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Submission + - How A Young IRS Agent Identified The Man Behind Silk Road (nytimes.com)

circletimessquare writes: Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, was identified as Ross Ulbricht by one agent googling, off work hours, in just two weekends in 2013. Many agents had been working on the case for a year or more, and since agent Gary Alford was new to the case, not FBI, and not technologically sophisticated, no one took him seriously for months. He escalated the discovery and became such a pest about it, one agent told him to drop it.

"In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But I'm like, 'Well, that stuff still works.'" Mr. Alford’s preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name "altoid." "Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?" altoid asked. "It’s kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com." The early date of the posting suggested that altoid might have inside knowledge about Silk Road. During the first weekend of June 2013, Mr. Alford went through everything altoid had written, the online equivalent of sifting through trash cans near the scene of a crime. Mr. Alford eventually turned up a message that altoid had apparently deleted — but that had been preserved in the response of another user. In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com.


Comment dear national security personnel: (Score 5, Insightful) 259

do your fucking job. spying on suspects

not hoovering everything from everyone and thinking a search query will give you magic intelligence. intelligence work is *work*

the encryption is not important. your gumshoe work is. get out of your fucking cubicle you lardass and find these dirtbags

and if you can't do that maybe your useless security theatre job should be axed

Comment there should be many easy fail safes (Score 1) 97

input or output from any part of the system should conform to narrow parameters, or the entire communication is disregarded, and the fail safe implemented. so falling back to the fail safe should be frequent, not rare and alarming. it could be a hack, it could also just be network or equipment issues, either way

for example, the data: distance to car in front of you

the data should be of rigorously correct format, received in the correct and expected small time frame, and the source must be locked to certain trust indicators (which would be another entire laundry list of overlapping qualifications)

if there is any failure, no matter how slight, the data should be considered tainted and incorrect, and back up redundant systems (lidar, whatever) or even fail over to manual control should be implemented

Comment Re:Drunks don't make the best decisions (Score 1) 327

because you drink and drive and don't think it's a problem

this makes you a fucking piece of shit

not a baseless insult, but objectively speaking: your irresponsibility is dangerous to the people you share the road with. by your choice. it's not your culture, asswipe, that's a lame dodge. you're just an immature irresponsible asshole who will kill someone, and seems happy about it

Comment Re:Drunks don't make the best decisions (Score 1) 327

basically you're saying your culture is ignorant and stupid. when the truth is only you are ignorant and stupid

your attitude obviously sucks, and you are an accident waiting to happen. when it does happen, please do us the favor and only kill yourself

and thanks for insulting the south in an attempt to mitigate your douchebag character, you irresponsible fuck

you will of course go "he hates the south"

no, i love the south, i have old family roots there. i only hate you, shitbag, because your attitude is clearly somebody's death by automobile waiting to happen

Comment Re:Drunks don't make the best decisions (Score 1) 327

people like you, who argue that police should be allowed to ignore the law

so this has absolutely nothing to do with what i said, not even remotely

nothing i said anywhere would remotely lead you to believe that this statement has anything to do with the content of my comment

it goes without saying i don't believe anything remotely like that

either you are

1. purposefully lying for the sake of trolling, badly. or you

2. genuinely lack the social and cognitive abilities necessary to carry on a coherent conversation

in fact, your comment is kind of a microcosm of much of what goes on in many arguments in the world

1. me: someone says something

2. you: some malicious asshole or social retard grossly twists the meaning to an unrelated fearmongering smear

and then pointless useless drama results

congratulations: you are a useless toxic shitbag. not a baseless insult. an objectively valid description of your contribution to this thread

Comment Re:Drunks don't make the best decisions (Score 1) 327

ah yes, my narrow minded attitude that drinking and driving is wrong

how shallowly judgmental of me

actual narrow minded righteousness is about finding people wrong for arbitrary things

like fashion or sexuality or... swearing

do you know anyone who would judge someone for swearing, you hypocritical shitbag?

Comment Re:Drunks don't make the best decisions (Score 1) 327

all i know is that you have hijacked the topic with a tirade about arbitrary laws

gee, that's a really exciting topic

but it has not one fucking thing to do with the fact that drinking and driving is wrong, period. not arbitrary. and the actual fucking topic

i look forward to you missing the actual fucking point and going on an obtuse tangent about nanny states and arbitrary laws, asshole

Comment Re:Drunks don't make the best decisions (Score 1) 327

drinking and driving is never acceptable

if you're insulting people in the south and saying most of them are fine with that (seems rather prejudicial and self-serving to your own shitty attitude), then you will simply reap many more pointless traffic deaths

and therefore tell the rest of the country to avoid an area populated with such morons. and then after enough morons like yourself are dead, your children and grandchildren will pass better laws and have better attitudes. and the "culture" you defend will die, as much of bad and ignorant "culture" in the south has died and should die and will die. as it is with the north as well: everything changes, and no place is squeaky clean

that's not uptight. that's responsible. freedom is never about being free to be irresponsible. nowhere, not logically possible, no matter the lame weak "culture" argument

culture is about cheap plastic beads getting women to show their tits. culture is never about excusing the defilement of other people's freedom by putting their lives in danger

oh sure, someone like yourself will try. and only thereby slander the culture you are supposedly defending. the only question then is why you cheapen your own culture

there is never an excuse for risking the lives of others by drinking and driving. none. never. not even the lame excuse you articulate, which boils down to insulting cheapening and hating your own people

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