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I'll readily entertain the possibility of tangible artifacts over some bytestream any old day of the week. If he's busted with a bunch of fake IDs on his person

I'll readily entertain the possibility of tangible artifacts over some bytestream any old day of the week. If he's busted with a bunch of fake IDs on his person, I'd consider that to be evidence proper. But anything transpiring in the netherworld of the internet needs to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when no real-world violence erupted. It may be possible that this is the guy. The evidence that rings truest in my mind is that there was a real world cause-and-effect chain of events that occured immediately after his arrest. The shit hit the fan, and the site went down. Clearly, the real world arrest had a direct influence on the availability of the website. But given the DEA's predilection for parallel construction, and the NSA's predilection for electronic dragnets, can we take the narrative of how they came to bust the Ulbricht at face value? Even if he was breaking the law, was he apprehended lawfully? Did they come into possession of this digital evidence in a lawful manner? If Ulbricht gets off on a technicality for the crime he's charged with, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. He's being charged with the hypothetical thoughtcrime of killing an internet persona (or two). To me, that feels like a technicality to begin with. If the people he killed never existed to begin with, then how can we be sure that the evidence that supports these ideas was collected and not crafted? He may be the real deal, the guy himself, responsible for The Silk Road. But if you're going to put him away with that in mind, justice is not served unless he's charged with the crime he's being punished for, and justified by the true story of how they nailed him. I want to know what was truly so evil about The Silk Road, such that it might necessitate some sneaky peaky, in order to lock up the man responsible for it. Maybe they achieve their goal of unmasking him, through this direct relationship of arrest and then site outage, but does that mean we have to swallow this murder-for-hire wrap too, no matter how flimsy it feels?

MrMan 13y ago
yeah man! murder is just a thought crime now.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Let's be clear, attempted murder is a thoughtcrime. ;)
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    No, considered murder is a thought crime. Attempted murder involves actions.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      I was being sarcastic.
ceejayoz 13y ago
> If Ulbricht gets off on a technicality for the crime he's charged with, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. He's being charged with the hypothetical thoughtcrime of killing an internet persona (or two). To me, that feels like a technicality to begin with. I'm sorry, we're considering hiring a hitman and paying them large amounts of money for what you believe to be a successful torture and execution as a thought crime now?!
- scenicBulimic 13y ago
  A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person. He didn't have the capacity to visit this person in real life. He couldn't have possibly been sure whether it was a real person or not. He never met them, he never shook their hand, he couldn't have been sure of where they lived, because they didn't exist to begin with. Another screen name claims to have the ability to reach out and eliminate the existence of this bothersome screen name. The only catch is that in order to have one user id destroy another user id, you have to part ways with an imaginary tally of digital crypto-currency. This is not a case of high school classmates cyberbullying one another until one commits suicide. There was never any real world interaction, nor could there have been, because the target of the murder was always hypothetical. He couldn't have known for sure who was responsible for ANY of the screen names. In contrast, consider cyber bullying, where a classmate knows for a fact that a given login assuredly represents a person they see everyday during class at school, and which point they begin a campaign of deliberate harassment and psychological warfare. One scenario involves verifiable individuals known to eachother in the real world, and the other scenario (the silk road hit) does not. The drug trade and the bitcoin exchange for real money may portend that his intent to defend the black market network could potentially turn violent, and that perhaps he was of a mindset prone to acting as an accessory before the fact and an accomplice to murder, but nevertheless, I still question the reality of this sting operation, and what it may have actually represented to Ulbricht himself, in situ. Did he honestly think anyone was getting killed for bitcoins, if he never met them face to face? How can we know for sure?
  - quesera 13y ago
    > A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person. Are you suggesting that there are advanced AI botherbots out there just looking for other entities, presumably flesh and blood, as prey?

MrMan 13y ago

yeah man! murder is just a thought crime now.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Let's be clear, attempted murder is a thoughtcrime. ;)
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  No, considered murder is a thought crime. Attempted murder involves actions.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    I was being sarcastic.

ceejayoz 13y ago

> If Ulbricht gets off on a technicality for the crime he's charged with, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. He's being charged with the hypothetical thoughtcrime of killing an internet persona (or two). To me, that feels like a technicality to begin with. I'm sorry, we're considering hiring a hitman and paying them large amounts of money for what you believe to be a successful torture and execution as a thought crime now?!

scenicBulimic 13y ago
A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person. He didn't have the capacity to visit this person in real life. He couldn't have possibly been sure whether it was a real person or not. He never met them, he never shook their hand, he couldn't have been sure of where they lived, because they didn't exist to begin with. Another screen name claims to have the ability to reach out and eliminate the existence of this bothersome screen name. The only catch is that in order to have one user id destroy another user id, you have to part ways with an imaginary tally of digital crypto-currency. This is not a case of high school classmates cyberbullying one another until one commits suicide. There was never any real world interaction, nor could there have been, because the target of the murder was always hypothetical. He couldn't have known for sure who was responsible for ANY of the screen names. In contrast, consider cyber bullying, where a classmate knows for a fact that a given login assuredly represents a person they see everyday during class at school, and which point they begin a campaign of deliberate harassment and psychological warfare. One scenario involves verifiable individuals known to eachother in the real world, and the other scenario (the silk road hit) does not. The drug trade and the bitcoin exchange for real money may portend that his intent to defend the black market network could potentially turn violent, and that perhaps he was of a mindset prone to acting as an accessory before the fact and an accomplice to murder, but nevertheless, I still question the reality of this sting operation, and what it may have actually represented to Ulbricht himself, in situ. Did he honestly think anyone was getting killed for bitcoins, if he never met them face to face? How can we know for sure?
- quesera 13y ago
  > A screen name on the internet, possibly a sock puppet, may or may not be tied to a real world person. Are you suggesting that there are advanced AI botherbots out there just looking for other entities, presumably flesh and blood, as prey?