Silk Road was not seized by the FBI, the site was manually shut down

[BitcoinAccepted]

Best tools for anonymity when conducting dubious transactions are..

Balaclava
Remote car park
Being called John or Dave

[tilray]

Best tools for anonymity when conducting dubious transactions are..

Balaclava
Remote car park
Being called John or Dave

Lol +1

[blumangroup]

I'm not sure how much time you would have between "Freeze!" and turning off your computer/laptop.

Nobody yells "Freeze!" anymore. AFAIK all law enforcement is now trained to first create a distraction by e.g. activating the alarm on the suspect's car. There's apparently a great overlap between various computer hackers/fraudsters and the expensive car enthusiasts. Only after the suspect runs away from the computer he gets served with the warrant.

Oh.. That makes total sense. I guess I'd need to put some sort of time-out / screen saver / auto-log-off thing on my laptop, in case I'm actually operating a hidden site through a VPN in a public library. Cars have this thing called an immobilizer.

That goes back to physical security. You can avoid this by accessing the hidden site only when you are in a secure location, and where you should be able to see law enforcement coming, or at least notified a few seconds before they can serve the warrant.

I think the reason why Ross was using a insecure location to access SR was to create some level of deny-ability if his connection from SR was to be traced back to his internet connection. Accessing it from public would mean that there could have been potentially several people who could have been the person behind the connection verses just one (actually 4 if you count his roommates) if he used his own internet connection.   

[zorke]

Feds already had the server, they didn't need to hack into it. The feds were trying to locate the owner of the server and collect the evidence.

That's the whole point of my first post. Read it again. Ulbricht's feeble authentication method was to only allow his VPN IP to connect to sshd. This was his decided method to keep out anybody trying to get into the open SSH port. When the feds found the server (through other means), and had the hosts in Iceland copy the server state they discovered this IP address in sshd_config, traced it and found him.

What I don't understand is why he didn't use TOR to connect to the VPN, instead of connecting to the VPN directly. (I think this is possible?) The government apparently had used pen registers to get routing information from the server in iceland, so I would assume they did the same with the VPN to get his actual IP address. However if TOR exit nodes were all that were connecting to the VPN with his credentials then it would be impossible to make the connection back to him (unless I am missing something). 

[Bitcoinpro]

how many copies in 17 countries

sounds like the Rise and Rise of the SilkRoad

[dankkk]

I'm not sure how much time you would have between "Freeze!" and turning off your computer/laptop.

Nobody yells "Freeze!" anymore. AFAIK all law enforcement is now trained to first create a distraction by e.g. activating the alarm on the suspect's car. There's apparently a great overlap between various computer hackers/fraudsters and the expensive car enthusiasts. Only after the suspect runs away from the computer he gets served with the warrant.

Oh.. That makes total sense. I guess I'd need to put some sort of time-out / screen saver / auto-log-off thing on my laptop, in case I'm actually operating a hidden site through a VPN in a public library. Cars have this thing called an immobilizer.

That goes back to physical security. You can avoid this by accessing the hidden site only when you are in a secure location, and where you should be able to see law enforcement coming, or at least notified a few seconds before they can serve the warrant.

A better reason to want to have some kind of security feature on your laptop would be because you have the potential for someone actually stealing it from you. If you do not have full disk encryption (or something similar) then your data is essentially controlled by whoever physically has possession of your laptop. This could easily result in you having your bitcoin stolen from you or having other sensitive data leaked to people you don't want to have

[Magicman420]

I'm not sure how much time you would have between "Freeze!" and turning off your computer/laptop.

Nobody yells "Freeze!" anymore. AFAIK all law enforcement is now trained to first create a distraction by e.g. activating the alarm on the suspect's car. There's apparently a great overlap between various computer hackers/fraudsters and the expensive car enthusiasts. Only after the suspect runs away from the computer he gets served with the warrant.

Oh.. That makes total sense. I guess I'd need to put some sort of time-out / screen saver / auto-log-off thing on my laptop, in case I'm actually operating a hidden site through a VPN in a public library. Cars have this thing called an immobilizer.

That goes back to physical security. You can avoid this by accessing the hidden site only when you are in a secure location, and where you should be able to see law enforcement coming, or at least notified a few seconds before they can serve the warrant.

I think the reason why Ross was using a insecure location to access SR was to create some level of deny-ability if his connection from SR was to be traced back to his internet connection. Accessing it from public would mean that there could have been potentially several people who could have been the person behind the connection verses just one (actually 4 if you count his roommates) if he used his own internet connection.   

Ya it wasn't a bad idea, guess it just didn't work. I wonder if he will ever get out of,jail. Good,luck bro

[wasserman99]

I'm not sure how much time you would have between "Freeze!" and turning off your computer/laptop.

Nobody yells "Freeze!" anymore. AFAIK all law enforcement is now trained to first create a distraction by e.g. activating the alarm on the suspect's car. There's apparently a great overlap between various computer hackers/fraudsters and the expensive car enthusiasts. Only after the suspect runs away from the computer he gets served with the warrant.

Oh.. That makes total sense. I guess I'd need to put some sort of time-out / screen saver / auto-log-off thing on my laptop, in case I'm actually operating a hidden site through a VPN in a public library. Cars have this thing called an immobilizer.

That goes back to physical security. You can avoid this by accessing the hidden site only when you are in a secure location, and where you should be able to see law enforcement coming, or at least notified a few seconds before they can serve the warrant.

I think the reason why Ross was using a insecure location to access SR was to create some level of deny-ability if his connection from SR was to be traced back to his internet connection. Accessing it from public would mean that there could have been potentially several people who could have been the person behind the connection verses just one (actually 4 if you count his roommates) if he used his own internet connection.   

Ya it wasn't a bad idea, guess it just didn't work. I wonder if he will ever get out of,jail. Good,luck bro

Who says his strategy had not worked? As of now he has not been found guilty. I think he is likely the person who was behind SR, but I also think there is a good chance that he may get off on a technicality.