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There's a Problem In the Silk Road Trial: the Jury Doesn't Get the Internet
sarahnaomi (3948215) writes "The trial began this week for Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texas man accused of being the mastermind behind the dark net drug market, Silk Road. But as the jury began hearing testimony in the case, it was clear the technological knowledge gap would impede the proceedings. Judge Katherine Forrest said right off the bat when the case began that "highly technical" issues must be made clear to the jury. "If I believe things are not understandable to the average juror, we will talk about what might be a reasonable way to proceed at that time," she said. After the first day of proceedings, Forrest told the prosecution to be more clear with explanations of concepts central to the case, noting she was unhappy with its "mumbo-jumbo" explanation of the anonymizing service Tor. She also requested all readings of chat transcripts include emoticons."
Yeah but you spelled it wrong!
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
How do you fill that knowledge gap? Nobody outside of IT is going to have a clue how tor works. Should you limit the jury selection to IT professionals?
If we're to believe that Ross Ulbricht is really a internet and tor mastermind surely a Jury of his peers would require some sort of technical experience. While this might not require someone to be a professional, it should require some level of subject matter experience. It does make me wonder, what other "for cause" jury selection criteria was also avoided?
Maybe, in cases like this, the notion of a "jury of your peers" should be extended to include technical competence. In other words, instead of asking the prospective jurors about their views on the death penalty, they could ask about their knowledge of DNS or BGP.
My read so far based on the video blogpost I saw on http://beta.watchmybit.com last night is that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence and not a lot of hard facts.
Also, the agent who worked Chicago border control seems to know an aweful lot about IT and TOR that makes me wonder why he's working packaged duty.
Starting to smell like a lot of planted evidence...
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Perhaps some pictures, with primary colours only, might help? Narrated by Dora the Explorer maybe? Or Peppa Pig?
Sometimes you just need a better, more educated jury rather than a dumbed down series of explanations - the Judge would probably have an issue if the prosecution spent a week explaining Tor in single syllable words and interpretive dance...
They help go toward intent and mood of the conversation. There's a difference between "I'll kill you" and "I'll kill you :)" as part of a conversation.
I know a lot about Linux, but I do not work with Linux. However if there would be an issue at the department where I work and it would need some knowledge of Linux, I would be the go-to guy.
For all I know he used to work as an IT person and used TOR against the will of his employer and the only job he could get was as a border control person. ...
Or he hinks doing IT as a job sucks. Or
I know a LOT of people who have knowledge of other things outside their field of work. That does not mean anything by itself.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The idea being if its complicated enough, the prosecution can just gloss over to the fireworks like 'terror' 'drug' 'kingpin' 'murder' and insist the jury just have faith because the whole damn thing is too hard to understand. to think that the united states government would be so contemptuous of its own rule of law that it would be willing to overtly insult the intelligence of not only a jury but a judge is nothing new. Ferguson jurors have a lifetime ban on ever discussing the details of the trial, for example. And the reason guantanamo bay still exists is because we demanded its closure, and legislated its perpetual existence by preventing the incarceration or trial of prisoners in american courts.
The general idea is this: admit defeat and go to jail, but fight against injustice and youre now waging a war of dissent against an ideological construct. Expose too many glaring flaws in the rule of our law and the arbitrary if not meaningless nature of our criminal justice system becomes too apparent to sustain. The prosecution at this point is a hail mary, and suggests that if the defense dissects the argument too much the prosecution may not have a leg to stand on for lifetime offenses like kingpin and RICO charges which are arguably being pursued as a form of biblical retribution. the notion that someone who once bested the FBI can walk after 6-10 years, and doesnt exist as a member of the cloistered plutocracy, flies in the face of American justice.
Good people go to bed earlier.
That's sort of insulting IMHO, to refer to a technical description as "mumbo-jumbo". Also, having once had a web site titled "mumbo jumbo" that caught me some flack for the name itself, I know that the words "mumbo jumbo" are racially charged. Overall, not words that should be coming from this judge's mouth. Who cares about the jurors when this judge's manners are clearly setting a bias against the defendant as just one member of this "mumbo jumbo" society of shady "techies" that go around mucking up our simple, phone-nosing lives.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
:-|
And the DA was like :-\
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The jury was instructed to believe that any technical evidence the FBI provides was obtained legally. Whether or not they did remains controversial.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
surely there are some whizbang animated power points showing a packet leaving a computer but there should be a level of abstraction. I haven't read how they got him but if its as trivial as linking a user id or IP/MAC address to his ISP/computer then it doesn't matter how TOR or the internet works outside of those basic concepts which shouldn't be too hard to grasp if explained in practical terms, and without jargon.... unless perhaps the defense is arguing that the anonymity of TOR would make it easy for the feds to make a mistake or someone is framing him...do prosecutors have to explain how a bullet works when someone gets shot?
Colon minus backslash. It's important that when we're reading these aloud we know which way the slash was facing and whether the defendant bothered to include a nose.
In a case like this, the defense attorney wants to make his case and have it judged on its merits. If you have a bunch of jurors with expertise in the field, the defense attorney may find himself trying to make a case beyond what the law requires him to make. Attorneys want to make their cases by presenting their arguments in a certain context (within the narrow view of the law(s) being tried). Having jurors make judgments outside of that context is not fair.
In such a technical-topix trial I would have expected an engineering/media-based **blue ribbon** jury to have been seated. It's been done before. If Einstein is on trial for math-harassment, then Born, Fermi, Wheeler and Feynman better be in the jury-box.
It's always seemed to me that it is critical that the judge be, if not expert, at least well-educated in areas of science, philosophy, religion, etc. which are pertinent to the case. How can a judge properly rule on admissibility of evidence (e.g. all those cases involving data sent through an open home router) or validity of objections if he doesn't comprehend the technological or cultural situation?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Jury Nullification
http://www.vocativ.com/underwo...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Should someone with a BS in Computer Science accept someone with a BA in Computer Information Systems as a peer?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
maybe his job was outsourced and he switched fields, or he read Wikipedia
"cloistered plutocracy" = rich fat people who are members of the clergy
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If the judge orders the lawyers to give inaccurate information it could lead to an injustice in either direction.
lose != loose
Why are you even on slashdot?
The judge should give the jurors back their internet access. Or maybe the jurors need to contact their ISPs. I mean, how else would they not be getting their internet?
English noobs
so I'm so confused, your honor. there is this thing of radio pipes, right? but you can hide pipes inside of pipes, so you are running poo inside of drinking water? but it's drugs instead of poo? and they are stuffing fake money in with the poo, except it runs the other way? and it's all hidden so we can't see it, except bad guys can, and sometimes the cops? except it wasn't really there?
you got any booze in that desk? I need a big swallow...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In US jury trials, there are almost never any jurors really knowledgeable about the topic of the trial, if the topic is of any complexity. These candidate experts are reliably weeded by by peremptory challenges during the jury selection by the side with the weaker arguments.
This is a perennial problem with US patent trials with regular international repercussions: Every other civilized nation lets expert judges decide these trials, the US uses farmer jurors from certain Eastern Texas districts who are quick to slap foreign, un-American companies with ridiculous judgements.
In the US we have no right to a jury "of our peers" as we generally think of it.
It's one of those things that people think is in the Constitution but in reality is not.
We have the right to a jury trial. The jury has to be impartial.. It has to be in the state that the crime was committed. And that's it.
The only way we get a jury "of our peers" is if you consider that the American ideal says that we are all peers, regardless of gender, race, religion, education, experience, etc.
In the case of this specific trial, given that detailed knowledge of the Internet is rare, I imagine that the attorneys involved were asking questions designed to find out if any potential jurors had a deep understanding of these things, and while I'm not sure which side would be doing it, but one side or the other would decide that deep knowledge of these things was bad for their case, and since such people are rare, they'd use their peremptory challenge to keep such people off the jury.
Without this system, you might have a person or two on the jury who understands such things pretty well. But with the system ... such people would have been excluded by one side or the other.
That's who the lawyers picked as their jurors. And if the lawyers chose poorly, sucks to be them.
Have I forgotten something else you're likely to say?
English noobs
I'm not sure whether it's okay by /.'s terms of use to share an account between multiple persons, but anyway: Pleased to meet you.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
It's not just jurors who don't understand this stuff. Most judges are just as clueless. A big part of the problem is that the bench has become so political. Smart people don't get appointed anymore. They want "reliable" people - and that's a big difference.
cloistered does not mean "religious" it means an extreme form of "sheltered"
Priests are generally not cloistered. Monks are more likely to be cloistered.
If you ran a construction firm and we being prosecuted for fraud or something after a bridge collapse don't you think the jury should have members that know somethings about materials science and masonry? I think that would be fair.
The jury of your peers is supposed to be representative of the community as a whole --- and that is essential to keep the system from being corrupted for "the good of the team."
Think of the rage that surrounds every police shooting or choke-hold death.
Rape on campus. Bishops sheltering priests who sexually abuse children. The "watchdogs" who presided over the physical decay and medical malpractice in our Veterans' Hospitals.
Ambiguity is safer for the defense, not the prosecution.
No way. How it works is the jurors think, "Man, I don't understand any of this. And I'm bored. And I would rather be doing _____. F-it. GUILTY."
The prosecution has to demonstrate that a crime occurred and how that crime was carried out, beyond a reasonable doubt.
They're so cute when they're young. In any jury trial, doubt has nothing to do with it. Most jurors want a conviction—because they were forced to be there, someone must pay—especially for defendants who are "other".
If you ever get on jury duty for a trial that involves a LEO, watch how your fellow (white, middle/upper-class) jurists act: LEOs cannot lie (even when it is obvious to anyone with two brain cells), they are trustworthy and would only arrest someone if they were guilty.
She also requested all readings of chat transcripts include emoticons.
I mean the author of the summary.
There's a huge difference between:
I'm going to kill you and hide the body. :D
and:
I'm going to kill you and hide the body.
They pay so low that people look for ways to get out of it.
I am unable to find this mythological "any" key.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Jury Nullification
The geek's infatuation with jury nullification never ends.
Historically, jury nullification meant that the black man would be lynched before the trial began and the Klansman would go free. The outsider - the stranger - never holds the winning card in this game.
But good luck trying to explain to the geek why he is not the hometown hero who gets the free pass.
This is really hard. I am not saying the accused was framed, but how hard would it be for the government to frame whoever it wanted to? Even without any dishonesty or shadiness at all, it's going to come down to experts saying essentially "this thing I say I saw, proves it was him."
A frame job and an honest prosecution will look identical. Shit, I'm a techie and I wouldn't know how to tell the difference.
They better have some non-TOR-packets evidence to present, or else any responsibile jury will have no choice but to acquit.
This is actually a fairly reasonable request. There can be a big difference between
I'm going to kill that guy :-)
VS
I'm going to kill that guy
Even with the emoticon, a lot of context can still be lost, but they can help a bit.
Indeed. I am a Linux "professional". I am not an "expert", though some may call me that.
This is because I personally understand that while I know a lot about Linux and specifically about the systems I administer, there is so much more I don't know. Much of that is "stuff you don't need to know... until you do (which is unlikely, but possible)".
Whenever somebody in IT calls himself/herself an expert, I cringe, because there's *always* so much more you can learn. Hell, people are learning new tricks about systems they've been tending to for decades, especially when it comes to interaction with other systems.
The protection should be from reasonable doubt. If the prosecution hasn't explained their case so the jury understands it, the case isn't proven to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. It is very reasonable to doubt someone when you don't understand what they're saying.
It's really only a problem if it results in the miscarriage of justice; otherwise it's just a potential problem. There are lots of potential problems in any situation, and no reason to believe (or evidence provided) that this potential problem is dire enough to warrant more attention than any other aspect of the case. But since the judge has been addressing it all along, a better headline might be: "Judge ensuring adequate explanations of technical issues. Nothing to see here."
Besides, the case doesn't rest on understanding Tor -- Ulbricht was observed accessing and communicating via the dreadpirateroberts account. You don't need to trace a phone call to demonstrate that someone on the other end is who you say they are; just show that they were observed on the other end of the phone while you were talking to them. This isn't rocket science or voodoo. And even if their evidence was purely circumstantial -- say DPR consistently appeared online when Ulbricht was at a computer, and never when he was away from a computer -- circumstantial evidence is still evidence.
It appears from everything we know thus far that Ulbricht was definitely the person responsible for running the site. Personally, my only concern is that they're using parallel construction (aka lying) to build the case.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's marked 'power' or '1/0'
So, does anyone think we'll ever spin off a cyber court responsible for handling these types of cases?
Maybe one with a jury selection process aimed at finding those with at least a baseline understanding of the technical aspects of the Internet.
My chat scripts will include emoticons just as soon as you show me a US Robotics modem that can respond correctly to emoticons.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I spoke with someone who was involved in the process to determine jurors in highly technical cases, and the response was not promising. Essentially the first step of selecting jurors is to eliminate all candidates that have any technical or expert background because they can influence the other jurors.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
"The" geek? There's only one?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
How do we have any freaking clue whether or not the jury understands the internet? If they are doing their jobs, they aren't saying a damn thing about what they do or don't understand.
The judge on the other hand, certainly is requesting things be simplified on her (and the juror's) behalf.
Really, this isn't any different from ANY other trial. Any trial involves the jury deciding on things that they do not have a great deal (or any) experience with. The whole job of the Forensic evidence, insider trading, patents, whatever.
"Judge Katherine Forrest .. was unhappy with its "mumbo-jumbo" explanation of the anonymizing service Tor.
..
More like her Honor doesn't get BITCOIN, TOR or the Internet. She should have the jury read these documents, assuming they can work out how to use the 'Internet'
Guide to the Silk Road Part #1
Infographic - A Comprehensive Guide to Buying Drugs Using Silk Road 2.0
Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs On Silk Road's Black Market
Well, the part where they caught Ulbricht responding to a live chat session as DPR with the undercover agent that was a moderator on Silk Road with the screen open and responding when they arrested him is pretty compelling evidence that he was DPR.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Great move there on the stereotype. Women do it too.
It sounds like the lawyer was crap. Anonymity is not illegal and really isn't pertinent to the case. Maybe s/he was trying to make the jury think the dependent is evil or something for wanting privacy, but it sounds to me like s/he was barking up the wrong tree.
Just open with the crime. If you want to say that he went to great pains to hide his identity, say that he went to great pains to hide his identity. Get to thepoint and skip all the techno mumbo jumbo and explain what matters in plain english.
And when the details come out that Tor is freely available, easily downloadable and installable, and demonstration in court shows that it's just lie installing a game, don't be surprised when it's no longer scary. Instead of making it scary, try the facts and the law. The court is not a law & order episode.
It's a technical definition - so your mistake above is similar to comparing a wireless bridge to an arched stone bridge built by the Romans. Both are bridges without wires. Similarly "peers" does not mean people in your profession in this context.
I'm sure there have been other more positive instances of Jury Nullification
and maybe next week I'll win the Tri-State Lotto
--- but that isn't how I plan to meet the mortgage payment on my house.
can you post a single example of a geek who escaped conviction because of jury nullification?
A good lawyer should be able to push this case to mistrial easily. The judge is a moron.
If jurors do get the internet, they'll just use their smartphones to post their case to http://peers.stackexchange.com...
Anyone with understanding of technology would be barred by the defense attourney. If the defense failed to do this, that would be cuase for disbarment from the legal profession. Inept defense is not allowed.
The only way to have this be a fair trial with knowledgeable peers would be to pick from CS/engineering students, which would be unfair in other ways.
As a recently retired enterprise architect, I have time to serve on jury's, but haven't been called since moving to a new state almost 20 yrs ago. The only trials I've been jury on were class-b drunk and disorderly conduct types. Meh.
Is that like living in a gated community with its own security force?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It seems to me that juries are the cause of more problems than good and is a system that's systematically abused by crafty procecutors or defenders:
* There are "jury consultants", whose job it is to make sure that only jury members are selected, which they feel are easiest influenced to pass the 'desired' judgement.
* Dog and pony shows in the courtroom, designed to influence jury members on an emotional level.
* Endless time wasted explaining technical concepts to clueless people (no offense here, most of us are clueless about most things), while in reality experts should be needed.
When the coverage of some high-profile trial focuses only on about how this or that event or statement ("the glove doesn't fit!") might influence the jury then we know something went wrong: It's not about truth or lie, about guilt or innocence anymore. It's all just about fomralities, proceedings, and how to mess with people's (the jurors) minds.
This is what the justice system has degenerated to and "justice" has been left behind long ago in favor of just "winning" by whatever means necessary, completely independent of guilt or innocence. The courtoom becomes a showroom, ruthless lawyers (on both sides) climb the ranks based on how good they are in influencing the jury.
Doesn't that seem very wrong?
I say: Get rid of the jury system! It's more trouble than it's worth. There are other countries which do just fine withou juries. Germany comes to mind. Their justice system generally has a pretty good reputation.
Its funny the average american can explain a vespr structure but not what a DNS server is...