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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.
So does this mean they go to jail for perjury?
So you're saying the FBI made shit up? That's... that's... inconceivable!
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.
Exactly. And now the government must be stoked that it will have a test case to bring to the Supreme Court so that the Supreme Court can twist out some "logic" to say parallel construction is OK. They say that bad facts make bad law, and Ubrecht is fairly unlikeable, what with the attempts to find a hit man. From a "destroy the 4th" perspective, this case is even better than Smith v. Maryland: http://www.google.com/url?q=ht... (*). The Feds must be creaming their pants in anticipation of having parallel construction deemed constitutional.
(*) This is the grandfather of our massive indiscriminate surveillance policy. The short summary is that the police were too lazy to get a search warrant that would surely have been granted, simply had the phone company set one up. And although it dealt with a single individual, with specific facts sufficient for a warrant, and covered a specific and short time period, the Third Party Doctrine took on a different character after that, being applied to all people, in the absence of any evidence, for all time.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
How does this matter?
Well, because the US has a set of requirements for defining the circumstances under which the government can search private property, and the scope of that search if allowed.
The FBI has effectively just admitted that they had no legitimate way of knowing that they had probable cause. This means one of two things - They broke the law to obtain that evidence (the police can't search you to get the evidence they need to get approval to search you); or more likely, they lied about the real origin of their evidence (ie, the NSA told them "go here and do this, and make up a good cover story").
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...
Great link: http://www.alexaobrien.com/sec...
NSA programs PINWALE, MARINA, NUCLEON are now used to share their collected data (that isn't actually "collected" under new legal redefinition.) with DOD and who knows how many other agencies.
"Parallel Construction" is used to hide sources.
This is what happens when checks and balances decay in a system that has no honor or respect for what once made it great.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.