Silk Road founder loses appeal
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
Edit: I should have said "LEA's".
But it's not clear where the idea came from. Some say that it was his mentor Roger Thomas Clark aka Variety Jones aka Cimon. Some say that it was DEA agent Carl Force aka Nob. In any case, it's clear that Ross was initially shocked by the idea.
Importantly: this case had apparently nothing at all to do with Force, who was involved in a different murder-for-hire scheme, one for which Ulbricht could still stand trial (but probably won't, since his life sentence is now overwhelmingly likely to stand).
I'm arguing that he was initially shocked by the idea of killing people. But I don't disagree that he later became comfortable with the idea.
In hindsight, the better option would have been adequate security, to prevent interference by adversaries. Also, there should have been policy and mechanisms in place for dealing with adversaries.
Silk Road clearly demonstrated a broad unmet demand for drugs from trusted sources. With trust based on user ratings. And by philosophy and necessity, it operated outside mundane society. If there were no laws against drug use, he could have just sued people or filed criminal charges. In future, the second realm will need its own enforcement services. And insurance.
The chat logs of the first incident seem to suggest that he took some time to come around to it but he didn't seem to find it particularly horrifying or objectionable.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-boss-first-murder-at...
And nobody was actually killed.
But LEA does commonly engage in entrapment.
Maybe Roger Thomas Clark is also an undercover agent. I wonder if he'll ever go to trial.
The US market for illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin was just over $100B in 2010. This lines up well with estimates that legal marijuana in Colorado was around $1B. If we're going to look at how big this guy was in absolute terms, his global market was the size of a single illicit drug in a single state.
This is where I run out of data. What's the usual sentence for single-state single-drug distributors? My impression was always that it took huge infiltration operations to get the management with more than a few years on technicalities, and the only way to get more than that was to hit them with charges like murder, bribery, or conspiracy.
Saying he only had 1% of the US market is a ridiculous way to look at it. I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for this guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_Criminal_Enterprise
> I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for this guy.
If we're really going to get into this discussion...
The marketplace was inherently driven by "customers find and buy" rather than "suppliers market and sell" and the supply chain had tighter feedback loops, meaning that there were few mechanisms or motivations for suppliers to worsen their customers' habits. Additionally, the use of mail, cryptocurrency, and a website reduced the possibility for Things To Go Wrong, eliminated threats of force, disallowed predatory loans and bartering, and I presume provided conflict-resolution protocols that didn't involve "busting a cap in yo ass". Finally, doing it by internet and mail reduced or eliminated suppliers' ability to interact each other, forcing them to compete by attracting customers The Way Smith and Young Intended and wiping out entire classes of harm relating to organized crime and bad product.
This guy was not a saint, he did something bad, the lesser of two evils should not get off. But I hold the position that the silk road was the economic equivalent of a safe injection site, unquestionably a better harm-reducer than the War on Drugs, and that a rational approach to harm reduction supports it.
The war on drugs has failed to stop drugs, but has created a very profitable war on drugs machine, that includes extra police, equipment, for-profit prisons, etc. We all pay for that.
However, this guy made choices. And he knew exactly what he was doing, and consciously contributed to every single one of these problems, and did it solely for the profit. I know he held to a strong libertarian philosophy, but how is that helping him now? It's not.
If you want to fix these problems, make people aware. Make them campaign issues. Donate to candidates who support good solutions. Vote. Protest. Use jury nullification. Fix the broken DEA schedule system. But don't sell 1.2 billion dollars of drugs and call yourself a hero.
First: as the appeal opinion clearly states, there's still an open case against Ulbricht for the Force-related murder-for-hire scheme in Maryland. The charges have not been dropped.
Second, evidence of the murder-for-hire charges was presented in court. It was an element of the conspiracy charge. Not only was it presented, but it was presented in a way that Ulbricht's defense was obligated to rebut it.
Finally, the murder charges were presented again during sentencing, and proven to a "preponderance of evidence" standard during that process as well.
These details are all spelled out in the appeals decision.
They've more than cleared that bar here.
For example: Is the rational that if I earnestly believed I was planning on murdering someone who I thought existed, that it is the lead up and consideration that is the crime, rather than the actual attempt (which could never happen)?
Incredible.
Penetrating insight.
Here's the indictment: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/releases/2013/131002baltimor...
That indictment is referenced here: http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15... at footnote 15
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci... [2] http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/b4f95197-e15...
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.
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.
But I was under the impression that ross ulbricht was being convicted mainly for drug trafficking and wasn't charged for any of those other things.
As an anecdata piece I know a guy who had nothing to do with drugs until he was able to get some easily and with less risk from Silk Road. Not every buyer was already an addict.
I strongly disagree with your statement and where you're placing blame for the issues of peoples' lives being ruined. Drug users are the ones ruining their lives and their families if they have them with their addictions. They are consuming them, whether the "choice" of consumption is theirs anymore is anyone's guess, but the choice to not so much as attempt be clean is. There are support groups, harm reduction strategies, and rehabilitation avenues for most users of physically addictive substances.
Do you believe life imprisonment is the correct answer for every bar and liquor store owner in the world, or every pain management MD that is overprescribing Oxycontin? At the worst, Ulbricht has no worse social effect than these people.
I say this as someone whose own life has been "ruined" by addicts, has had my own issues, and who has seen my families' lives ruined by them the same. It is not the fault of the supplier. It is the fault of the user.
There's a substantial difference between social drinking or overprescription and facilitating the large-scale sale of hard drugs.
We're talking about lives being ruined. I know many alcoholics that are "social drinking", every day, to the detriment of their own careers and family lives, being run through the court system DUI after DUI. I also know many who, after a back injury, are still on Oxy years later, just finding new doctors that will re-prescribe them Oxy again. I know people whose teenage children then started stealing and taking the Oxycodone from their parents' supply. I have a friend currently sitting in prison for opiate-based drug offenses as well -- much to the detriment of his immediate family.
These situations were facilitated by these very institutions. Alcohol distributors may be the kingpins and bars the corner dealers, pharma companies the kingpins and MDs the dealers. SR was a proxy and gateway to substances that in some cases are far less dangerous than the ones our own country seems completely OK with.
These are consumption-side issues, as you seem to agree with -- I am drinking a glass of wine right now, not four bottles. The same can be said about a lot of potentially socially destructive substances that were available on SR, and other illegal-in-many-states substances such as marijuana are generally accepted as virtually harmless in comparison to oxy or alcohol.
That means by facilitating the distribution of a drug, you are propping up an illegal industry, perhaps run by organized crime and so on.
I don't disagree that there is an element of regulatory / governmental failure here, but to suggest that these activities are equivalent strikes me as a stretch.
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.)
Blame your government for the black market profiting from the illicit sales of drugs.
Humans have been seeking to alter their state of mind for pretty much as long as there have been humans and they will continue to do so.
It's a force of nature that cannot be stopped and denying it only causes more suffering.
You wanna buy mind-altering substances from legally grown sources, through a legal distribution network? Fine. But if you pay into the black market, there isn't enough blame shifting in the world to change the fact that you've got blood on your hands. Bleat about the ills of government all you want, but it won't reduce your complicity.
Very US-centric view. I can't. Weed is illegal in this country, and even if it wasn't that's not the drug I want.
I want LSD, which will never be made legal. Am I going to stop buying it? Am I fuck.
> Bleat about the ills of government all you want, but it won't reduce your complicity.
I'll reiterate;
It's a force of nature that cannot be stopped and denying it only causes more suffering.
By the same fallacious logic you are complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousnds of people in US wars of aggression or the massive increase of asthma and respiratory conditions in children due to your cars being on the road.
You. You are complicit.
Get over your mastabatory self-righteousness, it's not as attractive as you think.
If you were determined to behave ethically, you would refuse to buy the stuff unless you could procure it legally. And if you couldn't obtain it legally, you would abstain.
And as for the tortured war and asthma comparisons, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
But it was an effective proof of concept, and nobody can take that from him.
To me the difference between the two statements isn't one of simple semantics.
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.
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.
I only say that because I think most people don't realize that.
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.
So is Uber.
(As a former Uber FTE, I got out because Grayballing was a thing, and because their argument of public good very clearly didn't hold water from inside the bucket, and I maintain that pretty much the same will happen to Kalanick when all is said and done. But the facade of peaceful tearing down of injustices - The very real statistics that show that you can hail an Uber to the bronx while black - are enough to put them in an entirely different class, at least until investigation got really started)
Not that I'm arguing they shouldn't have tried to charge anyone running one, despite my personal views it is against current laws, but by no means has the mission been accomplished imho.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_...