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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.
If only he had read that article in 2600 "so you want to be a darknrt drug lord".
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?!"
This has been reported before.
People rarely realize how much stuff they put on the internet about themselves, willingly or not. Since the internet never forgets, it's usually quite easy to dig up a lot of information about almost everybody. All it takes is a lot of time and knowing how to look.
Do the exercize: try to unearth bits of information about yourself: it's scary how much you can find out (or rediscover) about yourself in a mere couple hours...
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"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*
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Am I the only one who noticed the similarities in the name altoid and Alford? Maybe he typoed while googling?
This story indicates the surveillance state, and much of its collection efforts, are even less necessary as long as the detectives are willing to put in the work.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Are you sure isn't about a Muslim terrorist? "He escalated the discovery and became such a pest about it, one agent told him to drop it. " That sounds like standard operating protocol Democrats use under Obama.
What, are we supposed to see this guy as some sort of hero or something? Forget it..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
anything without the mark of the leased on it is considered smuggling? what will they think up next? this & other queries remain unanswered... ask ed snowden your questions here on /...continues.. truth+mercy=justice
There is another area of major tax fraud where the agent involved has been told to drop it... http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
It's possible that the FBI already knew who Ulbricht was. Or just didn't care, preferring to pursue the criminal groups using Silk Road rather than bringing the system down. But the IRS philosophy is to chase nickels in front of a steam roller. To them, the crime is the money. Not the drugs, weapons and other contraband being exchanged.
This is why many many law enforcement officials don't like sharing information with the IRS. Tip a terrorist off that he's being watched because he forgot to report some income and he goes underground.
Have gnu, will travel.
Used by "lawful" mafiosi to bring down a legitimate businessman, because he sold something they believe only their friends may sell. Its a success story, allright. The criminals won.
It took me 2 hours to source a supply of Testosterone in Australia just using Google. Correlating and using limits will find you just about anything. Not everything is on Google, of course. In fact, in recent years I'm finding Google has less and less interesting information and content as web sites shut it out. The other search engines aren't any better. But it does lead you to doors like forums.
"...altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com."
Whoopsie.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
How the tax collection agency goes after this guy and not the FBI. Shows the real priorities of Uncle Sam.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This smells to much like FUD to me. Do you think they would admit that all the money they spent on the high tech stuff was for naught? or is it more reasonable that they would be trying to cover up how they really down a tor website? I'm pretty sure they wanna do it again. I don't trust the FBI, they're known to lie and manipulate, why can this be trusted to be true?
The silly stuff of pride and self preservation means you can't do someone's job for them.
You show that they (and possible the massive task force behind them are "useless").
It is a stupid system. The whistle blowers should get a nice reward for saving further wasted money. And yes it is possible those in charge get a black mark for not following whatever lead it was. Overall from the top, the system should adjust and continue to reward these outside sources of information as good competition against an inside system going soft.
I am not surprised- I mean, if you have a secret anonymous website how are people supposed to know about it? You still have to talk it up initially. He just never created sock puppets to do so. At least then.
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Gary L. Alford is black. That probably contributed to them not believing him.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
hint LEO is not Low Earth Orbit or a specimen of Panthera leo but a
Law
Enforcement
Officer
and given that there seems to be a lot of Spineless Brainless Gits getting badges you might in some areas depend more on your neighborhood "citizens forum" for actual public safety.
and given the number of folks that have been a Guest of the State[ |s] of %list of state[ |s]%
in said neighborhoods they are a bit jumpy to begin with.
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This story is false. The FBI used Tor de-anonymization via a tool that they paid Carnegie Mellon researchers. They also used parallel construction against Ross Ullbricht. His conviction should be overturned. His trial was a mistrial.
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By posing as customers the FBI could put lots of people in Jail. But Alford insisting that they arrest Ulbrict they just got one head. Not good for the KPIs. Not good at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
was not followed here, and that shit will kill you every time.
If you like to talk about your political views and favorite economists online, make fucking sure that your aliases don't do the exact same thing. In fact, if you're using an alias to do stuff that governments will frown on (like running an online black market) then make sure your alias doesn't say a damn word about stuff like political views and personal heroes.
If you run an online black market and law enforcement shows up at your door to talk about some fake IDs seized at the border, don't fucking bring up that site in your conversation. Act bewildered, and say as little as possible.
LinkedIn is a fantastic source of information and help, but it leaves a hell of a trail. If you really need to leave an email in a message, make a throwaway account at one of the literally hundreds of available sites. Also, make sure you're using tor for it at all times.
Be weary of when and where you login from. This can be a real bitch to get around, but if you're only ever logged in the online black market that you administer when you're at home, and the feds are watching you, you're pretty much fucked.
It's not that law enforcement people are smart...look at the various federal agencies in the US, for every IRS agent Alford, there's a busload (a literal short bus) of lazy semi retarded idiots who build careers solely on people they set up and "make into" criminals...it's that it is very easy to fuck up and leave a trail that leads right to your door, and despite the incompetence of most investigators who are looking in your general direction, it's that one guy with three digit IQ who will connect the dots.
It's not too hard to find the post that the IRS agent found:
https://bitcointalk.org/index....
If interested, please send your answers to the following questions to rossulbricht at gmail dot com
In fact, it the post was simply there. It didn't have to be preserved in another poster's response.
I leave that as an exercise to the reader to find the posts where altoid (Ulbricht) promoted the Slik Road.
But never mind the facts; I'm sure the FBI just faked the post...
You better watch out for the IRS! It seems they are able to catch people who have found ways to evade the FBI and other law enforcement authorities. Remember that if you are getting a refund on your taxes, don't file a tax form to claim this refund or the government will find out where you live.
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