Silk Road founder arrested ...

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:37 PM 10/2/2013, Ted Smith wrote:
>The "slip" in this case is that the services were hacked.
>Tor (neither TOR, nor ToR) wasn't compromised.

A surprising number of things *were* compromised,
not even counting the known FBI malware attacks on the Tor network.
If you read the indictment, there are a lot of email messages
between DPR and various other people, implying either that
DPR's mailbox has been seized (and that he saved a lot of messages
that would be really dumb to save)
or that many of the participants were actually Feds or informants
(boy, would that be a surprise :-)
or that the Feds have been monitoring communications on
Silk Road's email for a while that I'd expect to have been private,
in addition to monitoring open communications (drug ads, etc.),
which says they've either compromised Silk Road or Tor.

Also, somebody had said that the alleged hit on the extortionist competitor
wasn't in the indictment, just the press release; that's incorrect.
It's described in a fair bit of detail (including the Somewhere, BC police
saying that there weren't actually any dead bodies lying around),
in ways that sound almost like the extortionist and hit men were really cops;
it wouldn't be a bad strategy for finding DPR if they'd wanted to do it,
but you'd think they'd need to report that in the indictment if they had.
Alternatively, the email systems were hopelessly compromised,
to an extent that I'm glad I didn't try to buy any "research 
chemicals" in Silk Road.

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Events have superseded my travel to a working Wifi hotspot :-)
http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/02/the-silk-road-to-federal-prosecution-the-charges-against-ross-ulbricht/
Ken at Popehat explains that there are two indictments,
one in NY and one in MD, and at least the MD one indicates that the 
alleged hit was against a Federal witness,
so it's possible that they've got some of the data directly from a participant;
there's also speculation that the whole "witness" thing may have been 
a scam by an ex-employee.
--------------

(On a side note, it's kind of frustrating that the correct 
capitalization of Tor is "Tor";
makes it hard to distinguish cypherpunks mail from mail about
Tor Books, the science fiction oriented publishing company :-)