[mbillie1]

> Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.

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)

[pakled_engineer]

He hired CIs posing as hitmen a few times. His diary/movie script/fictional book on his laptop they found claimed he tried to kill an employee who had potential to snitch, and a scammer in Canada that ripped off many users.

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.

[tripzilch]

Got a link for the claims in those first two paragraphs for us? Because if that is true, it changes a whole bunch of things, including the argument about entrapment I made in a sibling thread.

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.

[Disruptive_Dave]

There is entrapment, though. A good true crime read that deals a bit with the dilemma police/FBI deals with: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/12/sexual-predators-2009...

[malka]

SO, in his line of business, what would be the 'good thing to do, when someone blackmail your whole customer base ? Sue ? Sadly, due to the prohibition, hitmen and violence are the only way for people like Ulbricht to deal with such issues.

[gnopgnip]

Did he send any money to the hitman?

[kevinnk]

Yes. For the first murder he spent $500,000 and for the second $80,000

[tripzilch]

> > Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.

> 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