Dratel has filed some new motions asking for a mistrial/new trial for Ulbricht: http://antilop.cc/sr/files/2015_03_06_ULBRICHT_motion_new_trial.pdf Most of it is arcane legal arguing; Dratel lamely argued several times for a mistrial during the Ulbricht trial with zero success, and I don't think this is going to work either.
But particularly interesting are several claims I noticed on pg20-22 (emphasis added):
The predominant share of the documents necessitating the reopening of Mr. Ulbricht's suppression motion were included in the 3500 material produced in regard to SA Der-Yeghiayan. In particular, text messages between SA Der-Yeghiahan and a confidential informant (designated in the 3500 material and hereinafter as "CI") demonstrate unequivocally that the government was conducting warrantless TOR network surveillance on a TOR exit node that would have enabled the government to capture information about the source and content of the data passing through the TOR exit node. See 3505-4059 to 3505-4066.
For example, in an August 4, 2012, communication, at 2:13 p.m., SA Der-Yeghiayan asked the CI, "[a]re we up on the exit node yet?" In response, at 7:18 p.m., August 12, 2012, the CI states "[s]uceess!" and then, at 7:20 p.m., "100 percent running, logging, and recording . . . with verification." Id., at 3505-4059 to 3505-4060. 5
In the context of Mr. Ulbricht's suppression motion, this surveillance raises some novel Fourth Amendment issues, and also provides further evidence that the government discovered the Internet Protocol (hereinafter "IP") address for the Iceland server ending in ".49" through warrantless TOR network surveillance.
In addition, still other text messages between SA Der-Yeghiayan and the CI discuss the prospect of the government performing a distributed denial of service (hereinafter "DDOS") attack on the Silk Road server, with the express purpose of "listening" to the Silk Road servers. See 3505-4066. While it is not clear from the context of the text messages whether the government ever performed the DDOS attack discussed, it is known, from evidence in the record, that DDOS attacks on the Silk Road servers did occur, including one during the Spring of 2013, when the government was actively seeking to find the Silk Road servers, and during which period the government claimed to determine the IP address of the Iceland server by other means.
(One big missing piece here is that I'm not sure how controlling exit nodes would help with locating hidden servers or the SR1 investigation. Do exit nodes also serve as middlemen for hidden services or was this some sort of general data collection in the hope of finding interesting user names and maybe target particular SR-related clearnet sites like Mtgox?)
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