Monat: November 2016

Corrupt Law Enforcement Sold Information To Silk Road Mastermind, Lawyers Say

Ross Ulbricht

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A person with inside knowledge of law enforcement’s investigation into dark-web drug bazaar Silk Road sold information to the site’s mastermind, according to lawyers for Ross Ulbricht, the man convicted over the site and sentenced to life in prison.

Attorneys for Ulbricht, who was convicted last year of seven drug crimes, said Tuesday that a user named 'notwonderful&039; communicated with the Silk Road boss’s Dread Pirate Roberts account on the site&039;s forum in the summer of 2013.

According to the defense attorneys, notwonderful asked DPR to pay him or her an $8,000 down payment, with subsequent payments of $500 per month, in exchange for information on the authorities&039; investigation into Silk Road.

After DPR was said to have agreed, notwonderful allegedly set up an account on the Silk Road marketplace under the name albertpacino in order to receive the payments in bitcoins.

Ulbricht’s attorneys believe that between $10,000 and $11,000 was paid by DPR to the albertpacino account. The last payment was made in September 2013 just weeks before Ulbricht’s arrest inside a California library, where his laptop was still logged-in to the DPR account.

Ulbricht’s lawyers said that the information “kept DPR one step ahead” of the investigation.

Ulbricht’s lead attorney, Joshua Dratel, said that his team found the communications between notwonderful and DPR while examining an administrator version of the forum they just discovered this past summer during their persistent review of the massive amount of digital data — an estimated five to six terabytes — from the Silk Road.

However, in a puzzling twist, Dratel said that the communications were missing from previous versions of the forum that were turned over to the defense during the course of the case by the government. In fact, all forum data from July and August 2013 is missing from those government versions, Dratel said.

“Why was it wiped? Because somebody didn’t want it to be found,” Dratel said.

Silk Road

According to Ulbricht’s attorneys, notwonderful told DPR that they were working as a law enforcement analyst and had access to the same intel as field agents. The notwonderful user allegedly told DPR that he was “in it for the money” and thought the Silk Road was “interesting” and “in a fantasy world I might be doing this myself.”

Ulbricht’s attorneys said that they reviewed the investigation information that notwonderful provided to DPR and that the timing and substance of communications align with information that agents testified to during the case, further leading them to believe that the person operating notwonderful was a corrupt law enforcement agent.

However, Dratel said that they had reason to believe notwonderful is not one of the two former law enforcement agents who were convicted of corruption related to their investigation into Silk Road, DEA agent Carl Mark Force and Treasury Department special agent Shaun Bridges.

Force and Bridge were caught extorting hundreds of thousands of dollar in bitcoin from site admins that they transferred to personal accounts.

Dratel said that during the investigations of Force and Bridges all of their electronic devices were seized and investigated by the government, and neither albertpacino or notwonderful came up. If one of the corrupt agents had operated under these aliases, Dratel said, “We would have seen it in hundreds of pages.”

However, the albertpacino handle was referenced in the Force case at least one time during the investigation, according to a recently unsealed 2014 letter in which Department of Justice officials discussed their probe of agency corruption:

Department of Justice

However, the albertpacino handle was never officially mentioned again in the case.

“This is someone else,” Dratel maintained.

Ulbricht’s team said that they sent a letter requesting additional discovery to prosecutors handling the case against the corrupt agents in the District of Maryland. They hope to gain more information about notwonderful and albertpacino and determine why exactly the forum communications were wiped from versions of the site that the government turned over to the defense.

“If they have investigated, we should be apprised of the results,” Dratel said. “If they haven’t, the government is derelict.”

Ulbricht is currently appealing his life sentence in the Second Circuit. At the appeal arguments in October, the judges indicated some apprehension, calling the life sentence for Ulbricht “unusual” and “quite a leap” given his lack of a criminal history.

The judges also asked whether allowing the impact statements of families whose loved ones died after buying drugs from the Silk Road and overdosing created “enormous emotional overload” at sentencing.

During his argument at the appeal, Dratel told the panel of judges that corrupt agents had administrative privileges and hijacked user accounts. “They were inside the guts of the website,” Dratel said.

Ulbricht’s attorneys said that this new evidence would not have direct immediate impact on the appeal. However, Dratel said that this new information “amplifies our defense that the investigation lacked integrity.”

They also said they would not ask the Second Circuit to put the appeal aside while they continue to investigate. However, they said they were not ruling out using this new information about notwonderful selling information to DPR as the subject of a new trial motion at some point.

LINK: Judges Question Whether Life Sentence For Silk Road Founder Is Unfair

Quelle: <a href="Corrupt Law Enforcement Sold Information To Silk Road Mastermind, Lawyers Say“>BuzzFeed

Trump’s Transportation Secretary May Be Friendly To Uber and Lyft

Former US Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao arrives at Trump Tower on a day of meetings scheduled with President-elect Donald Trump on November 21 in New York.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AFP / Getty Images

Uber and Lyft cheered President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation pick, Elaine Chao, after her appointment today.

“Ms. Chao&#039;s knowledge of transportation issues is extensive and we look forward to working closely with her,” Niki Christoff, head of federal affairs at Uber, said in a statement.

Lyft spokesman Adrian Durbin said the company looks forward to working with Chao and has the “utmost respect” for her.

The admiration is mutual. As recently as November, 2015, Chao expressed general support for ride-hail — and skepticism of regulation thereof — arguing in a speech to the American Action Forum Panel that “at a minimum, government policies must not stifle the innovation that has made this sector such an explosive driver of job growth and opportunity.”

Chao was deputy secretary of the DOT under President George H.W. Bush, and labor secretary under the second Bush. She is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a connection that could help as Trump looks to push forward an ambitious infrastructure plan. Her appointment comes at a time when the transportation industry faces a crucial turning point: cash-strapped local agencies across the US are outsourcing public transit to private companies, and the tech and auto industries are racing to put self-driving cars and trucks on the road, threatening millions of jobs.

Local governments with strained budgets are increasingly subsidizing Uber and Lyft rides for their residents as an alternative to adding bus routes and building parking structures. In August, DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx told BuzzFeed News he expects public transportation to continue to be outsourced to private companies.

But Uber and Lyft, which employ their drivers as independent contractors, are also facing legal battles in courts across the country with drivers who say they should receive benefits such as reimbursement for expenses.

On Tuesday, the same day President-elect Trump announced Chao’s appointment, Uber drivers joined nationwide protests for $15 minimum wages. BuzzFeed News reported in June that Uber drivers in three major US markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — earned less than $13.25 an hour after expenses in late 2015.

A report by the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, found in 2008 that Chao’s labor department “inadequately investigated complaints from low-wage and minimum wage workers alleging that employers failed to pay the federal minimum wage, required overtime, and failed to issue a last paycheck.”

In a statement today, Jim Conigliaro Jr., founder of the Independent Drivers Guild, which represents over 45,000 Uber drivers in New York City, said, “As Labor Secretary, Chao failed to stand up for workers and safety.”

“At a time when the transportation industry is being transformed by companies like Uber that want to put driverless vehicles on our roads, we need leadership that puts safety first,” Conigliaro said. “Chao&039;s hands-off approach could be dangerous for America&039;s roads.”

Chao’s administration will also likely have a heavy hand in determining the regulation of autonomous vehicles. The agency released guidelines for self-driving vehicles in September. It may fall to the next transportation department to finalize those rules. Where Chao stands on self-driving vehicles is unclear, but her department’s actions could influence the livelihoods of millions of truck and ride hail drivers.

In October, Otto, the self-driving truck company owned by Uber, demonstrated its first delivery for Anheuser-Busch.

Chris Spear, President and CEO of the American Trucking Associations, the largest trade group for that industry, said in a statement that Trump “could not have picked a more qualified, experienced and dedicated individual to serve in this important role.”

“I had the privilege of serving with and working closely with Secretary Chao during my time at the Department of Labor, and I am extremely pleased that she will be taking on this new challenge,” Spear said.

Quelle: <a href="Trump’s Transportation Secretary May Be Friendly To Uber and Lyft“>BuzzFeed

The Clever Trick An Alt-Right Hot Spot Is Using To Seem Much, Much Bigger

Since the presidential election, the media has paid an enormous amount of attention to the alt-right, a loose confederation of trolls, white nationalists, conservatives, and neo-Nazis. From intense scrutiny of Steve Bannon — the former Breitbart executive appointed to be Donald Trump&#039;s chief strategist — to blanket coverage of a white separatist press conference last week in Washington, DC, the spotlight has been commensurate with a major new force in American politics.

But there&039;s a fundamental problem in our understanding of the alt-right: No one knows how many people the controversial movement comprises. Like Anonymous and other leaderless, internet-driven movements before it, the alt-right leverages social media to amplify its message while keeping its membership, if you can call it that, obscure.

Last week, the journalist John Herrman noticed one eye-popping number: 7,528,000, or the total number of subscribers to the subreddit r/altright. That would make r/altright one of the 50 most popular pages on Reddit, up there with huge general interest subs like r/food and r/gadgets.

And this morning, that number had grown by a factor of 1,000, to the humungous figure of 8,190,000,000, or roughly half a billion subscribers more than the population of planet Earth.

So what the heck is going on?

The moderators of r/altright appear to be playing a simple trick with an input prompt. Reddit allows moderators to customize the name for subscribers to a subreddit in the right-hand column where the subscriber count appears, so the group of subscribers could be called “readers,” or “followers,” or “fanatics” — whatever you like. In the case of r/altright they appear as “Fashy Goys.”

A simple right-click inspection of the page HTML shows that name, but it also shows something else: six zeroes.

That places the true subscriber count directly next to a multiplier of 1,000,000 (or when Herrman noticed it last week, merely 1,000). A moderator appears to have done the same thing with the online count for the current number of subscribers:

On the moderator page you can find the real number of subscribers, 8,191, or approximately .000001 of Earth&039;s population.

Eight thousand subscribers isn&039;t nothing: As the Anti-Defamation League found in its examination of anti-Semitic abuse against journalists, a relatively small number of internet users can make a hell of a lot of noise. But it does provide a new data point about an amorphous movement that may have a vested interest in appearing bigger than it really is.

Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="The Clever Trick An Alt-Right Hot Spot Is Using To Seem Much, Much Bigger“>BuzzFeed