The prosecution’s papers were in response to Ulbricht’s defense team crying foul on the government’s explanation of how they discovered the servers. Experts suggested that the FBI didn’t see leakage from the site’s login page but contacted the site’s IP directly and got the PHPMyAdmin configuration page. That raises the question of how the authorities obtained the IP address and located the servers.
“Thus, the leaky CAPTCHA story is full of holes,” said Nicholas Weaver, a University of California, Berkeley computer scientist who analyzed traffic logs the government submitted as part of the case.
The authorities also disputed assertions that they found the servers through illegal wiretapping.
“However, no wiretap of any kind was used in the FBI’s investigation—let alone any wiretap intercepting Ulbricht’s communications,” Turner wrote. “Indeed, Ulbricht did not even become a suspect in the FBI’s investigation until well after the SR Server was searched. Hence, no information collected from or about Ulbricht, through a wiretap or otherwise, was ever used to locate the SR Server.”
The underground drug website Silk Road was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, and it was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, “reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site’s leader. Trial is set for next month. Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty.