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The Technologies That Betrayed Silk Road's Anonymity
itwbennett writes Silk Road was based on an expectation of anonymity: Servers operated within an anonymous Tor network. Transactions between buyers and sellers were conducted in bitcoin. Everything was supposedly untraceable. Yet prosecutors presented a wealth of digital evidence to convince the jury that Ross Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, the handle used by the chief operator of the site. From Bitcoin to server logins and, yes, Facebook, here's a look at 5 technologies that tripped Ulbricht up.
He was overconfident in his abilities and probably got more and more sloppy as time went on, convincing himself that he was too smart to get caught.
I think it's more convincing himself that his opponents were too dumb to catch him even if he was sloppy... but they're not complete idiots, obviously.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Looks like he was done in by being stupid more than the technologies.
The article is more than a little sensational too. "He was done in by CHAT!" No, he was done in by keeping a goddamn log of his criminal activities. The fact that it happened to be chat is beside the point. Probably the only entry in there that deserves the headline is the Bitcoin one, only because it highlights how people misrepresent Bitcoin (It's so anonymous that every single transaction ever is recorded on the internet!). The article points out that he could have used tumblers to hide his bitcoins, but with the volume of coins Silk Road deals with that probably wasn't practical. Tumblers are really only useful for relatively small numbers of coins at a time. Put too many in and take too many out and your transactions stand out.
The article does harp a lot on how this information was only available because Ulbrict was dumb and let his laptop be snatched out of his hands while he was logged in. It is somewhat frightening to consider how poor the government's case might be if he had simply been facing the other direction.
I read the internet for the articles.
Variety Jones, perhaps the true mastermind behind Silk Road, had the perfect level of involvement. He was disconnected and impossible to track, which means he ran this empire through a patsy. This isn't meant as an insult to Ulbricht. It's too hard to do everything right at that level of involvement. Jones's mistakes only had negative ramifications for Ulbricht. You could say that his only error that might come back to him was that he didn't explicitly tell Ulbricht to keep logging disabled for his Tor chats, which allowed Jones's writing habits and estimates of his schedule (time zone) can be analyzed and perhaps mapped to his other (less obscured) online activity in a manner similar to Ulbricht's Facebook notes about Thailand.
Who knows, perhaps Jones, who was quite arguably the true architect of Silk Road, is now serving the same capacity in another similar enterprise.
Never substitute a conspiracy theory when you don't need one.
Sure, I suppose the NSA could have used magical spying technology to know everything about Dread Pirate Roberts, but whether they did or not, they didn't need to. He had left enough clues about DPR's identity scattered around in public to put him on a small list of suspects.
That's just the thing, at some point someone will make a mistake, he should have been more like the Dread Pirate Roberts and retired before that happened. From what I understand he had made a lot of money, should have walked away while he still could (yeah, yeah I know easier said than done).
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
> Indeed. Just working behind two doors and/or having a dead-man-switch handy would have been enough.
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition, the SAS, GSG-9, S. Matkal, GIGN, GROM, SEAL-6 or Spetnaz to come through the window on fast-rope? With a Silent Hawk Laden-copter hovering above?
In fact, military-style commandos usually enter through the walls, using tube-like shaped charges to form a nice big manhole, out of concern for the possible booby-trapping of doors and windows. Or they will first infiltrate the basement / attic, gas the building from there russian theatre style, then carry out the targets and collaterals on stretchers. Or simply drop in a flash-bang grenade through the chimey for starters, which leaves the inhabitans unable to tell their left and right hands apart for several minutes.
After all, that Kim Un Dotcom guy was caught, even though his ranch was a fortress. They came for him in a black helicopter and said drop your shotgun now, cause we have RPGs.