Silk Road Defense Says Ulbricht Was Framed by the ‘Real’ Dread Pirate Roberts
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Whatever Ulbricht himself may be, whether or not the murder for hire allegations are true, however he might have gone about running Silk Road, the libertarian ideals that justify the existence of Silk Road should have their day in court. But that won't happen here, because his defense relies on Silk Road being a terrible thing that somebody else did.
In modern society, this authority is the state.
In Dread Pirate Robert's universe, no authority should wield violence... except Dread Pirate and his associates if it suites them.
Libertarian and anarchistic ideologies start from the wish that no-one would wield violence and all would be equal.
Unfortunately, how real world scenarios evolve is that existing system is replaced by chaos, from which a few entities reach political authority, at which point they take the authority to wield violence and make the decisions for everyone else they want to make.
Anarchy and the like work only in smaller social groups such as a family or a commune where everyone can rationally assume everyone can be trusted and to act fairly within the context of an uncodified behavioral standard - to stay within the groups culture.
At larger scales these types of population dynamics just don't work, and the stuff rises up which require the equivalent of the functions of modern state to function properly as a whole.
The point is, if there is no central auhtority, someone will become that authority (picture somalian warlords, russia after 1917 revolution and so on).
So replacing current state with an entity on 'non-violence' and non-coercion does not work - these are sociological oxymorons that do not exist.
But there are some core arguments about freedom of choice that Silk Road addressed in some ways, and DPR was a figurehead for those arguments, and to see him ignore those ideals in exchange for a half-hearted defense like this is disappointing, that's all. Whether or not he's guilty, DPR is dead and Silk Road achieved nothing.
The court of popular opinion seems to be edging ever so slightly in Ulbricht's favor. Morally and politically, arguments for minimal government and drug legalization might have some merit. But no one is ever going to convince a judge that, while, the defendant might be guilty, the real crime is that there are even laws against everything he's accused of.
Although I suppose he could use the opportunity to make a statement anyway, regardless of how well it works as a legal defense. I wouldn't blame him either way, really. </IANAL>
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/
(or read it...)
On what planet? Public opinion just shifted in favor of legalizing marijuana in 2013, but support for keeping everything else illegal is overwhelming: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Around 10% of people support legalizing cocaine, crack, heroin, meth, or LSD. 80-85% oppose legalizing those drugs.
The transition in political thought doesn't seem to have been toward "people should be able to freely trade in whatever they want." It seems to have been a change in attitude towards the harmfulness of marijuana specifically.
Nope. My opinion is that it's a desperate ploy from a guilty man who knows that the strength of the evidence against him is so great that he's resorting to a defense they wouldn't use in a movie plot because it's so unbelievable. I'm entirely unapologetic about my opinion, because that's what it is, an opinion. Fortunately I'm neither judge nor jury in this case.
Also, don't put words in my mouth and don't ascribe motives to me that I don't have. The very first sentence of my comment says explicitly that I understand he's free to mount whatever defense he likes - it's his freedom to lose.
Real trials don't play out like they do in hollywood. You don't get to spend your time in court talking about your ideology and lobbying for better laws. The entire trial will be about whether or not he's guilty of breaking the laws that already exist.
> Prosecutors in the case against alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht want the court to prohibit Ulbricht from saying almost anything political at all, according to a motion filed last week by the government.
> They’re worried that the jury might end up sympathizing with Ulbricht’s politics.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/silk-road-jury-nullificatio...
To me, this goes against every freedom of speech. To not be allowed to defend yourself in any and every way possible is to not be free.
Edit: "in any and every truthful way possible" - obviously perjury is perjury.
It's not about the trial, because the trial is lost no matter what he does (regardless of whether or not he's innocent, he's going to jail, guaranteed), it's about nailing your colours to the wall and showing the rest of the world that you're willing to go to jail to stand up for the freedoms you ostensibly believe in.
Ulbricht won't be doing any of that, instead he's going to mount a defense that effectively says that his manifesto, his politics, his core beliefs, are all just something to be discarded when it's convenient.
And in order to do that, he'd have to discredit the authenticity of their evidence that his computer was the one doing all the work, which means the defense would have to show that his computer was hacked, and all of the evidence was forged by the hacker(s).
How's he going to show a jury of non-techies (which you know the prosecution selected for) that it was all just his computer getting hacked?
How do any high-level technical trials work, when the jury goes into the trial not educated on the topic? The reliance on expert testimony?
My main reason for finding it immediately believable is that the name "Dread Pirate Roberts" is an obvious Princess Bride reference to a pirate who inherited his trade and occupation from another pirate. That combined with the fact that the name did not appear on the forums for the first few months leads me to believe that the name is an inside joke about the fact that the Dread Pirate Roberts did not create the site.
The 2013 quote from the Dread Pirate Roberts saying the same thing when he had no particular reason to lie is just icing on the cake.
Despite all the evidence, lots of people did not want to believe it was him and held out for hope, in the end, though, people realized indeed it was he who did it.
[1] http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/06/09/1155214/hans-reiser-...
[2]http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/02/23/2218256/hans-reiser-a...
You don't even need to believe him, as long as it casts doubt on the prosecution's narrative. I'm interested to see what digital forensics the government relies on to prove association with the evidence. Is he guilty? Probably. But that is not sufficient for conviction, at least in theory.
He's still going to prison just maybe not for the rest of his life.
That should shave decades off the jailtime.
That would make it harder to claim you were "framed".