Silk Road Judge: Tor Browser Is "Mumbo-Jumbo To Most People On The Jury Right Now"

Illustrations by Susie Cagle.

The Silk Road trial is a high-tech case of nearly inscrutable levels, and prosecutors are grappling with the burden of having to explain cryptographic technologies to a jury whose demographics lean away from technological sophistication. As Judge Katherine Forrest explained to them on Tuesday, the jury need not have any technical expertise to rule on the issues at trial, since everything they need ought to be presented to them in court. But the prosecutionalthough not for lack of effortseems to be falling short of making sense to the jurors.

In a conference with the attorneys on Wednesday, before the jury entered the courtroom, Judge Forrest complained about the prosecutions explanation of Tor. What [the Tor Browser] is, I think, is mumbo-jumbo to most people on the jury right now. theres room for clarity, here.

Quite early on in the pre-trial process, the judge had asked for the two sides to come up with a glossary of technical terms. But in the end, the prosecution and the defense could not reach an agreement on how the terms should be defined. Although the exact substance and the extent of their disagreement is yet unknown, the filings do show that they often sparred over whether to characterize Bitcoin as a currency (a term favored by the prosecution) or as a payments system (favored by Ross Ulbrichts defense). Another point of contention may have been how to characterize Tor. In the opening statements, the prosecution repeatedly referred to the Tor-hidden service Silk Road as a dark and secret part of the Internet, whereas the defense pointedly mentioned that Tor had actually been developed by the U.S. government for legitimate means.

Only three days have passed and the jury has already been barraged with detailed technical explanations of a dizzying array of cryptographic technologies: Tor, PGP, Bitcoin. The run-downs of these technologies have been interspersed with nearly comical explanations of far more basic elements of the Internethow forum posts work, the difference between forum posts and direct messages, what the Internet Archive is, and the concept of a wiki.

With respect to the last, at one point, the prosecutor asked his first witness, a DHS agent, What is a wiki? The witness began his answer with, Its, uh, its like Wikipedia.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

For the most part, the prosecutions explanations have been thorough, detailed, and technically correct. Explanations have often been accompanied by exhibits that can only be described as tutorial videos, where Jared Der-Yeghaiyan, the aforementioned DHS agent, walked the jury step by step through how to use Tor, how to track Bitcoin transactions on blockchain.info, and how to encrypt e-mails with PGP. Nonetheless, the prosecution is up against a difficult task: hosting a crypto-party for a group that never asked to be in the room in the first place.

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Silk Road Judge: Tor Browser Is "Mumbo-Jumbo To Most People On The Jury Right Now"