I doubt they needed to take the risky step of faking extra evidence here.
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?
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?!
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?
Are you suggesting that there are advanced AI botherbots out there just looking for other entities, presumably flesh and blood, as prey?
You don't pay $500000 to kill a "sock-puppet".
Besides, the whole premise is BS, based on "internet isn't real life". As if he arranged a kill on Second Life or something!
Well, newsflash, the internet is just a method of communication, like snail mail and talking is. And it's connecting very much with the physical world. When I order something from Amazon, it arrives on my doorstep, physically, and 4-5 people have worked on getting that to me.
What I'm saying is this: There was no murder-for-hire skull duggery, until the sting provoked him into it. There were no murderous provocations without federal law enforcement in the picture, conflating the whole scenario with their invented personas that didn't exist.
That's the reality of what happened here.
They explicitly state that they taunted and coerced him, with fictitious sock puppetry. I'm not inventing that. That really happened.
So we're being asked (as internet jurors) to convict this guy on what he might have done if placed in a similar situation by real people. We're asked to throw him in jail because maybe he would have done something like this, eventually.
Except I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that he belived he was dealing with more than one person on the internet. He may have suspected that this was all an elaborate con game, architected by a single entity, and if he did suspect that, he'd have been right. Except that the single entity in this case was the FBI.
And bitcoin? $500,000 in bitcoin? First of all, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the bitcoin wallet he allegedly had at his command. But really, any exchange rate you'd like to apply here is as turbulent, and volatile, and imaginary as whatever we pretend bitcoin is worth in general. It's a virtual currency people are still grappling with. The concept of bitcoin wealth is as absurd as internet fame. Yeah it seems to have real world effects, but how long will it last, and do we take it at face value? If he went from nothing to multi-millionairre IN BITCOIN ONLY, almost over night, is that real money? Did he try to give real money to a real internet hitman?
The federal government acknowleges bitcoin's existence, but even they don't acknowlege it as a true currency. So when you boil it down, it's more like he committed some hypothetical crime for $500,000 in semi-precious baseball cards, or bottle caps or pogs. Bitcoin is regarded as a collector's item at the moment, and little more. You could say he did it for $500,000 in ham sandwiches, and you wouldn't be far off the mark. Maybe it's 7,500 KG of ham sandwiches? Are they fresh ham sandwiches, stored in a refrigerator? Maybe they're moldy ham sandwiches, but what if they're THE VERY HAM SANDWICHES THAT CHOKED MAMA CASS TO DEATH???
Maybe it's still quid pro quo, no matter how you look at it, but when you bandy about dollar amounts, don't pretend like that's an objective value.
I'm old enough to remember when a fake ID meant you wanted to buy beer.