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Silk Road founder loses appeal
- sandov 9y agoIt's bizarre to think that, according to most countries' justice, a guy behind a computer is as dangerous to society as a serial killer.
- _vn5r 9y agoHe did pay for murders. It doesn't matter if it was behind a computer or not.
- blazespin 9y agoThere were better murders. He's paying for all the drug trade he facilitated. Given the current opiod crisis, maybe he deserves it. Maybe a few drug company ceos deserve it too.
- Hydraulix989 9y agoI haven't been following this closely. Was he actually charged for anything murder related?
- kinghajj 9y agoNo, he wasn't. Everyone keeps parroting the FBI's claim without any evidence. I strongly suspect the entire murder-for-hire story was either completely fabricated, or construed to kill any sympathy there may be for him in the public eye.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago"I strongly suspect the entire murder-for-hire story was either completely fabricated, or construed to kill any sympathy there may be for him in the public eye." Incredible.
- na85 9y ago>Incredible. Penetrating insight.
- eli 9y agoThat motive doesn't really make sense. A huge conspiracy to frame someone for a crime who was already going to get life?
- andylei 9y agoYou are wrong Here's the indictment: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/releases/2013/131002baltimore.pdf https://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/releases/2013/131002baltimor... That indictment is referenced here: http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15a-40e0-be91-bde1c83676dd/1/doc/15-1815_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15a-40e0-be91-bde1c83676dd/1/hilite/ http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15... at footnote 15
- pcthrowaway 9y agoCharged but not convicted.
- yourapostasy 9y agoIt likely wasn't the solicitation for murder that brought on the eye-popping sentencing (and that solicitation charge didn't make it into the final proceedings from what I read), but the entire stack of charges, but that is just my guess. This looks a lot like "throwing the book" at Ulbricht to "make an example" out of him, and try to clamp down on darknet activities. I'm not clear on the wisdom of this approach, as it seems as if it only encourages future darknet participants to increase opsec and "play for keeps", but as I'm just an outside observer, I'll defer to the judgement of the involved prosecutors and law enforcement who are much closer to the details. Would be fascinated to hear from others who follow this much more closely, and their thoughts on why Ulbricht got such a long sentence.
- andylei 9y agohe got a long sentence because the court followed the federal sentencing guidelines [1], determined that his offense level was 50 which maps to life in prison. the court could have chosen a lesser sentence, but they determined that he tried to have 5 people killed to protect his criminal enterprise, which they didn't look too kindly upon. its all in the appeal [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentencing_Guidelines#Sentencing_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci... [2] http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15a-40e0-be91-bde1c83676dd/1/doc/15-1815_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15a-40e0-be91-bde1c83676dd/1/hilite/ http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15...
- greggh 9y agoThat charge was dropped. It was never brought to court, and he was not found guilty of that. The murder for hire charges were just to make everyone agree with them, it was about opinion, not truth.
- tptacek 9y ago"That charge" (there are in fact several of them) wasn't "dropped": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14457569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14457569
- cafman 9y agoIt's not bizarre at all. A guy behind a computer or a guy leading a company can do so much more damage than any murderer. The "guy behind the computer" didn't hack up and at people but ruined the lives and many people, and their families. You might argue that everyone on silk road is a little guilty and that's probably true but he facilitated the ruining of lives of many spouses and children who did nothing wrong.
- lprubin 9y agoIf you're arguing that silk road's drug sales ruined lives, I'll posit a counter-argument that silk road may have saved lives. People who are drug addicts are going to find their drugs one way or another. I highly doubt there were many people who got their drugs on silk road that wouldn't have gotten them somewhere else. And instead of purchasing them on the street from dubious sources where the drugs may have been cut or mixed or mis-measured or not even actually what they claimed to be, these people were able to purchase them from sellers who had been peer reviewed thousands of times. Not an ideal situation, but often far safer than purchasing from random people on the street. In my opinion, the solution to drug addiction problems is not prohibition. That's what we have now and it's not working.
- pazimzadeh 9y agoThe silk road provided a place for anonymous discussion and review of goods. It provided access to transcendent experiences. I'd say it saved lives.
- Belphemur 9y agoDrug was only one of the item on sale. You had also assassination, children, organs, human trafficking, and more that I can't remember. I agree with you on the point of the drug, but the rest... Is disgusting.
- cafman 9y agoI'm sympathetic to the damage done by the "war on drugs". We need to change laws, creating a website that allows for murder and other horrible crimes is not the right approach.
- aseipp 9y ago"guy behind the computer"? Watching a Let's Play of a video game makes you a "guy behind a computer". This dude was responsible for one of the biggest online drug trafficking sites in the world. Do you think that Foghorn Leghorn or somebody is the one growing the poppy seeds that became the Heroin sold on Silk Road? No, systems like cartels grow it. And they inflict massive amounts of violence in order to do so. People in parts of places like Mexico are getting eaten alive by that violence due the heroin epidemic in the US fueling the illegal drug trade even further. Try telling victims of the drug trade that the people running and profiting on that epidemic are "just guys behind computers". Does Ross Ulbricht deserve a life sentence? I don't really think so, but it sure as hell isn't because he's some angel "behind a computer". But because criminal justice should be rehabilitative and protective, not massively punitive and destructive of the lives it governs. Taking away someone's whole life is a serious matter. Is Ross Ulbricht responsible for people in general doing drugs? No, and people will do them regardless of the law. But that also doesn't give Ulbricht a free pass for engaging in the act of trading drugs, taking part in the drug trade, a trade which is largely violent in many ways today and hurts people. (And no, it is not non-violent because your weed dealer grows 3 plants in his room and gives you sweet deals on it. There are consequences to the entire system of illegal drug trafficking.) No more than you have a free pass to take advantage of the mentally ill or a child, simply because there's a buck to be made from them. The solution to the violence of the drug trade isn't "let's monetize it ruthlessly", it's "let's dismantle it by putting people's lives first". Is Ross Ulbricht absolutely guilty of running a criminal enterprise, and did he knowingly profit off a massively unjust model of business that put his own profit and selfish, misguided values ("nobody was getting hurt!") above the lives of people who suffer at the hands of the drug trade? Did he externalize the human consequences of his poor lil' business in order to profit? You bet your ass he did. Call a spade a goddamn spade. Why so many dorks come out of the woodwock on this website in order to identify with Ulbricht, I'll never know. He's a gigantic moron (who apparently could not understand the possible implications his own trade could have) and criminal who was caught. Do people also empathize with abusive pimps here too, or did I miss something? (Perhaps there's something there, about how Ulbricht and his fall fully characterizes the idea of "fuck you, got mine" which is pervasive in the spectacle of Silicon Valley, and the race for funny money. It's so sad Ulbricht's business failed, think about it! Everything and everything is fair game, and little apps can totally change it all. There was no violence involved at all using drug-trade-dot-com! He was just "disrupting" the good ol' drug trade, and messed up a lil' bit. He didn't "understand" that some living humans would be kidnapped and literally flayed alive, burned into dust and the ashes disposed, in order to intimidate people, so cartels could control production routes. Oops, maybe 2.0 can fix it. I bet if his last name was "Rodriguez" or something and he wasn't a huge nerd who knew how to use SSH, we'd be seeing some different tunes in here, too.)
- dragonwriter 9y agoA guy behind a computer who orders multiple murders for hire, sure. Not sure what is bizarre about it; the idea that using a computer mitigates crime somehow is the more bizarre concept.
- sergiotapia 9y agoThat's a shame, so young and entire life ahead of him. Would he have had a shorter sentence if he dealt only in narcotics? The article implies Silk Road was narcotics-only, but didn't it deal in other more immoral areas?
- mirimir 9y agoI doubt that it would have made much difference. The US has quite a thing about illicit drugs.
- Taek 9y agoIf I remember correctly, it banned guns and child porn. So it wasn't this lawless no-ethics zone. In my opinion it should have banned opiates too (they are just so much more likely to destroy lives than other drugs), but regardless the site clearly had a minimum bar when it came to ethics. I only say that because I think most people don't realize that.
- closeparen 9y agoIt doesn't matter which laws. Silk Road was a large-scale public display of flagrant lawbreaking, which appeared to be impervious to enforcement action through clever use of technology. Shutting it down and eviscerating the person behind it was a matter of preserving the belief that we live in a law-governed society. The stakes here aren't drug prohibition, they're the capability and reach of government as an idea. If darknet markets continued at similar scale and visibility, we wouldn't be the United States anymore, but something closer to Somalia. You could make a comparison to Wall Street, I guess, but selling volatile securities that turn out to be wildly overvalued isn't an obvious crime in the way that selling heroin is. And even then, the fallout of the financial crisis did enormous damage to public trust in society.
- bronson 9y ago> Silk Road was a large-scale public display of flagrant lawbreaking, which appeared to be impervious to enforcement action through clever use of technology. So is Uber.
- mirimir 9y agoThat's sad :( But it was an effective proof of concept, and nobody can take that from him.
- pcthrowaway 9y agoI'm not going to argue Ulbricht shouldn't be serving a serious sentence, assuming legitimacy of the evidence of his murder-by-hire attempt. However, he wasn't convicted on those charges. He was convicted of 'conspiracy to traffic narcotics', money laundering, and 'computer hacking'. The 'hacking' and laundering were only necessities of the narcotics trafficking business, so it really does boil down to him being convicted to a life sentence for the drug distribution business. I'd take no issue with a life sentence for procuring murder, but see it as an absolute travesty that drugs are demonized to the point where a life sentence for trafficking is even a possibility.
- mirimir 9y agoIt's arguable that killing people was the FBI's idea. It's a standard tactic for them. Edit: I should have said "LEA's".
- s73ver 9y agoNo, it's not. He ordered the hits. He, himself, did it.
- accountyaccount 9y agoyet to be proven
- s73ver 9y agoHis own chat logs show him ordering hits.
- accountyaccount 9y agoThe burden of proof is on the government to prove that those were his chat logs and they weren't altered. Until he's formally tried he's innocent of that accusation.
- mirimir 9y ago
- Hydraulix989 9y agoI really disagree with the judicial concept of "making an example out of somebody."
- m-j-fox 9y agoYou wouldn't like Saudi Arabia much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Arabia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stevebmark 9y agoThis makes me very sad, but it's hard to explain why. The nonviolent crime charges leading to a life sentence is part of it. The obvious inability of our modern legal system to understand technology above a basic level is part of it. Maybe I'm not separating how awful "the drug trade" might be from some kid running a darkweb network. This sentence stings in a weird way.
- ryan-allen 9y agoEspecially when USA citizens are dying from prescription medication overdoses at a rate higher than illegal drugs.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoWhat do you think the courts don't understand about technology that's relevant to this case? You're saying he's just a middleman, but that's what he's accused of being: a guy who brokered millions of drug deals between suppliers and consumers, and made a ton of money doing it. Why does it matter that he did it via a darknet website or in person? Being a drug network middleman is illegal, no matter how you do it. And he was one of the largest in history.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> The nonviolent crime charges leading to a life sentence is part of it. Conspiracy charges where the overt acts charged include murder for hire (even if murder for hire isn't separately charged) is not really a nonviolent crime charge.
- ploggingdev 9y agoIs there any chance of further appeals or any way of a shorter sentence?
- Jach 9y agoThere's always a chance, but you and he may be waiting in vain for a few decades still.
- reader5000 9y agoCruel and unusual punishment. The judges kept alluding to the volume of the sales; thats just the nature of the technology, not the nature of the crime. There was also language in the original sentencing that he was "privileged" (i.e., white) and therefore deserved an absolutely absurd sentence. You can rape and murder somebody and spend less time in jail.
- intrasight 9y agoInteresting coincidence with this news coming out the day I finished the Nick Bilton book. I do highly recommend it for anyone interested in the Silk Road or in drugs or in e-commerce. What I found most fascinating was to hear a true "Breaking Bad" tale.
- blackoil 9y agoIs funny how so many people are trying to lowball crime simply because it's done using computer, as if computer is some pure tech with no evil possible. Bernie Madoff got 150years for a non violent crime. Also scale always matter, hacking in neighbour WiFi is not same as putting ransomware in million systems.