The Net Is An Open Universe Open To Adept Explorers

Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, was identified as Ross Ulbricht by one agent googling, off work hours, in just two weekends in 2013. 

Ulbricht's passport, submitted in evidence in his trial.

Many agents had been working on the case for a year or more, and since agent Gary Alford was new to the case, not FBI, and not technologically sophisticated, no one took him seriously for months.

 He escalated the discovery and became such a pest about it, one agent told him to drop it.

  From the New York Times article: 

"In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. 

But I'm like, 'Well, that stuff still works.'" 

Mr. Alford's preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. 

That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name "altoid." 

"Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?" altoid asked. "It's kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com." 

The early date of the posting suggested that altoid might have inside knowledge about Silk Road. During the first weekend of June 2013, Mr. Alford went through everything altoid had written, the online equivalent of sifting through trash cans near the scene of a crime.

Image placed on original Silk Road after seizure of property by the FBI

Mr. Alford eventually turned up a message that altoid had apparently deleted — but that had been preserved in the response of another user. 

In that post, altoid asked for some programming help and gave his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com.