Ulbricht didn’t do himself any favors by working that day with his back turned to the rest of the room-something he had warned other Silk Road administrators not to do.īecause law enforcement agents snatched the laptop before Ulbricht had closed it, the contents of its hard drive were completely accessible to them, including the chat logs, a personal journal, Silk Road spreadsheets, and most importantly, Dread Pirate Roberts’ private encryption keys.1)Reflect on the assigned readings for the week. They arrested him before he could close the laptop lid, which would have logged him out and locked the contents. So agents staked out his San Francisco neighborhood until he showed up at the local library, set up his laptop and logged on. Ulbricht occasionally took his laptop out in public to work. That’s why law enforcement agents had to catch Ulbricht while he was logged into the SIlk Road’s admin console. But eventually the person with the keys has to unlock the information in order to see it. Encryption: Encryption puts a digital padlock on information so it can’t be viewed. Perhaps he thought law enforcement agents would never see the chats because they were on an encrypted hard drive.ģ. Why Ulbricht chose this option is a mystery. In TorChat, the user has to turn on the logging function for the chats to be saved in log files. In example after example, the prosecution pointed to logs where the laptop user identified himself as Dread Pirate Roberts. It provides an encrypted communication channel between two parties, using a Tor network to obscure the connection between them.Īlthough TorChat promises encrypted messaging, Ulbricht chose to save the logs in plain text on his computer, creating a trove of conversations with fellow Silk Road administrators.
#Torchat conversation software#
Internal communication was carried out mostly through free software called TorChat. Thousands of pages of chat logs helped prosecutors trace the growth of Silk Road. Ulbricht either didn’t use the tumbler, or if he did, it didn’t help.Ģ. Silk Road offered a service, called a tumbler, that passed bitcoins through several intermediate wallets to obscure their origin and destination. In Silk Road’s case, prosecutors found it relatively trivial to track profits from Silk Road as they were transferred from wallets used by the online market to wallets on Ulbricht’s laptop. This case showed that all law enforcement needs to do is locate the wallets on each side of a transaction and follow the money. But unlike cash, a detailed public ledger called the blockchain keeps track of each wallet a bitcoin passes through.
Like cash, bitcoins aren’t tied to a person’s identity. Bitcoin: If you assume your bitcoins can’t be traced back to you, think again. How was Ulbricht nabbed? At least some of the blame can be placed on what now seems like misplaced trust in a handful of technologies Ulbricht thought would shield his identity.
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