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On May 31 2015 01:07 PassiveAce wrote: yeah he was caught in a law enforcement sting trying to order the murders of some old colleagues that threatened the service. lot of people think that the punishment is too severe but seems to me he got what was coming to him The government didn't even charge him with the hitman/murder stuff. I think those allegations were only used to deny him bail.
On May 31 2015 01:07 Deleuze wrote:Show nested quote +On May 31 2015 00:25 Catch]22 wrote: Rumour has it that you could buy killings there as well. Along with e.g. fake identities etc. Don't think that this was the case for Silk Road? Tor yeah, but I'm not so sure about SR Yeah people seem to confuse the Silk Road trial with the entire deep web. There are hitmen out there, but from everything I've read, SR wasn't a market for them.
On May 31 2015 05:09 AndreWiles wrote:Show nested quote +On May 31 2015 01:07 PassiveAce wrote: lot of people think that the punishment is too severe but seems to me he got what was coming to him yes its quite amazing. This guy was born into privilege and used his privilege to make the world worse. All in what he thought was noble intent of course, as you can see from his linkedin profile he wanted to sell drugs to free people from government oppression, lol. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossulbrichtHis punishment is a 1000x more just than the millions of blacks put in jail, yet who cares about them? The last part is a real non sequitur... People who oppose the war on drugs generally don't like industrial incarceration for nonviolent, victimless drug offenses. There's a negative reaction to Ulbricht's case not only because of the fishy shit the government did, but because of the scapegoating involved in doing all this to take down a white collar tech guy when prohibition has created a war with Mexican drug cartels. Reminds me of blaming Kim Dotcom for internet piracy.
+ Show Spoiler +
It's interesting to me that the friends/family of OD victims were at the trial. I'm not convinced that blame is going in the right direction there... For instance, if someone bought a knife on Amazon and stabbed their friend to death with it, you wouldn't show up at the trial of Jeff Bezos and ask him how he could be so heartless. People die in alcohol related deaths regularly, but people don't seem to blame Johnny Walker or the liquor store or the government for legalizing alcohol.
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your right i think hes charged in maryland for the hitman stuff. court date for that charge isnt for a while.
still hard to feel bad for the guy after you read those transcripts.
yeah bringing in the families of od victims seems really silly. cant blame other people for your risky behavior.
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On May 31 2015 08:31 CosmicSpiral wrote:Show nested quote +On May 31 2015 08:29 PassiveAce wrote: Is your point that because the US government gets away with murder Ulbricht should be allowed to get away with murder too? The inverse, but thank you for perfectly illustrating my real point.
You can invoke systematic hypocrisy regardless of whether the verdict in question is justifiable or not, all it does is derail the conversation.
I find that almost all the arguments for why Ulbricht shouldn't be punished as harshly is that other individuals or organizations are doing more illegal / morally abhorrent things and not being penalized as harshly or not at all; instead of directing their energy towards those other organizations and talking about it in the appropriate channels and seeking penalties for those individuals or organizations as well. Completely counter intuitive behavior.
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The charges seem pretty dubious with the exception of money laundering.
If someone were to place illegal drugs or false IDs on Ebay and it didn't get caught and stopped by their systems, would the CEO of Ebay have to go to jail? If someone were to sneak some child porn images into Google Images, would the CEO of Google have to go to jail for distribution of child pornography? If people used PMs on TeamLiquid to sell illicit drugs, would the owners of TL have to go to jail?
Okay, I admit that Ebay, Google, and TL take steps to prevent illegal action while the Silk Road encourages it, but the law can sometimes be a very blunt force with little regard for nuance. Setting a case history such as this one can have negative consequences of holding website providers responsible for the actions of their users.
Bringing in families of OD victims for testimony seems to be especially poor. People don't get onto SilkRoad by accident. If not there, then these OD victims would have gotten their drugs from somewhere... quite likely somewhere more dangerous.
Now, I do believe the guy should go to jail for a long time for his attempted hits, which he still hasn't been tried for. He has shown a clear lack of respect for human life and I don't want people like that in the general populace. But he's getting punished for the wrong crimes right now and that concerns me.
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United States15275 Posts
On May 31 2015 08:49 Caihead wrote:Show nested quote +On May 31 2015 08:31 CosmicSpiral wrote:On May 31 2015 08:29 PassiveAce wrote: Is your point that because the US government gets away with murder Ulbricht should be allowed to get away with murder too? The inverse, but thank you for perfectly illustrating my real point. You can invoke systematic hypocrisy regardless of whether the verdict in question is justifiable or not, all it does is derail the conversation. I find that almost all the arguments for why Ulbricht shouldn't be punished as harshly is that other individuals or organizations are doing more illegal / morally abhorrent things and not being penalized as harshly or not at all; instead of directing their energy towards those other organizations and talking about it in the appropriate channels and seeking penalties for those individuals or organizations as well. Completely counter intuitive behavior.
Well it doesn't. The framing of the conversation itself derails what's actually at stake. Whether he deserves a 200-year sentence is irrelevant: he's not going to live to see half of it. It sets a precedence for other people who will be in his position.
Frankly I don't care how harshly Ulbricht is punished or not. I care whether the schema of drug distribution he presented with the Silk Road will be expanded or discarded. If it's the latter, then it puts a lot more people at risk. We don't need another 2005-2006 outbreak because the illegal drug trade degraded into the Wild West frontier again.
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You can't set up a criminal enterprise just because you don't believe in drug laws. What he did was only innovative in the sense that identities were protected by TOR, it's not like Silk Road was actually the answer to getting drugs safely to market.
Having said that I'm not sure life in prison is necessarily the right decision for what seems to be a white collar crime.
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Landmark rulings like this are so silly, but what are you gonna do =/
If I were in the situation of being extorted $700,000 for the identities of colleagues in a business which is explicitly run on anonymity, I would probably be on the fence about forking over a fat sum or having some guy die, especially when being contacted by people who have the [supposed] capability of taking him/myself out. But hey, I'm just some guy.
gg bro, thanks for giving our country what we want (DURGS), hopefully your dudes can smuggle some gear into your cell once in a while.
Also, who the fuck would name a blackmail file "blackmail.txt" lol.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
It's concerning the number of sympathizers DPR has in this thread.
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On May 31 2015 06:15 ninazerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 31 2015 05:09 AndreWiles wrote:On May 31 2015 01:07 PassiveAce wrote: lot of people think that the punishment is too severe but seems to me he got what was coming to him yes its quite amazing. This guy was born into privilege and used his privilege to make the world worse. All in what he thought was noble intent of course, as you can see from his linkedin profile he wanted to sell drugs to free people from government oppression, lol. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossulbrichtHis punishment is a 1000x more just than the millions of blacks put in jail, yet who cares about them? C'mon. Don't make this about 'race' and 'privilege'.
I just think it's amazing that there is more outrage shown over this than other things. For what its worth i think his sentence is too long as well, but i generally think the 'justice' system is horrible in its punishment and exploitive aspect rather than trying to restore peoples lives, especially in America.
i'll make it about the war on drugs. If we simply decriminalized drugs dangerous people like this would never be able to make tons of money . Not only that but people worse than this guy like the bloodthirsty warlords in Afghanistan would go broke and lose all their power if we decriminalized heroin.
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i'd give him, to IS. i don't really care about the legal precedence or whatever legal shit people are so concerned about because the laws are rigged, broken; i'd even go as far as to call them clientelistic.
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I expect this is largely agenda based sentencing, that it is extra harsh punishment because of the nature of what he did, how he "went outside the system".
I have not done research on the details of what he has done, but this list:
+ Show Spoiler + 1. distributing or aiding and abetting the distribution of narcotics 2. distributing narcotics or aiding and abetting distribution over the Internet 3. conspiracy to violate narcotics laws 4. conspiracy to run a "continuing criminal enterprise" 5. conspiracy charges for computer hacking 6. distributing false identification 7. money laundering
does not contain things that I think someone should spend life in prison for.
HOWEVER, I don't really care because the guy sounds like a worthless sack of shit who tried to (or did) get people killed
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Frankly of all the people he "killed" only the first was one I'd have any sympathy for at all. The rest were people scamming insane amounts of money and holding the identities of silk roads clientele hostage. I wouldn't have too much sympathy for someone being shot if they were trying to extort the hells angels, its just fucking stupid.
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On May 31 2015 12:41 travis wrote:I expect this is largely agenda based sentencing, that it is extra harsh punishment because of the nature of what he did, how he "went outside the system". I have not done research on the details of what he has done, but this list: + Show Spoiler + 1. distributing or aiding and abetting the distribution of narcotics 2. distributing narcotics or aiding and abetting distribution over the Internet 3. conspiracy to violate narcotics laws 4. conspiracy to run a "continuing criminal enterprise" 5. conspiracy charges for computer hacking 6. distributing false identification 7. money laundering
does not contain things that I think someone should spend life in prison for. HOWEVER, I don't really care because the guy sounds like a worthless sack of shit who tried to (or did) get people killed
Basically this, except he's like the least responsible person in the chain of cultivation to consumption, and the only thing that makes the drug/money stuff criminal is ridiculously dumb and counterproductive laws.
The best evidence is how consumption and distribution numbers were practically unaffected by the creation or destruction of the network. A network that is essentially already run by competing institutions (HSBC to name one) to which this seems like a clear retaliation for stepping on toes and cutting people out.
I don't know the details about the killing of people, but if the guy was a privileged fuck like people make him sound it wouldn't surprise me he would want to kill people for convenience and not just because they were a legitimate threat.
Illicit drugs are nothing compared to all the deadly shit bought and sold everyday in the US. And if you are buying and selling stuff, you need a market. So I really couldn't care less about that.
I don't know the details about the killing people part but go ahead and lock em up if he's guilty of that stuff, but for drugs and money, fine him like you do the fat cats or throw them all in prison (although I think prison for drugs is stupid), but locking him up for life while giving institutions free reign to do the same shit is just ridiculous.
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United Kingdom20158 Posts
On May 31 2015 03:53 helpman176 wrote: Silk Road got busted because it became too popular. It was even in the normal news when people involved were still anonymous.
I heard of it more than a few times without looking, for an "underground" drug dealing/exchange network that's not a very good thing
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On May 31 2015 08:50 RenSC2 wrote:
Now, I do believe the guy should go to jail for a long time for his attempted hits, which he still hasn't been tried for. He has shown a clear lack of respect for human life and I don't want people like that in the general populace. But he's getting punished for the wrong crimes right now and that concerns me.
to be fair the people he was trying to kill were also killers/scammers/blackmailers the same as him (from what i read). if you're a criminal and another criminal threatens to kill you or blackmail you then its pretty much standard to want to kill them too....
i only read half of it but it was basically "this guy is a professional scammer and is trying to blackmail me/get me in jail/fuck up my crime business so i try to find and kill him"
saying he "ordered the execution of people" is a bit sensationalist
yeah ok so i finished reading it:
his (silk road's) business was facilitating the sale of drugs. a group of scammers emerged that scammed users on the network for many $100,000s. one of the scammers attempted to blackmail the owner of silk road. the owner of silk road coincidentally was contacted by a super drug lord who said he could kill these (3) people for him and they went ahead.
later on the police were unable to find any record of the people who were allegedly killed and there is no further mention of who this super drug lord might be. article also mentions that (at least 1 of) the murders was faked by undercover agents
it also turned out that the agents working undercover were ALSO scammers/criminals. it gets confusing now but it sounds like the people scamming silk road were the actual undercover cops who were supposed to be investigating it. some of these cops were outed after the investigation
so basically he got scammed by undercover agents, entrapped and framed for fake murders, then a few months later the undercover agents got caught by other cops (coz one of them went on a spending spree)
so i guess thats why he's only charged for certain things.
BASICALLY some undercover cops blackmailed him, then offered to kill these people for him, then took a shitload of money from him and kept it, then arrested him, then got caught and arrested themselves
other stuff one of the cops done: + became part of a bitcoin company and then robbed one of the clients by using his power to freeze the account and take the money under pretence of law enforcement + had one of his embezelling accounts frozen so tried to use his police badge to get the company to release it then when they reported him he tricked his fellow officers into shutting down the company and taking their money
apparently a lot of the evidence/happenings were not able to be presented in court in the silk road trial because they came from a different department than the one locally handling the case . so all this shit about him getting framed, blackmailed and fucked around by the criminal cops had to be dropped.
so it does look like he was legit life imprisoned for facilitating drug transfers *shrug*
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United Kingdom13774 Posts
Higher profile criminals have been imprisoned for tax evasion. Using lesser felonies to obtain a life sentence is not uncommon for those who committed pretty significant crimes and who are guilty of significantly more than can be proved in court.
In my eyes, good riddance. His works blatantly support organized crime in that they allow criminal organizations to market drugs.
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On May 31 2015 13:34 FFGenerations wrote:Show nested quote +On May 31 2015 08:50 RenSC2 wrote:
Now, I do believe the guy should go to jail for a long time for his attempted hits, which he still hasn't been tried for. He has shown a clear lack of respect for human life and I don't want people like that in the general populace. But he's getting punished for the wrong crimes right now and that concerns me. to be fair the people he was trying to kill were also killers/scammers/blackmailers the same as him (from what i read). if you're a criminal and another criminal threatens to kill you or blackmail you then its pretty much standard to want to kill them too.... i only read half of it but it was basically "this guy is a professional scammer and is trying to blackmail me/get me in jail/fuck up my crime business so i try to find and kill him" saying he "ordered the execution of people" is a bit sensationalist yeah ok so i finished reading it: his (silk road's) business was facilitating the sale of drugs. a group of scammers emerged that scammed users on the network for many $100,000s. one of the scammers attempted to blackmail the owner of silk road. the owner of silk road coincidentally was contacted by a super drug lord who said he could kill these (3) people for him and they went ahead. later on the police were unable to find any record of the people who were allegedly killed and there is no further mention of who this super drug lord might be. article also mentions that (at least 1 of) the murders was faked by undercover agents it also turned out that the agents working undercover were ALSO scammers/criminals. it gets confusing now but it sounds like the people scamming silk road were the actual undercover cops who were supposed to be investigating it. some of these cops were outed after the investigation so basically he got scammed by undercover agents, entrapped and framed for fake murders, then a few months later the undercover agents got caught by other cops (coz one of them went on a spending spree) so i guess thats why he's only charged for certain things. BASICALLY some undercover cops blackmailed him, then offered to kill these people for him, then took a shitload of money from him and kept it, then arrested him, then got caught and arrested themselves other stuff one of the cops done: + became part of a bitcoin company and then robbed one of the clients by using his power to freeze the account and take the money under pretence of law enforcement + had one of his embezelling accounts frozen so tried to use his police badge to get the company to release it then when they reported him he tricked his fellow officers into shutting down the company and taking their money apparently a lot of the evidence/happenings were not able to be presented in court in the silk road trial because they came from a different department than the one locally handling the case . so all this shit about him getting framed, blackmailed and fucked around by the criminal cops had to be dropped. so it does look like he was legit life imprisoned for facilitating drug transfers *shrug*
I think you got most of it. There's also the likely issue that they tracked down the servers by illegal means. Have to give the prosecutors credit, though. This was one mess of a case because of at least 1 dirty cop and a lot of tainted information. They managed to keep that most segmented off, which is why the case should survive appeal. A lot of other prosecutors would have screwed that up and Ross would eventually get the verdict tossed.
There's also the semi-hilarious aspect that undercover agents were involved from pretty much Day 1. But that's not as uncommon in this situations as people think. Though nothing as bad as when Spain bombed itself.
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Happy about this, just two comments -
1) He's an idiot for getting caught. As an admin for this kind of website you keep a low profile, also on the website. 2) I find it hilarious what US police can do.. they basically are criminals themselves. All those stories about this case, DEA, ATF, FBI, CIA, ... :S
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On May 31 2015 11:36 Plexa wrote: It's concerning the number of sympathizers DPR has in this thread. That's what I was thinking too. I know nothing about Silk Road or its founder, but from the comments it sounds like the evil US government caught some kind of freedom fighter.
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I thought the sentence was too much, then I read this on Slashdot
Yes sentencing should be consistent which is why we have sentencing guidelines, and this judge followed them. He was convicted of running a continuing criminal enterprise which has a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. And it gets worse when you add up the offense levels in the guidelines for his crimes: It was demonstrated that people who took drugs purchased on Silk Road have died from that drug use, which give him a base offense level of 38. The continuing criminal enterprise offense adds 4 points, and since he played an Aggravated Role as the ring leader that adds another 4 points, bringing him to 46 points. The sentencing table for someone with no prior convictions and an offense level of 43 or more is a life sentence, period, and that is before talking about the other five charges he was convicted of! As a judge you would have to present a very strong argument as to why someone with that high of an offense level should get less than life.
The reason he got such a harsh sentence is because our drug laws are so harsh, not because the judge was harsh. Prosecutors have huge flexibility in what they charge people with, and in this case they threw the book at him.
This made a lot more sense, and seems like a reasonable explanation.
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