I haven’t followed the Silk Road case on this blog, but because the defense has raised privacy and 4th Amendment concerns, I thought I’d note this story by Andy Greenberg:
As the trial of alleged Silk Road drug market creator Ross Ulbricht approaches, the defense has highlighted the mystery of how law enforcement first located the main Silk Road server in an Icelandic data center, despite the computer being hidden by the formidable anonymity software Tor. Was the FBI tipped off to the server’s location by the NSA, who used a secret and possibly illegal Tor-cracking technique?
The answer, according to a new filing by the case’s prosecution, is far more mundane: The FBI claims to have found the server’s location without the NSA’s help, simply by fiddling with the Silk Road’s login page until it leaked its true location.
In a rebuttal filed Friday to a New York court Friday and accompanied by a letter from the FBI, the prosecution in Ulbricht’s case laid out an argument dismissing a series of privacy concerns Ulbricht’s lawyers had expressed in a motion submitted to a New York court last month. That earlier motion had accused the government of illegal searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment, including a warrantless search of the Silk Road server, and argued that those privacy violations could render inadmissible virtually all of the prosecution’s evidence. The defense motion also demanded that the government explain how it tracked down the Silk Road’s server, and reveal whether the NSA had participated in that hunt.
Read more on Wired.