All the Evidence the Government Will Present In the Silk Road Trial Is Online 52
apexcp writes: In less than a month, one of the biggest trials of 2015 will begin in New York City. The full list of government evidence and defense objections found its way online recently, shedding light on both the prosecutor's courtroom strategy and the defense team's attempted rebuttals. Also important is what's not presented as evidence. There's not a single piece of forensic documentation about how the FBI originally found Silk Road servers, an act the defense has called "blatantly criminal."
if there is no evidence presented in how they... (Score:2)
for example, you get pulled over for speeding, but you were not speeding and can prove it, cops find a bag of weed on you. that gets tossed out as soon as you prove you were not speeding. same thing should apply here
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I'd like to see a reference for that, actually.
My understanding is that if the police have a legal reason to be looking where they're looking, they can respond officially to whatever they find. To use your example, if they pulled you over for speeding because their radar gun was malfunctioning, they would have had a legal reason to stop you, and a legal reason to do a basic search (like looking in the car windows for weapons). If they see a bag of weed openly, incidental to the search for weapons, they can
Re:if there is no evidence presented in how they.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was pulled over doing 52 in a 45. the problem was there was no posted speed limit (the sign was covered with burlap, road work was starting within a day or 2) In NY, if there is no posted speed limit, the speed limit is 55, so I was not speeding per the law. After the fact, they found a dime bag in my car (dumb friend, fell out of his pocket onto my back seat)
It took me 6 months of going to court but after proving that the speed limit sign was obscured (by the town) I got the initial contact thrown out. And because the cop had no right to pull me over, he had no right to search my car, therefore the possession charge was also thrown out
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Radar guns in most places have to be re-certified and calibrated every 30 days(I have seen 7, 14 and 21 days and 6mo). In Canada it's rare for that defense to work, in the US not so much. Also, the officer is required to log the gun and serial number in their notes. That one gets them quite oftent.
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Either you were protected by state law, or the judge was just being nice.
Re:if there is no evidence presented in how they.. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, what happened to you was odd. It's always been the case that if the cop had probable cause for conducting the search the results are admissible. If he heard screaming coming from inside your house and thought someone was being murdered so he busted inside but it turned out it was just the TV (but he genuinely thought it was real) he can still bust you for the brick of cocaine sitting on your coffee table.
So he could always get you despite being mistaken on the facts. Now it's the case he doesn't even have to be right on law. The Supreme Court just ruled that the cop doesn't even have to know the law he stopped you under. [npr.org]
What is inadmissible, though, is evidence obtained intentionally without warrant or cause. The cop cannot break into your house without a warrant or probable cause and snoop around, find something and then come back in the daylight with a warrant and bust you. And that's the question here. I don't understand how they can present the evidence of wrong doing if they don't say how they obtained the evidence. If they illegally hacked into his servers...then no, it shouldn't be admissible. There has to be a valid chain of custody [wikipedia.org], and we don't know if the chain is valid if we don't know where it started.
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And how many times has the traffic stop been bogus?
Your tail light is out... (It was not out and I had the wiring checked)
You were swerving in your lane... (Louisiana used this one while the state had forfeiture laws. That was until they pulled over a reporter from a Dallas TV station)
I have been stopped for doing 56 in a 55. Think about that, speedometers are not even that accurate.
I friend of mine that is a cop once told me that he could pull anyone over at any time. Why? Because there are 1000's of traff
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I friend of mine that is a cop once told me that he could pull anyone over at any time. Why? Because there are 1000's of traffic laws and you are breaking one every time you drive. When I asked which one I was breaking as we were driving down the street he responded "You are not preceded by a man caring a red flag." Seems the law was and may still be on the books from the early 1900's.
I totally believe you... there are whole books written on crazy and silly laws...
The sad thing is that when you make a hundred thousand laws, all you do is make a nation of law breakers. Then you bread contempt for the law since so many of them are trite and silly, and this carries over to the ones that are not...
I don't respect police because of what you describe, the media and some people like to say, "oh, that poor Police officer was hurt in the line of duty"...
Yea, whatever, too many of his friends ar
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I friend of mine that is a cop once told me that he could pull anyone over at any time. Why? Because there are 1000's of traffic laws and you are breaking one every time you drive. When I asked which one I was breaking as we were driving down the street he responded "You are not preceded by a man caring a red flag." Seems the law was and may still be on the books from the early 1900's.
Bullshit. That would be laughed out of court, even if by some weird oversight it had been left on the books, which I find hard to believe in the first place.
The argument that there are so many laws that everyone is breaking the law every minute of the day, and so The Government can just pull you in and lock you up for life on a whim, is just an excuse to justify breaking any law that inconveniences you, on the basis that all laws are equally absurd.
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They don't even need to pull out some ancient law. They just lie. I was pulled over a few weeks ago. I was leaving a Wal*Mart after some late grocery shopping at 2:30AM and was pulled over for an "unsafe lane change." This is despite the fact that I was in the same lane I entered after leaving the parking lot. I had no reason to change lanes sinc
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No, what happened to you was odd.
It's actually quite normal for the Supreme Court to pick cases where the lower courts normally can't agree on. In this case, the Supreme Court ruling was given on December 15th, 2014 [upi.com]. So today, being December 19th, 2014, implies that there wasn't a definitive answer on this question until four days ago.
It's always been the case that if the cop had probable cause for conducting the search the results are admissible.
You're extrapolating. In the case of the Supreme Court case, the driver (allegedly) gave the cops consent to search his car. In the case of the parent poster, he doesn't say whether he consented to the searc
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I don't understand how they can present the evidence of wrong doing if they don't say how they obtained the evidence. If they illegally hacked into his servers...then no, it shouldn't be admissible.
It's a publicly accessible site, surely all they have to do is get access as a user and see that illegal transactions are taking place?
Just because it's not as simple as typing "where can I buy illegal drugs online" into Google, potential buyers and sellers must be able to find out what's on there.
I don't know, because the idea of buying something illegal online seems pretty stupid to me, but if Joe Methhead can find out how to buy his supplies, it can't be that difficult for the FBI to do the same.
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But they had to figure out where the servers were located in order to seize them. How did they know where the servers were such that they could present the location to a judge for him to sign off on a warrant? If that method was illegal, the search is no good.
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its happened to me After the fact, they found a dime bag in my car (dumb friend, fell out of his pocket onto my back seat)
With your username, you really expect us to believe that? Right.....
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Ferguson is not a good example because the police officer did NOT know that anything had happened at the convenience store, however the fact that the event had happened was likely why he behaved as he did when confronted by the police officer.
Re: Ferguson is a good example. (Score:1)
Why do you continue to promote that lie? It has been proven true at this point that Wilson was aware that the crime at the store had taken place prior to his encounter with the perpetrators.
Don't take my word for it. Watch the video of the grand jury decision press conference:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?322925-1/ferguson-missouri-grand-jury-decision-announcement [c-span.org]
The transcript of the video says:
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Correct - even if the officer if pulling you over for something they thought was against the law but turns out it's legal
http://www.scotusblog.com/case... [scotusblog.com]
Re:if there is no evidence presented in how they.. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's some scary Supreme Court precedent just handed down. The cop can be ignorant of the law, i.e., think you broke a law when you didn't, and then conduct a search, and that search is now legal thanks to a brand new Supreme Court decision. That's right, ignorance of the law is no excuse, except for cops.
Pick your poison:
http://thinkprogress.org/justi... [thinkprogress.org]
http://www.foxnews.com/politic... [foxnews.com]
Of course this is supposed to be limited to "reasonable" ignorance, but look at Smith v. Maryland. A one time, short term, metadata collection on a specific individual where there was certainly probable cause for a warrant if the cops had not been lazy, is today interpreted to mean that all metadata can be collected for every person, for all time, in the absence of probable cause. Or how the Executive branch interprets "imminent" to include "maybe possibly at some point of time in not so near future." This ruling is a free pass for the cops to do whatever the hell they want and claim ignorance of the law. Just give it 30 years.
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(legally) found the site, any further evidence should be tossed out of court.
for example, you get pulled over for speeding, but you were not speeding and can prove it, cops find a bag of weed on you. that gets tossed out as soon as you prove you were not speeding. same thing should apply here
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagrees with you:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/15/... [npr.org]
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"The perverse effect of permitting police to go ahead with a mistaken reading of the law, she wrote, is to prevent or delay clarification of the law "
And it is a good point. If the police can just say "I did not understand the law in question" where are the rest of us left?
Ignorance of law is no excuse unless you're a cop (Score:3)
The supreme court just found that even if a cop did something not exactly lawful, if the breaking of the law was reasonable then that's fine and forget the 4th amendment [reason.com].
In a decision issued this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the police in a case arising from an officer’s “mistake of law.” At issue in Heien v. North Carolina was a 2009 traffic stop for a single busted brake light that led to the discovery of illegal drugs inside the vehicle. According to state law at the tim
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her colleagues for giving the police far too much leeway.
Wow, I thought she was a terrible addition to the SCOTUS, I didn't like her at all...
until today...
I might have to reconsider my prior views on her, so long as she feels the same way about the 2nd amendment of course...
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Wait, what... (Score:2)
It’s been over a year since Ulbricht’s October 2013 arrest, an event that catapulted Silk Road into the national spotlight and shook the Dark Net, the seedy subsection of the Internet not indexed by Google
So we are supposed to accept that anyone on the up and up should be tracked and indexed by Google? Are we supposed to look at it as seedy when it helps people organize and communicate in oppressive regimes?
Re:Wait, what... (Score:5, Insightful)
The media love the idea of the Dark Net (Capitals strongly encouraged). They don't actually know what it might be, but it's just such a great media-friendly term they can't pass it up. Even if they have to search for a definition to apply after starting to use it.
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The media love the idea of the Dark Net (Capitals strongly encouraged). They don't actually know what it might be, but it's just such a great media-friendly term they can't pass it up. Even if they have to search for a definition to apply after starting to use it.
They are always conflating "Dark Net" (which refers to Tor, Freenet, i2p, etc) with "Deep Web". These are different things. It's the latter that actually refers to the information that Google cannot ordinarily index because it is (eg) buried inside media files, ftp servers etc. Because some guy once said the "deep web" was huge - so many times bigger than the surface web - the media now keeps crapping on about the darknet being many times larger than the ordinary web, which is clearly isn't. These idiots
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If you're going to be dark, be Dark:
User-agent:*
A.
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And now we know how the FBI found the servers.
Re:Wait, what... (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't currently have mod points, but I think it's awesome that you came here to clear it up.
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Yeah, the seedy subsection of the internet not indexed by google. Like IRC and World of Warcraft chat logs.
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So we are supposed to believe that Google does not have some bot crawling as much of Tor as possible?
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this is actually GREAT news! (Score:2)
"The government's argument is that, as the site's alleged administrator, Dread Pirate Roberts, anything that occurred there is his fault."
EXCELLENT! when do Jamie Dimon & Lloyd Blankfein's trials start?
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The defense is being a little hyperbolic (Score:4, Interesting)
While the prosecution will probably have to cough up the goods after a hearing ordering them to do so, I'm pretty sure not dotting the proverbial i's during pre-trial briefing doesn't qualify as "blatantly criminal".