My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
As an aside, that's a sad little bit of commentary on the tech scene these days.
These people were interviewing for an apartment in a notoriously tough housing market - they were probably just "posturing" (mentioning their good jobs and money) because they thought it would help them get the apartment.
He sounds like an outlier of a landlord who prefers a sketchy semi-employed roommate to one with a guaranteed salary.
And I'm not sure in what world talking up how much money you make or the vacations you take would endear you to a potential roommate - it'll just make you sound pompous.
But then again, as long as your roommate has paid his rent in advance, one of the nicest times of the year in San Francisco is when all the burners are out of town.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/08/i-wish-you-could-stay-on-the...
(in any case, you should really be signing a sublease agreement)
I know this is converse to the way the "professional" world is and also converse to people who play along the rules of professionalism.
But dammit, it ain't real! And it needs to stop! Be who you are! And then change it from the inside out, if you need to.
I've seen fake empathy used more here to play people than legit empathy to help another adult struggling.
I know some such people well.
Edit: Yay! down votes!
Not relevant to the discussion, or the 01-02 burst, or salaries, or anything else.
and don't call him shirley.
I know several people who have "Renter's" resumes, where they try to sell themselves as awesome people to live with. My guess is he is remembering them only because of the renter market effects.
If anything, it's a sign of a property bubble in SF.
This isn't even necessarily "bad" objectively (though it could be bad subjectively depending on who you are). It's just how it is now.
I didn't know him personally, but several of my friends did. I had a few friends in college (some of whom I still talk to) who were good friends with him. When he got arrested, I looked up his Facebook page, and I found we have 5 mutual friends listed (and I know a couple of others who knew him but didn't have him on FB). Also, when he was arrested, my then-officemate looked him up, and it turns out he met Ross at a party once and had a conversation with him (though they didn't know each other beyond that). Small world.
That stunned me, but what stunned me more was when I found out Richard Bates did most of the technical work. I knew Richard. We were in a few of the same clubs, we had a class or two, we hung out in the same friend groups, and we were almost friends for a while. Richard was a... peculiar person. He had no people skills whatsoever, and he managed to be both shy and condescending at the same time. He treated people horribly. I ended up having a falling out with him in my senior year after he cut me out of his life for trying to patch things up between him and one of my best friends, who he suddenly cut out of his life with no explanation whatsoever (that is, Richard cut my friend out of his life). IMO, he wasn't a good person. Certain... nicknames for him based on his name began floating around as people got fed up with how he treated them. I'm still absolutely gobsmacked that this guy I personally knew and disliked built the Silk Road of all things. It's still hard for me to believe (and, yes, I know for a fact that this is the same Richard Bates because his email address was published in the trial, and I recognize it as his).
UTD was a special place.
(For the record, I changed my name last year, and I seriously doubt Richard knows my new name. I have to wonder if he'll read this and think "who the hell is this person?", because there's nothing about my username here, which is based off my new name IRL, that he'll recognize.)
'Most' is a gross exaggeration. Bates helped troubleshoot a few problems by fielding some questions. The trial transcripts and exhibits don't show he wrote any, much less 'most', of the SR1-related code; he had so little contribution that he had to be told what the project was by Ross.
Other people like 'Variety Jones' or especially the hired coder 'Smedley' contributed way more. (They just managed to avoid their real names coming up, as far as we know, and avoided lying to federal agents.)
Was Richard the guy who went as a flasher at a Halloween party? Because every time I read about him testifying in court, I'm imagining him doing so in that costume, which was ... graphic.
And yeah, that was Richard. I was there. Oh god, that floppy dildo hanging out of those briefs. There are probably still pictures floating around on Facebook...
I think I also know a Richard Bates from UTD, as a co-worker (but I am not real sure that it is the same person so I won't be too specific as to company and etc.). I found this Richard Bates to be a hard worker who was detail oriented and focused on doing the right thing.
Although, to be fair, some of that 'fun" was actually pretty regrettable in hindsight. But them's part of learnin'.
I didn't know Richard well, but nothing I learned about him made him seem like he would be a bad employee, except I guess the possible personality clash, which can be true of anyone.
>> Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth.
One of the main reasons I got into software development in the 90's was the fact that software engineers were (largely) eloquent, optimistic, and down-to-earth.
It's sad that a vocal minority has sullied the image of an entire industry.
If you read what the author wrote, he implied that as outside observer he found software engineer eloquent, optimistic and down-to-earth. So he wasn't just reflecting group bias.
I got into software engineer by finding software engineer down-to-earth at least in the sense that it seemed you didn't have to engage in the posturing implicit in finance, say.
That seems to be gone in Silicone Valley but that might be only a small sample of the whole software world.
It's like just because someone slapped a label on a thing we're not allowed to do the thing anymore. We need an "Anti-Godwin's Law" that states no mention of Nazis or Hitler can be made on the internet without someone inevitably invoking Godwin's Law.
It just seems nonsensically reductive to go 'the nazis did it! therefore its bad!'
The first poster essentially said "this is so normal, even Nazis do it".
We consider Nazis to be abnormal, so if a behavior is common many groups inclusive of Nazis it can be used to imply that the behavior is something inherent to human beings or human governments or human societies.
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Corvairs approaches 1"
This law, as best as I can determine, is rubbish.
Deleted comment
As it turns out, the person I quoted said exactly what I wanted to say. It doesn't need elaboration.
>It's a complaint at people being lazy in making arguments.
Godwin's law is a very lazy way to make that argument, I would expect.
That may be partially true, but Ross polluted much of the goodwill the Internet community had for him when he decided to "order a hitman." I doubt he was ever that serious about hiring one. If you read the chats he had, he sounds completely out of his league, and probably never would have been capable of it if the FBI did not sort-of-entrap him with a murder-for-hire plot. Unfortunately, he really screwed himself by going down that road.
The best argument in defense of silk road and Ross, from a moral/philosophical standpoint, is that it represents a victimless crime. Indeed, by moving transactions into the online world, it may have actually facilitated a drop in real crime. Ross must have known that if the FBI ever caught up to him, he could defend himself with this moral reasoning, and at least stand a chance of acquittal in a jury trial. It's a shame that he had to completely ruin that chance by also trying to hire a hitman. He should have kept things simple and never strayed out of the territory of libertarian economic experiment.
Now, maybe he actually did more good than bad. Maybe for every sale funding a bad organization, he helped switch 10 from a bad organization to a responsible producer. And maybe that would still have been enough to get a jury to acquit him.
So basically, to rephrase, the existence of the law is what makes the law necessary. It's almost tautological.
IF it were treated as a public health problem (Portugal apparently did this with some success), Ross might have been hailed as a leader of a new economy and the IRS coffers might have been a bit heavier. Instead, the intelligent, optimistic, apparently caring mind who wrote this, is rotting in jail: http://rossman.deviantart.com/journal/something-new-24987116...
How many of us would have at least considered hiring a hitman if someone threatened to make our black-market 100 million dollar empire go away and have us get sent to jail? More than would be comfortable admitting it, if they looked deep into their hearts, I'm guessing.
Not quite. The law against production is what makes the law against buying and selling more relevant. What makes the law against production and sales relevant is different reasoning (I am neither defending nor attacking that reasoning as that would be a long discussion either way). I wouldn't consider it tautological nor circular reasoning, but it is stacked, and if you were to legalize production, that reason for the ban on selling and buying would no longer apply. The stacked reasons, now without their base, would no longer be supported.
Are there other reasons, especially for certain drugs that are more dangerous? Maybe (once again, it would be a long discussion if they are justified or not).
Or if it were punished by death, like in Singapore.
Interesting way to describe someone who apparently tried to hire people to murder others in cold blood.
The most drastic realization we'll have in the future (relative to now) is that situations determine behavior far more than any notion of free will, so avoidong creation of the situations that cause people to consider crime will become the priority.
Here is but one of MANY examples of outstanding-seeming people who were undone by their situations:
http://m.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Nowak-recalled-...
It's not like Ross hired hits on innocent people - regardless of whether that is murder or not.
People get hung up on the hired hit thing. At that level it was him or them and no human ever makes that choice any way but one.
The American government will never release Ross. They'll also never release Brianna Manning.
But the American government probably won't outlive those two revolutionaries. At least, I have to believe it won't. The future can't be so Orwellian. I don't think humanity will let it happen.
Of course I can't be sure if he was serious about the 'hitman' or not. Probably he wasn't all that serious about it BUT at some point in time he would have to become either digitally or physically violent one way or another to protect what is his.
Now, considering a guy who made loads of money bulding an illegal marketplace online the "poster boy for privacy in the information age" while having characters like Assange and Snowden around is a shame IMHO.
Since ancient Greece (e.g. Antigone by Sophocles) there is a strugle between Human law and God's law (e.g. Ethics, True, etc.). Snowden falls in that category IMHO. What Ross did was both illegal and unethical.
The ones that go home, don't get caught, and so you don't hear about it.
That said, as far as damage control, he had no choice it seems. If the blackmailer really was going to turn over many innocent people to be prosecuted, well, it was probably the morally correct thing to do. (Assuming negotiations for a payment or other settlement didn't seem feasible.) It's not like he was out trying to murder random people or competitors. He was protecting many innocent users from potentially having their lives destroyed.
I dunno about everyone else here, but that feels like it'd be a heavy burden to have to choose. Sorta like shooting an informant that's gonna leak info on a bunch of refugees. You know the informant might just be trying to get out of his own mess, or getting a safety package setup for his family or whatnot. But if you let him have his way, many people will be tortured. As sad as it is, what else can you do in such a case, even if it was your fault in the first place?
Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.
He hasn't lost my goodwill yet.
I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.
(edited for grammatical clarity)
He also agreed to a higher price for the "hit" in Canada, as it was claimed by the CI the target lived with 3 other people and if they were to collect all his assets as ordered then everybody would have to die. Ross was totally cool with that and paid.
I also don't think this is why his fanbase on SR dumped him, they seemed more pissed that his security practices were so terribad awful it put everybody else in jeopardy. It's almost as if he read his own forum's security base and then did the opposite of what everybody said not to do like "Never order fake ID to where you live" and "Don't sit in a cafe ordering drugs off this site" (don't sit in a cafe/library and run the site either).
The money he paid to kill non existent people was way more than what they caused him to lose through scamming, he could have paid back the losses out of pocket with his huge stash of bitcoins instead of seeking vengeance. He acted exactly like a boss of a gangster dial a dope operation that orders the hit of one of their drivers they think is ripping them off.
It's a rather different thing if they entrap him with a tough moral dilemma than entrapping him with simply ordering a hit on people when it's not the only alternative to a whole bunch of other people having their lives destroyed, including targeting 3 people that just happen to live there.
> I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.
But the FBI could basically do this to anyone: try and convince them using a play that involves fabricated emotional pressure, blackmail and, if some other comments are correct (I haven't followed the case that closely), even inventing physical danger and multiple other people's lives being on the line.
The FBI could do this to anyone, do you think it's fair or desirable that anyone that could be tricked into agreeing to hire a (fictional) hitman should in fact be charged with that crime and put into jail for the rest of their lives? Because I think that would be a lot of people you'd pre-emptively have to put in jail. Especially if they deliberately put in the classic moral dilemma of saving a whole bunch of people's lives from being destroyed versus killing the single person responsible.
How many people would make the same decision if confronted with this circumstance? Should they all be put in jail, just for the fact that they would've made that choice if it had been real? Because I don't think that's a very good "test" for detecting "bad people" or people that are really dangerous for society. You can argue about the moral choice (since those victims would merely "have their lives ruined", not be actually killed), but as presented I think it's a really difficult dilemma, and I couldn't really fault a person for choosing one way or another. It's a terrible moral dilemma that I personally just hope to never have to face in my life.
So, having argued that any random person who would make this choice is not necessarily so bad they should be convicted, what differentiates Ross Ulbricht? Seems that, in this particular context, his "crime" was that because of his involvements, he was a person likely to actually face this dilemma situation at some point in his Silk Road career. That seems about the only reason to expose Ulbricht to this moral dilemma situation, instead of just any (or every) random person on the streets.
So then, really, is it reasonable to entrap and then convict someone because they are involved in business that may likely at some point in the future lead to a situation where they would have to make choices like these?
To repeat, if the hitman thing had just been about offing a competitor for financial or business gains, my whole argument above doesn't hold. But they actively put him in a situation where there was no moral right answer, and then convicted him for it.
EDIT: if this is true then that rather changes the whole story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192416
On January 26, 2013, Roberts asked that the former employee get "beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back." A day later, afraid that his former employee would squeal to the police, Roberts asked if it was possible to "change the order to execute rather than torture?" Roberts said he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case." The agent offered to do the job for $80,000."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...
I'm not seeing the entrapment here...
I haven't followed this trial closely enough to know exactly what happened here, but despite the sanctimonious, performative "I'm-a-good-person" denials you're getting in response, entrapment is a real thing. If one's opponent is a pro (this is a lucrative sub-profession of "private investigators") one won't see it coming and will be lucky to avoid it. I'm sure the FBI is also skilled at this technique, which may explain why many PIs are former agents.
A family friend had disappointed some wealthy people by lawfully overcoming a do-not-compete. It didn't happen for years, but eventually she was manipulated into making statements about another person, and of course those statements were taped by the "friendly" person who was "helping" her with a family issue. The swiftness of the DOJ's response could only have been motivated by campaign contributions. And now this person is a felon.
This is a good person, certainly much more "Christian" than I've ever been. Some might say that sort of person is actually easier to entrap, since her emotional levers are more obvious, but I think everyone has levers, often closely related to their own moral codes. Ulbricht's levers were his project and potential threats to that. Of course it would have been wiser for Ulbricht to take a broader view and reject violent suggestions. It isn't the case that mere morality suffices to avoid this trap.
The only situation I can imagine where I might consent to this would be if someone were, say, physically threatening myself or my family and I had clear evidence that they intended to follow through -- and no normal civilized legal recourse.
The government guy could have said "Hey look I think this guy is going to go to the feds and we're all going to go to jail! Give me the money and I'll take care of this problem. If you don't, I'm going to come after you because I'm not going to go to jail for this."
At that point, a person might not feel that they have any choice. And the government gets to claim that "he ordered a hit"
Anyway, the 'government guy' happened to keep records of what was said, so I don't see why you'd be tied up on such a hypothetical. And Ulbricht could have argued entrapment in court, if that was contested dialog.
Ok so you're going to turn the other guy in to the feds for what exactly? How do you know this other guy? Why would him turning you in to the feds be a problem, unless you're doing something illegal?
DPR: He this guy is doing something bad, arrest him!
Feds: How do you know he's doing something bad?
DPR: Well I run the Silk Road and he told me that if we didn't do something about this other guy, that HE was going to turn us in to you!
Feds: Oh, okay well now you're definitely going to jail.
So your clever arrangement whereby you're going to use the feds to get the guy threatening you to go to jail has now fallen flat on its face, because now you're both going to jail. Which is the thing that you were both trying to avoid in the first place.
Why is the drug trade so violent? Because it exists outside the law and thus there's no one to arbitrate disputes (legally) and so people have to find their own resolution. Hence killing.
If you're willing to kill someone to avoid jail, you better believe I would be willing to turn you in if you've already decided to turn me in because I don't want to kill someone. If we DO kill them, then by the same logic, I should have you killed to.
Threatening the person you are working with to "deal with threats" is just stupid. It just means you have to be dealt with as well.
Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. I'm not saying violence in the ONLY answer, but it's definitely the only one that I can think of that doesn't involve them going to jail.
They can't sue because the thing under dispute is an ill-gotten-gain and thus the court wouldn't adjudicate the issue that is for them at hand but instead put them both in jail for stealing.
What are their other choices? Just suck it up and deal with the fact that they got screwed? Sure, but then the next time a robbery comes around, everyone knows that they can screw you and you'll just suck it up. Yay, free labor! That won't end badly for you will it?
Maybe they can pre-negotiate a contract that specifies how a certain sum of money will be distributed but which doesn't specify how it comes to be? Why would a law-abiding person write such a contract? Take them to court and you might win, but the police might investigate and again you're both in jail.
I'm not saying that there is no possible alternative ever, but your simply asserting that something is true and then providing absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up that claim isn't terribly convincing.
They don't, but that's their own fault. If your life of crime has forced you into such a predicament that murder-for-hire is a more viable option than dealing with the authorities, you only have yourself to blame. The reason that crime pays so well is because criminals take advantage of opportunities that the rest of society agrees to abstain from for the sake of maintaining order and mutual security; if you decide to exploit those opportunities for the sake of enriching yourself, you shouldn't expect society to feel any sympathy for the fact that you one day felt forced to employ violence in order to protect your criminal investments.
But marijuana is now straight up legal with similar restrictions and regulations as alcohol in several states. And it seems like there's serious momentum to legalize in the rest of them.
I doubt we're going to see radical legalization where the drug war completely ends in the next 5-10 years but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened well within my lifetime.
"Life of crime" can have a highly temporal definition and thus introduce far, far more grey area than you're letting on by your very binary assertions.
I never said they had recourse through the courts. I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence. If they choose to resort to violence, that's entirely their fault, and no one else can be blamed for that.
I like the idea of a microkernel government better than the monolithic thing that we currently have, where you can subscribe to police and fire and whatever. I'd prefer that the government mostly provide courts and a system by which other areas of natural monopoly are better managed (like roads, utilities, etc). But to suggest that we don't need a government at all is pretty radical.
If you can't see that "I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence" leads DIRECTLY to the government isn't really necessary, then I don't know what to say.
These people made their choices. They decided, of their own free will, to become involved in something they knew to be highly illegal. Everything that follows is their fault, and their fault alone. Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQl-qAtNwQ
> Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
Not at all! I merely show that a NECESSARY result of disenfranchising people who want to engage in a particular kind of trade which the government deems "wrong" (in the legal sense, because the government can't really determine morality) is that there are very predictable, unfortunate outcomes like this. The whole drug trade is absolutely RIFE with violence because people have no alternative to settle their disputes. I'm not saying that they are guiltless; far from it! But a modicum of thought makes it plain that the violence is due to the illegal nature of what they're doing.
Look at all the other industries that manage to grow things, distribute them, and eventually sell them directly to customers. Coffee, fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. All these industries have rates of violence which are very close approximations to ZERO. What is different about drugs? Two things:
1. They get you high (but so does coffee, sugar, etc)
2. They're illegal
Obviously I can't PROVE the causality is from 2 rather than 1, but I think a reasonable person could make a reasonable assumption that 2 is far, far more likely than 1.
Ross Ulbricht believed harm had come to the people he'd ordered gangland executions against.
There were plenty of opportunity to come forwards and say: "Hey, I've done an incredibly bad act; here's everything I know about the people I talked to."
Obviously, doing so wouldn't end well for him; it would show some moral standing, however.
The only person responsible for these choices is Ross Ulbricht.
I can see the entrapment argument as a reason not to charge him for a crime here, but it's absolutely a reason to personally judge his character.
"he never had to decide in real life"
The reason he got in trouble was because he did decide it in real life. It's not like he put a hit out on a World of Warcraft character.
"put a lot of emotional pressure on him"
Emotional pressure? really? That's an elegant way of putting it.
"He hasn't lost my goodwill yet."
It's only because you support the legalization of drugs and you are letting this cloud your judgement. He is an asshole and deserves to do some jail time.
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/...
https://www.mosesandrooth.com/drug-crimes/conspiracy-to-traf...
"It's only because you support the legalization of drugs"
Oh please. Ad hominem much?
I'm not sure what's more horrific:
- Someone who orders murders.
- Someone who orders murders and doesn't think that seriously about it.
Thoughtlessly ordering someone else to commit a murder is definitively worse than ordering someone else to commit a murder after careful and deliberate consideration, presuming all other factors remain equal.
In my view, killing someone just because it benefits you in some way is worse than killing someone because you truly believe that they deserve it--even if the thought process that led to the latter conclusion is provably flawed.
Not all murders are equally bad. The condition only short circuits at murder if your ethical framework has discrete values rather than defined intervals on a continuous spectrum.
Of course, ordering a murder in a stage production where no one actually gets killed is hardly even bad at all. It's almost like doing a mission in Grand Theft Auto, or doing a shot-for-shot remake of the baptism scene from Godfather II. Or perhaps it's the inversion of Ender's Game, where rather than the ethical burden being lighter because you didn't realize it was for-realsies, it is heavier because you didn't know it was fake.
RU may be an ass for trying, but the facts remain that no one died because of him, nor was anyone at any risk of dying from his actions. The cops put him inside a fake situation, and he acted according to his assumed role as though it were real. If I were judge or prosecutor, I wouldn't want to untie that knot either.
And he did not know that it was fake. Therefore any idea that he's off the hook because no one got hurt is irrelevant. It could have just as easily been real, and then people would have died because of his actions.
We simply have different rules in our ethical systems, you and I.
I, for one, am less apt to makes crimes of someone's thoughts or intentions, in the absence of actual harm. I also feel the role of policing should be more in the nature of investigation, capture, and detention awaiting trial, rather than prophylactic protection.
I would very much like all police work to start with identifying that a crime has occurred, work backwards to find out who did it, capture that person, and then turn over the person and all available evidence to the courts. I find the trend towards identifying a potential criminal, then gathering evidence on that person until a crime can be identified, to be anathema to a free society.
Whether RU committed the crimes of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder or not, the police committed crimes themselves in exposing him, and I find it more acceptable ethically for the guilty man to go free than to allow the state's justice system to profit by its own corruption. That's the fruit of the poison tree doctrine. It's how we keep a free society free, and how we protect cops from retaliatory violence from the people who feel they are serving themselves rather than justice.
The evidence of other crimes was collected as a result. Even if he was guilty beyond doubt, that's still poisoned fruit.
They absolutely did not. It was his idea. You need to go learn what entrapment is. Hint: It's not simply when you do something and the cops happen to be involved.
Now, don't misunderstand. That was wrong of him. And it was also stupid. But there is a very important difference between finding out about an illegal transaction and participating in one.
If it were prostitution, it would be the difference between watching a john pick up a hooker and arresting them both, or posing as either a john or a hooker and arresting the other when they eventually committed to the crime. The former is acceptable. The latter is not.
It wasn't a case of a contract killer ratting his client out to the police. There never was a contract killer.
In my opinion, if the cops were a necessary component in the commission of the crime, it is entrapment. If they were simply able to exercise a degree of control over the situation such that they are able to immediately arrest all parties to a crime before anyone gets hurt, that's a little creepy, but still acceptable.
Crime requires intent, conduct, concurrence, and causation. Entrapment elides over one or more of those elements.
It's pretty obvious that the specific incongruence I'm talking about is persecution of drugs.
Incongruence undermines respect for the rule of law in general (cf. "stop snitching"). It changes the calculus from "should I transgress against what society deems sacred" to "I'm already in trouble with the biggest gang around, might as well keep going".
He chose, of his own free will, to start an illegal marketplace, knowing full well what he was doing. He chose, of his own free will, to hire someone else to kill someone.
Never tried for murder.
Never charged.
Why not? That's a slam dunk if it were true. But it carries with it greater scrutiny by appellate courts, greater scrutiny by the press. Perhaps those accusations were bullshit.
Perhaps our prosecutors should be prohibited by law from making any accusations unless they're actually leveling charges. Just a thought.
In that phony hit, the FBI was on the other end and can testify they received payment and instructions from Ulbricht to kill a witness so it isn't just a textfile diary as the only evidence like in the other murder charges (which were quietly dropped after he was denied bail).
In 40 or 50 years (assuming the country doesn't become some Hollywood-movie-esque dystopia), we'll find out how they cheated to find him and lied about his crimes.
His defense did seem pretty poor, but given the amount of evidence against him, its not really clear what a "good defense" would've looked like.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross-ulbric...
I suspect a lot of the people who were pressing for Ross to challenge the seizure of the server are doing so because they're interested in the legal questions involved, rather than maximizing the chances of an innocence verdict.
But in anycase, you generally can't get a re-trial based on incompetent counsel based just on strategic decisions, even if those decisions were poor ones. You need to show your lawyer was really asleep at the switch on a basic level, like giving the client factually wrong information, or going off to Cancun for a couple weeks instead of preparing a defence.
The chat-logs that were evidence for all but one of the attempted murders he was indicted for were found on the server, which might be part of the reason he wasn't charged with those. Though those probably would've been difficult to get a conviction on in anycase, since no one knows who the "hitman" really was.
Does anyone honestly believe this is how he was caught? Or is it just parallel construction[1]? I wouldn't be surprised if Tor is completely compromised by the United States Government, and this fact is just being hidden.
[1]: http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentima...
It was a little sketchy but I never seemed like a sketchy guy so maybe they suspected porn or something like that. It's not hard to have an online life that's different from the real world, that you hide from everyone.