Feds say Silk Road suspect’s computer shows he (thought he) plotted 6 murders

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/feds-say-silk-road-suspects-computer-shows-he-thought-he-plotted-6-murders/

by llambda • 13 years ago

37 71 13 years ago

nwh2• 13 years ago

He kept a written journal of this stuff? Truly must not have expected to be caught, I can't imagine what world he was in inside his head to have believed that. Given the status of the website, it was only going to be a matter of time.

Fairly convincing looking fake Australian license though, wish there was a better photo of it.

Pheno• 13 years ago

I can't get over how he wasn't using full disk encryption.

anaphor• 13 years ago

The way I see it there are a few possibilities:

1) He isn't the real DPR

2) He is the real DPR, but he's extremely inept and didn't get caught before due to dumb luck

3) He isn't the original DPR, but an inept person who took over to take the fall for the original DPR

4) He wanted to get caught?

evilrevolution• 13 years ago

If he was they'd either leave the computer on and retrieve the key out of the ram, or he'd hand it over within a week of custody.

berberous2• 13 years ago

He probably did. The FBI deliberately waited until he was using his laptop at the library, then tackled him while the computer was still logged on.

sliverstorm8• 13 years ago

I can't imagine what world he was in inside his head

Perhaps the world of in for a penny, in for a pound

mpyne4• 13 years ago

I'm extremely interested in who this 'redandwhite' guy is. It's still unclear if the murders even occurred, but if no one got killed then this might be one of the most effective cons (against DPR) I've ever seen.

consonants2• 13 years ago

It's the feds. They faked the hit.

mpyne4• 13 years ago

That was the first hit, against chronicpain/flush. I'm referring to the other 5 hits from the Hell's Angel. The Feds aren't sure who he is or whether the hits even happened, they only know that DPR released payment for them so presumably the proof was acceptable to DPR.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

Isn't it obvious it was the friendlychemist?

friendlychemist: "Hey, I need $500.000 I owe to some bad guys. Give it to me or I'll expose you."

silkroadguy: "Sure, can you get me in contact with the guys that you owe money to, first?"

(He ...really expects somebody that owes money to bad guys will give their address to someone he tries to blackmail????)

"redandwhite": "Hello, I'm the guy friendlychemist owes money to. Want me to kill him? I can do it for, say, $500.000".

silkroadguy: "Seems legit. Go ahead".

"readandwhite": "Done! Here's a photo of me^H^H him dead."

silkroadguy: "Great! Here's the money!".

(time passes)

"readandwhite": "Hey, I found somebody else who steals from you. Four of them? Want me to kill 'em? Wire some bitcoins".

silkroadguy: "Sure, wiring!".

I mean, is he dumb or what?

mpyne4• 13 years ago

That does seem the most likely explanation, yes.

veb• 13 years ago

From the comments (Silk Road Tales) http://antilop.cc/sr/

shill• 13 years ago

The link from his bookmarks bar.

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/why-hackers-should-...

epynonymous2• 13 years ago

leet!

scenicBulimic6• 13 years ago

So, as an armchair juror, 3 enourmous questions spring to mind:

1. Why would a man, who allegedly built an extremely profitable empire using robust cryptographic software, not have enough expertise to employ powerful encypted countermeasures on his personal machine? Why wasn't his hard drive encrypted? Why were there no plans to erase and destroy data at a moment's notice, in the event that he gets arrested? Are we expected to believe that his meticulous use of crypto-currency and onion routing go hand in hand with maintaining a silly plain text journal of his comings and goings? That he was simply naive to the idea that his local storage devices should not be a meticulously guarded has his network presence?

2. Are screenshots honestly a valid form of evidence? Consider that there's a distinct lack of any sort of chain-of-custody for such evidence, and the fact that it's trivial to fabricate screenshots, why should I believe that any give screenshot can be regarded as authentic evidence?

3. Screenshots aside, how can we honestly buy into any digital evidence presented to us, when there's no assured certainty to its integrity? Consider that one cannot even trust plaintext HTTP data to be safe from corruption by MITM attacks. Given that large quantities of digital evidence can be manufactured programatically, with relative ease, given the proper expertise, how are we to trust a large volume of digital data as anything more than artificially produced bits and bytes spat out by a machine? Logs? Logs, you say? Who maintained these logs? What program created these logs? And if I can possibly capture and replay a remote desktop session, doesn't it stand to reason that I might be able to spice things up, and insert salacious tidbits, and then programatically produce screenshots at will? So what if they have gigabytes of data demonstrating such and such? What is the true measure of authenticity when confronted by the fact that it's still just faceless bytes sitting on a disk?

maxerickson• 13 years ago

It is just like any evidence. You look at the people that are certifying it and decide if it is plausible that they are all lying.

(aimed mostly at 3.)

loceng8• 13 years ago

One very plausible answer is the government wanted to demonize him so there'd be less of an uproar of support against their actions.

krapp7• 13 years ago

An uproar from whom?

ericcumbee2• 13 years ago

1) He was arrogant and thought that they would never get that close to him. or He thought that keeping notes offline in an analog format would be safer than keeping digital copies.

Also consider that for all the Trade Craft Bin Laden practiced to stay hidden. He was sloppy when it came to the computer drives and notes he kept in his house.

XorNot• 13 years ago

There's an observation from the FBI that applies to people caught for child pornography: it turns out that usually most of them have disk encryption software installed, but don't actually use it (i.e. you find a whole bunch of unencrypted stuff that's still completely illegal just in a folder somewhere).

The main thing to remember about crime is that it's not rational - the risk/reward payoff is absurdly lopsided, so to some extent every step of the way you have to engage in little fictions to convince yourself you won't ever get caught - because if you took stringent precautions, you'd have to acknowledge that if you ever need to use them it probably still means you're going to jail for some amount of time.

saalweachter• 13 years ago

There's a certain commonality there. It didn't matter whether any of Bin Laden's hard drives were encrypted; he was dead when we found him and he knew it.

Likewise, from a practical stand point once the Feds came knocking at DPR's front door the jig was up. While the extra evidence will no doubt add a couple of nails to the coffin when this finally goes to trial, chances were that if he was tracked down at all, there would be enough evidence to convict him on that paper trail alone.

Chances are this is just the standard "it's a lot harder to commit a perfect crime than you think it is." But it might also not be irrational to focus exclusively on not getting caught, and not worry so hard about all the extra evidence that will be scooped up with you.

gcv• 13 years ago

All good points. This is why neither you, nor any other programmer, is likely to sit on a jury in a trial relating to computer crime.

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

The FBI appears to have seized a very large number of Bitcoins, posed as hitmen killing someone on his behalf, and they've got a wide variety of physical evidence like the fake IDs shown.

I doubt they needed to take the risky step of faking extra evidence here.

scenicBulimic6• 13 years ago

I'll readily entertain the possibility of tangible artifacts over some bytestream any old day of the week. If he's busted with a bunch of fake IDs on his person, I'd consider that to be evidence proper.

But anything transpiring in the netherworld of the internet needs to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when no real-world violence erupted.

It may be possible that this is the guy. The evidence that rings truest in my mind is that there was a real world cause-and-effect chain of events that occured immediately after his arrest. The shit hit the fan, and the site went down. Clearly, the real world arrest had a direct influence on the availability of the website.

But given the DEA's predilection for parallel construction, and the NSA's predilection for electronic dragnets, can we take the narrative of how they came to bust the Ulbricht at face value? Even if he was breaking the law, was he apprehended lawfully? Did they come into possession of this digital evidence in a lawful manner?

If Ulbricht gets off on a technicality for the crime he's charged with, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. He's being charged with the hypothetical thoughtcrime of killing an internet persona (or two). To me, that feels like a technicality to begin with.

If the people he killed never existed to begin with, then how can we be sure that the evidence that supports these ideas was collected and not crafted?

He may be the real deal, the guy himself, responsible for The Silk Road. But if you're going to put him away with that in mind, justice is not served unless he's charged with the crime he's being punished for, and justified by the true story of how they nailed him. I want to know what was truly so evil about The Silk Road, such that it might necessitate some sneaky peaky, in order to lock up the man responsible for it.

Maybe they achieve their goal of unmasking him, through this direct relationship of arrest and then site outage, but does that mean we have to swallow this murder-for-hire wrap too, no matter how flimsy it feels?

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

they've got a wide variety of physical evidence like the fake IDs shown

I'm old enough to remember when a fake ID meant you wanted to buy beer.

Steko• 13 years ago

You really think "my client is too smart to have made any of these mistakes it must all be a government conspiracy" is going to fly as a defense?

berberous2• 13 years ago

1) The drive was very likely encrypted. The FBI deliberately waited until he was using the laptop in a public location, and tackled him so they could explore the drive while it was still logged in. As to why he wrote everything down in a diary, or didn't plan for that eventuality...seems to be a combination of hubris, inexperience, and naivety.

2) Yes. They can be authenticated by the officers who took them. The officers merely state that they tackled Ross in the library, and that they personally photographed what was on the screen, and that the image you see is said photograph. You are of course correct that they could be fabricated, but that's up to his defense attorney to argue, and for a jury to believe is enough to constitute "reasonable doubt" in their collective minds.

3) Again, evidence does not have to be perfect. Everything you argue applies to any kind of evidence. What's to say the witnesses testimony wasn't coerced? The letter forged? The rules of evidence come into play here, as well as the jury's role in deciding what to believe. That said, it's certainly an interesting issue, and it would be great if there were stronger chain-of-custody and verification rules for digital evidence collected from a seized hard-drive, for example.

scenicBulimic6• 13 years ago

Specifically in response to number 3: I contend that it is easier to coerce a machine than a witness, that forged bits can be perfectly identical whereas forged letters might not.

Machines need to be held to different standards for different reasons. If we lend them a greater veracity than is appropriate, how unforgiving might such an error be?

We live in a world of statecraft through malware with Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu. We live in a world where international telecommunications companies enable global eavesdropping and interception at the carrier-grade level.

You cannot discount the idea that his entire machine might have been compromised all the way down to the firmware, to elicit highly specific programmable responses choreographed in real time. That much is is honestly unlikely, and unrealistic, but in theory, the possibility is there.

Consider that he may have been a useful idiot. A patsy. That he was framed, does the physical evidence and circumstantial evidence seal off that path of doubt? How advanced could the Silk Road's administrators actually be? Could they have crafted such malware, to root kit his laptop and lead investigators to a fall guy, and then temporarily close up shop if he goes down?

I don't think that's what happened, but when a laptop is a key piece of evidence that a case may hinge on, The first thing I think of is how much control I honestly have over my own laptop.

Fabricating bits is not the same as fabricating other evidence. Machines are different.

As for your points #1 and #2, yeah, I'll agree that those are valid points and that sounds pretty damning, and I'll give it up on those.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

1. Why would a man, who allegedly built an extremely profitable empire using robust cryptographic software, not have enough expertise to employ powerful encypted countermeasures on his personal machine?

Because they wouldn't matter one iota.

Either they would get him with his computer on, and read them off of memory, or the court would have forced him to give the password -- or face even harsher sentence based on all the other evidence.

Apane• 13 years ago

Seems like a scum bag to me.

brianpgordon• 13 years ago

“Who he’s been portrayed as is so not him, it’s absurd,” Lyn Ulbricht told Forbes. “He’s one of the best people I know.”

Said every mother ever.

npb32• 13 years ago

This is like a movie

epynonymous2• 13 years ago

most of the comments tend to say that he was stupid, but in some respects, i think the guy was quite bold and somewhat intelligent if he was able to roll something up this large over that long of a time period even if what he was doing was highly illegal. sure he could have been smarter about some things, but honestly, the fact that he got this far, this fast means that he was an enterprising individual, just on the wrong track.

Feds say Silk Road suspect’s computer shows he (thought he) plotted 6 murders

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