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All the Evidence the Government Will Present In the Silk Road Trial Is Online
apexcp writes: In less than a month, one of the biggest trials of 2015 will begin in New York City. The full list of government evidence and defense objections found its way online recently, shedding light on both the prosecutor's courtroom strategy and the defense team's attempted rebuttals. Also important is what's not presented as evidence. There's not a single piece of forensic documentation about how the FBI originally found Silk Road servers, an act the defense has called "blatantly criminal."
The media love the idea of the Dark Net (Capitals strongly encouraged). They don't actually know what it might be, but it's just such a great media-friendly term they can't pass it up. Even if they have to search for a definition to apply after starting to use it.
Author of the article here. I agree, that's not a great sentence. An editor put that in an attempt to define what the Dark Net is to readers. I missed it when re-reading it. My excuse is that this is like 5000+ words and I had just spent hours getting through everything and putting it together. To the editor's credit, he was also working long hours late at night to get this out today, so I don't blame him either. So let me reiterate that yeah, I think that's a poor definition that unnecessarily casts anonymity it a bad light. Anyone who reads other stuff I've written about privacy knows that's not how I feel. Sorry!
No, what happened to you was odd. It's always been the case that if the cop had probable cause for conducting the search the results are admissible. If he heard screaming coming from inside your house and thought someone was being murdered so he busted inside but it turned out it was just the TV (but he genuinely thought it was real) he can still bust you for the brick of cocaine sitting on your coffee table.
So he could always get you despite being mistaken on the facts. Now it's the case he doesn't even have to be right on law. The Supreme Court just ruled that the cop doesn't even have to know the law he stopped you under.
What is inadmissible, though, is evidence obtained intentionally without warrant or cause. The cop cannot break into your house without a warrant or probable cause and snoop around, find something and then come back in the daylight with a warrant and bust you. And that's the question here. I don't understand how they can present the evidence of wrong doing if they don't say how they obtained the evidence. If they illegally hacked into his servers...then no, it shouldn't be admissible. There has to be a valid chain of custody, and we don't know if the chain is valid if we don't know where it started.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.