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This really reminds me of when Hans Reiser was on trial. I remember a lot of people in the tech community tried explaining away things like him removing the (p

This really reminds me of when Hans Reiser was on trial. I remember a lot of people in the tech community tried explaining away things like him removing the (presumably bloody) seat from his car, washing out the carpet of his car with a hose, buying books on how to commit a murder, and finding Nina's cel phone with the battery popped out in her abandoned car. Each of those things was explained away by the tech community. The seat was taken out and the floor was cleaned with a hose because Hans was broke and wanted to live in the car. He bought the books because he knew he was being followed and was curious about the process. The cel phone battery was popped out because of the real perp had done it, or maybe it was something Nina had done. The point is none of that shit matters. The finer points of TCP are going to be lost on a jury and debating the academic points of packetlogs is fruitless. I've served on a jury before where not even a single other member could parse the most basic of logical statements. Our judicial system is based on story telling; each side tells their story and the person with the best story wins. The feds do this shit all the time, so they're probably going to have a pretty damn good story.

granfalloon 12y ago
I wouldn't trust a jury on this stuff, either, but it's going to be a judge deciding these issues, and they usually at least TRY to get this stuff right (though some are much better at it than others).
tedivm 12y ago
There's a major difference between this and the Reiser case. As you mentioned, with Reiser people were really practicing wishful thinking in order to save a hero of theirs. In this case people are trying to follow the case because there's a huge and reasonable chance that the FBI did not act above board in following US law. I don't think anyone things DPR is innocent, or that he's going to some how get away with this. However, people are concerned that the methods used to find him were not constitutional. This has more to do with keeping the government in check than it does with anything else.
- Patrick_Devine 12y ago
  That's a fair point. I think you articulated better what I was feeling than I had expressed, which is that it felt like wishful thinking on the part of the OP. There does feel like there is hero worship going on with DPR "standing up to the man" though, regardless of whether people feel he's guilty or not. That's particularly so with people who feel services like the Silk Road only came about as a result of the prohibition of narcotics. Regardless though, the unsavoury nature of Ulbricht's actions unfortunately taint the constitutionality issue.
- mpyne 12y ago
  > However, people are concerned that the methods used to find him were not constitutional. However, people are expressing this concern independent of evidence to support this concern. Even if you're of the school of thought that the FBI has no extra "public authority" power to do their statutory job whatsoever, it's not illegal for anyone to go to the SR website on Tor, and to see what IP addresses the website instructs your web browser to hit in the process. So there's a perfectly reasonable (and likely, IMHO) explanation on the record that supports the FBI position, and against the FBI position, there's only a lot of rather painful wishful thinking (as you say). So I'm not sure how the situation is that different, at least until more substantive evidence against the FBI's claims are presented.
clamprecht 12y ago
I believe that if the evidence were found to be false or otherwise inadmissible, then a jury would never see it.

granfalloon 12y ago

I wouldn't trust a jury on this stuff, either, but it's going to be a judge deciding these issues, and they usually at least TRY to get this stuff right (though some are much better at it than others).

tedivm 12y ago

There's a major difference between this and the Reiser case. As you mentioned, with Reiser people were really practicing wishful thinking in order to save a hero of theirs. In this case people are trying to follow the case because there's a huge and reasonable chance that the FBI did not act above board in following US law. I don't think anyone things DPR is innocent, or that he's going to some how get away with this. However, people are concerned that the methods used to find him were not constitutional. This has more to do with keeping the government in check than it does with anything else.

Patrick_Devine 12y ago
That's a fair point. I think you articulated better what I was feeling than I had expressed, which is that it felt like wishful thinking on the part of the OP. There does feel like there is hero worship going on with DPR "standing up to the man" though, regardless of whether people feel he's guilty or not. That's particularly so with people who feel services like the Silk Road only came about as a result of the prohibition of narcotics. Regardless though, the unsavoury nature of Ulbricht's actions unfortunately taint the constitutionality issue.
mpyne 12y ago
> However, people are concerned that the methods used to find him were not constitutional. However, people are expressing this concern independent of evidence to support this concern. Even if you're of the school of thought that the FBI has no extra "public authority" power to do their statutory job whatsoever, it's not illegal for anyone to go to the SR website on Tor, and to see what IP addresses the website instructs your web browser to hit in the process. So there's a perfectly reasonable (and likely, IMHO) explanation on the record that supports the FBI position, and against the FBI position, there's only a lot of rather painful wishful thinking (as you say). So I'm not sure how the situation is that different, at least until more substantive evidence against the FBI's claims are presented.

clamprecht 12y ago

I believe that if the evidence were found to be false or otherwise inadmissible, then a jury would never see it.