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Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

He kept a written journal of this stuff? Truly must not have expected to be caught, I can't imagine what world he was in inside his head to have believed that. Given the status of the website, it was only going to be a matter of time.

Fairly convincing looking fake Australian license though, wish there was a better photo of it.

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I can't get over how he wasn't using full disk encryption.

The way I see it there are a few possibilities:

1) He isn't the real DPR

2) He is the real DPR, but he's extremely inept and didn't get caught before due to dumb luck

3) He isn't the original DPR, but an inept person who took over to take the fall for the original DPR

4) He wanted to get caught?

5) Hubris.

5) none of us are as smart as we think we are.

Corollary: The FBI is sharper than we lead ourselves to believe.

(Not to say they are gods among men, but if you believe The Internet, the FBI couldn't sleuth their way out of a wet paper bag)

The Internet watches too much television.

There's nothing to suggest that anybody apart from him ever ran the site. The screw ups on StackOverflow and Bitcointalk point to him and nobody else. He's just someone who totally didn't prepare for his adversaries, who ultimately didn't need to go to any great lengths to unmask him. I'm surprised nobody in the general public managed to do it, quite honestly.

Just not as clever as he thought he was being, essentially.

> The screw ups on StackOverflow and Bitcointalk point to him and nobody else.

Ah, so the original DPR is a true master then :P

didn't get caught before due to dumb luck

There isn't really much "before". The site was only up for about 2.5 years before shutdown, and the FBI started building a case back in, what, May? June?

> 3) He isn't the original DPR, but an inept person who took over to take the fall for the original DPR

The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.

If he was they'd either leave the computer on and retrieve the key out of the ram, or he'd hand it over within a week of custody.

He probably did. The FBI deliberately waited until he was using his laptop at the library, then tackled him while the computer was still logged on.

I can't imagine what world he was in inside his head

Perhaps the world of in for a penny, in for a pound

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