Interesting argument by FBI in Silk Road trial

[Robert]

US government attorneys have argued that the FBI didn't need a warrant to snoop evidence from the Silk Road darknet drugs souk, for a simple reason: its servers were located outside the United States.

Attorneys representing accused Silk Road headman Ross Ulbricht have suggested that the FBI used hacking techniques to pull data from the Silk Road servers without first obtaining a warrant, which they claim violated Ulbricht's Fourth Amendment right to privacy.


Because virtually all of the evidence the government plans to present at Ulbricht's trial was gathered as a direct result of an illegal infiltration of the Silk Road servers, Ulbricht's lawyers argue, most of the prosecutors' case should be inadmissible.

But in a new court filing on Monday, the prosecutors countered that this argument doesn't hold water, because the Silk Road server the FBI hacked was located not in the US, but in Iceland.

"Given that the [Silk Road] Server was hosting a blatantly criminal website, it would have been reasonable for the FBI to 'hack' into it in order to search it," the filing bluntly states, "as any such 'hack' would simply have constituted a search of foreign property known to contain criminal evidence, for which a warrant was not necessary."

Even more bizarre:

the government claims that investigators could tell that the server was hosting an illegal enterprise just by looking at the software running on it.

"Indeed, the fact that the [Silk Road] Server was running 'phpmyadmin' would have further corroborated that it was hosting Silk Road, since 'phpmyadmin' is used to administer PHP databases – which are commonly used to run online businesses – and Silk Road's reliance on PHP databases was readily observable from the website itself during the time of its operation," the attorneys write.

Story here.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

All part of the "we can do whatever we want because it's us doing it" argument. Any packets passing through the US has been fair game for ages. Forcing companies to hand over data and not tell anyone about it, routine. Hack into foreign servers - fine (so long as you aren't Chinese or Russian or who-ever else is "bad" at the moment.

When the most powerful nation on the planet does stuff it's legal because ... what are you gonna do about it?