According to the filing, they found him through a combination of posting his personal @gmail.com address on the bitcointalk forum from the same account used to market Silkroad. Further, they found that his LinkedIn account somewhat corroborated the timeline/interest in what Silkroad is. Page 24 for the juicy details of how they identified him.
Also there is a section about murder-for-hire in Canada. Pretty wild stuff.
Update: Also he posted on Stackoverflow asking questions about Tor with his real name, then later changed his name. Supremely conspicuous.
"All told, the site has generated sales revenue totaling over 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected commissions from these sales totaling over 600,000 Bitcoins. Although the value of Bitcoins has varied significantly during the site's lifetime, these figures are roughly equivalent today to approximately $1.2 billion in sales and approximately $80 million in commissions."
Incidentally exactly how much Walter White made... That's a strange coincidence, or perhaps one of the clerks that gets paid to make up statistics for drug related criminal complaints is a breaking bad fan...
So this means the FBI now owns 600,000 bitcoins (5% of all bitcoins)? Probably more, since they also control the (presumably large number of) bitcoin stored in accounts on Silk road.
Seems like this could lead either to the legitimation or deligitimation of bitcoin as the FBI must assess their worth. It also gives the FBI the ability to mess with bitcoin markets if they choose, by flooding supply.
These numbers are over the lifetime of the site. I bet many of the bitcoins earned were sold/exchanged. It also includes revenue numbers which was paid out to sellers.
If it's the same person, there's a Ross Ulbricht who has a BS in Physics from UT, and would be 29. Best friends with this guy[1], who lives in SF (from Austin), and declares himself as best friends.
The anti-spoiler crowd are pretty demanding. A large and vocal group fought hard to introduce prominent spoiler warnings on Wikipedia. There was a time when every other literary work there had a warning that the article might be discussing the subject at hand.
It's a strange phenomena, and I'm not entirely convinced that it doesn't imply poor quality entertainment. Good quality entertainment is eminently re-watchable. How many times have I seen "Groundhog Day", or read "Lord of the Rings"? The fact that I know exactly what happens doesn't seem to diminish my enjoyment at all. In fact, it seems like with every re-experience I pick up some new detail or insight.
OTOH I can totally understand spoiler alerts with respect to sport and sporting-type events (like politics). It usually does seem to diminish the pleasure of watching a game when you know the outcome.
I don't think that the actual amount was mentioned until the last run of episodes. Prior to that I only remember it being a huge pile of cash that they had "stopped counting."
I don't think that an amount of money constitutes a spoiler, unless that very specific amount has something to do with a specific plot point. ("Ouch, my cancer! If only I had $80,000,001 exactly!")
I always err on the side of "it's a spoiler". If it's not in the show's trailer, I treat it like a spoiler.
I know that I'm personally much more sensitive to spoilers than a lot of other people, so it always annoys me how somebody says something thinking they're not spoiling anything without fully thinking through the implications of what it is they're saying. It's almost arrogance, really, to simply assume that you know what will and will not spoil some given experience for another person.
It's worth remembering that the "Revenue" number would count bitcoins twice if they were used in two transactions. If bitcoins used to buy something on the site were then used by the seller to buy something else, the revenue would be twice the total bitcoins used.
That's a real page-turner. I found this particular item funny on page 30:
"Based on my training and experience, I know that criminals
seeking to hide their identity online will often use
pseudonymous usernames to conceal their identity."
> Today, those specific, articulable facts take the form of sweeping generalizations that officers assure us are based on their “training and experience.” This phrase comes from the Evidence Code section stating the sources an expert can use to form their “expert opinion” in court. Today, police are taught to repeat this phrase on the witness stand when they want the court to take their bullshit speculations and generalizations as actual evidence.
Well, I read the PDF and every statement of something based on "training and experience" seemed completely reasonable. What it means is "this is so obvious I shouldn't need to prove it". Maybe this is abused at times, but not here.
So, Agent-1, based on your training and experience, can you conclude, Agent-1, that simply because someone uses a pseudonymous username to conceal their identity, Agent-1, that they are a criminal?
He posted a question about connecting to a Tor hidden service with PHP on Stack Overflow. He didn't realize it puts your full name next to the question (and he had signed up with his real name), so literally 1 minute after posting the question, he changed his full name to a "pseudonymous username". He then changed his SO registration information from firstname.lastname@gmail to a fake name at a fake server.
> …so literally 1 minute after posting the question, he changed his full name to a "pseudonymous username".
If this is true then how did they catch it? Does SO keep records of all name changes? Did they give that info to the FBI? Do the FBI scrape SO and save all versions of the data? Was this data collected from PRISM?
The exact question I had ... though I guess if they're tracking all network data, then they could have just gone back and looked up the history of the SO post.
Like "hey guys I'm starting a server for the illegal trade in drugs, but it's on Tor so nobody will know who I am, sincerely I M Anidiot".
Oh and just in case my names not distinctive enough here's my Gmail account so you can trace back all my IP connections and verify when I'm online and such.
They probably literally just scanned-in a printout of it. Likely they do this to avoid the issues of improper PDF redactions that got famous a few years ago. Do the redaction on real paper (or not) and just always scan it in, and it's nearly foolproof. And trust me, we get a lot of fools in the government. ;)
I just read through it. They introduce a lot of evidence from their forensic analysis of the Silk Road servers, but they don't seem to explain how they got access to the servers. Did anyone find that in there?
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ulbric... / Mirror: http://www.scribd.com/doc/172773407/Ulbricht-Criminal-Compla...
According to the filing, they found him through a combination of posting his personal @gmail.com address on the bitcointalk forum from the same account used to market Silkroad. Further, they found that his LinkedIn account somewhat corroborated the timeline/interest in what Silkroad is. Page 24 for the juicy details of how they identified him.
Also there is a section about murder-for-hire in Canada. Pretty wild stuff.
Update: Also he posted on Stackoverflow asking questions about Tor with his real name, then later changed his name. Supremely conspicuous.