poke Holes In FBI's Story
wiredog points out an article from Brian Krebs about the court proceedings against Ross Ulbricht for his involvement in Silk Road, the online drug marketplace that was shut down (at least temporarily) by law enforcement last year. Ulbricht's lawyers have demanded information from the FBI in the course of discovery, and the documents provided by the government don't seem to confirm the FBI's story.
For starters, the defense asked the government for the name of the software that FBI agents used to record evidence of the CAPTCHA traffic that allegedly leaked from the Silk Road servers. The government essentially responded (PDF) that it could not comply with that request because the FBI maintained no records of its own access, meaning that the only record of their activity is in the logs of the seized Silk Road servers. ... The FBI claims that it found the Silk Road server by examining plain text Internet traffic to and from the Silk Road CAPTCHA, and that it visited the address using a regular browser and received the CAPTCHA page. But Weaver says the traffic logs from the Silk Road server (PDF) that also were released by the government this week tell a different story. ... “What happened is they contacted that IP directly and got a PHPMyAdmin configuration page.” See this PDF file for a look at that PHPMyAdmin page. Here is the PHPMyAdmin server configuration.
No. Perjury is saying demonstrably false things in court. Failing to provide evidence for your points is merely a justification for acquittal.
Perjury is saying false things INTENTIONALLY while under oath in court. If I am called to the witness stand and say that to the best of my knowledge the guy accused of scamming really IS a Nigerian princess, and I genuinely do believe that, it doesn't make me guilty of perjury, it just makes me a very derpy individual.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
It matters because it means the intelligence/evidence was gathered some other way, that the government doesn't want to admit to, and so they made up this story to cover how they supposedly found out this information. It's called "parallel construction", and it basically means that the NSA (or some other spooks) tipped off the FBI, whose job it was to come up with a plausible story as to how they found out.
Evidence not legally collected won't be admissible, so if the defendant's lawyers can call BS on some of the legally obtained evidence and have it excluded, what's left might not be enough for a conviction.
Silk Road said they blocked requests. But their attempt to do so was incorrect, it allows any php request through. Think about how secure that server was...
So this is part of a collective hallucination?
Actually, this is the US, the selling of the evidence and even its seizure is independent of the trial, in fact, it would be handled in a seperate civil trial under a much more leniant standard of evidence, allowing for all of his assets to be seized and kept EVEN IF HIS TRIAL RETURNS A NOT-GUILTY VERDICT.
He can actually be found not-guilty, let free, and they still get to keep his stuff.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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We also know that this Parallel Construction process really does happen. Thomas Tamm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tamm/, one of the many pre-Snowden leakers, was a lawyer at the Justice Department whose job it was to prepare warrants for the FISA court. He had cases where the basis for the warrant, the "probable cause", was based on illegal warrentless surveillance by the NSA. He knew that this was illegal but it was up to the FISA court to deny the warrants. They didn't. Instead they granted many such warrants and the decisions were never open to public scrutiny. After seeing too much of this, Tamm leaked the story to the New York Times in 2005. The Bush administration was able to dismiss the story, more or less as just allegations. This and similar treatment of other leaked stories was the reason that Snowden released he had to leak hard evidence and lots of it. The PBS Frontline documentary, The United States of Secrets has a good summary of these events.
Again, it was the unclaimed money-laundered Silk Road bitcoins which were sold (which, if claimed by anyone, would be an admission of a felony since it's well-known that they are mixed with drug money). DPR's bitcoins have not yet been sold. They are being held.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...