There is a timeline of events available, but it's taken from the court documents which are public.

One thing we don't know at the moment is what was in the - as yet unsealed - original documents filed in Maryland (the first documents relating to the case were filed in May).  

Likewise, the criminal complaint from Maryland specifically states that the information supplied is purely to establish probable cause - they certainly have more information than is supplied in that complaint.  

Enough mistakes were made that DPR could have been caught through the human errors he made and the technological measures outlined in the complaint and the indictment.  It is highly likely that some operational information will not be made public until the trial, if at all, but some of it can be inferred.  

For example, in order for DPR to be convinced that the former employee had been killed that employee had to co-operate with law enforcement in staging the photos sent to DPR and in remaining out of sight afterwards (he essentially had to abandon his old life).  I'd co-operate with them too if confronted with evidence that my former employer was trying to have me killed, but his co-operation isn't explicitly mentioned as a source of any of the information provided to the grand jury.

And yeah, it's really, really stupid to assume that Tor and PGP are magical invisibility cloaks.  They might be great for hiding your penchant for porn or messages to your mistress from your wife, but if maintaining secrecy is absolutely critical then assuming that they're impenetrable is kind of stupid.  Just as we can solve cold cases because advances in processing physical evidence mean we can make decades old physical evidence speak to use, we need to assume that technological evidence collected now can be made to disgorge its secrets sooner rather than later.

It depends how they scammed you.  A lot of things people regard as scamming are civil issues rather than criminal offences, meaning there's nothing the police can do to help you.

Reports of Swedish arrests, too.

Sorry about the translation.


http://unvis.it/www.aftonbladet.se/senastenytt/ttnyheter/inrikes/article17617871.ab

Interesting that this arrest is for cannabis rather than the harder drugs which have featured on other arrests.

If you're talking about a civil matter, it could be an expensive exercise if they've been even half-way cautious.  Hell, pirate's RL identity was known but it's unlikely he'd have been facing any consequences at all had the feds not got involved.

You could certainly try to get an order for theymos to disclose any information the forum has related to the account.  That information may or may not be useful.   Assuming that it looks promising, you could then try get an order for email providers and/or ISPs to disclose information they have related to the account - which may or may not be useful depending on how cautious the other party has been.

Generally speaking, it's not going to be worth the effort for small claims matters.  Even if you're talking about being scammed out of large amounts, litigation is expensive and often protracted and prevailing in court is meaningless if the other party cannot pay.

You're better off taking measures to protect yourself against being scammed than hoping that a lawsuit will bring you a satisfying result in the event that you are scammed.

Except that it's chasing short-term profit at the expense of security.  If you're a decent vendor, you can afford to sit it out for a few months while you see where the chips fall.  You can afford to take a few months to establish a reputation under a new online identity which cannot be connected to your old SR account (remember that they've used feedback to estimate the quantity of drugs sold by the guys arrested in the UK) which was located on a system which seems to have been nowhere near as secure as people believed.

The smartest thing for any large vendor to do right now is assume that everything they ever did through SR (including any encrypted PM's) is known to law enforcement and act accordingly. They need to assume that stuff which shouldn't have been kept on the SR system was and that at least some of their users kept information which shouldn't have been kept.

They also need to assume that a new marketplace which has been thrown together in a week is not going to be totally secure and neither are its forums.  If the new site/forums leak information because they've been thrown together in a hurry, that information could provide missing links which law enforcement currently doesn't have.

It's not just him.  Vendors are using their old usernames at the new sites.  Some of them want their old statistics to carry over to SR 2. 

Think about that for a moment.  You're a vendor that right now law enforcement might not have enough information to charge.  You can simply "disappear" as if your old on-line identity had never existed and establish a new, unconnected identity down the track.  But instead of doing that, they want to start selling to their old customers as soon as possible, with as much fanfare as possible.  You don't need to crack Tor or Bitcon when people are so supremely stupid.

He certainly got caught up in playing the role of DPR.  He attracted an almost cult-like following amongst SR users and plenty of people wanting to establish more personal relationships with him for the reflected glory.

When you're living a "nobody" life in the real world, and getting all this adoration in the online world, over time it's got to be difficult to maintain your distance from those who are validating you as some kind of revolutionary hero.

People get reckless over time.  They sacrifice security for convenience in what seem like little, unimportant ways.  When they've "gotten away with" something over a sustained period of time, they come to believe in their own invincibility - and DPR had a hell of a lot of SR users reinforcing the belief that he and SR were invulnerable.

Hell, take a look at the various SR 2 projects happening now.  They're all claiming that they'll be more secure than SR and bigger and better when in truth analysing exactly what went wrong and working out how to prevent it happening again should take at least weeks, if not months - especially when only some of the information the feds have about SR and DPR is currently known.

Human beings have a habit of idealising people.  We believe that people who are "smart" don't do dumb things.  Yet time and again people enterprises fail because those who conceived them lacked the skills to properly execute them or because those who should have remained in the shadows sought public validation. 

Take a look at the new SR 2 forums.  The very first post is a "debut speech" by the "new DPR".  Posting long philosophical ramblings provides opportunities for your speech patterns to be analysed and compared to other online writings.  Anything the "new DPR" feels compelled to post should be short and clinical, but that horse has already bolted.

Has there ever been a time when a significant amount of Bitcoins have been donated/pledged to any cause?  Even when addresses are set up with the intention of being able to say "hey, people have donated X amount, all you have to do is accept Bitcoin to claim it), my recollection is that the amounts donated have been trivial - which tends to bolster psy's argument that people don't really want to put their Bitcoin where their mouths are.

A few hundred or even a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoins aren't going to be persuasive when dealing with large organisations.  You need to convince them that donations will increase by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (after administration costs) by accepting Bitcoin - that it will bring them new donors, not just the same donors giving them the same amount by a different method.

Sure, but he set the commission levels.  It's hard for people to claim that he "wasn't in it for the money" when the amount of commissions collected was so high.  He was the one setting the commission levels and they were certainly set at a level which covered a lot more than overheads plus a generous "salary" for himself. 

That he got hooked on greed at some point (even if that wasn't his original motivation) is evidenced by him actively seeking to bring people he thought were major suppliers to SR and his insistence that payment for the 1 kg cocaine deal go through SR (so SR got a cut).  As SR grew, that meant he had to try to hide and launder increasing amounts of income.  He could have controlled or even halted the growth of SR to make that more manageable, but he didn't.

There's a rough timeline of the various mistakes made by DPR here.  It's been put together using only the information in the court documents which have been released so far.  When you see it all in one place put together in a coherent fashion, it becomes apparent why DPR getting caught was only a matter of time.  

Not all of the evidence the feds have is referenced in the unsealed court documents (this is acknowledged in the criminal complaint), but anyone who's even contemplating setting up a similar enterprise to SR should keep in mind just how many simple errors led to DPR's downfall.

http://shadowlife.cc/2013/10/tracking-the-silk-road-lessons-for-darknet-services/

http://shadowlife.cc/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/SR-Timeline.html

DPR aside, the human element is going to be the biggest challenge in operating any SR-like market place - because stuff like this will inevitably happen.


Three mistakes right there. Vendor hold's customer's shipping info, buyer uses same delivery address on an ongoing basis, order is shipped (and therefore received) in a predictable pattern.

Over the long term, people get too comfortable and start sacrificing security for convenience.  The minute you start establishing personal relationships with others in enterprises where secrecy is vital, you start making yourself vulnerable.

At the moment, he either hasn't yet been indicted in NY or there's an indictment which hasn't yet been unsealed.  Only part of the Maryland proceedings (which first started in May) have been unsealed so far.  If he even looks likes getting bail, the feds almost certainly have more charges in reserve. 

Summary of the legal issues here.

http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/02/the-silk-road-to-federal-prosecution-the-charges-against-ross-ulbricht/

Both of which are currently down (and BMR existed prior to the shut down of SR).  It's seriously not possible to throw together a secure illegal marketplace which can handle a large amount of traffic at short notice -  BMR already existed and it still couldn't cope with the extra traffic.

More UK arrests.  Yeah, I know it's the Telegraph but they're giving the Director of the National Crime Agency as a source.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10361974/First-British-Silk-Road-suspects-arrested-by-new-National-Crime-Agency.html

Re-read the complaint.  It doesn't say that "FriendlyChemist" claimed to have hacked into the SR system.  It says that he claimed to have hacked the computer of a large SR vendor.

While it's tempting to believe that FriendlyChemist and redandwhite were under cover agents, there is no reason to not disclose that in the complaint if that's the case - indeed doing so would actually bolster the strength of the complaint.

If you've read the Silk Road forums, you'll know that it's like any other community, users come to regard people as "friends" relatively quickly and they seek to establish closer ties with the more powerful figures within that community - whether DPR, the admins, or the major vendors.  DPR himself courted adoration and approval and he engaged in PM conversations with various SR users using the SR system.  It's highly probable that some SR users made their real life identities known to DPR.

According to his posts on SR forums, he had considered both the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison and/or dying for SR.  Of course considering something in the abstract is a whole lot different than being faced with it as a very real, immediate possibility.  Whatever romanticised image he might have had of himself may well have dissolved in the face of the cold hard reality with which he's now presented.

While DPR will likely always be recognised as a pioneer for starting SR, I think you're buying into the romanticism if you believe that he'd be regarded as a "legend" or a "sacrificed hero" if he committed suicide.


And you're going to prove the money with which you're paying your lawyer is "clean" how?  Remember that literally everything related to him is subject to seizure right now.  In order to spend/liquidate it, he has to prove it was legally acquired. 

He's not getting out for decades.  Assuming he even survives prison, would you be confident enough that BTC will still be around and worth something in 30 years to rely on it for funding your post-prison life?

Yeah, I think he just started to believe the whole mythology he'd created around Silk Road and himself - and really, truly believed that he was smarter than federal agents and that anything they ever discovered was nothing he couldn't talk his way out of.

There are just so many things he never seems to have considered - especially that the online world isn't some magical kingdom which exists separately from the real world.

Who is "we" and what are their credentials for conducting research?

Seized cash often gets distributed amongst the agencies responsible for the seizure.  As the BTC currently held by the feds could never be spent from that account without everyone realising they were dealing with law enforcement, it makes more sense to liquidate them - even though generally keeping currency is the more logical option.

I'm curious about what sized lots the BTC will be offered in and especially curious about whether the feds will follow the trail of the BTC post-sale ('cos I'm damned sure they'll set it up so that buyers must prove their identity in some way).

Why not reveal it?  It was going to be discovered eventually by those trying to fix the forum and revealing that a two year old backdoor was used made it more difficult for theymos to claim it was some new, previously unheard of exploit.  There's some lulz to be had when you tell someone how you did something just after it happens and it still takes them days to find and fix the problem.

Use seized money to buy some of the BTC at auction so that they appear to no longer be under federal control.  How are those that care going to establish which buyers were legitimate and which buyers were government agencies - the BTC are going to be transferred to the addresses of the buyers following the auctions so they don't need to send them through a tumbler. 

After that first transfer, you really have no idea whether subsequent transfers are the address holder selling their coins, using their BTC to purchase something or transferring the coins to another account they control.