9 ms·

United States vs. Dread Pirate Roberts (Silk Road) FBI Report (2013) [pdf]

99 points by ryansiddle 6y ago

s0rce 6y ago
Wow, I just looked him up as I was unaware of the sentence and he received two life sentences with no parole in Federal prison for a first offender who made an online market place (for illicit goods).
- tyingq 6y ago
  Yep. They first put him in the Florence Supermax, which has a terrific policy where you first do 3 years of solitary. Since transferred to USP Tuscon, a high security, but not Supermax facility. Looks like they shut down visitation for the COVID duration.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Holy smokes, you're not wrong. Seems a bit out of proportion. "Federal Bureau of Prisons director Norman Carlson argued for the creation of a new type of facility where the most dangerous, uncontrollable inmates could be isolated from correction officers and other prisoners for security and safety. Under his guidance, Marion Penitentiary was operated in "permanent lockdown" for the next two decades. It became a model for the design of ADX as a control unit prison. Carlson said that such a prison would hold criminals desperate enough to murder corrections officers or other inmates in the hopes of being sentenced to death. He argued that as draconian as these measures were, they were the only way to deal with inmates who have "absolutely no concern for human life."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence
    - CerealFounder 6y ago
      I dont get why. If you want the upside of businesses of scale (profits) why would you not get the downside of criminality at scale? This is a moralistic version of privatize the gains and socialize the losses. Im not even a big law and order guy, but the "go easy, boys will be boys" take seems baseless.
      - loeg 6y ago
        The isolation is to keep inmates from murdering guards ("most dangerous, uncontrollable inmates could be isolated from correction officers and other prisoners for security and safety"). Dread Pirate Roberts is a keyboard jockey with no priors. It seems unlikely he will attempt to murder guards.
      - phobosanomaly 6y ago
        Ross Ulbricht definitely owes a debt to society, but I don't think he falls into the category of "the most dangerous, uncontrollable inmates." Is this guy going to stab a CO because they disrespected him?
    - warent 6y ago
      Solitary confinement in general is out of proportion, particularly for extended periods. In my opinion it should be a violation of the Eighth amendment and they need to shut down Florence, but few people fight for it because it's full of really wicked humans. Important to remember they are still humans and torturing them is not okay. That being said I also think that the life sentencing was probably appropriate considering he started the silk road as a fully grown man, so it's a clear reflection of his morals and empathy. It's difficult to think about how many addictions, overdoses, and so forth that he helped to enable, in addition to assaults and murders (silk road sold weapons and services). Not saying that it wouldn't have happened without him, but certainly enabling these things to be trafficked does not provide net positive to the world.
      - djsumdog 6y ago
        Some people are kept in solitary for their own protection. People who hurt children tend not to make it long in prison. I went to high school with a kid who murdered both of his parents, and he was put in solitary mostly for his protection. It's more of a sad state of American prisons where crimes like this are common and seemingly unstoppable in US prisons.
        phobosanomaly 6y ago
        As sort of an extension of that, the fact that prison rape is socially accepted as just a part of going to prison is absolutely terrifying to me. "In 2001, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 4.3 million inmates had been raped while incarcerated in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...
      - tempsolution 6y ago
        > but certainly enabling these things to be trafficked does not provide net positive to the world. You really wanna go there? Seriously? Nobody forces you to use drugs. It doesn't even harm anyone else directly. He didn't even sell drugs directly, he offered a marketplace for others to sell drug on. What about pawn shops? Should we lock em all up in super max prisons for providing weapons to people? I mean here the intent is at least directly to harm people other than the client, while with drugs its just to harm clients. Net positive... LOL Name a single politican that does provide a net positive to the world. How about Trump? What about locking him up? Did he provide a net positive to the world? He has a list of crimes that could wrap buildings in documents, however he is president of the US, which somehow manages to kill more people in a year than this guy could have killed indirectly in a life-time. But hey, yeah lock em up! > so it's a clear reflection of his morals and empathy. Oh is it? So what now? We lock up everything who doesn't have your high moral standards in a federal super max? Oh wait, your morals seem a bit off actually. I think you are kindof insane. How about locking you up? Do you provide a net positive to the world? Probably not. Wait, let me just call 911 so they can lock you away for life.
- sterlind 6y ago
  The Silk Road caused unprecedented embarrassment for the DEA and other agencies. Each news report about it just made it more known and popular, and highlighted the fact that the Federal government couldn't track down the website or its administrators. The combination of Tor and Bitcoin made a brazen drug bazaar untraceable yet widely accessible for the first time ever. So they brought the hammer down hard. He did get slapped with attempted murder for trying to hire a hitman online, as well. But doubtless his sentence reflected how incompetent it made the feds look.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > He did get slapped with attempted murder for trying to hire a hitman online, as well Holy crap, the way you read these threads you would think drug dealers are totally harmless and being wrongfully punished for victimless crimes but this dude showed he was totally willing to commit murder. But yeah, a bit over the top.
    - thatcat 6y ago
      >this dude showed he was totally willing to commit murder That's a gross overstatement. An agent who had infiltrated the site convinced him to agree to allow the agent to hire a hitman to kill another person on the site. This was after agents had already kidnapped and tortured the second person and used his account to threaten dpr. There was no attempt at conviction on that charge.
      - MertsA 6y ago
        That agent was also Carl Mark Force IV, who is currently in prison for, among other things, surreptitiously trying to extort money out of DPR on the side and hiding that from the DEA. The prosecution withheld all evidence surrounding the corrupt DEA agent and Secret Service agent from the defense. I don't know if Ross wrote that message or not, but at the very least Force was already caught trying to frame the Silk Road administrator they had in custody for the theft. I find his testimony more suspicious than Ross's, and the logs were 100% up to him to write whatever he wanted.
      - 6y ago
Meekro 6y ago
If you're interested in the Silk Road story (and you should be, it's fascinating), have a listen to this talk by a federal prosecutor involved in it: https://youtu.be/Ot8sgY2JuVc https://youtu.be/Ot8sgY2JuVc
jmcguckin 6y ago
Was he actually charged with soliciting murder? I thought I read that he was not actually charged with that offense, yet the prosecutor mentioned it all the time.
- MertsA 6y ago
  He wasn't charged with it and the indictment was dismissed with prejudice after the failed Supreme Court appeal. He was however sentenced as if he was convicted of that, the judge explicitly stated as much during the sentencing, and the prosecutors also used that to sway the jury even though they wouldn't charge him with it. Part of the reason why is because those charges most likely would not have actually resulted in conviction because it was blatantly entrapment on the face and the veracity of those claims is dubious given that all of that evidence is coming from Carl Mark Force IV, the same agent who is now convicted himself for his corruption in that investigation and stealing a fortune from the Silk Road and just pocketing it. I realize it may seem like an entrapment defence wouldn't apply here but keep in mind, even for the government's alleged chain of events, the government absolutely induced the crime, they stole the money, they came along with the "solution", etc. Then there's the matter of if DPR was predisposed to commit the crime. He certainly had a predisposition to commit crime, but definitely not murder-for-hire in particular. Even in the conversation with Carl Mark Force IV, he did not want to kill him and explicitly stated so, the special agent convinced him that killing him was his only option, the guy knew names and had sensitive information, etc. Even after he got caught and the government seized his laptop with his encrypted drive mounted and got the keys to the kingdom they didn't find any other instance of anything like the alleged murder-for-hire plot. The government inducing the crime and the defendants lack of a predisposition for that specific crime are the two elements to an entrapment defense in federal court. Because he wasn't actually charged with the crime he didn't get to mount any kind of defense against those allegations and the prosecutors just hid all of the corrupt B.S. involving Carl Mark Force IV and Shaun Bridges. I think Ross is guilty as sin of running the Silk Road but that trial was a huge miscarriage of justice and in an ideal world, a bunch of those prosecutors and law enforcement agents would be sitting in prison right beside him. Alas, only two of them are. I really feel like the Supreme Court should have overturned his sentence based off of not receiving due process for the murder-for-hire allegations yet being sentenced substantially worse based off of it.
gwern 6y ago
As a historical document, you should be aware that the SR1 complaint is extremely incomplete and misleading; one could write a book* about what is left out or wrong in it, starting with the Carl Mark Force and Bridges corruption scandal, lighting on the shall we say questionable veracity of Agent Tarbell's account of finding the Iceland server's IP (and who shortly afterwards left for the greener climes of the private cybersecurity sector), before moving on to the revelations at trial like about the hitmen scams - not to neglect pondering the claims recently by Variety Jones about, among other things, participants in the corruption scandal still being on the loose. Quite a rabbit hole. * One could also write a book naively taking all police claims at face value without applying any critical thinking, and it seems one Wired journalist did so...
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Do you have a better single source for review, or are we stuck having to piece together information from the varied sources?
  - emXdem 6y ago
    https://antilop.cc/sr/ https://antilop.cc/sr/ my favorite
  - nmlnn 6y ago
    https://freeross.org/real-untold-story/ https://freeross.org/real-untold-story/
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      The land of the free....
    - pc86 6y ago
      Why would a site dedicated to the defense of a convicted criminal be any less biased than the government in this case?
      - 6y ago
refurb 6y ago
It's interesting the trail of breadcrumbs he left leading up to his arrest. They go back years from his arrest. Things like his posts on theshroomery.org where he leaked his gmail address with his real name. When they intercepted his fake IDs and he tells the agents "Anyone could hypothetically order these from the website Silk Road".
- catsdanxe 6y ago
  It's called parallel construction.
rmolin88 6y ago
This documentary sums it up pretty well. Definitely worth the time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpMP6Nh3FvU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpMP6Nh3FvU
- easterncalculus 6y ago
  Glad to see this here, this one is good. Disappointed but not entirely surprised that people are downplaying what's covered in this video.
stevespang 6y ago
Ulbricht was a bright boy, he graduated Westlake High, a top public high school in Austin, graduated with a Physics degree from UT, the top public university in Texas, did grad school in Penn. for Engineering and Materials Science. Ulbricht comes from a wealthy Republican family. Should Trump pardon him, especially if Trump is not re-elected ? In the ole days, a pardon could be bought for $60,000. I'd argue that Ulbricht's knowledge and ability could be put to better use than whiling away his years staring at prison walls . . . . he could payback society in serious, useful ways . . .
myaltacct415 6y ago
https://antilop.cc/sr/ https://antilop.cc/sr/ was a great source of information for those not following closely. One of the corrupt agents involved, Carl Force, gets out of prison in a couple of weeks. The other corrupt agent, Shaun Bridges, gets out in a year. I find the corruption angle to be most intriguing. Maybe more were not caught.
MrsHippy 6y ago
Based on my training and experience, the war on drugs causes violence and wastes resources.
- cies 6y ago
  Al victimless crime law does that. We need constitutional freedom against such law imho.
  - MrsHippy 6y ago
    I suggest national initiative type democracy, but everyone gets nervous when it comes to decentralizing power, even though we supposedly pride ourselves on being democratic. http://www.ncid.us/ http://www.ncid.us/

99 points by ryansiddle 6y ago

Wow, I just looked him up as I was unaware of the sentence and he received two life sentences with no parole in Federal prison for a first offender who made an online market place (for illicit goods).

tyingq 6y ago
Yep. They first put him in the Florence Supermax, which has a terrific policy where you first do 3 years of solitary. Since transferred to USP Tuscon, a high security, but not Supermax facility. Looks like they shut down visitation for the COVID duration.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Holy smokes, you're not wrong. Seems a bit out of proportion. "Federal Bureau of Prisons director Norman Carlson argued for the creation of a new type of facility where the most dangerous, uncontrollable inmates could be isolated from correction officers and other prisoners for security and safety. Under his guidance, Marion Penitentiary was operated in "permanent lockdown" for the next two decades. It became a model for the design of ADX as a control unit prison. Carlson said that such a prison would hold criminals desperate enough to murder corrections officers or other inmates in the hopes of being sentenced to death. He argued that as draconian as these measures were, they were the only way to deal with inmates who have "absolutely no concern for human life."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence
  - CerealFounder 6y ago
    I dont get why. If you want the upside of businesses of scale (profits) why would you not get the downside of criminality at scale? This is a moralistic version of privatize the gains and socialize the losses. Im not even a big law and order guy, but the "go easy, boys will be boys" take seems baseless.
    - loeg 6y ago
      The isolation is to keep inmates from murdering guards ("most dangerous, uncontrollable inmates could be isolated from correction officers and other prisoners for security and safety"). Dread Pirate Roberts is a keyboard jockey with no priors. It seems unlikely he will attempt to murder guards.
    - phobosanomaly 6y ago
      Ross Ulbricht definitely owes a debt to society, but I don't think he falls into the category of "the most dangerous, uncontrollable inmates." Is this guy going to stab a CO because they disrespected him?
  - warent 6y ago
    Solitary confinement in general is out of proportion, particularly for extended periods. In my opinion it should be a violation of the Eighth amendment and they need to shut down Florence, but few people fight for it because it's full of really wicked humans. Important to remember they are still humans and torturing them is not okay. That being said I also think that the life sentencing was probably appropriate considering he started the silk road as a fully grown man, so it's a clear reflection of his morals and empathy. It's difficult to think about how many addictions, overdoses, and so forth that he helped to enable, in addition to assaults and murders (silk road sold weapons and services). Not saying that it wouldn't have happened without him, but certainly enabling these things to be trafficked does not provide net positive to the world.
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      Some people are kept in solitary for their own protection. People who hurt children tend not to make it long in prison. I went to high school with a kid who murdered both of his parents, and he was put in solitary mostly for his protection. It's more of a sad state of American prisons where crimes like this are common and seemingly unstoppable in US prisons.
      - phobosanomaly 6y ago
        As sort of an extension of that, the fact that prison rape is socially accepted as just a part of going to prison is absolutely terrifying to me. "In 2001, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 4.3 million inmates had been raped while incarcerated in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...
    - tempsolution 6y ago
      > but certainly enabling these things to be trafficked does not provide net positive to the world. You really wanna go there? Seriously? Nobody forces you to use drugs. It doesn't even harm anyone else directly. He didn't even sell drugs directly, he offered a marketplace for others to sell drug on. What about pawn shops? Should we lock em all up in super max prisons for providing weapons to people? I mean here the intent is at least directly to harm people other than the client, while with drugs its just to harm clients. Net positive... LOL Name a single politican that does provide a net positive to the world. How about Trump? What about locking him up? Did he provide a net positive to the world? He has a list of crimes that could wrap buildings in documents, however he is president of the US, which somehow manages to kill more people in a year than this guy could have killed indirectly in a life-time. But hey, yeah lock em up! > so it's a clear reflection of his morals and empathy. Oh is it? So what now? We lock up everything who doesn't have your high moral standards in a federal super max? Oh wait, your morals seem a bit off actually. I think you are kindof insane. How about locking you up? Do you provide a net positive to the world? Probably not. Wait, let me just call 911 so they can lock you away for life.
sterlind 6y ago
The Silk Road caused unprecedented embarrassment for the DEA and other agencies. Each news report about it just made it more known and popular, and highlighted the fact that the Federal government couldn't track down the website or its administrators. The combination of Tor and Bitcoin made a brazen drug bazaar untraceable yet widely accessible for the first time ever. So they brought the hammer down hard. He did get slapped with attempted murder for trying to hire a hitman online, as well. But doubtless his sentence reflected how incompetent it made the feds look.
- umvi 6y ago
  > He did get slapped with attempted murder for trying to hire a hitman online, as well Holy crap, the way you read these threads you would think drug dealers are totally harmless and being wrongfully punished for victimless crimes but this dude showed he was totally willing to commit murder. But yeah, a bit over the top.
  - thatcat 6y ago
    >this dude showed he was totally willing to commit murder That's a gross overstatement. An agent who had infiltrated the site convinced him to agree to allow the agent to hire a hitman to kill another person on the site. This was after agents had already kidnapped and tortured the second person and used his account to threaten dpr. There was no attempt at conviction on that charge.
    - MertsA 6y ago
      That agent was also Carl Mark Force IV, who is currently in prison for, among other things, surreptitiously trying to extort money out of DPR on the side and hiding that from the DEA. The prosecution withheld all evidence surrounding the corrupt DEA agent and Secret Service agent from the defense. I don't know if Ross wrote that message or not, but at the very least Force was already caught trying to frame the Silk Road administrator they had in custody for the theft. I find his testimony more suspicious than Ross's, and the logs were 100% up to him to write whatever he wanted.
    - 6y ago

Meekro 6y ago

If you're interested in the Silk Road story (and you should be, it's fascinating), have a listen to this talk by a federal prosecutor involved in it: https://youtu.be/Ot8sgY2JuVc https://youtu.be/Ot8sgY2JuVc

jmcguckin 6y ago

Was he actually charged with soliciting murder? I thought I read that he was not actually charged with that offense, yet the prosecutor mentioned it all the time.

MertsA 6y ago
He wasn't charged with it and the indictment was dismissed with prejudice after the failed Supreme Court appeal. He was however sentenced as if he was convicted of that, the judge explicitly stated as much during the sentencing, and the prosecutors also used that to sway the jury even though they wouldn't charge him with it. Part of the reason why is because those charges most likely would not have actually resulted in conviction because it was blatantly entrapment on the face and the veracity of those claims is dubious given that all of that evidence is coming from Carl Mark Force IV, the same agent who is now convicted himself for his corruption in that investigation and stealing a fortune from the Silk Road and just pocketing it. I realize it may seem like an entrapment defence wouldn't apply here but keep in mind, even for the government's alleged chain of events, the government absolutely induced the crime, they stole the money, they came along with the "solution", etc. Then there's the matter of if DPR was predisposed to commit the crime. He certainly had a predisposition to commit crime, but definitely not murder-for-hire in particular. Even in the conversation with Carl Mark Force IV, he did not want to kill him and explicitly stated so, the special agent convinced him that killing him was his only option, the guy knew names and had sensitive information, etc. Even after he got caught and the government seized his laptop with his encrypted drive mounted and got the keys to the kingdom they didn't find any other instance of anything like the alleged murder-for-hire plot. The government inducing the crime and the defendants lack of a predisposition for that specific crime are the two elements to an entrapment defense in federal court. Because he wasn't actually charged with the crime he didn't get to mount any kind of defense against those allegations and the prosecutors just hid all of the corrupt B.S. involving Carl Mark Force IV and Shaun Bridges. I think Ross is guilty as sin of running the Silk Road but that trial was a huge miscarriage of justice and in an ideal world, a bunch of those prosecutors and law enforcement agents would be sitting in prison right beside him. Alas, only two of them are. I really feel like the Supreme Court should have overturned his sentence based off of not receiving due process for the murder-for-hire allegations yet being sentenced substantially worse based off of it.

gwern 6y ago

As a historical document, you should be aware that the SR1 complaint is extremely incomplete and misleading; one could write a book* about what is left out or wrong in it, starting with the Carl Mark Force and Bridges corruption scandal, lighting on the shall we say questionable veracity of Agent Tarbell's account of finding the Iceland server's IP (and who shortly afterwards left for the greener climes of the private cybersecurity sector), before moving on to the revelations at trial like about the hitmen scams - not to neglect pondering the claims recently by Variety Jones about, among other things, participants in the corruption scandal still being on the loose. Quite a rabbit hole. * One could also write a book naively taking all police claims at face value without applying any critical thinking, and it seems one Wired journalist did so...

aidenn0 6y ago
Do you have a better single source for review, or are we stuck having to piece together information from the varied sources?
- emXdem 6y ago
  https://antilop.cc/sr/ https://antilop.cc/sr/ my favorite
- nmlnn 6y ago
  https://freeross.org/real-untold-story/ https://freeross.org/real-untold-story/
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    The land of the free....
  - pc86 6y ago
    Why would a site dedicated to the defense of a convicted criminal be any less biased than the government in this case?
    - 6y ago

refurb 6y ago

It's interesting the trail of breadcrumbs he left leading up to his arrest. They go back years from his arrest. Things like his posts on theshroomery.org where he leaked his gmail address with his real name. When they intercepted his fake IDs and he tells the agents "Anyone could hypothetically order these from the website Silk Road".

catsdanxe 6y ago
It's called parallel construction.

rmolin88 6y ago

This documentary sums it up pretty well. Definitely worth the time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpMP6Nh3FvU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpMP6Nh3FvU

easterncalculus 6y ago
Glad to see this here, this one is good. Disappointed but not entirely surprised that people are downplaying what's covered in this video.

stevespang 6y ago

Ulbricht was a bright boy, he graduated Westlake High, a top public high school in Austin, graduated with a Physics degree from UT, the top public university in Texas, did grad school in Penn. for Engineering and Materials Science. Ulbricht comes from a wealthy Republican family. Should Trump pardon him, especially if Trump is not re-elected ? In the ole days, a pardon could be bought for $60,000. I'd argue that Ulbricht's knowledge and ability could be put to better use than whiling away his years staring at prison walls . . . . he could payback society in serious, useful ways . . .

myaltacct415 6y ago

https://antilop.cc/sr/ https://antilop.cc/sr/ was a great source of information for those not following closely. One of the corrupt agents involved, Carl Force, gets out of prison in a couple of weeks. The other corrupt agent, Shaun Bridges, gets out in a year. I find the corruption angle to be most intriguing. Maybe more were not caught.

MrsHippy 6y ago

Based on my training and experience, the war on drugs causes violence and wastes resources.

cies 6y ago
Al victimless crime law does that. We need constitutional freedom against such law imho.
- MrsHippy 6y ago
  I suggest national initiative type democracy, but everyone gets nervous when it comes to decentralizing power, even though we supposedly pride ourselves on being democratic. http://www.ncid.us/ http://www.ncid.us/