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Silk Road Journal Found On Ulbricht's Laptop: "Everyone Knows Too Much"
sarahnaomi writes On Wednesday, prosecutors in the Silk Road trial began to lay out the wealth of evidence found on the laptop taken from accused kingpin Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library in October 2013. The evidence presented by prosecutor Timothy Howard was the most comprehensive and damning thus far, including more than a thousand pages of chats between the site's pseudonymous operator Dread Pirate Roberts and Silk Road administrators. Also entered into evidence was a journal that dates back to at least 2010 describing the creation and operation of the site. FBI computer scientist Thomas Kiernan, the second witness in the trial, testified about the day Ulbricht was arrested and the evidence gathered from his laptop.
Isn't it the first thing they teach you in Criminal 101: Don't keep a journal!
It just shows what happens when you take drugs: you end up losing interest in your education and dropping out, just before you get to the part of your Criminal 101 class that you really needed. Here's the transcript:
Dear Diary,
Criminal 101 class was really, really, boring today. I don't know how much longer I can take it. We learned about a bunch of junk about how not to leave fingerprints and how to wipe a hard drive. Duh - everybody knows that. When are we gonna learn something really useful?... I think I'll just drop out.
your friend,
Ross
There's actually some neat forensic gear out there designed for this kind of situation. It's basically a battery with a fast UPS style switchover mechanism and various bits for tapping into the power line connected to a computer. Basically they wire this thing in, pull the plug, and the battery keeps the machine running and unlocked while they cart it away/image it/etc. They've also got devices called "jigglers" that simulate mouse movement to keep the screen from locking.
Obviously this turns into a cat and mouse thought experiment with a variety of rube goldberg type countermeasures and counter-countermeasures, but against the average guy this kinda thing probably works quite well.
Yeah they had two agents get into a fight right behind him and when he jumped up to see what was going on (just like anyone would do) another agent snatched the laptop and started the task of getting evidence off it and mirroring the drive's contents.
The FBI is often really fucking good at what they do.
The simplest strategy would have been to have already moved to a non-extradition country. He'd already racked up tens of millions of dollars in profits! What was he waiting for?