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.

Comments

Perjury

[MacDork]

So does this mean they go to jail for perjury?

Re:Perjury

[Virtucon]

No, they're the government's witness. If agents committed perjury themselves on the stand that's a different matter. That's why we have judges and ultimately they can exclude testimony/evidence based on the credibility of the witnesses or evidence that they affirm is true. What frosts my cornflakes is that the Prosecutors have a conflict of interest here in seizing and selling assets that were DPR's, the bitcoins, before the trial even commenced. The proceeds of which wound up in the government coffers supporting the prosecution. That alone should have been prohibited by the judge in the case so it remains to be seen how these holes in the evidence trail will be handled. IMO this guy is still fucked.

Re:Perjury

[kelemvor4]

So does this mean they go to jail for perjury?

That's not how it works in America. Only citizens take that risk of actually being punished for a crime. Government agencies are free to do what they want.

Re:Perjury

[Virtucon]

Yes but there still has to be the right to defend yourself. If you take away the means by which I can pay lawyers, my funds, then I can't get the best legal representation. Therefore the prosecution is already convicting you before the trial even commences. This was already addressed by SCOTUS earlier this year and it's sad that it went the way it did. It's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty and I could see seizing them after trial but not before or at least the judge allowing the guy to pay for his defense. In this case the judge already allowed the bitcoins to be auctioned but there's the sense here of convicting before any adjudication has actually been done. That really needs to be fixed in the legal system.

Re:Perjury

[ray-auch]

C. Like it or not, the bitcoins represent evidence. Seizing evidence is par for course in any criminal case.

Is selling the evidence off before the trial (which it was seized to be used in) also par for the course ?
What happens to seized evidence after a not-guilty verdict - or do certain people already know that is not a possibility ?

Re:Perjury

[ShanghaiBill]

Perjury is saying false things INTENTIONALLY while under oath in court.

Nitpick: Even that is not necessarily perjury. To be guilty of perjury, you not only have to intentionally lie under oath, but you have to lie about something of material significance to the case. For instance, if you lie about having sex with an intern during a deposition about an allegedly corrupt real estate deal in Arkansas, that is not perjury if the intern had nothing whatsoever to do with the real estate transactions.

Wait, what?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

So you're saying the FBI made shit up? That's... that's... inconceivable!

Re:Wait, what?

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Whenever a law enforcement does something blatantly unethical, they lose reputation and... then what?

And then you end up with a society where the reputation of law enforcement officers is such that "fuck the police", "don't snitch", etc., become popular sentiments, and respect for the rule of law is replaced by a hatred for the agents of an oppressive state. The failure by the police to police their own (blue code of silence, etc.), entirely expected (and deemed inevitable) by many, has gotten us to where we are today. Where we go from here is anyone's guess.

Re:How does this matter?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

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.

Re:Methinks that

[anagama]

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.

Re:How does this matter?

[pla]

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").

Lawyer is wrong, no holes in FBI story

[tomhath]

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...

Snowden leaks: NSA data now used by DEA, others.

[kbonin]

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.