6 ms·

They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? It's not even in their effective jurisdiction, if this indeed is a Russ

They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? It's not even in their effective jurisdiction, if this indeed is a Russian national. Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate? I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cuts-funding-for-program-that-tracked-ukrainian-children-abducted-by-russia https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cut...

yapyap 1y ago
The US gov doesn’t even care about copyright infringement, just in the cases where big companies are inconvenienced by it and it’s done by an individual / small company instead of a mega AI corp swallowing up all copyrighted content to vomit out their own spin on it through algorithms.
- dmix 1y ago
  Federal investigations tend to only go after big fish yes. The root problem is the IP laws that congress passed. There will always be large pressure on law enforcement from the industry if you give them that leash.
gverrilla 1y ago
there's no lordship because afaik there's no direct profit
Aurornis 1y ago
> They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.
- nobodyandproud 1y ago
  Source? Any of them still employed?
- avgDev 1y ago
  I don't think it is political reasons, seems like it is for large donation reasons.
  - rokkamokka 1y ago
    In the US, this is much the same thing
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    That is a political reason... It convinces others that you're willing to pardon them too in exchange for money and convincing other people is the definition of politics.
    - warkdarrior 1y ago
      That is not political, it is purely a service offered at a price. There is no specific political agenda behind these pardons (i.e., they don't pardon only folks who are, for example, Evangelicals or anti-immigration or whatever), the only criteria is payment.
      - ElevenLathe 1y ago
        Selling pardons for money is inherently a very political act. It means that you are aligning yourself with moneyed interests, which is clearly the heart of Trumpist politics. Setting ideology aside even, the open selling of pardons sends the message to the moneyed interests in general that he's on their side, even if they don't need a pardon at this exact moment. It serves both practical (get rich people to like you and therefore donate money to your campaigns and causes to help them succeed) and ideological (supply-sider-esque doctrine going back to at least the protestant reformation says that rich people should be in charge because they're rich, QED) purposes.
mothballed 1y ago
Trump pardoned Ross largely to buy the (big L) Libertarian vote. It was announced at his speech with the Libertarian Convention. Not for any ideological reason.
- prodigycorp 1y ago
  It's not the libertarian vote that he cared about in particular so much as it was the firehose of crypto money that was supporting free ross.
  - IncreasePosts 1y ago
    This seems more likely - how many libertarians are there in the US? Surely there are much larger groups you can appeal to if votes is what you're after
    - godshatter 1y ago
      There are dozens of us. And none of us can agree on anything.
      - nazgulsenpai 1y ago
        Libertarians are like independents except noone wants to try to win us over
        Ray20 1y ago
        > Libertarians are like independents except noone wants to try to win us over Because they are not like independents. Democrats have moved so far left that it's not even a question of who libertarians will vote for. The candidate just needs to show them a little attention so they remember to register and vote.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      I don't think the crypto crowd was ever at hazard at not voting for Trump, so I'm not sure what the advantage would have been with respect to them. However, the libertarian crowd was. As a libertarian voter, the pardon for Ross was the only thing Trump did that actually brought me pause. To the point, I felt immensely guilty for not voting for him when I voted (L) because I knew[thought] I was damning Ross to a jail cell. It weighed on my conscious for a long time after the vote, an it wasn't until Trump won I felt somewhat absolved of the guilt.
freedomben 1y ago
> Silk Road drug lord Oh please. Ross was no saint by any stretch and it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a mountain of details and nuance around that case, including a whole host of law enforcement abuses that many people would find distasteful if not sickening if they actually got the whole story.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ratelimitsteve 1y ago
  >it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point very vague. care to expound?
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    Entrapment. The FBI posed as a user and convinced Ross that some people needed to be taken out, offered to do it, arrested him, dropped the murder-for-hire charges because they didn't want to play that game in court, knowing it would backfire, while still using those (unconvicted) charges to publicly smear him and influence the judge's decisions, and finally stole his Bitcoin. Two agents went to prison over this. Those same agents have a history of fraud and abuse.
  - alwa 1y ago
    So -- I can't imagine how one could expect to run a massive drugs-and-arms bazaar and not go to jail forever for something or other. But. I think the surrounding circumstances gp's alluding to might have involved [0] and [1] (with a fairly colorful slant). I'm inclined to give a little weight to the colorful account since the agents in question actually went to jail for the massive theft; for a more neutral treatment, Justice [2] and Vice [3] cover the situation. The basic claim being that the salacious murder-for-hire bit was 1) never tried or proven, and 2) was allegedly instigated in part by federal agents (operating out of unrelated offices) and a "mentor" of Ulbricht's. In reaction to one of the federal agents himself stealing $800,000 from the criminal enterprise for himself in the course of his investigation. Or something like that. I'm not clear how that squares with Ulbricht going on to order five more imaginary executions, but the whole thing seems awfully sordid from every angle. [0] (Sarah Jeong for Forbes' contributor network thing) https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the-crimes-of-two-corrupt-agents-free-ross-ulbricht/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the... [1] (Andy Greenberg for Wired Magazine) https://archive.is/BvuQr https://archive.is/BvuQr [2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged-bitcoin-money-laundering-and-wire-fraud https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-federal-agent... and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sentenced-extortion-money-laundering-and-obstruction-related-silk-road https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sen... [3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-evidence-of-government-corruption-was-suppressed-in-the-silk-road-trial/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-evidence-of-government-c...
joshmn 1y ago
They got me—a copyright infringement lord—too. The FBI profile assigned to me even wrote in a case study that the FBI thought I was making millions, amongst other misses. Their priorities are highly political.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  Would love to hear more about this if you're inclined to share or have written about it somewhere. Legal contacts betweent he fedreal government and individuals are often surreal.
  - kleiba 1y ago
    https://prison.josh.mn https://prison.josh.mn
  - joshmn 1y ago
    The case study: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10628922/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10628922/
    - anigbrowl 1y ago
      Appreciate it. Will read both of these this evening.
      - joshmn 1y ago
        Feel free to reach out with thoughts. :)
    - chocalot 1y ago
      I read this, and found it to be a disappointing read. It had few details, and instead was more of a social sciences paper, covering basic ideas in academic language. Roughly it seemed to be suggesting that: * It's easier to deceive someone if they first solicit for help on a forum * You can trick someone into revealing sensitive info like which infrastructure provider is used by nerdsniping them: "My mate thinks you should just enable health checking on AWS ELB", and then they reply "Well actually I use Hetzner". Except I'm guessing it was more elaborate than that. I guess I wasn't the target audience of the article though. joshmn, what did you think of the article? Do you find it difficult to trust random commenters online now? I see you mentioned you can't discuss technical details, but if/whenever that expires (?), that'd be great to hear.
quickthrowman 1y ago
Look, when Jeffrey Bezos and Larry the Lawnmower ask Trump for an FBI investigation and send him over another solid gold turd or whatever bribe is fitting for such a request, they expect results.
gethly 1y ago
> It's not even in their effective jurisdiction Like that ever stopped USA before...
- cestith 1y ago
  It’s currently not stopping the US federal government domestically.
themafia 1y ago
Shouldn't that be an Interpol or UN responsibility? Why is the US tracking foreign children?
slim 1y ago
> Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate? not if their top priority is to erase memory

yapyap 1y ago

The US gov doesn’t even care about copyright infringement, just in the cases where big companies are inconvenienced by it and it’s done by an individual / small company instead of a mega AI corp swallowing up all copyrighted content to vomit out their own spin on it through algorithms.

dmix 1y ago
Federal investigations tend to only go after big fish yes. The root problem is the IP laws that congress passed. There will always be large pressure on law enforcement from the industry if you give them that leash.

gverrilla 1y ago

there's no lordship because afaik there's no direct profit

Aurornis 1y ago

> They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.

nobodyandproud 1y ago
Source? Any of them still employed?
avgDev 1y ago
I don't think it is political reasons, seems like it is for large donation reasons.
- rokkamokka 1y ago
  In the US, this is much the same thing
- lesuorac 1y ago
  That is a political reason... It convinces others that you're willing to pardon them too in exchange for money and convincing other people is the definition of politics.
  - warkdarrior 1y ago
    That is not political, it is purely a service offered at a price. There is no specific political agenda behind these pardons (i.e., they don't pardon only folks who are, for example, Evangelicals or anti-immigration or whatever), the only criteria is payment.
    - ElevenLathe 1y ago
      Selling pardons for money is inherently a very political act. It means that you are aligning yourself with moneyed interests, which is clearly the heart of Trumpist politics. Setting ideology aside even, the open selling of pardons sends the message to the moneyed interests in general that he's on their side, even if they don't need a pardon at this exact moment. It serves both practical (get rich people to like you and therefore donate money to your campaigns and causes to help them succeed) and ideological (supply-sider-esque doctrine going back to at least the protestant reformation says that rich people should be in charge because they're rich, QED) purposes.

mothballed 1y ago

Trump pardoned Ross largely to buy the (big L) Libertarian vote. It was announced at his speech with the Libertarian Convention. Not for any ideological reason.

prodigycorp 1y ago
It's not the libertarian vote that he cared about in particular so much as it was the firehose of crypto money that was supporting free ross.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  This seems more likely - how many libertarians are there in the US? Surely there are much larger groups you can appeal to if votes is what you're after
  - godshatter 1y ago
    There are dozens of us. And none of us can agree on anything.
    - nazgulsenpai 1y ago
      Libertarians are like independents except noone wants to try to win us over
      - Ray20 1y ago
        > Libertarians are like independents except noone wants to try to win us over Because they are not like independents. Democrats have moved so far left that it's not even a question of who libertarians will vote for. The candidate just needs to show them a little attention so they remember to register and vote.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I don't think the crypto crowd was ever at hazard at not voting for Trump, so I'm not sure what the advantage would have been with respect to them. However, the libertarian crowd was. As a libertarian voter, the pardon for Ross was the only thing Trump did that actually brought me pause. To the point, I felt immensely guilty for not voting for him when I voted (L) because I knew[thought] I was damning Ross to a jail cell. It weighed on my conscious for a long time after the vote, an it wasn't until Trump won I felt somewhat absolved of the guilt.

freedomben 1y ago

> Silk Road drug lord Oh please. Ross was no saint by any stretch and it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a mountain of details and nuance around that case, including a whole host of law enforcement abuses that many people would find distasteful if not sickening if they actually got the whole story.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ratelimitsteve 1y ago
>it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point very vague. care to expound?
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Entrapment. The FBI posed as a user and convinced Ross that some people needed to be taken out, offered to do it, arrested him, dropped the murder-for-hire charges because they didn't want to play that game in court, knowing it would backfire, while still using those (unconvicted) charges to publicly smear him and influence the judge's decisions, and finally stole his Bitcoin. Two agents went to prison over this. Those same agents have a history of fraud and abuse.
- alwa 1y ago
  So -- I can't imagine how one could expect to run a massive drugs-and-arms bazaar and not go to jail forever for something or other. But. I think the surrounding circumstances gp's alluding to might have involved [0] and [1] (with a fairly colorful slant). I'm inclined to give a little weight to the colorful account since the agents in question actually went to jail for the massive theft; for a more neutral treatment, Justice [2] and Vice [3] cover the situation. The basic claim being that the salacious murder-for-hire bit was 1) never tried or proven, and 2) was allegedly instigated in part by federal agents (operating out of unrelated offices) and a "mentor" of Ulbricht's. In reaction to one of the federal agents himself stealing $800,000 from the criminal enterprise for himself in the course of his investigation. Or something like that. I'm not clear how that squares with Ulbricht going on to order five more imaginary executions, but the whole thing seems awfully sordid from every angle. [0] (Sarah Jeong for Forbes' contributor network thing) https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the-crimes-of-two-corrupt-agents-free-ross-ulbricht/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the... [1] (Andy Greenberg for Wired Magazine) https://archive.is/BvuQr https://archive.is/BvuQr [2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged-bitcoin-money-laundering-and-wire-fraud https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-federal-agent... and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sentenced-extortion-money-laundering-and-obstruction-related-silk-road https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sen... [3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-evidence-of-government-corruption-was-suppressed-in-the-silk-road-trial/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-evidence-of-government-c...

joshmn 1y ago

They got me—a copyright infringement lord—too. The FBI profile assigned to me even wrote in a case study that the FBI thought I was making millions, amongst other misses. Their priorities are highly political.

anigbrowl 1y ago
Would love to hear more about this if you're inclined to share or have written about it somewhere. Legal contacts betweent he fedreal government and individuals are often surreal.
- kleiba 1y ago
  https://prison.josh.mn https://prison.josh.mn
- joshmn 1y ago
  The case study: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10628922/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10628922/
  - anigbrowl 1y ago
    Appreciate it. Will read both of these this evening.
    - joshmn 1y ago
      Feel free to reach out with thoughts. :)
  - chocalot 1y ago
    I read this, and found it to be a disappointing read. It had few details, and instead was more of a social sciences paper, covering basic ideas in academic language. Roughly it seemed to be suggesting that: * It's easier to deceive someone if they first solicit for help on a forum * You can trick someone into revealing sensitive info like which infrastructure provider is used by nerdsniping them: "My mate thinks you should just enable health checking on AWS ELB", and then they reply "Well actually I use Hetzner". Except I'm guessing it was more elaborate than that. I guess I wasn't the target audience of the article though. joshmn, what did you think of the article? Do you find it difficult to trust random commenters online now? I see you mentioned you can't discuss technical details, but if/whenever that expires (?), that'd be great to hear.

quickthrowman 1y ago

Look, when Jeffrey Bezos and Larry the Lawnmower ask Trump for an FBI investigation and send him over another solid gold turd or whatever bribe is fitting for such a request, they expect results.

gethly 1y ago

> It's not even in their effective jurisdiction Like that ever stopped USA before...

cestith 1y ago
It’s currently not stopping the US federal government domestically.

themafia 1y ago

Shouldn't that be an Interpol or UN responsibility? Why is the US tracking foreign children?

slim 1y ago

> Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate? not if their top priority is to erase memory