scenicBulimic

13 yıl öncediscuss

No, I am not suggesting that.

13 yıl öncediscuss

Yeah, I get it. He ran a drug ring. A mail order drug ring on the internet, with real world consequences. I get that.

What I'm saying is this: There was no murder-for-hire skull duggery, until the sting provoked him into it. There were no murderous provocations without federal law enforcement in the picture, conflating the whole scenario with their invented personas that didn't exist.

That's the reality of what happened here.

They explicitly state that they taunted and coerced him, with fictitious sock puppetry. I'm not inventing that. That really happened.

So we're being asked (as internet jurors) to convict this guy on what he might have done if placed in a similar situation by real people. We're asked to throw him in jail because maybe he would have done something like this, eventually.

Except I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that he belived he was dealing with more than one person on the internet. He may have suspected that this was all an elaborate con game, architected by a single entity, and if he did suspect that, he'd have been right. Except that the single entity in this case was the FBI.

And bitcoin? $500,000 in bitcoin? First of all, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the bitcoin wallet he allegedly had at his command. But really, any exchange rate you'd like to apply here is as turbulent, and volatile, and imaginary as whatever we pretend bitcoin is worth in general. It's a virtual currency people are still grappling with. The concept of bitcoin wealth is as absurd as internet fame. Yeah it seems to have real world effects, but how long will it last, and do we take it at face value? If he went from nothing to multi-millionairre IN BITCOIN ONLY, almost over night, is that real money? Did he try to give real money to a real internet hitman?

The federal government acknowleges bitcoin's existence, but even they don't acknowlege it as a true currency. So when you boil it down, it's more like he committed some hypothetical crime for $500,000 in semi-precious baseball cards, or bottle caps or pogs. Bitcoin is regarded as a collector's item at the moment, and little more. You could say he did it for $500,000 in ham sandwiches, and you wouldn't be far off the mark. Maybe it's 7,500 KG of ham sandwiches? Are they fresh ham sandwiches, stored in a refrigerator? Maybe they're moldy ham sandwiches, but what if they're THE VERY HAM SANDWICHES THAT CHOKED MAMA CASS TO DEATH???

Maybe it's still quid pro quo, no matter how you look at it, but when you bandy about dollar amounts, don't pretend like that's an objective value.

scenicBulimic

13 yıl öncediscuss

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.

scenicBulimic

13 yıl öncediscuss

A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person. He didn't have the capacity to visit this person in real life. He couldn't have possibly been sure whether it was a real person or not. He never met them, he never shook their hand, he couldn't have been sure of where they lived, because they didn't exist to begin with.

Another screen name claims to have the ability to reach out and eliminate the existence of this bothersome screen name. The only catch is that in order to have one user id destroy another user id, you have to part ways with an imaginary tally of digital crypto-currency.

This is not a case of high school classmates cyberbullying one another until one commits suicide. There was never any real world interaction, nor could there have been, because the target of the murder was always hypothetical. He couldn't have known for sure who was responsible for ANY of the screen names.

In contrast, consider cyber bullying, where a classmate knows for a fact that a given login assuredly represents a person they see everyday during class at school, and which point they begin a campaign of deliberate harassment and psychological warfare. One scenario involves verifiable individuals known to eachother in the real world, and the other scenario (the silk road hit) does not.

The drug trade and the bitcoin exchange for real money may portend that his intent to defend the black market network could potentially turn violent, and that perhaps he was of a mindset prone to acting as an accessory before the fact and an accomplice to murder, but nevertheless, I still question the reality of this sting operation, and what it may have actually represented to Ulbricht himself, in situ. Did he honestly think anyone was getting killed for bitcoins, if he never met them face to face? How can we know for sure?

scenicBulimic

13 yıl öncediscuss

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?

scenicBulimic

13 yıl öncediscuss

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?

scenicBulimic

13 yıl öncediscuss

TOR is bullshit because it's a festering pile of assholes all trying to pretend that no one knows what no one is doing, without knowing who's doing the pretending not to know.

  C'mon, guys, I'm serious. Please don't sniff my
  exit node. It's not nice, you know! We're all
  supposed to be mysterious strangers, and not know
  each other, but still implicily trust all participants
  even though we'd never do that in real life. And oh, by 
  the way, here's a browser bundle that still uses
  third party cookies, and runs javascript by default,
  but fuck the world, because javascript is hella 
  convenient, and animated web pages are just super cool!

Yeah, that sounds really fucking secure to me.

comments