Feds say Silk Road suspect’s computer shows he (thought he) plotted 6 murders

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.

From the comments (Silk Road Tales) http://antilop.cc/sr/

So, as an armchair juror, 3 enourmous questions spring to mind:

1. Why would a man, who allegedly built an extremely profitable empire using robust cryptographic software, not have enough expertise to employ powerful encypted countermeasures on his personal machine? Why wasn't his hard drive encrypted? Why were there no plans to erase and destroy data at a moment's notice, in the event that he gets arrested? Are we expected to believe that his meticulous use of crypto-currency and onion routing go hand in hand with maintaining a silly plain text journal of his comings and goings? That he was simply naive to the idea that his local storage devices should not be a meticulously guarded has his network presence?

2. Are screenshots honestly a valid form of evidence? Consider that there's a distinct lack of any sort of chain-of-custody for such evidence, and the fact that it's trivial to fabricate screenshots, why should I believe that any give screenshot can be regarded as authentic evidence?

3. Screenshots aside, how can we honestly buy into any digital evidence presented to us, when there's no assured certainty to its integrity? Consider that one cannot even trust plaintext HTTP data to be safe from corruption by MITM attacks. Given that large quantities of digital evidence can be manufactured programatically, with relative ease, given the proper expertise, how are we to trust a large volume of digital data as anything more than artificially produced bits and bytes spat out by a machine? Logs? Logs, you say? Who maintained these logs? What program created these logs? And if I can possibly capture and replay a remote desktop session, doesn't it stand to reason that I might be able to spice things up, and insert salacious tidbits, and then programatically produce screenshots at will? So what if they have gigabytes of data demonstrating such and such? What is the true measure of authenticity when confronted by the fact that it's still just faceless bytes sitting on a disk?

One very plausible answer is the government wanted to demonize him so there'd be less of an uproar of support against their actions.

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