Ross Ulbricht Silk Road trial, Day 6 Thursday (forensics, Richard bates): excerpts from transcript

Thursday 22 January 2015 (ie. last week); full transcript: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24900303/1-14-cr-00068-2015-01-22.pdf

The main topic of discussion: Thumb drives, backups, Bittorrent, Richard Bates's testimony about helping Ulbricht on programming/sysadminning SR1

Excerpts: http://pastebin.com/K3jK3LvY ; see previously: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2tdjzd/day_6_of_ulbricht_trial_selected_quotes/

(I apologize if any conversations are incorrectly included; almost every other line copy-pastes out of order or otherwise mangled, and it was hella tedious formatting everything, took most of the reading time. I wondered more than once how it was possible to have such a messed up PDF which was still copy-pastable & displayed everything correctly. Next time I'll see if goddamn OCR software would yield a more usable transcript...)

Bates's testimony was interesting: we heard more about who leaked (Ulbricht told his girlfriend, who told a female friend), Ulbricht's troubles getting the site working (apparently he had programmed mostly in Perl before switching to PHP for SR1), and how Ulbricht told Bates he'd sold SR1 which would be fantastic news for fans of multiple-DPRs like Ormsby except that the prosecution then followed it with an amazing smackdown courtesy of Ulbricht's Torchat logs in which Variety Jones/cimon tells Ulbricht to lay down disinfo and switch his pseudonym to DPR. (Seriously, does anyone still think the multiple-DPR defense has the slightest chance of convincing the jury?)

The saddest part is probably Bates discussing how he was coerced into testifying: agents came to him after Ulbricht was busted, based on either the chat logs or the Gmail search warrant results (which we know from agent Alford only produced results after Ulbricht had already been arrested), and he panicked, talking to them and denying any involvement in SR1. Lying to agents is a crime, so that alone sank him. 'Never talk to police'. At least it seems like Bates is escaping any punishment, as is only fair: Ulbricht was the one who got him involved, and the one who was keeping chat logs and using Gmail chat for convenience.


Comments


[7 Points] AgoraMarket:

If I remember SR1's Rules For Vendors page, practically Rule #1 was "Never keep names + addresses after deals are completed". Meanwhile, Ross himself had a GMail account with multiple years' worth of correspondence implicating Bates and himself. :sigh:

Did the trial continue today, or was it post-poned because of the blizzard that [didn't even] hit NYC.


[8 Points] aft3rm4th:

I wanna have your babies gwern


[7 Points] ciphersexual:

Thanks Gwern, I can't imagine the amount of text you read in order to mine out these gems.

And for those who think the pastebin is long, give it a shot. Gems I tell ya. For example, apparently Ross and Bates got wasted one night and Ross offered Bates admin access to Silk Road.


[3 Points] throwaway:

So should we try to get another round going for the nightly transcripts?


[3 Points] None:

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[3 Points] None:

[deleted]


[3 Points] DankNetMarkets:

black trash bag that was, you know, running kind of empty. It looked like it had been full at some point -- ...So, yeah, I got them from He told me they were kind of old

What a douche


[1 Points] tgif3:

Multiple dpr still makes sense. If there were don't you think when they switch they would hand over all handles aka torchat pgp every fucking thing.