Hacker News Reader

Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

>Should a drug kingpin who built a global network that facilitated the transfer of illegal substances who was willing to kill people to protect that enterprise only get 10 years?

The murder for hire claims lack necessary evidence to convict. Outside that it becomes a question of whether platform owners are responsible for the content on their platform.

I am personally in favor of content owners being responsible. I think Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. However, Mark Zuckerberg is not in prison, and continues to wreak havoc on humanity. Why is Ulbricht responsible for what happened on his platform, but Zuckerberg is not?

In my view, Ulbricht should be free so long as Zuckerberg is free.

View on HN

Facebook has and continues to police its platform for illegal activity and cooperates with law enforcement. That's not to say they don't facilitate horrible crimes, but they make some effort not to. Facebook also wasn't created for the express purpose of operating drug trafficking.

Ulbricht created a website to sell drugs and made efforts not to police the platform.

It's pretty clear what the difference is between someone who makes a platform that can be used by bad actors but makes efforts to stop them, versus someone who makes a platform for bad actors and tries to protect them.

To me, it feels more like Facebook selectively facilitates the crimes of some and polices the crimes of others.

There's names of people in the public Congressional record that you cannot put in any post in any context.

The 2020 riots were coordinated on FB.

According to the White House press secretary, the WH sends lists of people to Facebook to censor who did not commit crimes.

If you are successfully opposed to the regime, for example popular voices against US criminal actions regarding Ukraine, you get nerfed.

Azov Batallion was previously banned from FB because they are literally Nazis, but ever since the government started giving weapons to these Nazis you can praise them without concern you will get banned.

>because they are literally Nazis

Because they wanted to appease russia, which proven to be futile.

No, Facebook banned them because they were literally Nazis. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Regiment#Neo-Nazism:

> The Azov Battalion has been described as a far-right militia,[60][16] with connections to neo-Nazism[214] and members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia, and expressing neo-Nazi views.[58][215]

> The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel (or a mirrored variation of it),[216][217][218][219] a German heraldic charge inspired by historic wolf traps adopted by the Nazi Party and by WW2 German military units. Its insignia also used to feature the Black Sun,[220][221][222][211][209] both of which remain two popular neo-Nazi symbols.[210][194][220][215] Azov soldiers have worn fascist or Nazi-associated symbols on their uniforms,[223] including swastikas and SS symbols.[23] In 2014, the German ZDF television network showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps".[224] In 2015, Marcin Ogdowski, a Polish war correspondent, gained access to one of Azov's bases located in the former holiday resort Majak; Azov fighters showed him Nazi tattoos as well as Nazi emblems on their uniforms.[225][16]

> Facebook has and continues to police its platform for illegal activity and cooperates with law enforcement.

This is jurisdiction-dependent. Facebook (a US entity) does things in other countries that would be illegal in the US, such as in Vietnam where it turns over identity information of protesters to police without due process, for beatings/torture purposes.

> Ulbricht created a website to sell drugs and made efforts not to police the platform.

There is another separate moral question about whether or not this should be illegal at all. Even if you think it should, most people agree that the penalties imposed for same in the USA are insanely disproportionate.

Jimmy Carter once said:

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed."

There's also the small issue of the hundreds of billions of dollars of whoring and drug retailing that happens via WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram DMs. WhatsApp is literally the biggest drug marketplace on planet Earth. Nobody seems to bat an eye at the fact that Meta/Facebook could but does not police these.

The other commenter is right: If Zuckerberg is free, then so should DPR be.

This is preposterous. Did you ever go on the Silk Road? It was very clearly a large marketplace of nearly only illegal items (drugs, guns, etc).

Your belief in the law doesn’t change its status. What he did was very illegal, with all use cases to support illegal activity. This wasn’t about possession for an individual, it was a mechanism for large scale distribution of illegal products.

It’s apples and oranges to compare the two.

Something being illegal doesn't make that thing wrong.

Indeed. Consider the inverse situation: Imagine if Catholics who tithe were investigated, prosecuted, and convicted by the same standards. You’d have to imagine it because while many of us know about the child sexual assault scandals in the Catholic Church, those that tithe certainly should and usually do know. They’re generally understood to be paying money for the good parts of the Church and not the obviously illegal criminal conspiracies protected and promulgated by the Church. So while it’s probably illegal, it’s probably not directly wrong and certainly isn’t being treated as a serious criminal conspiracy normally would be.

Meanwhile for making a website for an illicit market that explicitly sought to reduce violence between people who would otherwise buy or sell their drugs in a situation classically prone to violence — big U received not one but two life sentences.

America has some extremely strange investigation, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration priorities. One can reasonably call them absurd and unjust, but many Americans will simply tell you that he deserves what he gets. They don’t remark if the rest of us deserve it as well. We are all poorer for this kind of a railroading.

As someone who's generally pretty morally relative, and abstractly, I tend to agree. But you miss the point. Call actions what you want but they will land you in jail if you are a citizen of a society which considers them wrong and you are caught performing them. What's interesting in the US is that we acknowledge this limitation of the law and have an ethical escape hatch. The law does not convict you, a jury of your peers does. And they can decide what you did is not wrong even though the law says it's not allowed. Unfortunately (for sympathizers and for your argument in this context) in this case the jury very much decided that the evidence presented in court proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the actions, which the law says are not allowed, were confirmed as wrong (the law applied correctly) and subsequently worthy of punishment. So arguing from a stance of moral relativism is a logical non sequitur and simply not relevant. If you don't think DPR actions were wrong go change the law or somehow move him to your society where he's a hero. Don't pine over how terrible this man's life now is because "he was just a drug lord on the digital streets and didn't technically kill anybody and people use facebook to sell drugs too see this guy is no worse than zuck and and who says breaking laws is even wrong anyway???".

His prison conditions seem to extremely bad and your response is to argue he had a fair trial by a jury of his peers. I wonder if you can see that one does not relate to the other? He should be punished by being incarcerated, not by other prisoners during incarceration, no?

I would dispute that the mere fact that he did not have a jury trial where he lived was unfair and an indication that he did not actually have a jury of his peers. He was arrested in San Francisco and tried in New York City. Those are different worlds on technology and drug issues.

A system where an unaccountable pseudonymous warlord tries to hire nonexistent hitmen to kill people who steal from him isn't a very good system, but it's better than the system we have, where the US imprisons 2 million people, where heroin addicts die of fentanyl overdoses, and where at unpredictable times those addicts are forced into agonizing withdrawal when their dealers are arrested.

The undisputed fact that DSR existed to help people do all kinds of illegal things doesn't make those things wrong, and it doesn't make it bad for DSR to have helped them do those things. Fortunately, I wasn't a user, but as I understand it, DSR dramatically reduced the violence and risk of contamination involved in illegal drug use—the next best thing to actual full legalization of those drugs.

The US's drug laws are morally utterly indefensible, and the fact that DSR was violating them on a massive scale is something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

You are absolutely correct. The doublethink is real.

Your comment is my favorite in the entire discussion because you don’t trip over the supposed moral flaws in his character. I appreciate that you focus on why the state tried to entrap (or frame him if you want to assume the claims are totally baseless) him with murder for hire charges in the first place. I am sorry I have only one upvote to give Kragen.

DPR didn't hire, or attempt to hire, anyone to kill anyone. This was a fabrication by those prosecuting him to turn a set of exclusively nonviolent offenses into (supposedly) violent ones.

While that's a plausible possibility, you seem to be stating it as a definite fact, which doesn't seem justifiable on the basis of the public evidence. What do you know that isn't public?

You can't prove a negative. The burden of proof lies with the accuser. It has not been met for this claim.

>The murder for hire claims lack necessary evidence to convict.

Yep, the available "evidence" comes from those corrupt federal agents who robbed MtGox, and who fabricated the evidence which prevented Ulbricht's bail. The murder for hire wasn't proven, yet it was used to significantly enhance the sentence, basically a loophole allowing to punish for alleged acts without "proven beyond reasonable doubt" for those acts.

So, in short the trial is tainted beyond any salvage. Note - i have no idea whether Ulbricht did it or not.

Yes, the agents probably deserve longer sentences than Ulbricht, if only because they misused State power, which is inherently worse than any private activity.

But we should get the authors and participants in the torture regime first.

Abuse of state power is like an adult bullying children to steal their lunch money. One-sided and totally despicable.

How did they abuse state power? What evidence is there of that (that’s admissible)?

Asking because I’ve read the story of Silk Road but didn’t hear about this other than the bitcoin theft

>other than the bitcoin theft

what can be worse abuse of state power than that, or what other purpose for abusing state power other than money? It seems that everything else what they did kind of flows from the theft.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-silk-road-task-force-a... :

>Bridges’ plea agreement also established that he obstructed the Baltimore federal grand jury’s investigations of Silk Road and Ulbricht in a number of ways, including by impeding the ability of the investigation to fully utilize a cooperator’s access to Silk Road.

That grand jury indictment in Baltimore based on false info from those agents was the reason for denying bail to Ulbricht, and basically prejudiced the judge in the main case.

>According to his plea agreement, Bridges admitted that in January 2013 he used an administrator account on the Silk Road website

There seems to be enough indications to support for a variety of speculations like for example that the agents may have scapegoated Ulbricht, say may be he was an admin or a dev there and was made into the "kingpin", or something like this. Again it is impossible to say anything for sure as the trial wasn't just a fruit of poison tree, it were total poisoned deadlands.

Yeah, there is no objective reason to think they didn't fabricate all the evidence.

Except that it would be, you know, actual work.

Because Facebook was not built with the deliberate intent of facilitating illicit sales.

No? Zuckerberg wasn’t in it to sell illicit drugs, though that apparently happens often, and it seems clear that data and targeting of specific people based on that data was a conscious strategy. That might not be illicit in America but it sure is in Europe.

One rule for the rich in America, another rule for the rest of us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com