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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 no. This means the judge could go to jail for perjury. His decisions might not match the FBI's statements and so he may be going to lie in court. Better watch his back or else justice may need to be served in him.
On (C) at least, I think the frustration is they seized and liquidated the evidence before the case is settled. It is part of a larger problem with law enforcement lately where police can bring charges against the assets themselves and keep them. In some regions it is a serious money maker to the point finding too much cash in a random traffic stop funds the department.
C. Like it or not, the bitcoins represent evidence. Seizing evidence is par for course in any criminal case.
Seizing evidence is one thing, seizing evidence and selling it for money is perfectly legal, after the trial, conviction, etc. Doing so before trial is an entirely different thing, and will probably lead to some problems down the road, especially if DPR is not convicted. At that point, it's going to be a very very interesting case.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I don't have a solution
Here's the solution: You know those flyers you receive in the mail before election day from politicians saying they will "get tough on crime" and have the endorsement of the police chief and/or police union? Whenever you get one of these flyers, vote for the other guy.
My guess is the FBI is covering up that they somehow got VPN access into the Silk Road's internal server network. The same VPN access Ulbricht used to administer the servers from his local coffee shop.
They had already been tipped off about Ulbricht when he tried to order fake IDs from Canada. Then they figured out he was spending a good amount of time using the local coffee shop's wifi. They then sniffed his wifi traffic directly or just ordered the coffee shop / ISP to allow them to do the same. They couldn't decrypt his VPN session but they could see the destination IP which either lead to his server host provider or a 3rd party VPN service. Either way they just pressured the company that runs the service to give them the keys. Now that they have access to the server network they could collect what ever information they needed to build a case.
The key to my theory is the PDF of the PHPMyAdmin access. Notice it's an internal IP address. No way they were accessing that from anywhere but the server network.