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.
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.