So take note - the FBI is populated by the kind of people who enjoy roughing up suspects, even when it harms a larger investigation.
My only consultation is that hopefully one day prohibition will be fixed, and these agents will reflect and see their careers contributed nothing of value to the world. That they just caused trouble, like a bully. That countless lives, marriages, children got screwed up due to their pointless actions. I know, probably they'll remain delusional, but one can hope.
First, I haven't heard of any suspicions that Ross/DPR was in physical possession of any significant quantity of drugs or any weapons at all, or that he had any history of or inclination towards personally committing violence. So what's the point of the 5AM ninja raid? 4 agents in business clothes swinging by at noon would be perfectly adequate to take him into custody without hurting anybody, destroying anything, scaring the crap out of anybody, or scaring anybody into defending themselves with force against what looks an awful lot like criminal action.
Second, the cybercrime team, the guys who actually generated the evidence needed to find him in the first place, told the locals that they were very unlikely to get enough evidence to convict unless they literally snatched his work laptop out of his hands while he was working on Silk Road, without him even having a chance to press a single key. This was based on their experience in previous cybercrime investigations. They were completely ignored, and a SWAT raid was planned anyways, despite this and the first point above.
WTF FBI? Somebody needs to smack some sense into them over there, tell them that they exist to solve crimes and not play wannabe COD mall-ninjas.
This is so incredibly improbable, to me.
When did Wired become NSFW?
> When did Wired become NSFW?
More like when did caseysoftware decide to work somewhere stupid.
I work at a generic corporate america job. I've got a generic corporate america boss, and you know what? He wouldn't get any more upset with me for reading an article with that image in it than he'd get upset with me for reading some article so completely unrelated to work on the clock.
Women have breasts. If you work somewhere where images of breasts are more of an issue than you know... not working at work, then maybe you should just not work there. It's not Wired that's at fault. It's your ridiculously backwards employer.
I'm less concerned about my employer - after all we have the post-slaughter Charlie Hebdo cover framed on the wall - and thinking more of female coworkers. In case you haven't noticed, there is a huge "women are oppressed!" theme being pushed.
True or not, something like this is likely to set them off and result in negative consequences for you.
Without image: A quick glance and they'll see IT words and won't care.
With image: A quick glance and OMGWTFBBQ FIRED!
At least in the US the standard around nudity/reproduction is extremely immature. I was helping on a health system once and the user having an issue with part of the system recording reproductive health info, they refused to email/attach screenshots of the problem and had to send it physically in a sealed folder like it was some top secret document.
I hate to say it, because Ross and I have a few mutual friends, but the guy was an idiot, and it's looking more and more like he deserved what he got for being so utterly stupid.
I kinda sympathize with his position in a way. He was clearly in over his head both on the technological front and on the administration front, despite making piles of money. When that happens in a normal business, you hire some help. But how do you find help to hire for such a massively illegal operation? Finding anyone who could be trusted is a tough problem, much less someone who can be trusted and also has strong technical skills.
He hit that point pretty early on.
The again, I wouldn't start an illegal business intentionally...so there is that.
Well, Kim Dotcom is still kicking it.
As for Ross, the evidence might have been circumstantial at best if his un-encrypted notebook wasn't grabbed.
In your question lies the answer to another: why are exit scams so prevalent in bitcoin marketplaces?
"Comin up the way we did, you know, you kind of expect that. Waitin on it. See, the thing is, you only got to fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once. And how you ain't gonna never be slow? Never be late? You can't plan through no shit like this, man. It's life."
Also notice that most criminals are dumb and send their drug shipments through regular mail or air mail..very stupid..and also notice that those shipments tipped off LE..
Take-way anonymous is only secure at its weakest link..the weakest link here was the physical drug shipments..that will never be secure..ever
I have no experience in the matter, but I imagine that being the kingpin of such an organization tends to pull one's head in so many directions that it's easy for smart people to do dumb things unknowingly.
Well, it can be if you develop your own underground distribution networks, but then you aren't a darknet message board, you're the mafia.
In any event, Ross was running something somewhat more illicit than Megaupload. His opsec probably should have been commensurately better.
Even then, the FBI grabbed him with his laptop logged into the management interface for Silk Road... So he still would have been in some hot water.
(I'm not personally familiar with ZFS, but the ZFS docs, especially https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29007/gkkih.html#... really creep me with regard to this. The last thing you'd want is blocks in your local encrypted copy of PHP source code to be compressed first. And so then you'd think you'd want encryption enabled on a pool, but from reading the docs it seems that feature merely makes the filesystems on that pool inherit that encryption option, instead of doing some sort of filesystem-blind block-level encryption, where there's any variance in the encryption of blocks, or any information that could be derived from locations of blocks. So I think the suggestion to encrypt on a directory-by-directory basis to limit your exposure is not a very good one. I'd recommend that you use a spinning hard drive, whole disk encryption of the sort we have today, take out the battery, and keep your foot by the power outlet.)
That can be achieved by (1) transferring the machine to a portable battery unit without interrupting the power feed from the AC wall adapter and/or (2) imaging the machine's memory and mounted drives in-place.
These are things the FBI has in its toolbox, precisely because "yank the power cable" is how many criminals rely on protecting their otherwise encrypted data.