Judge: I won't reveal witnesses because Ulbricht could have them killed

Does Brady v. Maryland require disclosing witnesses?

Or technology coverage in Wired. And it has been that way since the first issue- it's always been a People Magazine type magazine.

When I got my first copy, stumbled on it at a news stand in harvard square on a trip to visit MIT, it was novel because at least it was talking about the internet.

But from that first issue, it's never been written by people who understood or gave a damn about technology.

Casting a defendant as a dangerous attempted murderer without ever intending to put the defendant on trial for attempted murder would seem like a good strategy for the prosecution for almost any major crime. What are the repercussions that would prevent the prosecution from making allegations that would prejudice the judge against the defendant and hamper the defendant's defense, but never producing a witness at the trial that can be cross-examined?

(My personal guess would be that Ulbricht likely discussed a murder with an agent, but the details of this discussion, whether it was initiated by Ulbricht, and the exact plan the two arrived at are not yet known. I'd also guess that whether or not Ulbricht intended to commit murder, some of these details are ones the prosecution would prefer not to become known for fear that it would damage other parts of their case.)

Because he is on trial, which means he has not been found guilty.

The reason it is important is because this case is going to set a legal precedent for a lot of important topics. It's worth reading up on both sides of it. http://freeross.org/

Many people here aren't fans of the drug war which has led to massive incarceration in our country, pissed off a variety of our South American "allies", made our neighborhoods more dangerous, and not shown any discernible decrease in drug use amongst the constituents of the United States. In fact, about all it has fostered is powerful lobbies who continue to fight to keep drugs illegal which prevent legitimate research into their possible medicinal uses and have resulted in over militarized police who use seemingly unnecessary force against generally nonviolent criminals and very often against innocent civilians.

The number of people who will request assassinations can be assumed to be small due to their expensive and extremely violent nature.

The people buying guns illegally might actually go down if there were less drug turf wars through legalization, decriminalization, and silk road esque services which deliver straight to the door step.

It's not a far stretch to make the case that the Silk Road makes the world, especially America a safer place.

And when drugs are legal, people do them less. Like in the Netherlands where marijuana use ranks far below America's. And other decriminalized countries.

Maybe Ulbright is not the world's greatest human, but his service may have saved more lives than anything.

I'm at work. But sources for everything I've said are rather easy to find using google. Generally I cite everything I say. In this case I can, but choose not to in recognition of time constraints ;-).

If you believe strongly in internet freedom and that drugs should be decriminalised / the drugs war is a terrible abomination, you probably think he's more or less a good guy. I think there's simply a large overlap in these two groups. It's somewhat internet related at any rate; the fact that he was found at all could be considered a statement that true freedom of speech may not exist.

(I'm pretty sure Silk Road never allowed assassination, and the similar claims against him personally seem quite dubious and designed to shape opinion.)

It's not so much what he is accused of doing, but how he allegedly did it.

I don't trust drug dealers. But then again, I also don't do business with them.

I don't trust my bank, and I don't trust my government. I cannot avoid them in quite the same way. So if someone can prove that it is possible for untrustworthy scum to anonymously do business with one another over the network, then I can almost certainly hope for a future where I am not forced to trust organizations that are only superficially trustworthy just to operate in the open marketplace.

As it is now, I get paid via direct deposit into a bank account, and pay my bills via electronic means from that account. Along the way, every transaction is compiled and reported to the state, so it can tax my money every time it moves.

Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is.

What's the best way to rob a bank? Own one.

My interest in the Silk Road is purely to see how effectively the government can fight it. They killed e-Gold. They killed Tor+Bitcoin+Silk Road. It remains to be seen whether they can kill their successors. I just really want open source money to work, because the closed source and curated money supply that I am forced to use isn't working out quite as well as I think it should.

So if Ulbricht is not convicted, I consider it to be no great loss to law and order. People like him exist in every big city, and many can remain at large for years. But it would be a great win for Tor and Bitcoin if it turns out that the state cannot prove its case, and a lesser win if the state is forced to reveal the methods used to compromise Tor and Bitcoin in the process.

Ulbricht himself is of little concern to me. But if someone like him is able to hide nefarious activities from the state and get rich without using the banking system, I can certainly do things like buy iodine for emergency preparedness without getting raided by a SWAT team (because it is apparently a precursor for something or other), and I can pay my electric bill from home without supporting the jerkass banking system that is apparently too big to fail and too avaricious to care.

You don't have to be a scumbag to hate your bank and fear your government.

And Ulbricht doesn't even need to get off completely for it to be a win for those of us who want to see more privacy in private business transactions and more personal control over private finances.

>I mean, ain't we talking about someone who ran a website where you could illegally buy drugs, guns and or even request an assination? Why should we be concerned by his case?

No, we aren't talking about that someone because Silk Road dealt exclusively in drugs and counterfeits. Weapons were banned from the site. Assassinations were banned from the site. Anything that was designed solely to inflict harm on humans was explicitly banned from the site, as per site rules.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

If you want an assination (or an assignation), you should use Tinder, not Silk Road.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Assination&de...

Do you think he was entrapped or do you think the government manufactured evidence of attempted assassinations out of whole cloth?

Why don't you think he was? I personally was all-for his cause (and everything silk road stood for), but I think he's probably guilty of the murder thing and they claim evidence to back it up.

Edit: Funny how I'm getting downvotes. Apparently it's soo controversial to make my decision based on evidence. And something that'll he likely be convicted for.

It must be somewhat common practice, because this is what the Witness Protection Program is for, right? And that program was established under the Organized Crime Control Act.

Yes. There are state criminal procedure rules that explicitly spell out when you can withhold the identities of witnesses; see for instance Ohio Criminal Procedure Rule 16 (D)(1). (I found Ohio's because there was a news story about increased use of the rule to protect witnesses there).

You can't withhold the identity of a witness at trial, because of the 6th Amendment.

It's clearly not as ridiculous, as there was no basis whatsoever to believe that Mitnick could do anything like that.

It's worth saying, as hackers we're familiar with the quotes about, if some old expert says something is impossible, be much more skeptical than when a young person says it is possible. Things like:

"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." - Robert Goddard

Are perfect quotes for hackers. Maybe we should ease up on mocking people for believing the whistling nukes thing. The reasons it couldn't have happened involve details more specific than "sounds on phones can't do things on computers", notably because that wasn't true at the time. And experts probably told him that people only have to be clever enough to find a single flaw in a security system to compromise it, and having one insight the creators of the system didn't could lead to compromising it.

So the judge hears some seasoned professional say it's impossible... and the same person says when you hear some old professional say something is impossible you should be extremely skeptical. When faced with Armageddon? Let's cut the people involved a little slack.