How a Young IRS Agent Identified the Man Behind Silk Road (nytimes.com)

circletimessquare writes: Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, was identified as Ross Ulbricht by one agent googling, off work hours, in just two weekends in 2013. Many agents had been working on the case for a year or more, and since agent Gary Alford was new to the case, not FBI, and not technologically sophisticated, no one took him seriously for months. He escalated the discovery and became such a pest about it, one agent told him to drop it. From the New York Times article: "In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But I'm like, 'Well, that stuff still works.'" Mr. Alford's preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name "altoid." "Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?" altoid asked. "It's kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com." The early date of the posting suggested that altoid might have inside knowledge about Silk Road. During the first weekend of June 2013, Mr. Alford went through everything altoid had written, the online equivalent of sifting through trash cans near the scene of a crime. Mr. Alford eventually turned up a message that altoid had apparently deleted — but that had been preserved in the response of another user. In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com.

Comments

Old school?

[CCarrot]

"In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But I'm like, 'Well, that stuff still works.'" Mr. Alford's preferred tool was Google.

"Old-school": I do not think that word means what you think it means...either that, or I'm ancient school *sigh*

Re:It's as old as search engines

[Dr. Evil]

"What surprises me here is that government agencies who should know better dismiss plain old search engine stalking as a valid method for finding out what someone is up to, or has done."

The NYT is trying to tell a story. There might be a nugget of truth, but I'm doubtful that the government agencies are so dismissive of old tech.

We work in an industry where we can raise red flags, calling meetings, send urgent emails, harass people in chat and in hallways and not have our ideas heard. I'm sure the IRS agent encounters the same. It's not just old tech. Could be not-invented-here, resources, sound reasons to dismiss the lead above his clearance (as the agent expected), internal politics... who knows?

Ticket systems are nice for this. IRS opens a ticket and assigns it to the FBI. Date, time, assignee and management oversight to see that it gets worked on eventually. Whomever closes the ticket without a good reason, only to discover it solved the case should look for a new job.

Re:Probably a lie

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Pretty much everything the FBI and the NYT says is a lie. Does anyone believe that Ross Ulbricht would just go chatroom to chatroom posting "Have all you guys heard of my super secret illegal website?!"

Yes, I think it's entirely possible. Some people are just plain stupid even when they're smart*, and some people have a hard time thinking forward in time.

Or, more likely, he may just not have given much thought to covering his tracks, especially early on.

So yeah, although the FBI and NYT do indeed lie, I think it's quite plausible that he made some mistakes that led to his unmasking.

-

*Ben Carson, for example. He's supposedly a skilled brain surgeon, and yet he's a complete fucking imbecile about literally every other subject in the known universe. For example, here are just a few of the things he's said:
"The pyramids were used to store grain." Err, no.
"Israel's Knesset should just move to a 2-party system." Err, no.
"The Earth is 6,000 years old." Err, no.
"Satan created the Big Bang." Err, no.
"Gayness must be a choice, because prisoners who are raped come out gay." Err, no.
"Obamacare is worse than slavery." Err, no.
"Planned Parenthood is a plot to kill black babies." Err, no.

Re:Oops

[gweihir]

Which does not sound credible to me. On almost all sites where you ask this type of questions, you ask anonymously or with an account, but giving a plain-text email will both not get you responses to it and will get you a lot of spam to it instead.

My take: Parallel construction (i.e. law enforcement criminally lying under oath) and some way to keep Ulbricht quiet about it. Possibly done to hide criminal and possibly unconstitutional snooping practices.