Feds Say NSA ‘Bogeyman’ Did Not Find Silk Road’s Servers
The FBI easily found the main server of the now-defunct Silk Road online drug-selling site, and didn’t need the National Security’s help, federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing.
The underground drug website, which was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross 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 later this year.
The two were accused of knowingly transmitting money for criminal activity.
The authorities said Friday that the FBI figured out the server’s IP address through a misconfiguration in the site’s login window. They said that a US warrant wasn’t required to search the Icelandic server because “warrants are not required for searches by foreign authorities of property overseas.”
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