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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: I didn't followed closely this case, and I'm quite surprised to see so much people defending Ulbricht or the Silk Road on behalf of internet freedom. Some people comparing him to kevin mitnick... 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?

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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 ;-).

You HN libertarians are living in a dream world.

So you think incarcerating people for what is categorically a health issue (drug abuse) is a good idea?

The comment you're replying to isn't a good one, but rebutting an argument it didn't make doesn't make yours much better.

> 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.

> You HN libertarians are living in a dream world.

I've heard this kind of argument multiple times talking to people about legalization/decriminalization of drugs. I just assumed GP meant their comment that way.

I know this is super post-mortem regarding my comment, but my "bullshit" claim was directed at the "Maybe Ulbright is not the world's greatest human, but his service may have saved more lives than anything" and "It's not a far stretch to make the case that the Silk Road makes the world, especially America a safer place". Everyone and their dog is against the drug war, I had no expectation that people here would assume I was for it.

The social and financial benefits of stopping the drug war is not limited to libertarians. I am a socialist and believe it to be a misguided and deeply destructive set of policies that have done far more harm than good.

Come live in Mexico and tell me that the drug war is working. And once you are at it, try to explain how the potential risk of getting some more people addicted is better than 40,000 deaths, as many "disappearances" and many more kidnappings a year (just in Mexico).

If you think that the drug problem only involves the US, please read this article [1]. Maybe by the time you reach the end of the article, those libertarians don't look so libertarian anymore.

[1] http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-country-disappeared/

My problem isn't with the obvious statement that everyone agrees with already (the drug war is ineffective), my problem is with the remaining paragraphs of bullshit in that post.

State loving socialist here; the drug war is fucked.

Free Ross!

I'm a social libertarian but that's all.

Presumptive comments on hacker news which add nothing to the discussion are neither welcome nor warranted.

You'd do well to refrain from them in the future.

Cheers.

>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.

"Speading misinformation" ahaha.

I think you missed this two parts of my comment:

- "Genuine question: [...]"

- "ain't we [...] ?"

As you may now understand, I am asking questions. Questions are asked in order to obtain informations, not to spread them. But thank you for your bit of infos regarding silk road's sites rules.

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.

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/

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

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

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.)

What's dubious about the murder claims? To believe that they're false, don't you have to believe that the prosecution literally falsified evidence?

Overcharging is one thing. Fabricating evidence, though? The risk/reward doesn't add up here.

Oh no the US government wouldn't lie or fake anything to accomplish their task at hand.

I don't think you read the whole comment to which you just replied.

I believe the prosecution believes Ross intended to pay for an assassination. But that's about it.

Without a murder victim it's pretty hard to prove murder. AFAIK there's no record of anyone with the name of the supposed victim, much less a body.

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

That's an obligation of the law, but not of public opinion.

The law doesn't do an especially good job of it either. Perhaps it would be better were we all more observant of the principle than we tend to be; the accused is not always guilty.

Edit: For context, this is what I had in mind: https://medium.com/for-the-love-of-podcast/serials-big-confe...

The same distinction is what allows us to express outrage in the Eric Garner case.

Not really - the cop that killed Eric Garner wasn't even indicted/accused.

By the logic I was responding to, it is inappropriate to be angry at the cop. He's innocent until proven guilty. That's obviously not how public opinion works.

Many demonstrably innocent people are indicted and convicted with far less evidence than a video. Nonetheless, for other cases I grant the point.

I doubt that in Garner case there was any doubt over any verifiable facts. The only things questionable were the feelings of the policemen involved (not following too close the case, though, might be wrong).

So it was never a case of what they did, but was it a crime.

I think that Cosby's fall from grace is better recent example if I read your point correctly

There is a difference between not qualifying someone as guilty until it is proven and asking for it's liberation.

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