This won’t get very far once they remember that IP addresses aren’t people.
Have you read the article? That’s how they found them, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the charges.
I think he’s referring to getting the evidence thrown out, if it was an illegal search-and-seizure, based on “this IP == these people, so search their mail.”
They should have been behind 7 proxies.
Next time they will do the crucial stuff from a McDonalds, and not the closest one to their home either.
I don’t place any trust in Tor btw.
I’m glad these violent thugs are behind bars.
Selling stuff on the internet involves violence and thuggery, right?
Using the same post office every time is very bad tradecraft as well…
The very worst kind.
So visiting a website is enough to get surveillance and to have your UPS packages tracked and the word of a dog is all it takes to get a warrant.
If the website deals in illegal drugs and the dog is a well trained drug sniffing dog, yes. I don’t like the law that they are using to arrest them, but the tactics used seem fine to me.
K9 units use this tactic to do unlawful searches on property and cars. Normally if they have no reason to search your car then they plainly cannot make up an excuse. But if the dog were to alert it’s human partner then the police have a reasonable doubt to initiate the search. And cops do train their dogs to do fake signals so they can do illegal searches.
I should also add that i’m not particularly upset these people got busted selling pot, but the initial methodology for snooping internet traffic is what i have a problem with.
The guy on the corner of Elm and Commerce sells drugs too. Am I under surveillence for talking to him when I wait for a bus?
There is no standard for ‘well trained’ other than the police saying so.
If you’re regularly talking to a known drug dealer in his drug dealing place (I know all the lingo), you’re probably worth a bit of a look at, yeah. The extent of that ‘look’ would depend on the circumstances.
We’re not talking random stop and search here, there was reason to believe these people were involved in something nefarious and it panned out.
I think we are talking random search. The only reason they had to think there was something suspicious is where they visited. That’s the same tactic as saying since there are known drug dealings going on in a club then anyone who visits the club is now a suspect.
I don’t know everything that was sold at Silk Road 2.0, maybe there were also legit items for sale and they were interested in them. Maybe they were wanting to learn more about what types of things people sell on the ‘dark’ web. Maybe they were writing a book. In any case, visiting a website should not get you tracked - full stop.
Never mind proxies - the site was supposed to only be reachable via Tor, IIRC. Something about this really doesn’t ring true.
That’s what I thought but assumed I missed something
The site was seized wasn’t it? It’s possible that they could’ve done some trickery to either infect people who visited the site with malware that revealed their IP (there is presedence for this). Or they could’ve used an exploit in Tor or other services. Or some other NSA grade trickery and they are glossing over it in the reporting of the crime.
Really?
I am. I hate seeing people’s lives destroyed by insane drug laws, a failed drug war, a militarized police, and a commercial prison industry – but hey, maybe that’s just me.
To me it sounded like a pretty big scale operation. If the couple that got busted was making huge batches of moonshine my reaction would be the same.
What’s wrong on moonshine?
