[emcrazyone]

yea, but, there is this tid-bit:

"During the Government’s investigation, which was conducted jointly by the FBI and HSI, an HSI agent acting in an undercover capacity (the “HSI-UC”) successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website, and was given access to private, restricted areas of the site reserved for BENTHALL and his administrative staff. By doing so, the HSI-UC was able to interact directly with BENTHALL throughout his operation of the website."

I realize it's vague but seems conceivable this level of access would allow you to connect the dots. No?

[legalbeagle]

But how could they know what support staff to infiltrate if they hadn't identified the server? The first step was locating the server. The second step was identifying the individuals and getting evidence against them. The undercover operation couldn't happen (except by accident) until step 2.

[thefreeman]

It seems you read this as support staff for the underlying webhost. However I get the impression the undercover agent had a role akin to an admin or moderator on other user content generated sites.

If that was the case, they didn't need to know where the server is hosted. And the "private" parts of the back end very likely opened up methods of code execution on the underlying host (eg. editing php templates, etc.)