Their servers were found or their encryption were broken under mysterious circumstances involving classified "techniques".
In 3 out 4 cases malware was sent from the services to their users once taken over.
All were hosted in the EU, even stranger, all of them had servers hosted by OVH. Although SR was not directly hosted by OVH Ross Ulbricht had a vnc server (virtual desktop) there which he apparently used to administrate the SR main server and on another OVH server he had a deadmanswitch and his will.
In a sense this is the counterpart to the survival bias. But in this case we only know where the taken down services were hosted, we don't know where the survivors are being hosted.
All this has serious Crypto AG vibes. Back then it was: trust us, we are from Switzerland, we are neutral....
It doesn’t make sense to build a conspiracy theory on randomly selected facts, when there’s an obvious explanation that in all those cases the law was broken and law enforcement acted as they were supposed to act. Other ISPs and hosting providers are cooperating with lawful requests too.
I do not see any lies or omission of important details in this document. Looks like OVH complied with some legal request and just handed over everything they had, including encrypted copies of hard drives. Americans then just cracked the root password.
Silk Road, SkyECC, EncroChat, TorMail+Freedom Hosting.
What do they all have in common?
Their servers were found or their encryption were broken under mysterious circumstances involving classified "techniques". In 3 out 4 cases malware was sent from the services to their users once taken over.
All were hosted in the EU, even stranger, all of them had servers hosted by OVH. Although SR was not directly hosted by OVH Ross Ulbricht had a vnc server (virtual desktop) there which he apparently used to administrate the SR main server and on another OVH server he had a deadmanswitch and his will.
In a sense this is the counterpart to the survival bias. But in this case we only know where the taken down services were hosted, we don't know where the survivors are being hosted.
All this has serious Crypto AG vibes. Back then it was: trust us, we are from Switzerland, we are neutral....