As a refresher to what exactly happened in the investigation that the judge ruled "not an illegal search":
1. FBI agents noticed the captcha mechanism on Silk Road was not configured to go through Tor (revealing the server IP address)
2. They asked Icelandic police to get an image of the server.
Another part of the argument is that the TOS of the data center said that servers could be "monitored" for lawful use (probably removing expectation of privacy questions, independent of localisation, in the prosecution's mind).
I wouldn't call this "hacking", but the constitutional question remains. I think the crux of this is that information obtained from foreign agents seems to be admissible independent of how they obtained it. Not a fun state of affairs.
1. FBI agents noticed the captcha mechanism on Silk Road was not configured to go through Tor (revealing the server IP address)
2. They asked Icelandic police to get an image of the server.
Another part of the argument is that the TOS of the data center said that servers could be "monitored" for lawful use (probably removing expectation of privacy questions, independent of localisation, in the prosecution's mind).
I wouldn't call this "hacking", but the constitutional question remains. I think the crux of this is that information obtained from foreign agents seems to be admissible independent of how they obtained it. Not a fun state of affairs.