I'm not going to argue Ulbricht shouldn't be serving a serious sentence, assuming legitimacy of the evidence of his murder-by-hire attempt.
However, he wasn't convicted on those charges. He was convicted of 'conspiracy to traffic narcotics', money laundering, and 'computer hacking'. The 'hacking' and laundering were only necessities of the narcotics trafficking business, so it really does boil down to him being convicted to a life sentence for the drug distribution business.
I'd take no issue with a life sentence for procuring murder, but see it as an absolute travesty that drugs are demonized to the point where a life sentence for trafficking is even a possibility.
I don't think it's just for a lifetime sentence for anything but murder itself... or someone who is an actual danger to individuals or society itself. I think what got Ulbricht in the end was the fact that he was acting like a drug kingpin and so they threw the book at him hard. It wasn't one of those things that did him in, it was all of those things combined that earned him a life sentence.
But it's not clear where the idea came from. Some say that it was his mentor Roger Thomas Clark aka Variety Jones aka Cimon. Some say that it was DEA agent Carl Force aka Nob. In any case, it's clear that Ross was initially shocked by the idea.
No, the opposite is true. As the appeals decision points out multiple times, Ulbricht was startlingly casual both about hte decision to order people killed and in his reaction to evidence that the killings had occurred. His ostensible hired assassin informed Ulbricht that he could have a target killed, but that he couldn't attmept to recover Ulbricht's funds unless he also paid for the assassination of several of the target's associates --- people Ulbricht had no ostensible connection to at all. Ulbricht essentially said "fuck it, whatever you think will help recover some of my funds" and paid for additional gratuitous killings.
Importantly: this case had apparently nothing at all to do with Force, who was involved in a different murder-for-hire scheme, one for which Ulbricht could still stand trial (but probably won't, since his life sentence is now overwhelmingly likely to stand).
The burden of proof is on the government to prove that those were his chat logs and they weren't altered. Until he's formally tried he's innocent of that accusation.
This is simply false, and moreover, false in each of its particulars.
First: as the appeal opinion clearly states, there's still an open case against Ulbricht for the Force-related murder-for-hire scheme in Maryland. The charges have not been dropped.
Second, evidence of the murder-for-hire charges was presented in court. It was an element of the conspiracy charge. Not only was it presented, but it was presented in a way that Ulbricht's defense was obligated to rebut it.
Finally, the murder charges were presented again during sentencing, and proven to a "preponderance of evidence" standard during that process as well.
These details are all spelled out in the appeals decision.
They don't have to. In federal law (and in several states), you're guilty of attempt if prosecutors can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you had the intent to commit a crime, and took some substantial step towards it.
For example: Is the rational that if I earnestly believed I was planning on murdering someone who I thought existed, that it is the lead up and consideration that is the crime, rather than the actual attempt (which could never happen)?
So I went looking at this number to see how it stacks up to existing drug distribution.
The US market for illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin was just over $100B in 2010. This lines up well with estimates that legal marijuana in Colorado was around $1B. If we're going to look at how big this guy was in absolute terms, his global market was the size of a single illicit drug in a single state.
This is where I run out of data. What's the usual sentence for single-state single-drug distributors? My impression was always that it took huge infiltration operations to get the management with more than a few years on technicalities, and the only way to get more than that was to hit them with charges like murder, bribery, or conspiracy.
The minimum sentence for the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Statute is 20 years, but pretty much everyone gets life, once all the other charges are added on.
Saying he only had 1% of the US market is a ridiculous way to look at it. I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for this guy.
Thanks for the legal link. I'd gone googling for "kingpin law" and hadn't found it. That explains that, and why my guess was wrong: I'd been looking at cases from before its introduction.
> I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for this guy.
If we're really going to get into this discussion...
The marketplace was inherently driven by "customers find and buy" rather than "suppliers market and sell" and the supply chain had tighter feedback loops, meaning that there were few mechanisms or motivations for suppliers to worsen their customers' habits. Additionally, the use of mail, cryptocurrency, and a website reduced the possibility for Things To Go Wrong, eliminated threats of force, disallowed predatory loans and bartering, and I presume provided conflict-resolution protocols that didn't involve "busting a cap in yo ass". Finally, doing it by internet and mail reduced or eliminated suppliers' ability to interact each other, forcing them to compete by attracting customers The Way Smith and Young Intended and wiping out entire classes of harm relating to organized crime and bad product.
This guy was not a saint, he did something bad, the lesser of two evils should not get off. But I hold the position that the silk road was the economic equivalent of a safe injection site, unquestionably a better harm-reducer than the War on Drugs, and that a rational approach to harm reduction supports it.
I can agree to a point here. Black markets will pop up anytime something is banned, and this was just a novel way for that to happen. The activities that come along with black markets aren't necessarily the fault of the thing being sold.
The war on drugs has failed to stop drugs, but has created a very profitable war on drugs machine, that includes extra police, equipment, for-profit prisons, etc. We all pay for that.
However, this guy made choices. And he knew exactly what he was doing, and consciously contributed to every single one of these problems, and did it solely for the profit. I know he held to a strong libertarian philosophy, but how is that helping him now? It's not.
If you want to fix these problems, make people aware. Make them campaign issues. Donate to candidates who support good solutions. Vote. Protest. Use jury nullification. Fix the broken DEA schedule system. But don't sell 1.2 billion dollars of drugs and call yourself a hero.
It's not bizarre at all. A guy behind a computer or a guy leading a company can do so much more damage than any murderer. The "guy behind the computer" didn't hack up and at people but ruined the lives and many people, and their families. You might argue that everyone on silk road is a little guilty and that's probably true but he facilitated the ruining of lives of many spouses and children who did nothing wrong.
If you're arguing that silk road's drug sales ruined lives, I'll posit a counter-argument that silk road may have saved lives. People who are drug addicts are going to find their drugs one way or another. I highly doubt there were many people who got their drugs on silk road that wouldn't have gotten them somewhere else.
And instead of purchasing them on the street from dubious sources where the drugs may have been cut or mixed or mis-measured or not even actually what they claimed to be, these people were able to purchase them from sellers who had been peer reviewed thousands of times. Not an ideal situation, but often far safer than purchasing from random people on the street.
In my opinion, the solution to drug addiction problems is not prohibition. That's what we have now and it's not working.
As an anecdata piece I know a guy who had nothing to do with drugs until he was able to get some easily and with less risk from Silk Road. Not every buyer was already an addict.
I completely agree that the sale of assassination, children, organs, human trafficking are deplorable and thats definitely regrettable if those things showed up on the silk road with consistency and were allowed to remain.
But I was under the impression that ross ulbricht was being convicted mainly for drug trafficking and wasn't charged for any of those other things.
I'm sympathetic to the damage done by the "war on drugs". We need to change laws, creating a website that allows for murder and other horrible crimes is not the right approach.
The "think of the children!" appeal to emotion doesn't usually garner sympathy here.
I strongly disagree with your statement and where you're placing blame for the issues of peoples' lives being ruined. Drug users are the ones ruining their lives and their families if they have them with their addictions. They are consuming them, whether the "choice" of consumption is theirs anymore is anyone's guess, but the choice to not so much as attempt be clean is. There are support groups, harm reduction strategies, and rehabilitation avenues for most users of physically addictive substances.
Do you believe life imprisonment is the correct answer for every bar and liquor store owner in the world, or every pain management MD that is overprescribing Oxycontin? At the worst, Ulbricht has no worse social effect than these people.
I say this as someone whose own life has been "ruined" by addicts, has had my own issues, and who has seen my families' lives ruined by them the same. It is not the fault of the supplier. It is the fault of the user.
>Do you believe life imprisonment is the correct answer for every bar and liquor store owner in the world, or every pain management MD that is overprescribing Oxycontin? At the worst, Ulbricht has no worse social effect than these people.
There's a substantial difference between social drinking or overprescription and facilitating the large-scale sale of hard drugs.
> There's a substantial difference between social drinking or overprescription
We're talking about lives being ruined. I know many alcoholics that are "social drinking", every day, to the detriment of their own careers and family lives, being run through the court system DUI after DUI. I also know many who, after a back injury, are still on Oxy years later, just finding new doctors that will re-prescribe them Oxy again. I know people whose teenage children then started stealing and taking the Oxycodone from their parents' supply. I have a friend currently sitting in prison for opiate-based drug offenses as well -- much to the detriment of his immediate family.
These situations were facilitated by these very institutions. Alcohol distributors may be the kingpins and bars the corner dealers, pharma companies the kingpins and MDs the dealers. SR was a proxy and gateway to substances that in some cases are far less dangerous than the ones our own country seems completely OK with.
These are consumption-side issues, as you seem to agree with -- I am drinking a glass of wine right now, not four bottles. The same can be said about a lot of potentially socially destructive substances that were available on SR, and other illegal-in-many-states substances such as marijuana are generally accepted as virtually harmless in comparison to oxy or alcohol.
So I agree there are substantial harms from alcohol, but the context of alcohol sales is still different. It occurs in a regulated market with oversight, safety standards, etc. Now perhaps the market for, say, heroin should be legal and regulated, in order to reduce social harm, but it currently isn't.
That means by facilitating the distribution of a drug, you are propping up an illegal industry, perhaps run by organized crime and so on.
I don't disagree that there is an element of regulatory / governmental failure here, but to suggest that these activities are equivalent strikes me as a stretch.
No, there absolutely isn't. Huge numbers of people have their lives ruined by alcoholism. It is exactly, precisely morally equivalent to hard drug sales. There is no difference. I say this as a former hard drug addict.
Not at all. People should receive treatment instead of mandatory minimums, but we are a country of laws. Change the laws. Putting up a website that operates like the wild west where anything goes is not conducive for a stable society. Classifying my comment as a "think of the children" is not exactly fair discourse. I'm being fair to your comments, maybe be fair to mine. Families are sometimes affected and it's reasonable to think of them. Families are part of society and families contribute to the stability of society.
It likely wasn't the solicitation for murder that brought on the eye-popping sentencing (and that solicitation charge didn't make it into the final proceedings from what I read), but the entire stack of charges, but that is just my guess. This looks a lot like "throwing the book" at Ulbricht to "make an example" out of him, and try to clamp down on darknet activities. I'm not clear on the wisdom of this approach, as it seems as if it only encourages future darknet participants to increase opsec and "play for keeps", but as I'm just an outside observer, I'll defer to the judgement of the involved prosecutors and law enforcement who are much closer to the details. Would be fascinated to hear from others who follow this much more closely, and their thoughts on why Ulbricht got such a long sentence.
he got a long sentence because the court followed the federal sentencing guidelines [1], determined that his offense level was 50 which maps to life in prison. the court could have chosen a lesser sentence, but they determined that he tried to have 5 people killed to protect his criminal enterprise, which they didn't look too kindly upon. its all in the appeal [2]
There were better murders. He's paying for all the drug trade he facilitated. Given the current opiod crisis, maybe he deserves it. Maybe a few drug company ceos deserve it too.
No, he wasn't. Everyone keeps parroting the FBI's claim without any evidence. I strongly suspect the entire murder-for-hire story was either completely fabricated, or construed to kill any sympathy there may be for him in the public eye.
"I strongly suspect the entire murder-for-hire story was either completely fabricated, or construed to kill any sympathy there may be for him in the public eye."
That charge was dropped. It was never brought to court, and he was not found guilty of that. The murder for hire charges were just to make everyone agree with them, it was about opinion, not truth.
A guy behind a computer who orders multiple murders for hire, sure. Not sure what is bizarre about it; the idea that using a computer mitigates crime somehow is the more bizarre concept.
"guy behind the computer"? Watching a Let's Play of a video game makes you a "guy behind a computer". This dude was responsible for one of the biggest online drug trafficking sites in the world.
Do you think that Foghorn Leghorn or somebody is the one growing the poppy seeds that became the Heroin sold on Silk Road? No, systems like cartels grow it. And they inflict massive amounts of violence in order to do so. People in parts of places like Mexico are getting eaten alive by that violence due the heroin epidemic in the US fueling the illegal drug trade even further. Try telling victims of the drug trade that the people running and profiting on that epidemic are "just guys behind computers".
Does Ross Ulbricht deserve a life sentence? I don't really think so, but it sure as hell isn't because he's some angel "behind a computer". But because criminal justice should be rehabilitative and protective, not massively punitive and destructive of the lives it governs. Taking away someone's whole life is a serious matter.
Is Ross Ulbricht responsible for people in general doing drugs? No, and people will do them regardless of the law. But that also doesn't give Ulbricht a free pass for engaging in the act of trading drugs, taking part in the drug trade, a trade which is largely violent in many ways today and hurts people. (And no, it is not non-violent because your weed dealer grows 3 plants in his room and gives you sweet deals on it. There are consequences to the entire system of illegal drug trafficking.) No more than you have a free pass to take advantage of the mentally ill or a child, simply because there's a buck to be made from them. The solution to the violence of the drug trade isn't "let's monetize it ruthlessly", it's "let's dismantle it by putting people's lives first".
Is Ross Ulbricht absolutely guilty of running a criminal enterprise, and did he knowingly profit off a massively unjust model of business that put his own profit and selfish, misguided values ("nobody was getting hurt!") above the lives of people who suffer at the hands of the drug trade? Did he externalize the human consequences of his poor lil' business in order to profit? You bet your ass he did.
Call a spade a goddamn spade. Why so many dorks come out of the woodwock on this website in order to identify with Ulbricht, I'll never know. He's a gigantic moron (who apparently could not understand the possible implications his own trade could have) and criminal who was caught. Do people also empathize with abusive pimps here too, or did I miss something?
(Perhaps there's something there, about how Ulbricht and his fall fully characterizes the idea of "fuck you, got mine" which is pervasive in the spectacle of Silicon Valley, and the race for funny money. It's so sad Ulbricht's business failed, think about it! Everything and everything is fair game, and little apps can totally change it all. There was no violence involved at all using drug-trade-dot-com! He was just "disrupting" the good ol' drug trade, and messed up a lil' bit. He didn't "understand" that some living humans would be kidnapped and literally flayed alive, burned into dust and the ashes disposed, in order to intimidate people, so cartels could control production routes. Oops, maybe 2.0 can fix it. I bet if his last name was "Rodriguez" or something and he wasn't a huge nerd who knew how to use SSH, we'd be seeing some different tunes in here, too.)
Nobody here has the courage to respond. How could they when a bunch of cents on their drug dollar goes to fund the Zetas? Or the Taliban? The drug users here are too busy getting angry that the gov't wants to harsh their buzz to take an unsparing view of the consequences of their spending habits. You buy pot? Congrats, you paid a little bit to have some people boiled in acid. You buy heroin? Good for you, you just paid for part of an IED. You can wish it were different, but that's the reality of the market today.
Nobody's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to fund cartels. Everybody makes a choice.
You wanna buy mind-altering substances from legally grown sources, through a legal distribution network? Fine. But if you pay into the black market, there isn't enough blame shifting in the world to change the fact that you've got blood on your hands. Bleat about the ills of government all you want, but it won't reduce your complicity.
> You wanna buy mind-altering substances from legally grown sources, through a legal distribution network? Fine.
Very US-centric view. I can't. Weed is illegal in this country, and even if it wasn't that's not the drug I want.
I want LSD, which will never be made legal. Am I going to stop buying it? Am I fuck.
> Bleat about the ills of government all you want, but it won't reduce your complicity.
I'll reiterate;
It's a force of nature that cannot be stopped and denying it only causes more suffering.
By the same fallacious logic you are complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousnds of people in US wars of aggression or the massive increase of asthma and respiratory conditions in children due to your cars being on the road.
You. You are complicit.
Get over your mastabatory self-righteousness, it's not as attractive as you think.
Is funny how so many people are trying to lowball crime simply because it's done using computer, as if computer is some pure tech with no evil possible. Bernie Madoff got 150years for a non violent crime. Also scale always matter, hacking in neighbour WiFi is not same as putting ransomware in million systems.
This makes me very sad, but it's hard to explain why. The nonviolent crime charges leading to a life sentence is part of it. The obvious inability of our modern legal system to understand technology above a basic level is part of it. Maybe I'm not separating how awful "the drug trade" might be from some kid running a darkweb network. This sentence stings in a weird way.
What do you think the courts don't understand about technology that's relevant to this case?
You're saying he's just a middleman, but that's what he's accused of being: a guy who brokered millions of drug deals between suppliers and consumers, and made a ton of money doing it. Why does it matter that he did it via a darknet website or in person?
Being a drug network middleman is illegal, no matter how you do it. And he was one of the largest in history.
> The nonviolent crime charges leading to a life sentence is part of it.
Conspiracy charges where the overt acts charged include murder for hire (even if murder for hire isn't separately charged) is not really a nonviolent crime charge.
That's a shame, so young and entire life ahead of him. Would he have had a shorter sentence if he dealt only in narcotics? The article implies Silk Road was narcotics-only, but didn't it deal in other more immoral areas?
It doesn't matter which laws. Silk Road was a large-scale public display of flagrant lawbreaking, which appeared to be impervious to enforcement action through clever use of technology.
Shutting it down and eviscerating the person behind it was a matter of preserving the belief that we live in a law-governed society. The stakes here aren't drug prohibition, they're the capability and reach of government as an idea. If darknet markets continued at similar scale and visibility, we wouldn't be the United States anymore, but something closer to Somalia.
You could make a comparison to Wall Street, I guess, but selling volatile securities that turn out to be wildly overvalued isn't an obvious crime in the way that selling heroin is. And even then, the fallout of the financial crisis did enormous damage to public trust in society.
> Silk Road was a large-scale public display of flagrant lawbreaking, which appeared to be impervious to enforcement action through clever use of technology.
Uber at least makes an argument that it is a public good. That the laws that it is breaking are unjust, and for the most part, Uber does little to hide that it's breaking them - Their behavior is more akin, at least in theory, to Nonviolent Resistance. Silk Road, on the other hand, was blatantly violent, and clearly not willing to stand up for it's beliefs
(As a former Uber FTE, I got out because Grayballing was a thing, and because their argument of public good very clearly didn't hold water from inside the bucket, and I maintain that pretty much the same will happen to Kalanick when all is said and done. But the facade of peaceful tearing down of injustices - The very real statistics that show that you can hail an Uber to the bronx while black - are enough to put them in an entirely different class, at least until investigation got really started)
I would argue the contrary, the advertisement the (edit)darknet (and silk road) and purchasing illict drugs received from this has facilitated and increased sales over many different sites.
Not that I'm arguing they shouldn't have tried to charge anyone running one, despite my personal views it is against current laws, but by no means has the mission been accomplished imho.
If I remember correctly, it banned guns and child porn. So it wasn't this lawless no-ethics zone. In my opinion it should have banned opiates too (they are just so much more likely to destroy lives than other drugs), but regardless the site clearly had a minimum bar when it came to ethics.
I only say that because I think most people don't realize that.
Interesting coincidence with this news coming out the day I finished the Nick Bilton book. I do highly recommend it for anyone interested in the Silk Road or in drugs or in e-commerce. What I found most fascinating was to hear a true "Breaking Bad" tale.
Cruel and unusual punishment. The judges kept alluding to the volume of the sales; thats just the nature of the technology, not the nature of the crime. There was also language in the original sentencing that he was "privileged" (i.e., white) and therefore deserved an absolutely absurd sentence. You can rape and murder somebody and spend less time in jail.
However, he wasn't convicted on those charges. He was convicted of 'conspiracy to traffic narcotics', money laundering, and 'computer hacking'. The 'hacking' and laundering were only necessities of the narcotics trafficking business, so it really does boil down to him being convicted to a life sentence for the drug distribution business.
I'd take no issue with a life sentence for procuring murder, but see it as an absolute travesty that drugs are demonized to the point where a life sentence for trafficking is even a possibility.