Feds say NSA "bogeyman" did not find Silk Road's servers
FBI says it found main server via a "misconfiguration" of the login interface.
by David Kravets Sept 6 2014
The FBI easily found the main server of the now-defunct Silk Road online drug-selling site, and didn't need the National Security's help, federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing.
The underground drug website, which was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, "reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars" through his role as the site's leader. Trial is set for later this year.
The authorities said Friday that the FBI figured out the server's IP address through a misconfiguration in the site's login window. They said that a US warrant wasn't required to search the Icelandic server because "warrants are not required for searches by foreign authorities of property overseas."
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I draw the readers' attention to page 7 of the PDF document found at the last URL:
"POINT I: ALL OF ULBRICHT'S SUPPRESSION ARGUMENTS ARE MERITLESS AND SHOULD BE DENIED".
AFAICT, the FBI is afraid of having to ask the NSA for sources and methods, and is claiming that a warrant isn't required to prosecute a U.S. Citizen when the information was obtained from a server located outside the U.S.
This "Flag of convenience" argument has been made before, and is used to justify CIA torture sites that are outside the U.S.: it translates to "Yes, we did it, but it's OK /there/".
Bill Horne Moderator