"The FBI is obviously lying about how they got the information they have. They clearly broke into the Silk Road servers."
This isn't obvious at all and the only backing we've seen for this is some butthurt speculation. Meanwhile we know for a fact that the Silk Road IP had leaked multiple times in the months before the FBI claims it leaked to them.
Can the FBI issue subpoenas in the USA, don't they need the court to do that?
My reading of the Cybercrime Convention they claimed to use (see my other post) means that if they needed to get a subpoena then they would need to get one before the Convention could be applied to compel the Swedish authorities to perform the search on their behalf.
They don't appear to have got a warrant, a subpoena nor any judicial oversight before ordering the initial search and seizure - that appears to break the Convention. Perhaps that's why there's a footnote saying they may have asked the Swedes just for comity's sake, it's so hard to remember!
What I'd really want to see to prove their position is the captured packets from their initial probing of the publicly available homepage that include the IP addresses. That would show suggest they were telling the truth [eg when matched with other peoples captures that the FBI don't yet have access to]. I'm going to go ahead and assume that they don't have that data. IMO if they can't produce that data it demonstrates the personnel in court are either completely incompetent in their positions as investigators and should be fired immediately or they are flat out lying; something tells me they're largely competent.
The server wasn't in the USA and from all the information I've read they claim the relevant foreign interests cooperated with them in obtaining the server image.
And I'm pretty sure they would have had NO trouble getting a warrant in the USA if they had a credible lead on the SR server. And any credible hosting company would GLADLY cooperate to the fullest extent with such a warrant. Generally hosting companies do not care what you're doing on your server and won't get in the middle of disputes UNLESS:
A.) You're doing something illegal
B.) Your actions pose an untenable threat to the network or other customers
>from all the information I've read they claim the relevant foreign interests cooperated with them //
The law they claim to have used requires that the requesting country act as if the computer being searched is in their own company, all protections that would apply domestically must be applied in order to request the search lawfully.
If they needed a warrant to get the local search done (eg in Pennsylvannia) then they needed one in order to use the 2001 Convention on Cybercrime to request that Sweden perform a search (and imaging) for them.
This appears to be a hole in the FBI argument - as you say, they're claiming they didn't need a warrant or to provide protections that would normally be applied if the server were in the USA. But the Convention used - by my reading at least (see my other post for links) - contradicts that specifically demanding that the normal domestic protections and procedures be applied.
This isn't obvious at all and the only backing we've seen for this is some butthurt speculation. Meanwhile we know for a fact that the Silk Road IP had leaked multiple times in the months before the FBI claims it leaked to them.