The criminal complaint says that he used the same username to publicize the site as well as on Bitcoin forums, where he listed his Gmail account and asked for help. From there, there's a whole lot of coincidences.
They also got an image of his server, but no details on how they found the server are given. The complaint notes that another user warned him "an external IP is leaking", so the FBI might have found a weakness in his PHP setup. All it'd take is one command on the server...
:-O wow, I really really want to read about how they found him ... just curious to know considering all of the self-professed safeguards he had set up for himself
Here's a summary of his capture, noting his activities on Stack Overflow and drug forums, summarized from the warrant: https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a
It's unclear what is happening and this may be a prank. The initial reports that the FBI had seized the domain appear to be a sarcastic "down for maintenance" page on the part of Silk Road. I've yet to find a real source on the alleged arrest of
According to the filing, they found him through a combination of posting his personal @gmail.com address on the bitcointalk forum from the same account used to market Silkroad. Further, they found that his LinkedIn account somewhat corroborated the timeline/interest in what Silkroad is. Page 24 for the juicy details of how they identified him.
Also there is a section about murder-for-hire in Canada. Pretty wild stuff.
Update: Also he posted on Stackoverflow asking questions about Tor with his real name, then later changed his name. Supremely conspicuous.
"All told, the site has generated sales revenue totaling over 9.5 million Bitcoins and collected commissions from these sales totaling over 600,000 Bitcoins. Although the value of Bitcoins has varied significantly during the site's lifetime, these figures are roughly equivalent today to approximately $1.2 billion in sales and approximately $80 million in commissions."
Incidentally exactly how much Walter White made... That's a strange coincidence, or perhaps one of the clerks that gets paid to make up statistics for drug related criminal complaints is a breaking bad fan...
I don't think that the actual amount was mentioned until the last run of episodes. Prior to that I only remember it being a huge pile of cash that they had "stopped counting."
I don't think that an amount of money constitutes a spoiler, unless that very specific amount has something to do with a specific plot point. ("Ouch, my cancer! If only I had $80,000,001 exactly!")
I always err on the side of "it's a spoiler". If it's not in the show's trailer, I treat it like a spoiler.
I know that I'm personally much more sensitive to spoilers than a lot of other people, so it always annoys me how somebody says something thinking they're not spoiling anything without fully thinking through the implications of what it is they're saying. It's almost arrogance, really, to simply assume that you know what will and will not spoil some given experience for another person.
The anti-spoiler crowd are pretty demanding. A large and vocal group fought hard to introduce prominent spoiler warnings on Wikipedia. There was a time when every other literary work there had a warning that the article might be discussing the subject at hand.
It's a strange phenomena, and I'm not entirely convinced that it doesn't imply poor quality entertainment. Good quality entertainment is eminently re-watchable. How many times have I seen "Groundhog Day", or read "Lord of the Rings"? The fact that I know exactly what happens doesn't seem to diminish my enjoyment at all. In fact, it seems like with every re-experience I pick up some new detail or insight.
OTOH I can totally understand spoiler alerts with respect to sport and sporting-type events (like politics). It usually does seem to diminish the pleasure of watching a game when you know the outcome.
i think there are two different qualities to entertainment/art:
-one is the structural quality, which remains with every repetition.
-another is the novel quality, which is basically the (un)pleasant surprise of something new or unexpected, which obviously is heavily diminished by repetition. i believe aristotle's catharsis to be based on this quality.
i agree with you that entertainment/art that only possesses the latter quality is poor quality entertainment. it does not follow that entertainment/art with both qualities does not lose at least some of its value when the spectator is exposed to spoilers.
So this means the FBI now owns 600,000 bitcoins (5% of all bitcoins)? Probably more, since they also control the (presumably large number of) bitcoin stored in accounts on Silk road.
Seems like this could lead either to the legitimation or deligitimation of bitcoin as the FBI must assess their worth. It also gives the FBI the ability to mess with bitcoin markets if they choose, by flooding supply.
These numbers are over the lifetime of the site. I bet many of the bitcoins earned were sold/exchanged. It also includes revenue numbers which was paid out to sellers.
If it's the same person, there's a Ross Ulbricht who has a BS in Physics from UT, and would be 29. Best friends with this guy[1], who lives in SF (from Austin), and declares himself as best friends.
It's worth remembering that the "Revenue" number would count bitcoins twice if they were used in two transactions. If bitcoins used to buy something on the site were then used by the seller to buy something else, the revenue would be twice the total bitcoins used.
That's a real page-turner. I found this particular item funny on page 30:
"Based on my training and experience, I know that criminals
seeking to hide their identity online will often use
pseudonymous usernames to conceal their identity."
He posted a question about connecting to a Tor hidden service with PHP on Stack Overflow. He didn't realize it puts your full name next to the question (and he had signed up with his real name), so literally 1 minute after posting the question, he changed his full name to a "pseudonymous username". He then changed his SO registration information from firstname.lastname@gmail to a fake name at a fake server.
> …so literally 1 minute after posting the question, he changed his full name to a "pseudonymous username".
If this is true then how did they catch it? Does SO keep records of all name changes? Did they give that info to the FBI? Do the FBI scrape SO and save all versions of the data? Was this data collected from PRISM?
The exact question I had ... though I guess if they're tracking all network data, then they could have just gone back and looked up the history of the SO post.
Like "hey guys I'm starting a server for the illegal trade in drugs, but it's on Tor so nobody will know who I am, sincerely I M Anidiot".
Oh and just in case my names not distinctive enough here's my Gmail account so you can trace back all my IP connections and verify when I'm online and such.
> Today, those specific, articulable facts take the form of sweeping generalizations that officers assure us are based on their “training and experience.” This phrase comes from the Evidence Code section stating the sources an expert can use to form their “expert opinion” in court. Today, police are taught to repeat this phrase on the witness stand when they want the court to take their bullshit speculations and generalizations as actual evidence.
Well, I read the PDF and every statement of something based on "training and experience" seemed completely reasonable. What it means is "this is so obvious I shouldn't need to prove it". Maybe this is abused at times, but not here.
So, Agent-1, based on your training and experience, can you conclude, Agent-1, that simply because someone uses a pseudonymous username to conceal their identity, Agent-1, that they are a criminal?
I just read through it. They introduce a lot of evidence from their forensic analysis of the Silk Road servers, but they don't seem to explain how they got access to the servers. Did anyone find that in there?
They probably literally just scanned-in a printout of it. Likely they do this to avoid the issues of improper PDF redactions that got famous a few years ago. Do the redaction on real paper (or not) and just always scan it in, and it's nearly foolproof. And trust me, we get a lot of fools in the government. ;)
If they want to get you, they will. Reading how they got him, but I wouldn't be surprised if NSA handed them the info informally and then the FBI had to find another way to justify it. When you know the end results, "connecting the dots" is much easier. Parallel construction http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUKBRE9... and all.
No seriously, the whole parallel construction dialogue for NSA feeding DEA tips is exactly the situation suggested here. Why do you equate published journalism with hoaxes and factually devoid crazies. It is insulting to a fairly civil discussion.
Ah, so the NSA's spying does have positive effects. It helped capture a drug king-pin who hires hitmen. I'd believed that dragnet capture of Internet traffic presents problems in trying to isolate relevant evidence, but you claim that this is not an issue.
This certainly bolsters the claim that the NSA's surveillance is doing society good. I'm not comfortable with that, but there it is.
It occurs to me: a great tool of a "know everything" government is the ability to exclude dots, leaving the dots which merely need connecting. Just like the sculptor's aphorism "I just remove everything that isn't the subject, and there it is", a near-omniscient police force can address a crime by eliminating everyone it knows wasn't involved (by their near-continuous presence on metadata, cell tower triangulation, security cameras, etc.), eliminating everywhere it knows the remaining 'dots' couldn't have been, and eliminating every action it knows couldn't have been performed ... leaving a very limited "negative space" for the inferred suspects to operate in. A lot of data to mine, but given NSA-levels of awareness, NSA et al could respond (legally!) to requests for information with a vast list of who/what/where wasn't involved, leaving a conspicuous implication of the guilty.
General idea yes, but takes on new implications & scope when operating at NSA levels of universal surveillance exceeding police work by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.
Well, we know the NSA is behind some things, or else it wouldn't exist.
We also know this is an incredibly high profile case. It's in the interests of the DEA and FBI to lean on their contacts in the NSA, even.
That said, the FBI is very good at what it does, and finding this sort of thing isn't just what the FBI does, it's what any investigator does. (I have personal experience with this area that I can't disclose, but trust me, everyone knows how to link usernames between websites.)
I'm not sure one way or the other, and while it's clear that Ulbright was fairly sloppy, there are a few instances of serendipity:
1. The agent randomly (?) stumbling on a LinkedIn profile which matched the timeline/description of the Silkroad project, which prompted to seek another unidentified agent which had all kinds of juicy deets on the suspect.
2. CBP intercepted a package addressed to Ulbright containing a bunch of counterfeit official documents during a "routine border search".
3. Found Tor/PHP/curl-related posts on Stackoverflow from his real name account, but also says he changed his name/email to a fake one. Did they happen to stumble on it before he changed his name? Or had some kind of access to an earlier archive? Or cooperation from Stackoverflow? Unclear.
I'll update more as I run into them. Super interesting read.
Still, it's clear that they've done a ton of research on Silkroad and DPR. The notes are thorough and accurate. A job well done.
I think that the main slip-up was the use of the same account on BitcoinTalk to both promo SR and to post his personal Gmail account to try to hire Tor experts. Everything else listed above sounded like it either came chronologically after that discovery (the CBP intercept) or it was a result of that discovery (the StackOverflow and LinkedIn accounts)
> 1. The agent randomly (?) stumbling on a LinkedIn profile which matched the timeline/description of the Silkroad project, which prompted to seek another unidentified agent which had all kinds of juicy deets on the suspect.
Sounds like parallel construction to give them a legal way to introduce evidence.
I'd imagine the NSA has crawlers that can parse LinkedIn profiles enough to make good guesses on who is likely to be involved in hacking, criminal entrepreneurship, etc., and to pull out relevant dates and other indications of ideological shifts or large secret projects. Cross-reference with banking records to show when someone is unemployed for a long time and yet still has unexplained funds... DPR was probably on a reasonably short list.
The curl part is also pretty shoddy btw. Would you really use curl to setup a server running behind TOR? I don't have adequate 'training and experience', but it seems natural that website working through TOR should use normal web server software behind some sort of reverse proxy, not curl. He, whoever, wrote that document, seems to imply that questions about curl and TOR network are necessarily connected with running a website through it. He also doesn't mention dates of the questions.
The curl code was probably for querying the latest exchange rates from Mt Gox. It's important he made sure those queries went out through TOR because otherwise they could be used to trace the Silk Road server.
The most interesting part was trying to decipher what was got cleanly and what was got with PRISM.
Stackoverflow is one not specifically mentioned as "obtained records from" just that those actions happened on stackoverflow. Non-public actions. Also why would stackoverflow keep a record about each username and email change, but not IP and access times? They never mentioned how he connected to SO or if he masked it. BUT they mentioned that in every other case.
I imagine they had access to his gmail account and StackOverflow emailed him when he changed his account information. I would bet that the StackOverflow information came after they identified his gmail account (which had his full name in it!).
Had he not made some pretty amateur mistakes (like using his real email) he probably wouldn't have been caught. My guess is that email address is what lead to his downfall. Without a target the FBI wouldn't have much to investigate.
Now the question is who will step in to fill his shoes. How much of Silk Road's infrastructure is open and reusable? The market has been created, the users exist - they'll be looking for a replacement.
Of course, after this I think most would-be entrepreneurs might be having second thoughts.
Atlantis Market was spun up not to long ago, including a full length animated commercial for the site. Many believe it was just an elaborate honey pot ran by law enforcement to entrap users, and it failed to gain any adoption.
Black Market Reloaded is where most of the SR users will go.
Atlantis was a scam, read the posts of all the people that could not withdraw their Litecoins and Bitcoins in that week they said they were going to stay open for withdrawals.
We released code for a Bitcoin market yesterday, opened it up to the community. The code is good, tested, and is now OS. So have at it. I think that Bitcoin has had enough press in recent months that there is enough traction for a few more companies to really make legitimate marketplaces if they can build the infrastructure. Hopefully the Coinpost project provides them with that. https://github.com/brighton36/CoinPost
His linkedin page is pretty transparent if you know anything about him
"Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."
So he's a hypocrite and/or got corrupted by money and fear...not saying he is a good person, just that in retrospect his linkedin page is pretty transparent to confirm who he is and what he's doing based on his market anarchist writings posted under the DPR name, etc
Systemic (not systematic) means "of or related to a system". This is not, strictly, governments. It can be any system from the ad hoc (Occupy movement) to the deliberately constructed (governments, corporations). It can be social systems, economic systems, anything.
Systemic use of force, then, is a situation where the use of force against some parties is inherently part of the system. Whether it be physical, legal with threat of physical, emotional force or violence.
If the particular economic sphere he's running in relies on violence (based on my experience in Las Vegas in the 90s, I'd say the drug world is one such system), then this isn't libertarian free market at its best, it's just the systemic use of force typical of the illicit drug industry.
But he mentions "institutions" specifically in his diatribe, alongside governments. Surely he believes that a corporation or organization can be just as evil and dangerous as a government actor?
It sounds like he corrupted himself through his own institution, if the allegations are true.
No, that would be anarchism. Part of what distinguishes libertarianism from anarchism is that it does acknowledge the utility of a government, and very few libertarians would deny one of its primary, legitimate duties is public safety.
Do not mistake believing that our current government (which is, might I add, the single largest entity in the history of man; sorry, it isn't that bizarre to think that it might just be a teensy bit too large, despite people's best efforts to somehow cast this as a crazy idea) is too large with thinking that the correct amount of government is zero.
Anarchism does not necessarily mean that and is not incompatible with libertarianism. Anarchism simply means "no ruler" -- everyone has the same rights. A libertarian anarchist condemns coercion and the initiation of force for all. Small government libertarians condemn the use of force and coercion for private individuals (e.g. robbery), but see no problem when the state commits the same acts (e.g. taxation).
Sure, an anarchist society could determine everyone has the right to murder/rob/etc., but our problems are bad enough when it's only the government robbing and murdering people (legitimately). I can't imagine why a society would decide it's OK for everyone!
>> art of what distinguishes libertarianism from anarchism is that it does acknowledge the utility of a government, and very few libertarians would deny one of its primary, legitimate duties is public safety.
Public safety to me means guaranteed housing, education, healthcare, and sustenance.
Arguably stretching "safety" I would also include prevention of the concentration of power (i.e. wealth) and exploitation by capitalists (i.e. those significant portion of the real assets of the world).
Everyone wants public safety, even Anarchists. It is a nothing statement. Beliefs vary in how to achieve it. Most libertarians* would want public safety to be outsourced to private sector so it supposedly would be ruled by a free market.
*To be clear, I refer to the people (mostly from USA) who call them selves libertarians. Whose beliefs have only superficial similarity with historically Libertarianism.
That's more the anarcho-capitalist wing of libertarianism. Overall libertarian is a pretty broad term. It can range from states-rights folks, to people that just want a smaller federal government, to people that want virtually no government at all. The NAP is not at all a common thread in that group. The primary thing that seems to bind them is a generally strict interpretation of the US Constitution, and where they differ is on how they interpret various sections. Some are almost like Christian fundamentalists, they just want the strict text of the Constitution. Others are more like conservative Roman Catholics, the strict text along with the other writings contemporary to its development (to frame the interpretation).
Maybe the victims of the tens of thousands of paramilitary police assaults that occur each year in this country? Do you think that those soldiers are just going to let their targets walk free?
We have the world's largest prison population for a reason: we imprison large numbers of people each year.
I agree that that's a problem, one that I want to see get more play in the popular press so people will stop ignoring it. And I do, primarily via voting for candidates that never seem to win (I have few options in this region), try to do something regarding the prison system and would like to see many activities decriminalized. smokeyj's post, however, is somewhat hyperbolic in its tone and I wondered if they had anything else in mind. Reminds me too much of my "The South will rise again!" coworkers.
I'm sure if you extorted a multi-millionaire Republican or Democrat or whatever with something they couldn't go to the police for, nothing at all bad would happen to you.
Reminds of how criminals wear religious symbols like golden crosses. I think the biggest and perhaps only believer in his anarchost theories was himself.
If you're running a private criminal enterprise bringing in millions of dollars, why would you risk drawing attention to yourself by putting you manifesto on LinkedIn allowing them to xref your crazy with your lack of unemployment?
Well, once you know, then it's 'obvious', just like a good murder mystery is obvious in retrospect. But that's hindsight bias talking. If you don't know that he's DPR, he just comes off as another libertard, of which there must be hundreds of thousands online.
Somewhat amusing list of YouTube videos recently liked by this guy: "How to Get Away with Stealing" and "Privacy: A PostMortem" are right on top. http://www.youtube.com/user/ohyeaross
well, actually it seems to be at least his 2nd hire if he is not using it as a bargain chip. if he is saying the truth, he previously managed to get somebody executed for 80k.
True, also, it seems like my first hypothetical twist might not have been that far off as I thought. Other comments[0] readily theorize it to be a likely scenario.
I really don't understand, why stay in the US doing that stuff when it's the most controlled place ever? even if he was pretty well hidden just leaving the US would have made his life a lot easier...
In previous postings DPR has indicated he inherited the site from the original owner, it would be funny if he knew they were closing in and sent the phony papers to the first DPR in an effort to give himself some time to escape.
His actions were so sloppy (according to the evidence listed) that even if was living somewhere else, they would have found him. And places that'd make it really hard for the USG to prosecure are not places that you'd want to live in the first place.
He should have operated as if he lived on the DEA's front lawn.
Wow, what a complete shitbag (DPR = Dread Pirate Roberts):
DPR sent a message to "redandwhite" stating that "FriendlyChemist"
is "Causing me problems" and adding: "I would like to put a bounty on
his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an
adequate amount to motivate you to find him?"
And then
Later that same day, redandwhite sent DPR a message quoting him a
price of $150,000 or $300,000 "depending on how you want it done" -
"clean" or "non-clean"
DPR responded: "Don't want to be a pain here, but the price seems high.
Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you
quoted the best you can do? I would like this done ASAP as he is
talking about releasing the info on Monday.
DPR and redandwhite agreed upon a price of 1,670 Bitcoins - approximately
$150k - for the job. In DPR's message confirming the deal, DPR included
a transacation record reflecting the transfer of 1,670 Bitcoins to a
certain Bitcoin address.
Made $80mm in commissions running a drug trafficking network, paying hundreds of thousands to have people executed, mail fraud, money laundering, conspiracy.... He's looking at cartel level prison time.
Depends how they did it. Shoot someone with an unregistered or stolen rifle from long distance, capture your brass, destroy the rifle and brass. Obviously a murder, if it were done that way. Very little effort involved, and what've the cops really got then?
You'd probably create more evidence trying to make it look like an accident than you'd clear up just by doing it some easier way.
It really depends on where you are. There are vast rural areas in USA, for instance, in which there are many rifles the theft of which wouldn't even be noticed for weeks. Just don't take them during the month before deer season.
I would imagine a 'clean hit' is one made to look like an accident and a 'non-clean' one doesn't take the same precautions?
The police couldn't find a record of the alleged murder victim, so I'm guessing that "redandwhite" and "friendlychemist" were the same person, just playing a con on DPR to get some cash.
If Person A has known motive to kill Person B, in a "non-clean" hit Person A will immediately come under suspicion. If the hit is "clean", anything could have happened and it's a lot harder to establish it as a murder and therefore Person A has a much lower risk of being brought into the case.
My guess is that "clean" includes disposal of the body and other evidence. Like in movies where people call up the "cleaner" after a murder to make the bodies disappear (e.g., "Victor the Cleaner" in Point of No Return).
He asked the other account a few months later to make him a fake ID. Why would you be contacting and want to be involved with somebody who extorted you to the tune of $150k just a few months back? Not to mention he would then have to give up his physical address to have the docs sent, to someone who just a few months previous threatened to release the physical addresses of users on the site?
There's no evidence of that. This theory just comes from the Bitcoin community's desire to make DPR into a martyr. Its not as if he was particularly sophisticated in covering his tracks in the first place (a lot of the things he did were facepalm worthy). Occam's razor -- he meant to take out a hit, and was just stupid.
Yeah, this is absolutely stunning stuff. No doubt plenty will immediately cry foul and say that he's been set up, but let's wait and see what the investigation shows.
If DPR actually paid to have someone killed, it would surprise everyone who knew anything about him. He's thought to be a libertarian and totally against the use of force.
That hypocrisy grabbed me too. The complaint, when talking about his background makes special note of this;
After going to Penn St for a grad degree in materials science,
"Ulbrecht states that his 'goals' subsequently 'shifted'. Ulbricht
elaborates, obliquely, that he has since focused on "creating an
"economic simulation" designed to "give people a first-hand experience
of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of
force" by "institutions and governments."
The monopoly on the use of force by Government agents keeps private actors (or at least it attempts to) from employing violence on their own terms. Absent that monopoly, private agents will fill the void.
You wouldn't be able to build up the necessary military force without expending massive amounts of money and drawing negative attention to yourself. Investors would not want to be involved with a company creating a PR nightmare and wasting their money on evil. Customers would boycott, the company's stock price would drop, and they wouldn't be able to carry out their plans anyway.
You seem to be assuming that the allegations are true. The understanding that most people have had is that DPR is a pure freedom fighter. If you take away those allegations, all that's left are fake "crimes" that aren't really crimes at all, just things that government doesn't like.
Edit: but I'm waiting and reading with an open mind.
I think it's reasonable to believe that he started out a pure (ish) freedom fighter and got corrupted by the fact that he had made 10's of millions of dollars off his little experiment.
A lot of libertarian writing on force starts from a more general "non-aggression principle", and derives the wrongness of state violence as just one special case.
I'm not sure this proposed hit was unjustified. Threatening to do something which would end up with 1000's of people caged for years seems like a valid reason to respond with force.
I think it is an arbitrary comparison. Possibly 10,000+ years in jail and who knows how many shankings vs maybe 50 of no existence for one person. You are right that, in a basic scenario, killing is a disproportionate response to a lesser crime, but this is an active threat versus a past event and who knows what jail would bring for these hundreds of people who could be convicted.
I'm not sure of the details of this situation but just following libertarian legal reasoning there may be another way to justify it. The logically consistent libertarian position on abortion is neither pro-choice nor pro-life. Block's theory of evictionism is basically that a mother's right to remove a fetus is stronger than the fetus' right to be in the womb, yet the mother is not permitted to kill the fetus straight off exactly.
If there was developed some technology such as a pig fetus used to carry the child to term then that technology would have to be employed. Would there be some other reliably effective means to stop this snitch besides killing him?
> I think it is an arbitrary comparison. Possibly 10,000+ years in jail and who knows how many shankings vs maybe 50 of no existence for one person. You are right that, in a basic scenario, killing is a disproportionate response to a lesser crime, but this is an active threat versus a past event and who knows what jail would bring for these hundreds of people who could be convicted.
If you are simply arguing the most utilitarian point of view for the sum of the actors involved, surely paying him off is the most moral thing to do. $300K to prevent 10,000+ years of jail and shankings versus killing someone. $300k is much less than the life of one person.
You think the most moral outcome is one person who threatens a thousand with years of caging getting $300K? Are there any situations where you don't think one should be rewarded for making massive threats?...
It's more moral than killing someone over a threat based on the pure conjecture that carrying out the threat will result in a punishment by a 3rd party.
Isn't the real threat the 3rd party that would be doing the jailing? Why is freely communicating what some people did a grounds for murder? He's not the one that is doing the locking people up -- it just so happens to be more convenient to murder him then to take on the justice system. Convenience does not make it the moral course of action.
> Block's theory of evictionism is basically that a mother's right to remove a fetus is stronger than the fetus' right to be in the womb, yet the mother is not permitted to kill the fetus straight off exactly
I adore libertarians, I really do, for all the energy and earnestness they bring to their theory of government. But I can't take them very seriously, and this sort of thing is exactly why.
I know that people who cling to government and democracy mean well, but when they eschew logic and waste my time with non-arguments like this it is terribly annoying.
The "non-aggression principle" is basically a propaganda con by libertarians, though.
The way this works is that they take their own favorite definition of personal property, and then re-define the word "aggression" as: "anything that violates my definition of personal property, and nothing else".
So, when a land owner shoots somebody who mis-stepped onto his land without warning, that is not aggression according to libertarians - if you really take them seriously.
Obviously, when you point that out to a libertarian, an endless game of shifting definition starts, much like how many discussions about the existence of god go with theists.
I certainly wouldn't endorse it, just pointing to it as an attempt to avoid the circularity of defining violence as "what the state does" and then defining "a state" as "the organization with a monopoly on violence".
I do think it nonetheless ends up pretty entangled in the ideas invented by the modern centralized state, especially the ideas of "property ownership" and "a contract", which are supposed to exist in a sort of ethereal global-variable state separate from any facts in the physical world or local interactions. The modern state enables that fiction by maintaining a central property register backed by a cadastral survey, and a set of courts that enforce the abstract idea of a contract. Minarchists are perhaps more open about this dependence than anarcho-capitalists are, by just directly asserting that the state should exist solely to operate and enforce a property register and contract law.
You're probably right, there's definitely a spectrum of libertarianism.
And it's not as if libertarians are entirely crazy. It's healthy to have some baseline skepticism towards authority. But it's also healthy to have some baseline skepticism towards market solutions. As usual, the best answer(s) are somewhere in compromise and in the middle.
I guess that ideas like the "non-aggression principle" are so alluring to some because they have a sort of superficial "intellectual purity" which that kind of compromising answer lacks.
You are spreading FUD and misinformation. Shame on you. The non-aggression principle does not work like the laws of physics, so just because someone steps on your land, it does not give you the right to shoot them. You are arguing from absurdity. The non-aggression principle is about not committing force, fraud or coercion against another human being. It's really that simple. You may use force when someone is directly threatening your life. That's how it's been discussed in the forums and videos I've been exposed to. Stop holding principles regarding morality to the same standard as the laws of physics.
I should point out that you're conflating anarcho-libertarians with old-school statist libertarians. Most people who self-identify as libertarian believe in a state to protect property, prosecute crime, etc.
Even the self-described anarcho-capitalist libertarians of my acquaintance usually see the use of force as legitimate, as long as it's a non-governmental actor such as a private police force, mutual defense pact, enforcer of contracts, publicly traded corporation, etc. The people who take on the somewhat more difficult task of imagining a society without the organized use of force at all tend to call themselves anarchists, in my experience.
I'd guess that he might be willing to kill people in the case that there are threats to his personal security. He also had aspirations for his site to bring about a libertarian revolution and may have thought that threats to the integrity of the site were worth killing for.
Although I believe the foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit
a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who
have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to
redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any
record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about
March 31, 2013.
I formatted your post a bit better so it's readable on mobile devices, but I agree.
32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's
intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with
Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of
there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to
redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire.
Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White
Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"
Since the police couldn't find a record of the alleged murder victim, I'm guessing that "redandwhite" and "friendlychemist" were the same person playing a con on DPR to get some cash.
No worries, the best way I've found to do it is to manually split the lines every 10 words or so.
So a paragraph that would run off the page and break mobile devices in normal circumstances should be broken in several places by a hard 'return' plus more spaces.
Is really just a collection of sentence fragments
that all fit the same formatting. There might be
a better way, but I don't know it!
> 32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"
Or an angle bracket, with an opening and closing asterisk.
> 32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"
This means you don't need to include any line breaks.
I've added (another) comment to the HN feature requests post asking for a real quote function, so that offtopic discussions like this can come to an end.
If you're an emacs user, prefix the line with the desired number of spaces then type M-q, copy back into your browser. That's my solution to formatting block quotes at least. Your long line prexixed with 3 spaces in emacs:
So a paragraph that would run off the page and break mobile
devices in normal circumstances should be broken in several
places by a hard 'return' plus more spaces.
And your split-by-hand block quote:
Is really just a collection of sentence fragments that all
fit the same formatting. There might be a better way, but I
don't know it!
As a Vim newb (well, ok I can use it, but I'm not well-versed in its more arcane elements), how do you select lines? C-<space> in emacs starts region selection, but I've never tried to select anything in Vim.
I'd venture a wild guess that DPR knew the two were the same :) He paid off friendlychemist "indirectly" but also communicated that he wouldn't mind extreme measures to make him disappear shall this occur again.
If you keep reading, the document later details that DPR contacted this "redandwhite" person, who he contracted to kill the other person, regarding false identifications. That seems to add some doubt to your hypothesis, or at least complicates things.
It appears to fit with his persona of being a ruthless pirate, and the language also fits the big talk idea. He was paying for the problem to disappear, and he knew that, but he talked it up for fun.
However, he went too far into his fantasy, and not too smartly, and he'll pay for it.
If it was a 'clean' hit, why would there be record of a homicide? From what I've read, it sounds like a clean hit could/would be made to look like an accident.
The US gov produced a document a while back about assassinating people - though for the life of my I can't find my copy so it's possible there wasn't anything novel enough in there to be worth keeping it. I believe they recommended causing someone to fall from a high place. I'd imagine by grasping their ankles and then tipping them over the edge; though the precise methodology for the tripping was redacted in the version I saw.
In case you are wondering why he was out for FriendlyChemist, this claims that user was extorting him for $500k by threatening to release the information of thousands of Silk Road users.
Here's the part I don't understand:
* A user friendlychemist threatens DPR.
* DPR asks friendlychemist to refer his "supplier" to DPR.
* redandwhite says he was "asked to contatct" DPR by friendlychemist and friendlychemist owes redandwhite money
* DPR asks for a hit from redandwhite on friendlychemist
That makes zero sense to me. Why would you assume those two users are not the same person or aren't at least allies?
Or that they would simply split the money and his target would shut up (pretend to die, by disappearing off that monicker). Or if it's the same user, the money doesn't even have to be split for that. Or it's a way to send a message that he's serious.... (in a way the recipient gets).
* BUT DPR was also afraid it'd lead to more extortion
* DPR knew redandwhite was same as friendlychemist or an associate of his
Based on these assumptions, DPR's move to pay redandwhite was really DPR paying friendlychemist while also communicating the length to which he is willing to go to deal with extortionists. So by going the path he went, he paid off friendlychemist and scared him at the same time.
That's crazy. Ulbricht would have to have been the dumbest person in the world to create an electronic record of having ordered and verified the consummation of a hired killing simply to send a message. "LOL JK", he planned to tell the jury?
The guy he tried to have killed could show up and testify on his behalf and a reasonable jury might still find him guilty.
Absurd.
I think we can all see at this point that Ulbricht got played. But that doesn't exculpate him. (Not that it matters yet; he hasn't been charged with the attempted murder).
FC: Give me money so I can pay my debts.
DP: Lemme talk to your creditor.
RW: I'm FC's creditor, whats up.
DP: I don't owe FC money. Rather I want him dead. Can you do this.
RW: Sure. $250k.
DP: I normally pay 80k to kill people. Split the difference?
... uh. wtf? The whole exchange really makes no sense, unless you assume that DPR knew he was talking to the same guy all along and was working on terms that would make the guy not bother him by scaring him off.
Or friendlychemist creates a new account called jerkyboy and rethreatens him with extortion, this time claiming to have evidence that he took out a hit on friendlychemist from his friend redandwhite ... and just keeps the whole cycle going.
Sounds like the guy was a petty criminal who wasn't as smart as he should have been if he wanted to run an underground market for criminal activity.
>>>> So by going the path he went, he paid off friendlychemist and scared him at the same time.
And anybody else who thought they would try and blackmail money out him. It seems completely plausible scenario and kills two birds with one stone. No pun intended.
Did I miss something in the article? Where did you get that information? Here's the complete text of the linked article:
Oct 2 (Reuters) - U.S. law enforcement authorities raided
an Internet site that served as a marketplace for illegal
drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and arrested its
owner, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday.
The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known as "Dread
Pirate Roberts," in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to
court filings. Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with
one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy,
computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering
conspiracy, according to a court filing.
Made $80mm in commissions running a drug trafficking network, paying hundreds of thousands to have people executed, mail fraud, money laundering, conspiracy.... He's looking at cartel level prison time.
He paid someone to kill an extortionist that had threatened to release incriminating info on a lot of users. As far as the law goes it's the same as him killing his child's first grade teacher over a bad grade but when you extort someone operating a drug dealing network, what do you expect?
I said this in the last DPR story (the interview): my bet is that he will go down for tax evasion. It's hard to prove murder, conspiracy, drug trafficking, etc., but it's easy to prove that this guy made a bunch of money and didn't pay taxes on it. He'll get federal prison time for it.
s/Libertarian ideals/Stereotypical Libertarian ideals in the general sense, as characterized by an emphasis on individual rights, and a decrease in power or control of the state or societal systems over individual financial or personal actions or rights./
I understand the psychology behind being shocked at this and everything thinking he deserves jail time, but given the War on Drugs and the way the US Justice System works with respect to drug charges, I would imagine that that one violent crime charge is likely to be a drop in the bucket in comparison to all the victimless crime charges for drugs.
However, what I am surprised by is the fact that there wasn't really any focus on his facilitation of arms trafficking. I would imagine that those activities are more likely to cause actual harm to society that we should be worried about.
I understand the psychology behind being shocked at this and everything thinking he deserves jail time, but given the War on Drugs and the way the US Justice System works with respect to drug charges, I would imagine that that one violent crime charge is likely to be a drop in the bucket in comparison to all the victimless crime charges for drugs.
However, what I am surprised by is the fact that there wasn't really any focus on his facilitation of arms trafficking. I would imagine that those activities are more likely to cause actual harm to society that we should be worried about.
It's not entrapment unless the police induce the crime to be committed. Nobody forced him to "order a hit." Attempting a murder-for-hire is not something you can be tricked into doing.
I think one could be entrapped into a murder-for-hire.
Certain government authorities know you're acquainted with someone who's previously been fingered for murder-for-hire but never convicted.
The "authorities" call you and threaten to murder your family; you naturally seek back-up from your erstwhile acquaintance. The police ensure they give you just enough information to track their threat back to a "person" of their construction.
Boom. You're up on a rap of "conspiracy to commit first degree murder" (or whatever it's actually called in your jurisdiction).
I've never used the road, but rather I fear it was central to the high value of Bitcoins. I would love to be wrong but I can see my investment dropping and I don't have the guts to sell back into fiat.
I guess it depends on whether you believe cryptographic currencies have significant use cases outside of criminal enterprise.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the greatest value of bitcoins comes from their use by criminals, doesn't that make your investment in them a touch morally questionable?
The government still exists, but there's no legal authority for many (but not all) of the federal employees to do work for the government, since there is no appropriation in force to pay for that work.
Those who are working are essentially working for the promise of payment at some indefinite time in the future (except for the military, who apparently really are a sacred cow...).
Government employee here. Many of us aren't working on the promise of payment - we've already been paid. My salary was already "paid" two years ago. Congress passed a bill, the president signed it, and the DOE gave us the money. Now, if the government shutdown lasts until May, we'll probably be out of that money then I'd stop receiving paychecks. Of course, I hope to have a new job by that point, anyway.
Are you a government employee, or a contractor? I know that there are some persons paid for by multi-year appropriation bills, but those are comparatively rare. Most expenditures are handled via a single-FY appropriation (and my understanding is that this covers all APF employees).
If you're a contractor, on the other hand, then you're not a government employee (legally), so the whole discussion doesn't apply to you directly.
Government shutdowns are done in a way that retains a certain subset of services that are either paid for through unaffected funding mechanisms, or have been designated essential. That includes soldiers' salaries, payments to military contractors, operations of the FBI and DEA, and small to medium-sized portions of other agencies (e.g. the EPA is mostly shut down, but the Superfund and Mine Safety divisions will stay open).
"Essential" services are kept running. Throwing people in prison for selling drugs is essential, as it turns out, as is making press releases about it.
It doesn't seem like it's how they caught him, but it's some circumstantial evidence towards his guilt. He changed his username from his real name to "frosty" at some point.
Not totally surprising since SR was mentioned before Congress over a year ago, and some leaked documents mentioned ongoing investigation. I've been telling people it's just a matter of time before it's shut down and that you should stockpile now before it's too late.
Let's hope SR hasn't been keeping any real identifying transaction records, or I bet we'll see a spate of high-profile arrests from tech companies.
607 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadWas just a matter of time. I'd be interested in knowing how they traced him, considering how overtly cautious he was known to be.
Also, leaving friends/family/network in the US behind is very, very difficult.
They also got an image of his server, but no details on how they found the server are given. The complaint notes that another user warned him "an external IP is leaking", so the FBI might have found a weakness in his PHP setup. All it'd take is one command on the server...
So he probably has a successor and/or is a decoy.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ulbric...
http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1nl5ne/shutdown_is...
However, there also appears to be a criminal complaint out for the founder.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ulbric...
EDIT: Seems like this is real. Reuters reports that Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, was arrested in San Francisco. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/02/us-crime-silkroad-...
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ulbric... / Mirror: http://www.scribd.com/doc/172773407/Ulbricht-Criminal-Compla...
According to the filing, they found him through a combination of posting his personal @gmail.com address on the bitcointalk forum from the same account used to market Silkroad. Further, they found that his LinkedIn account somewhat corroborated the timeline/interest in what Silkroad is. Page 24 for the juicy details of how they identified him.
Also there is a section about murder-for-hire in Canada. Pretty wild stuff.
Update: Also he posted on Stackoverflow asking questions about Tor with his real name, then later changed his name. Supremely conspicuous.
Incidentally exactly how much Walter White made... That's a strange coincidence, or perhaps one of the clerks that gets paid to make up statistics for drug related criminal complaints is a breaking bad fan...
I know that I'm personally much more sensitive to spoilers than a lot of other people, so it always annoys me how somebody says something thinking they're not spoiling anything without fully thinking through the implications of what it is they're saying. It's almost arrogance, really, to simply assume that you know what will and will not spoil some given experience for another person.
Seen JFK? He dies.
The Zebra did it.
OTOH I can totally understand spoiler alerts with respect to sport and sporting-type events (like politics). It usually does seem to diminish the pleasure of watching a game when you know the outcome.
i agree with you that entertainment/art that only possesses the latter quality is poor quality entertainment. it does not follow that entertainment/art with both qualities does not lose at least some of its value when the spectator is exposed to spoilers.
Seems like this could lead either to the legitimation or deligitimation of bitcoin as the FBI must assess their worth. It also gives the FBI the ability to mess with bitcoin markets if they choose, by flooding supply.
https://twitter.com/RJPinnell
http://renepinnell.com/homepage.html
According to this that's close to the current total supply of all bitcoins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time.p...
The graph shows the supply in 2013 at around 9.5 million, same number as what the article claims.
EDIT: But interestingly looks like canadian police can't confirm.
He posted a question about connecting to a Tor hidden service with PHP on Stack Overflow. He didn't realize it puts your full name next to the question (and he had signed up with his real name), so literally 1 minute after posting the question, he changed his full name to a "pseudonymous username". He then changed his SO registration information from firstname.lastname@gmail to a fake name at a fake server.
If this is true then how did they catch it? Does SO keep records of all name changes? Did they give that info to the FBI? Do the FBI scrape SO and save all versions of the data? Was this data collected from PRISM?
Seriously?!
Like "hey guys I'm starting a server for the illegal trade in drugs, but it's on Tor so nobody will know who I am, sincerely I M Anidiot".
Oh and just in case my names not distinctive enough here's my Gmail account so you can trace back all my IP connections and verify when I'm online and such.
> Today, those specific, articulable facts take the form of sweeping generalizations that officers assure us are based on their “training and experience.” This phrase comes from the Evidence Code section stating the sources an expert can use to form their “expert opinion” in court. Today, police are taught to repeat this phrase on the witness stand when they want the court to take their bullshit speculations and generalizations as actual evidence.
Interestingly, the FBI agent that wrote that document and requested his arrest warrant is the same one cited as tracking down Sabu of LulzSec: http://nymag.com/news/features/lulzsec-sabu-2012-6/index3.ht...
True, but "connecting the dots" is much easier when it's your job, and something you've spent decades practicing.
Not to say that you're wrong, but there's no evidence to back you up. We might as well assume that the NSA is behind everything, ever.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...
No seriously, the whole parallel construction dialogue for NSA feeding DEA tips is exactly the situation suggested here. Why do you equate published journalism with hoaxes and factually devoid crazies. It is insulting to a fairly civil discussion.
This certainly bolsters the claim that the NSA's surveillance is doing society good. I'm not comfortable with that, but there it is.
So we now have to prove a negative or the NSA did it? Logic has officially left the building.
It tends to work well from a prosecutorial POV as well because anyone who is accused by that process has little evidence to exclude them.
We also know this is an incredibly high profile case. It's in the interests of the DEA and FBI to lean on their contacts in the NSA, even.
That said, the FBI is very good at what it does, and finding this sort of thing isn't just what the FBI does, it's what any investigator does. (I have personal experience with this area that I can't disclose, but trust me, everyone knows how to link usernames between websites.)
1. The agent randomly (?) stumbling on a LinkedIn profile which matched the timeline/description of the Silkroad project, which prompted to seek another unidentified agent which had all kinds of juicy deets on the suspect.
2. CBP intercepted a package addressed to Ulbright containing a bunch of counterfeit official documents during a "routine border search".
3. Found Tor/PHP/curl-related posts on Stackoverflow from his real name account, but also says he changed his name/email to a fake one. Did they happen to stumble on it before he changed his name? Or had some kind of access to an earlier archive? Or cooperation from Stackoverflow? Unclear.
I'll update more as I run into them. Super interesting read.
Still, it's clear that they've done a ton of research on Silkroad and DPR. The notes are thorough and accurate. A job well done.
Sounds like parallel construction to give them a legal way to introduce evidence.
Stackoverflow is one not specifically mentioned as "obtained records from" just that those actions happened on stackoverflow. Non-public actions. Also why would stackoverflow keep a record about each username and email change, but not IP and access times? They never mentioned how he connected to SO or if he masked it. BUT they mentioned that in every other case.
Of course, after this I think most would-be entrepreneurs might be having second thoughts.
Black Market Reloaded is where most of the SR users will go.
Then the site went dark and took everything.
"Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."
Systemic use of force, then, is a situation where the use of force against some parties is inherently part of the system. Whether it be physical, legal with threat of physical, emotional force or violence.
If the particular economic sphere he's running in relies on violence (based on my experience in Las Vegas in the 90s, I'd say the drug world is one such system), then this isn't libertarian free market at its best, it's just the systemic use of force typical of the illicit drug industry.
It sounds like he corrupted himself through his own institution, if the allegations are true.
Do not mistake believing that our current government (which is, might I add, the single largest entity in the history of man; sorry, it isn't that bizarre to think that it might just be a teensy bit too large, despite people's best efforts to somehow cast this as a crazy idea) is too large with thinking that the correct amount of government is zero.
Sure, an anarchist society could determine everyone has the right to murder/rob/etc., but our problems are bad enough when it's only the government robbing and murdering people (legitimately). I can't imagine why a society would decide it's OK for everyone!
No true libertarian...
Arguably stretching "safety" I would also include prevention of the concentration of power (i.e. wealth) and exploitation by capitalists (i.e. those significant portion of the real assets of the world).
Everyone wants public safety, even Anarchists. It is a nothing statement. Beliefs vary in how to achieve it. Most libertarians* would want public safety to be outsourced to private sector so it supposedly would be ruled by a free market.
*To be clear, I refer to the people (mostly from USA) who call them selves libertarians. Whose beliefs have only superficial similarity with historically Libertarianism.
We have the world's largest prison population for a reason: we imprison large numbers of people each year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D16fm5NgsA
Hypothetical Meta Twist: DPR actually suffers from multiple personality disorder and is also the guy he's trying to kill and thus also the hitman.
A truly anonymous system really poses some hard problems, man.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483382
(Or at least include a link or something.)
He should have operated as if he lived on the DEA's front lawn.
You'd probably create more evidence trying to make it look like an accident than you'd clear up just by doing it some easier way.
That would be hazardous in my opinion. Now you have two places where you can place the preparator.
The police couldn't find a record of the alleged murder victim, so I'm guessing that "redandwhite" and "friendlychemist" were the same person, just playing a con on DPR to get some cash.
I took it to mean fast and relatively painless versus protracted suffering, i.e. "non-clean", messy.
Without the 'respectively', it's ambiguous whether the clean or non-clean were the cheaper of the two alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Guerin#Murder
Clean: Traffic accident, apparent suicide, etc.
Almost an analog for "Walter White," who also made $80mm on his calamitous journey from "honest" meth-cooker to kingpin.
Payed off anyways but at the same time negotiated a discount and scared the guy into not trying it again.
This is corroborated by the fact that the FBI knew the name, date and city yet couldn't match it up to a real body.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-s...
After going to Penn St for a grad degree in materials science,
Edit: but I'm waiting and reading with an open mind.
I'm not sure of the details of this situation but just following libertarian legal reasoning there may be another way to justify it. The logically consistent libertarian position on abortion is neither pro-choice nor pro-life. Block's theory of evictionism is basically that a mother's right to remove a fetus is stronger than the fetus' right to be in the womb, yet the mother is not permitted to kill the fetus straight off exactly.
If there was developed some technology such as a pig fetus used to carry the child to term then that technology would have to be employed. Would there be some other reliably effective means to stop this snitch besides killing him?
If you are simply arguing the most utilitarian point of view for the sum of the actors involved, surely paying him off is the most moral thing to do. $300K to prevent 10,000+ years of jail and shankings versus killing someone. $300k is much less than the life of one person.
Isn't the real threat the 3rd party that would be doing the jailing? Why is freely communicating what some people did a grounds for murder? He's not the one that is doing the locking people up -- it just so happens to be more convenient to murder him then to take on the justice system. Convenience does not make it the moral course of action.
I adore libertarians, I really do, for all the energy and earnestness they bring to their theory of government. But I can't take them very seriously, and this sort of thing is exactly why.
And I thought the journalist that got his laptop seized at an airport was harshly treated...
The way this works is that they take their own favorite definition of personal property, and then re-define the word "aggression" as: "anything that violates my definition of personal property, and nothing else".
So, when a land owner shoots somebody who mis-stepped onto his land without warning, that is not aggression according to libertarians - if you really take them seriously.
Obviously, when you point that out to a libertarian, an endless game of shifting definition starts, much like how many discussions about the existence of god go with theists.
If you're interested in a well-argued and entertainingly written outsiders' perspective on this, I recommend Matt Bruenig. Here's a starting point: http://www.demos.org/blog/8/21/13/fun-times-libertarianism
I do think it nonetheless ends up pretty entangled in the ideas invented by the modern centralized state, especially the ideas of "property ownership" and "a contract", which are supposed to exist in a sort of ethereal global-variable state separate from any facts in the physical world or local interactions. The modern state enables that fiction by maintaining a central property register backed by a cadastral survey, and a set of courts that enforce the abstract idea of a contract. Minarchists are perhaps more open about this dependence than anarcho-capitalists are, by just directly asserting that the state should exist solely to operate and enforce a property register and contract law.
I agree that it's a baffling world view though.
And it's not as if libertarians are entirely crazy. It's healthy to have some baseline skepticism towards authority. But it's also healthy to have some baseline skepticism towards market solutions. As usual, the best answer(s) are somewhere in compromise and in the middle.
I guess that ideas like the "non-aggression principle" are so alluring to some because they have a sort of superficial "intellectual purity" which that kind of compromising answer lacks.
I just put in two spaces like the formatting guide said. But the whole thing ended being one line.
> 32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"
Or an angle bracket, with an opening and closing asterisk.
> 32. Although I believe foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire, I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013"
This means you don't need to include any line breaks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6484074
Shift-v starts line-by-line visual mode.
Ctrl-v starts visual column mode(which is both very cool and very useful)
set mouse=a
Or startline,endline command: 10,20d
EDIT: Or he was watching too much breaking bad and beginning to assume Heisenberg's characteristics after feeling invincible for earning $80MM
However, he went too far into his fantasy, and not too smartly, and he'll pay for it.
Here's the part I don't understand:
* A user friendlychemist threatens DPR.
* DPR asks friendlychemist to refer his "supplier" to DPR.
* redandwhite says he was "asked to contatct" DPR by friendlychemist and friendlychemist owes redandwhite money
* DPR asks for a hit from redandwhite on friendlychemist
That makes zero sense to me. Why would you assume those two users are not the same person or aren't at least allies?
* DPR was ready to pay friendlychemist upto $150K
* BUT DPR was also afraid it'd lead to more extortion
* DPR knew redandwhite was same as friendlychemist or an associate of his
Based on these assumptions, DPR's move to pay redandwhite was really DPR paying friendlychemist while also communicating the length to which he is willing to go to deal with extortionists. So by going the path he went, he paid off friendlychemist and scared him at the same time.
The guy he tried to have killed could show up and testify on his behalf and a reasonable jury might still find him guilty.
Absurd.
I think we can all see at this point that Ulbricht got played. But that doesn't exculpate him. (Not that it matters yet; he hasn't been charged with the attempted murder).
Toy version of the conversation.
FC: Give me money so I can pay my debts. DP: Lemme talk to your creditor. RW: I'm FC's creditor, whats up. DP: I don't owe FC money. Rather I want him dead. Can you do this. RW: Sure. $250k. DP: I normally pay 80k to kill people. Split the difference?
... uh. wtf? The whole exchange really makes no sense, unless you assume that DPR knew he was talking to the same guy all along and was working on terms that would make the guy not bother him by scaring him off.
Edit: Nevermind! Apparently the 80k "hit" wasn't just a negotiation technique: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bal-sil...
Sounds like the guy was a petty criminal who wasn't as smart as he should have been if he wanted to run an underground market for criminal activity.
And anybody else who thought they would try and blackmail money out him. It seems completely plausible scenario and kills two birds with one stone. No pun intended.
Along with five other countries.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Ulbric...
There's some interesting stuff in there, page 21 is the murder for hire scenario and 24 is where the agent explains how they identified DPR.
He paid someone to kill an extortionist that had threatened to release incriminating info on a lot of users. As far as the law goes it's the same as him killing his child's first grade teacher over a bad grade but when you extort someone operating a drug dealing network, what do you expect?
They'll stack the charges so high you a helicopter to see over 'em. He'll either plead it out and get fifty or fight it and get life. His choice.
If the federales have all of his assets, he ain't fighting nothing.
However, what I am surprised by is the fact that there wasn't really any focus on his facilitation of arms trafficking. I would imagine that those activities are more likely to cause actual harm to society that we should be worried about.
However, what I am surprised by is the fact that there wasn't really any focus on his facilitation of arms trafficking. I would imagine that those activities are more likely to cause actual harm to society that we should be worried about.
1. Canadian spies set up "FriendlyChemist", hack into another vendor and get extortion material on DPR
2. "FriendlyChemist" tells "RedandWhite" (obviously the same person/agency) to contact DPR
3. "RedAndWhite" extorts American based DPR to pay for a murder that mysteriously does not happen in Canada
4. DPR then (stupidly?) pays "RedAndWhite" for fake ID documents from Canada, which mysteriously get stopped at the border
5. US agency arrests DPR on delivery of Fake ID's
6. There is no chance of entrapment since:
- Based on the Nature of TOR, we can never prove that "FriendlyChemist/RedAndWhite" are a police force (karma)
- They are most likely not a domestic force, but were working covertly with US agencies (cannot be subpoenaed). </pre>
Certain government authorities know you're acquainted with someone who's previously been fingered for murder-for-hire but never convicted.
The "authorities" call you and threaten to murder your family; you naturally seek back-up from your erstwhile acquaintance. The police ensure they give you just enough information to track their threat back to a "person" of their construction.
Boom. You're up on a rap of "conspiracy to commit first degree murder" (or whatever it's actually called in your jurisdiction).
Doesn't seem so impossibly far-fetched does it?
http://blockchain.info/en/tx/4a0a5b6036c0da84c3eb9c2a884b6ad...
If, on the other hand, you believe that the greatest value of bitcoins comes from their use by criminals, doesn't that make your investment in them a touch morally questionable?
Those who are working are essentially working for the promise of payment at some indefinite time in the future (except for the military, who apparently really are a sacred cow...).
If you're a contractor, on the other hand, then you're not a government employee (legally), so the whole discussion doesn't apply to you directly.
http://krebsonsecurity.com.nyud.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
It doesn't seem like it's how they caught him, but it's some circumstantial evidence towards his guilt. He changed his username from his real name to "frosty" at some point.
My takeaways:
When operating an underground network 1) don't post to SO questions regarding Tor 2) keep distinct login names for everything
It's probably best to keep distinct OS containers for everything. Don't trust the browser at all.
Let's hope SR hasn't been keeping any real identifying transaction records, or I bet we'll see a spate of high-profile arrests from tech companies.