The mystery of the disappearing Silk Road murder charges

Your liberal viewpoint is deeply misinformed. The fear of WMDs was also shared by Bill Clinton when still in power, Hosni Mubarak, the French Intelligence services, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

The WMDs found may not be on a scale with what, say, Russia could produce or even on a scale with what was expected, but they were there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destru...

So don't need to worry about these WMDs then if they're not part of an active program?

However my real point is that the Silk Road creator and maintainer is responsible and accountable along all three axes. If it is moral, ethical, and legal then that's great! If it's moral, ethical, but illegal then that kinda sucks but that's the risk you take. Morals and ethics are an endless debate which is beside the point here. My opinion is that the initial comparison vs eBay is unreasonble and that the creator is responsible in all three ways.

I've tried cocaine myself on two occasions. Not addictive whatsoever.

> "In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

You claim:

> You think a law is unjust, fight the law, don't break it and try to get away with it.

So you and MLK are claiming that a non-Jew in Nazi Germany who violates legislation by helping a Jew is morally culpable unless they do it publicly?

Seems pretty questionable, and I even agree with the strict Kantian maxim of not lying to the murderer at the door!

Perhaps you and MLK are confusing a strategy with morality. Perhaps it is strategically valuable to violate unjust legislation openly and suffer the consequences. That shouldn't mean that it is morally wrong to violate them in secret.

To me, it seems like there are two claims that are being tied together unnecessarily. 1) one has no obligation to obey unjust legislation 2) one has an obligation to disobey it openly to bring public awareness of the unjustness and increase likelihood of reform.

To me, you're just as culpable for not doing #2 whether or not you do #1. In other words, if you're morally culpable for not violating unjust legislation in public, then you bear that culpability whether or not you violate the legislation in private or not, and violating unjust legislation in private entails no culpability on its own.

[edit: I completely rewrote when I realized MLK really did say that]

But you will never get a sociopathic state worshiping authoritarian to admit they don't have the moral high ground. Letalone that their treasured institutions are practically identical to the terrorist organisations that they say they exist to protect the innocent from.

Do you have any proof of that? It looks like the government doesn't.

In that case, you, sir, are a child molester, until you prove to me that you are not.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves...

Morals are subjective, I realize that you've claimed to be speaking for yourself only; but with a comment such as that I have a hard time believing it.

Fixed it for you.

Since having and selling cocaine is (currently) illegal, any evidence gathered by that illegal act is tainted. You can't reasonably prosecute the person buying unless you also prosecute the person selling. And that person is effectively immune.

The current lower standard in the courts--whereby the police can set up any situation, no matter how ridiculous, and entice a person to commit a crime that he might never have committed without that prompting--is an open invitation to police misconduct that may be more damaging than the crimes they are claiming to combat.

"Hey, want some coke?" is entrapment. The state agent is encouraging people to commit new crimes for the express purpose of arresting and convicting them for it. That isn't fighting crime. That's manufacturing crime to pad your own job performance metrics. You may be showing that people in the area have motive and method to commit certain types of crimes, opportunity is still a significant barrier. Traditional crime-fighting seeks to deny those opportunities rather that providing them.

This is why I find tactics like "bait cars" to be sleazy and indicative of lazy police work.

If you have mice, you can set out baited traps and be certain to catch some. But it will not eradicate the infestation. You have to clean your house, removing accessible food sources. You have to eliminate places where the mice can hide and breed. And you have to seal up any means of ingress and egress. Traps just temporarily alleviate the symptoms. The real solution takes much more effort.

I am not, however, part of the current justice system, so my opinion on these matters is not taken into consideration directly. But the prosecution relying upon traps has cause to worry, if I am on their jury.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/feds-silk-road-hack-legal/

The Silk Road server in question, after all, was located not in the United States but in a data center near Reykjavik, Iceland. And though Ulbricht is an American citizen, the prosecutors argue that the server’s location abroad made it fair game for remote intrusion. “Because the SR Server was located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment would not have required a warrant to search the server, whether for its IP address or otherwise,” the prosecution’s filing reads.

In a footnote, the memo adds another strike against Ulbricht’s Fourth Amendment protections: The Silk Road was not only hosted in a foreign data center, but also rented from a third-party web hosting service. And because Ulbricht allegedly violated the company’s terms of service by using its computers to deal in narcotics and other contraband, that company was exempted from any obligation to protect his privacy.

Finally, prosecutors argue that for the 30-year-old Texan to claim privacy protections for Silk Road’s server, he would have to declare that it belonged to him—a tricky Catch-22. Ulbricht hasn’t claimed personal possession of that computer’s data, as doing so would almost certainly incriminate him. But because he hasn’t he can’t claim that his privacy was violated when it was searched, according to the prosecutor’s reasoning. “Because Ulbricht has not submitted any affidavit alleging that he had any possessory interest in the SR Server—let alone one that would give him a reasonable expectation of privacy—his motion should be denied,” reads the prosecutors’ filing.

Or maybe the decision by a US Magistrate Court which said private information is fair game, even if its located on servers in other countries, given a valid search warrant. Considering federal agencies tend to get a lot of leeway in such cases in regards to what exactly is contained in the warrant, and what they're searching for. So even if they had or needed a valid warrant, it's still within the governments authority to seize the data:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/29/us-court-m...

In a detailed ruling on Friday, US Magistrate Judge James Francis said that US companies, including Microsoft and Google, must turn over private information when served with a valid search warrant from US law enforcement agencies.

"Even when applied to information that is stored in servers abroad, an SCA warrant does not violate the presumption against extraterritorial application of American law," he concluded.