Silk Road Transactions Were Never Completely Erased By Ross Ulbricht

This is not going to be good news for Silk Road users. NYT reports:

A staff member in the electrical engineering department of a liberal arts college in eastern Pennsylvania played a small role in the investigation that resulted in the shutdown last fall of Silk Road, the online marketplace where drugs and weapons could be bought with Bitcoin.

The employee, Christopher Nadovich, director of laboratories at the electrical and computer engineering department at Lafayette College, owned a company that provided Silk Road with a backup server for its website, according to a previously undisclosed court filing in the two-year investigation...

The search warrant reveals that JTAN potentially provided the authorities with a wealth of information about Silk Road and Mr. Ulbricht. The authorities said that Silk Road’s primary server would purge information every 60 days or so, but data on the backup server at JTAN was not regularly deleted or destroyed.

“I believe that this backup data will reflect the details of numerous narcotics transactions conducted through the Silk Road website and the use of Bitcoins to launder the proceeds from these transactions,” the unidentified F.B.I. agent said in the search warrant application.