"Sure, we wanted Ross to go free. We wanted him to be innocent, to be a hero: the poster boy for privacy in the Information Age."
That may be partially true, but Ross polluted much of the goodwill the Internet community had for him when he decided to "order a hitman." I doubt he was ever that serious about hiring one. If you read the chats he had, he sounds completely out of his league, and probably never would have been capable of it if the FBI did not sort-of-entrap him with a murder-for-hire plot. Unfortunately, he really screwed himself by going down that road.
The best argument in defense of silk road and Ross, from a moral/philosophical standpoint, is that it represents a victimless crime. Indeed, by moving transactions into the online world, it may have actually facilitated a drop in real crime. Ross must have known that if the FBI ever caught up to him, he could defend himself with this moral reasoning, and at least stand a chance of acquittal in a jury trial. It's a shame that he had to completely ruin that chance by also trying to hire a hitman. He should have kept things simple and never strayed out of the territory of libertarian economic experiment.
Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.
Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> > 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.
I disagree. A person that doesn't want to harm anyone wouldn't hire (or attempt to hire) a hitman. If the agent would have been a hitman, someone might be dead.
"he never had to decide in real life"
The reason he got in trouble was because he did decide it in real life. It's not like he put a hit out on a World of Warcraft character.
"put a lot of emotional pressure on him"
Emotional pressure? really? That's an elegant way of putting it.
"He hasn't lost my goodwill yet."
It's only because you support the legalization of drugs and you are letting this cloud your judgement. He is an asshole and deserves to do some jail time.
This is similar to would-be terrorists who get honey potted by the fbi. They find people wiling to put bombs in a car and blow up a city block and they sell them the fake bombs/ equipment and then arrest them after they attempt to detonate it, some times not even getting that far.
Conspiracy to traffic narcotics cases are the same. A CI tells a tale of being connected to some cartel and offers to import a bunch of invisible cocaine and if you agree to it and show up with payment you're convicted without any actual drugs existing. The overt act does not even need to be completed, any action done by the accused to further the conspiracy agreement is good enough to get life in prison.
US and UK/Commonwealth countries have similar conspiracy laws where no actual drugs are needed just action on your part to further the conspiracy agreement. A gangster here in Canada actually tried to use a defense that it was his intention to rob the informant peddling invisible drugs, thus never planned to honor the conspiracy agreement as he and his henchmen showed up to the exchange with guns and not money. It didn't work because carrying out the full conspiracy isn't needed you just need any action on your part laid out in the conspiracy agreement and he had rented a truck to carry the large dope shipment as the informant had suggested.
The way I read about it, the FBI arrested one of this employees and made it appear as if that employee took all of his money and did not talk to Ulbricht anymore. Then the FBI created another persona that did talk to him, and waited until his hitman order. It was all part of an elaborate play.
"It's only because you support the legalization of drugs"
Ross Ulbricht believed harm had come to the people he'd ordered gangland executions against.
There were plenty of opportunity to come forwards and say: "Hey, I've done an incredibly bad act; here's everything I know about the people I talked to."
Obviously, doing so wouldn't end well for him; it would show some moral standing, however.
The only person responsible for these choices is Ross Ulbricht.
While the possibility of entrapment certainly adds a bit of grey, I know that I would never consent even under pressure to "ordering a hitman" under anything but the most extraordinary self-defense circumstances. I would never do that just because I didn't like someone or had some kind of disagreement, or even if that person was doing something bad (but not physically threatening) to me. If I found myself in such a conversation I'd just drop it and walk.
The only situation I can imagine where I might consent to this would be if someone were, say, physically threatening myself or my family and I had clear evidence that they intended to follow through -- and no normal civilized legal recourse.
The government guy could have said "Hey look I think this guy is going to go to the feds and we're all going to go to jail! Give me the money and I'll take care of this problem. If you don't, I'm going to come after you because I'm not going to go to jail for this."
At that point, a person might not feel that they have any choice. And the government gets to claim that "he ordered a hit"
That's a terrible argument. Imagine you just made that threat to me. I will say "No. And if you come after me, I will just turn you in to the feds." And now you're almost assuredly going to jail, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first place. This is a quick way to stick yourself in an impossible-to-win situation and violate everyone's trust.
Anyway, the 'government guy' happened to keep records of what was said, so I don't see why you'd be tied up on such a hypothetical. And Ulbricht could have argued entrapment in court, if that was contested dialog.
> "No. And if you come after me, I will just turn you in to the feds."
Ok so you're going to turn the other guy in to the feds for what exactly? How do you know this other guy? Why would him turning you in to the feds be a problem, unless you're doing something illegal?
DPR: He this guy is doing something bad, arrest him!
Feds: How do you know he's doing something bad?
DPR: Well I run the Silk Road and he told me that if we didn't do something about this other guy, that HE was going to turn us in to you!
Feds: Oh, okay well now you're definitely going to jail.
So your clever arrangement whereby you're going to use the feds to get the guy threatening you to go to jail has now fallen flat on its face, because now you're both going to jail. Which is the thing that you were both trying to avoid in the first place.
Why is the drug trade so violent? Because it exists outside the law and thus there's no one to arbitrate disputes (legally) and so people have to find their own resolution. Hence killing.
It's not a clever argument, it's just the better of two options. If we are killing the guy because he might turn us in, then I should also just kill you because you've threatened to turn me in. There is no way that is a winning proposition for anybody, so it doesn't guarantee any safety for anyone.
If you're willing to kill someone to avoid jail, you better believe I would be willing to turn you in if you've already decided to turn me in because I don't want to kill someone. If we DO kill them, then by the same logic, I should have you killed to.
Threatening the person you are working with to "deal with threats" is just stupid. It just means you have to be dealt with as well.
I'm sorry, but that idea that because it exists outside the law, people can't settle disputes with anything other than murder is complete horseshit. They choose to employ violence, and as such, they are completely and 100% responsible for their actions.
> I'm sorry, but that idea that because it exists outside the law, people can't settle disputes with anything other than murder is complete horseshit.
Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. I'm not saying violence in the ONLY answer, but it's definitely the only one that I can think of that doesn't involve them going to jail.
They can't sue because the thing under dispute is an ill-gotten-gain and thus the court wouldn't adjudicate the issue that is for them at hand but instead put them both in jail for stealing.
What are their other choices? Just suck it up and deal with the fact that they got screwed? Sure, but then the next time a robbery comes around, everyone knows that they can screw you and you'll just suck it up. Yay, free labor! That won't end badly for you will it?
Maybe they can pre-negotiate a contract that specifies how a certain sum of money will be distributed but which doesn't specify how it comes to be? Why would a law-abiding person write such a contract? Take them to court and you might win, but the police might investigate and again you're both in jail.
I'm not saying that there is no possible alternative ever, but your simply asserting that something is true and then providing absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up that claim isn't terribly convincing.
"Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. "
I never said they had recourse through the courts. I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence. If they choose to resort to violence, that's entirely their fault, and no one else can be blamed for that.
According to that logic we don't need courts, police, government, etc at all. I think it's a great idea, but practically speaking it's not awesome.
I like the idea of a microkernel government better than the monolithic thing that we currently have, where you can subscribe to police and fire and whatever. I'd prefer that the government mostly provide courts and a system by which other areas of natural monopoly are better managed (like roads, utilities, etc). But to suggest that we don't need a government at all is pretty radical.
If you can't see that "I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence" leads DIRECTLY to the government isn't really necessary, then I don't know what to say.
I'm not saying anything like that at all. And I do not respect any argument that mentions the "monopoly on violence" bullcrap.
These people made their choices. They decided, of their own free will, to become involved in something they knew to be highly illegal. Everything that follows is their fault, and their fault alone. Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
Even Candidate Obama (now President Obama) acknowledges that the state is the institution which has a monopoly on violence. To try and dispute this is akin to arguing that they sky in not in fact blue.
> Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
Not at all! I merely show that a NECESSARY result of disenfranchising people who want to engage in a particular kind of trade which the government deems "wrong" (in the legal sense, because the government can't really determine morality) is that there are very predictable, unfortunate outcomes like this. The whole drug trade is absolutely RIFE with violence because people have no alternative to settle their disputes. I'm not saying that they are guiltless; far from it! But a modicum of thought makes it plain that the violence is due to the illegal nature of what they're doing.
Look at all the other industries that manage to grow things, distribute them, and eventually sell them directly to customers. Coffee, fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. All these industries have rates of violence which are very close approximations to ZERO. What is different about drugs? Two things:
1. They get you high (but so does coffee, sugar, etc)
2. They're illegal
Obviously I can't PROVE the causality is from 2 rather than 1, but I think a reasonable person could make a reasonable assumption that 2 is far, far more likely than 1.
> Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts.
They don't, but that's their own fault. If your life of crime has forced you into such a predicament that murder-for-hire is a more viable option than dealing with the authorities, you only have yourself to blame. The reason that crime pays so well is because criminals take advantage of opportunities that the rest of society agrees to abstain from for the sake of maintaining order and mutual security; if you decide to exploit those opportunities for the sake of enriching yourself, you shouldn't expect society to feel any sympathy for the fact that you one day felt forced to employ violence in order to protect your criminal investments.
But marijuana is now straight up legal with similar restrictions and regulations as alcohol in several states. And it seems like there's serious momentum to legalize in the rest of them.
I doubt we're going to see radical legalization where the drug war completely ends in the next 5-10 years but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened well within my lifetime.
"Life of crime" can have a highly temporal definition and thus introduce far, far more grey area than you're letting on by your very binary assertions.
Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.
I haven't followed this trial closely enough to know exactly what happened here, but despite the sanctimonious, performative "I'm-a-good-person" denials you're getting in response, entrapment is a real thing. If one's opponent is a pro (this is a lucrative sub-profession of "private investigators") one won't see it coming and will be lucky to avoid it. I'm sure the FBI is also skilled at this technique, which may explain why many PIs are former agents.
A family friend had disappointed some wealthy people by lawfully overcoming a do-not-compete. It didn't happen for years, but eventually she was manipulated into making statements about another person, and of course those statements were taped by the "friendly" person who was "helping" her with a family issue. The swiftness of the DOJ's response could only have been motivated by campaign contributions. And now this person is a felon.
This is a good person, certainly much more "Christian" than I've ever been. Some might say that sort of person is actually easier to entrap, since her emotional levers are more obvious, but I think everyone has levers, often closely related to their own moral codes. Ulbricht's levers were his project and potential threats to that. Of course it would have been wiser for Ulbricht to take a broader view and reject violent suggestions. It isn't the case that mere morality suffices to avoid this trap.
Sure, we could draw the line at allowing law enforcement to kidnap a suspect's family, but should we? To the contrary, I think we've given our employees in law enforcement entirely too much leeway already.
Not necessarily, but when you have a guy who's hiring fake hitmen to punish sellers trying to rip off buyers it's hard to argue that he never would have considered a hitman if not for law enforcement intervention.
The practice of law enforcement officers inducing a person to commit a crime he otherwise would not likely have committed. I have a hard time seeing why my extreme example couldn't be found to be entrapment if any law enforcement official were foolhardy enough to try it.
"Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show these employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week—had stolen from Roberts and eventually managed to get himself arrested by dealing with an undercover agent. Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he would return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about hitmen, Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover agent who had helped bust his employee.
On January 26, 2013, Roberts asked that the former employee get "beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back." A day later, afraid that his former employee would squeal to the police, Roberts asked if it was possible to "change the order to execute rather than torture?" Roberts said he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case." The agent offered to do the job for $80,000."
My ethical system considers intent, consequences in specific, consequences in general, economic impact, psychological factors, and next-best alternatives for each actor.
Thoughtlessly ordering someone else to commit a murder is definitively worse than ordering someone else to commit a murder after careful and deliberate consideration, presuming all other factors remain equal.
In my view, killing someone just because it benefits you in some way is worse than killing someone because you truly believe that they deserve it--even if the thought process that led to the latter conclusion is provably flawed.
Not all murders are equally bad. The condition only short circuits at murder if your ethical framework has discrete values rather than defined intervals on a continuous spectrum.
Of course, ordering a murder in a stage production where no one actually gets killed is hardly even bad at all. It's almost like doing a mission in Grand Theft Auto, or doing a shot-for-shot remake of the baptism scene from Godfather II. Or perhaps it's the inversion of Ender's Game, where rather than the ethical burden being lighter because you didn't realize it was for-realsies, it is heavier because you didn't know it was fake.
RU may be an ass for trying, but the facts remain that no one died because of him, nor was anyone at any risk of dying from his actions. The cops put him inside a fake situation, and he acted according to his assumed role as though it were real. If I were judge or prosecutor, I wouldn't want to untie that knot either.
In all of those examples, those actions are so far beyond the point of "bad" that one being worse than the other is largely an academic argument, and completely moot.
And he did not know that it was fake. Therefore any idea that he's off the hook because no one got hurt is irrelevant. It could have just as easily been real, and then people would have died because of his actions.
I disagree. Laws in American states provide for different degrees of murder, and can adjust the range of punishments accordingly. Inchoate offenses can be tacked on for actions that increase the severity of the crime or attach guilt to other people.
We simply have different rules in our ethical systems, you and I.
I, for one, am less apt to makes crimes of someone's thoughts or intentions, in the absence of actual harm. I also feel the role of policing should be more in the nature of investigation, capture, and detention awaiting trial, rather than prophylactic protection.
I would very much like all police work to start with identifying that a crime has occurred, work backwards to find out who did it, capture that person, and then turn over the person and all available evidence to the courts. I find the trend towards identifying a potential criminal, then gathering evidence on that person until a crime can be identified, to be anathema to a free society.
Whether RU committed the crimes of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder or not, the police committed crimes themselves in exposing him, and I find it more acceptable ethically for the guilty man to go free than to allow the state's justice system to profit by its own corruption. That's the fruit of the poison tree doctrine. It's how we keep a free society free, and how we protect cops from retaliatory violence from the people who feel they are serving themselves rather than justice.
They absolutely did not. It was his idea. You need to go learn what entrapment is. Hint: It's not simply when you do something and the cops happen to be involved.
My understanding of the situation is that he contacted someone advertising contract killing services on his own darknet. The person he contacted was a confidential informant (undercover cop, or someone working with the cops).
Now, don't misunderstand. That was wrong of him. And it was also stupid. But there is a very important difference between finding out about an illegal transaction and participating in one.
If it were prostitution, it would be the difference between watching a john pick up a hooker and arresting them both, or posing as either a john or a hooker and arresting the other when they eventually committed to the crime. The former is acceptable. The latter is not.
It wasn't a case of a contract killer ratting his client out to the police. There never was a contract killer.
In my opinion, if the cops were a necessary component in the commission of the crime, it is entrapment. If they were simply able to exercise a degree of control over the situation such that they are able to immediately arrest all parties to a crime before anyone gets hurt, that's a little creepy, but still acceptable.
Crime requires intent, conduct, concurrence, and causation. Entrapment elides over one or more of those elements.
Is it really victimless? I'll admit that for something like pot, that is responsibly grown and used, there is no victims (well maybe with second hand smoke, but you get that just as much from cigarettes). But many drugs being sold do not come responsible producers. Instead, they come from groups that cause a lot of harm in order to acquire the money from selling those drugs. Yes, legalizing responsible production would largely fix this problem, but a current purchase still funds a horrible group. Even though the seller and buyer never hurt anyone themselves, they are directly funding those who do.
Now, maybe he actually did more good than bad. Maybe for every sale funding a bad organization, he helped switch 10 from a bad organization to a responsible producer. And maybe that would still have been enough to get a jury to acquit him.
I have no evidence for this, but I think that your chances of funding a violent group with your purchase would be significantly lower on a dark net market than if you made the purchase on the street.
Existing drug cartels have a great competitive advantage in violence, intimidation, and smuggling. None of those skills are particularly useful in competing with anonymous rivals on Silk Road.
For some drugs, sure. For the group of chemistry students cooking up a batch of MDMA or LSD inside the US and selling it directly to consumers through USPS, not so much.
Not likely. The prices on SR were higher than on the street because of more middlemen, not fewer. Whoever is selling to you on SR is buying from the street.
> Instead, they come from groups that cause a lot of harm in order to acquire the money from selling those drugs. Yes, legalizing responsible production would largely fix this problem, but a current purchase still funds a horrible group.
So basically, to rephrase, the existence of the law is what makes the law necessary. It's almost tautological.
IF it were treated as a public health problem (Portugal apparently did this with some success), Ross might have been hailed as a leader of a new economy and the IRS coffers might have been a bit heavier. Instead, the intelligent, optimistic, apparently caring mind who wrote this, is rotting in jail: http://rossman.deviantart.com/journal/something-new-24987116...
How many of us would have at least considered hiring a hitman if someone threatened to make our black-market 100 million dollar empire go away and have us get sent to jail? More than would be comfortable admitting it, if they looked deep into their hearts, I'm guessing.
>So basically, to rephrase, the existence of the law is what makes the law necessary. It's almost tautological.
Not quite. The law against production is what makes the law against buying and selling more relevant. What makes the law against production and sales relevant is different reasoning (I am neither defending nor attacking that reasoning as that would be a long discussion either way). I wouldn't consider it tautological nor circular reasoning, but it is stacked, and if you were to legalize production, that reason for the ban on selling and buying would no longer apply. The stacked reasons, now without their base, would no longer be supported.
Are there other reasons, especially for certain drugs that are more dangerous? Maybe (once again, it would be a long discussion if they are justified or not).
Let's not pretend the people he attempted to murder weren't aggressing on him in the first place. He hired hits on people who were trying to extort him (for money claimed to be lost that couldn't be repaid to Hells Angels, implying that exposing Ross' information would make him a possible target).
It's not like Ross hired hits on innocent people - regardless of whether that is murder or not.
You're a fool if you honestly believe that you can't be put into a situation that would cause you to at least consider offing someone. Especially someone who was trying to extort/blackmail you.
The most drastic realization we'll have in the future (relative to now) is that situations determine behavior far more than any notion of free will, so avoidong creation of the situations that cause people to consider crime will become the priority.
Here is but one of MANY examples of outstanding-seeming people who were undone by their situations:
People get hung up on the hired hit thing. At that level it was him or them and no human ever makes that choice any way but one.
The American government will never release Ross. They'll also never release Brianna Manning.
But the American government probably won't outlive those two revolutionaries. At least, I have to believe it won't. The future can't be so Orwellian. I don't think humanity will let it happen.
That is why I mentioned acquiring responsibly produced pot. The issue with buying it in an anonymous online black market is that it is really hard to verify who it is coming from.
I feel like there's an analogy between medical states and first-world-problems here. I went to grad school in a red state and pot was really hard to find. I did have a guy who was great and always on the ball but you could tell his product wasn't locally sourced. I was always ambivalent about my purchases. On the one hand, I was supporting a small business owner who was fantastic. On the other hand, I was bankrolling bad people. At the end of the day I think our legal system makes a much bigger difference than I ever could.
To be fair, contract killing is straight out of The Cyphernomicon. When the incumbent justice system shuns you, the remaining avenue of settling things is the old fashioned way. I primarily see him as yet another casualty of the drug war - if the law were congruent with morality, he would have respected the institution more to begin with instead of doubling down on a conspiracy.
So you're saying the justice system has some flaw(s) which make it not "congruent with morality", not being specific, so it's ok to put hits out on people?
It's pretty obvious that the specific incongruence I'm talking about is persecution of drugs.
Incongruence undermines respect for the rule of law in general (cf. "stop snitching"). It changes the calculus from "should I transgress against what society deems sacred" to "I'm already in trouble with the biggest gang around, might as well keep going".
"I primarily see him as yet another casualty of the drug war"
He chose, of his own free will, to start an illegal marketplace, knowing full well what he was doing. He chose, of his own free will, to hire someone else to kill someone.
> That may be partially true, but Ross polluted much of the goodwill the Internet community had for him when he decided to "order a hitman."
Never tried for murder.
Never charged.
Why not? That's a slam dunk if it were true. But it carries with it greater scrutiny by appellate courts, greater scrutiny by the press. Perhaps those accusations were bullshit.
Perhaps our prosecutors should be prohibited by law from making any accusations unless they're actually leveling charges. Just a thought.
The conspiracy to murder a federal witness indictment is still floating around Maryland. They used it to deny him bail but now that it's proven he is DPR they could if they wanted drive nails into his coffin and pursue that indictment.
In that phony hit, the FBI was on the other end and can testify they received payment and instructions from Ulbricht to kill a witness so it isn't just a textfile diary as the only evidence like in the other murder charges (which were quietly dropped after he was denied bail).
The feebs are doing parallel construction of evidence. Nothing they say, claim, or testify to is credible or trustworthy. And the only reason it's trusted at all is that the judges get their paycheck from the same place.
In 40 or 50 years (assuming the country doesn't become some Hollywood-movie-esque dystopia), we'll find out how they cheated to find him and lied about his crimes.
My personal belief on the matter is that Ross would at some point in time need to hire someone. When you're in the drug business, internet or not, at some point in time you will have to deal with this kind of people. At that point you either become an ferocious animal - more ferocious than your opponents - or you do as the say OR you go home. Strangely no one chooses to go home (a bit a la Walter White).
Of course I can't be sure if he was serious about the 'hitman' or not. Probably he wasn't all that serious about it BUT at some point in time he would have to become either digitally or physically violent one way or another to protect what is his.
Now, considering a guy who made loads of money bulding an illegal marketplace online the "poster boy for privacy in the information age" while having characters like Assange and Snowden around is a shame IMHO.
Since ancient Greece (e.g. Antigone by Sophocles) there is a strugle between Human law and God's law (e.g. Ethics, True, etc.). Snowden falls in that category IMHO. What Ross did was both illegal and unethical.
He only needed to kill people because he fucked up his opsec. Imagine if the person that was blackmailing him was an agent. If so, game over. Hence, he should never have allowed anyone to get into such a position.
That said, as far as damage control, he had no choice it seems. If the blackmailer really was going to turn over many innocent people to be prosecuted, well, it was probably the morally correct thing to do. (Assuming negotiations for a payment or other settlement didn't seem feasible.) It's not like he was out trying to murder random people or competitors. He was protecting many innocent users from potentially having their lives destroyed.
I dunno about everyone else here, but that feels like it'd be a heavy burden to have to choose. Sorta like shooting an informant that's gonna leak info on a bunch of refugees. You know the informant might just be trying to get out of his own mess, or getting a safety package setup for his family or whatnot. But if you let him have his way, many people will be tortured. As sad as it is, what else can you do in such a case, even if it was your fault in the first place?
So, I went to college with Ross. He was a year ahead of me.
I didn't know him personally, but several of my friends did. I had a few friends in college (some of whom I still talk to) who were good friends with him. When he got arrested, I looked up his Facebook page, and I found we have 5 mutual friends listed (and I know a couple of others who knew him but didn't have him on FB). Also, when he was arrested, my then-officemate looked him up, and it turns out he met Ross at a party once and had a conversation with him (though they didn't know each other beyond that). Small world.
That stunned me, but what stunned me more was when I found out Richard Bates did most of the technical work. I knew Richard. We were in a few of the same clubs, we had a class or two, we hung out in the same friend groups, and we were almost friends for a while. Richard was a... peculiar person. He had no people skills whatsoever, and he managed to be both shy and condescending at the same time. He treated people horribly. I ended up having a falling out with him in my senior year after he cut me out of his life for trying to patch things up between him and one of my best friends, who he suddenly cut out of his life with no explanation whatsoever (that is, Richard cut my friend out of his life). IMO, he wasn't a good person. Certain... nicknames for him based on his name began floating around as people got fed up with how he treated them. I'm still absolutely gobsmacked that this guy I personally knew and disliked built the Silk Road of all things. It's still hard for me to believe (and, yes, I know for a fact that this is the same Richard Bates because his email address was published in the trial, and I recognize it as his).
UTD was a special place.
(For the record, I changed my name last year, and I seriously doubt Richard knows my new name. I have to wonder if he'll read this and think "who the hell is this person?", because there's nothing about my username here, which is based off my new name IRL, that he'll recognize.)
> That stunned me, but what stunned me more was when I found out Richard Bates did most of the technical work.
'Most' is a gross exaggeration. Bates helped troubleshoot a few problems by fielding some questions. The trial transcripts and exhibits don't show he wrote any, much less 'most', of the SR1-related code; he had so little contribution that he had to be told what the project was by Ross.
Other people like 'Variety Jones' or especially the hired coder 'Smedley' contributed way more. (They just managed to avoid their real names coming up, as far as we know, and avoided lying to federal agents.)
From what I rememeber of the trial, Ross wrote the first version himself and then after he told Richard what it was, Richard ended up rewriting the whole thing because Ross's code was godawful.
No. That was Variety Jones, I believe, and it's unclear to what extent VJ wrote it himself or just pointed out all the problems and code-reviewed the new version; some of the journal entries points to the latter (Ross doing it himself).
I knew them vaguely as well, sharing some friends. (I'd wager we've probably met in real life at UTD a few times.)
Was Richard the guy who went as a flasher at a Halloween party? Because every time I read about him testifying in court, I'm imagining him doing so in that costume, which was ... graphic.
Oh, we did. I recognize your name. I remember hanging out with you at AFS (I miss the Abbey...).
And yeah, that was Richard. I was there. Oh god, that floppy dildo hanging out of those briefs. There are probably still pictures floating around on Facebook...
I never knew UTD had such goings-on, probably because I was just an evening student who attended business classes there :) (FYI: I have been a developer most of my life - just wanted to broaden my horizons re. business.)
I think I also know a Richard Bates from UTD, as a co-worker (but I am not real sure that it is the same person so I won't be too specific as to company and etc.). I found this Richard Bates to be a hard worker who was detail oriented and focused on doing the right thing.
Yeah, there was a fair amount of stuff happening at UTD when I was there - it was easy to miss if you didn't live on campus, or if you only attended in the evenings. Sorry you missed out on the fun!
Although, to be fair, some of that 'fun" was actually pretty regrettable in hindsight. But them's part of learnin'.
I didn't know Richard well, but nothing I learned about him made him seem like he would be a bad employee, except I guess the possible personality clash, which can be true of anyone.
This is a bit of an aside, but this line really stung:
>> Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth.
One of the main reasons I got into software development in the 90's was the fact that software engineers were (largely) eloquent, optimistic, and down-to-earth.
It's sad that a vocal minority has sullied the image of an entire industry.
Virtually every niche of society considers others of their kind as eloquent, optimistic, and down-to-earth. This is a common perception in a group of people with shared passions. From artists, techies, to politicians and even Nazi Germany.
Can't a person make a point that just happens to involve Nazis without someone invoking "Godwin's Law"?
It's like just because someone slapped a label on a thing we're not allowed to do the thing anymore. We need an "Anti-Godwin's Law" that states no mention of Nazis or Hitler can be made on the internet without someone inevitably invoking Godwin's Law.
Godwin's law is rubbish. The Nazis are a strongly and consistently disavowed extreme group. They're a perfect tool when you need to cut across cultures and remove any chance of ambiguity. Their actions so despicable that comparing X performing Y1 to the Nazis performing Y2 is a good tool for reasoning about Y itself and the difference between Y1 and Y2.
I agree, however that's not what this thread is about.
The first poster essentially said "this is so normal, even Nazis do it".
We consider Nazis to be abnormal, so if a behavior is common many groups inclusive of Nazis it can be used to imply that the behavior is something inherent to human beings or human governments or human societies.
And a new law is born: La muerte Flacas' law: Try to use a valid NAZI reference and a clueless bastard will mention Godwin's Law. The Laziest form of counter argument.
How could you reasonably expect me to anticipate your irritability? You've irritated me by failing to see obvious moral indignation, but I wouldn't bother to complain about it. (I'll complain about pettiness, though.)
As it turns out, the person I quoted said exactly what I wanted to say. It doesn't need elaboration.
>It's a complaint at people being lazy in making arguments.
Godwin's law is a very lazy way to make that argument, I would expect.
If you read what the author wrote, he implied that as outside observer he found software engineer eloquent, optimistic and down-to-earth. So he wasn't just reflecting group bias.
I got into software engineer by finding software engineer down-to-earth at least in the sense that it seemed you didn't have to engage in the posturing implicit in finance, say.
That seems to be gone in Silicone Valley but that might be only a small sample of the whole software world.
"I felt relieved: gone was the posturing so obvious in the previous candidates. They worked in advertising, at startups—Twitter employees who talked about how much money they made and the exotic locales where they took their vacations. Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth. He seemed trustworthy."
As an aside, that's a sad little bit of commentary on the tech scene these days.
Nice observation guys, one I've wondered about myself. And totally off topic to the thread. Question is: how to prepare for the burst? I tend to think the current bubble is related to Fed policy, so when the money supply tights up, so will salaries. Just my two cents here.
I was referring to the collapse in software development jobs after the 'first internet bubble' burst in 01-02 and extrapolating another jobs collapse after this bubble bursts. Guess people here don't have that perspective.
Someone else mentioned it, but you have to stand out when applying for a room in SF. Fairly-priced rooms (~$1200/mo) will go in less than 36 hours of posting.
I know several people who have "Renter's" resumes, where they try to sell themselves as awesome people to live with. My guess is he is remembering them only because of the renter market effects.
If anything, it's a sign of a property bubble in SF.
These people were interviewing for an apartment in a notoriously tough housing market - they were probably just "posturing" (mentioning their good jobs and money) because they thought it would help them get the apartment.
He sounds like an outlier of a landlord who prefers a sketchy semi-employed roommate to one with a guaranteed salary.
He's not really a landlord if he's looking for a roommate. I mean, technically he is, obviously, but it's not a traditional landlord - tenant relationship when you're living in the apartment together.
And I'm not sure in what world talking up how much money you make or the vacations you take would endear you to a potential roommate - it'll just make you sound pompous.
In a world where roommates don't always pay their rent on time and in turn screw you because now you have to cover since they're not on the lease. Vetting a roommates's ability to pay rent is not unreasonable.
And roommates who make a lot of money but DON'T spend it on exotic vacations and other luxuries are much better than roommates who do spend every penny they make on ephemeral luxuries.
But then again, as long as your roommate has paid his rent in advance, one of the nicest times of the year in San Francisco is when all the burners are out of town.
SF is one of those worlds. The rental market is intense, and people look for many ways to stand out. It looks like it worked for this case, just that it's not what they wanted in a roommate.
Did you read TFA? It says they were both subletters and were not on the same lease. He wasn't a landlord, he wasn't on the hook for Ulbrich's half of the rent. He wanted a friend, not a tool for a roommate.
The problem is if "who you are" is a quiet, fairly shy person, you will get run over by everybody in SF. Just my opinion. I've been to 40 different states and met people from all of them. The SF crowd has very little empathy towards other adults. Abandoned dog? Theyll adopt right away. Child with a peanut allergy? Theyll murder every peanut in sight and ban peanut butter city-wide. Grown adult trying to just find a place to live or get a decent job? You're entirely on your own.
I've seen fake empathy used more here to play people than legit empathy to help another adult struggling.
Also, it's as if only "normal people" act normally, when in reality even sociopaths tend to be very normal -- they enjoy music, good food and like having fun. I'm sure Saddam had a very human profile himself, so it befuddles me why people insist on contrasting people's humanness with their other activities, however abnormal some aspects might be.
On the last line of the FBI seizure form [1], does it say "Filastine currency"? What do you think they meant by that? AFAIK the Palestinian territories use Israeli currency, so that's probably not it...
The main thing I would like to know is why did he hire the lawyer he did? His defense basically sold him up the river, as can be seen from the scathing comments from the judge. Is it still a fair trial if your lawyer is incompetent?
They were probably angling for the conviction to be overturned on appeal. There was almost no chance of getting a "not guilty" verdict in this situation.
I doubt that would be the question of law the appeal hinged on, but some of the procedural issues with the case. The government never fully explained how the evidence abroad was legally located or acquired, which could unravel the entire case.
Most of the case was based on evidence found on the laptop seized when Ulrich was arrested. Even if the Server evidence was thrown out (which itself doesn't seem likely, IMHO) Ulrich still would've faced substantially the same case.
The chat-logs that were evidence for all but one of the attempted murders he was indicted for were found on the server, which might be part of the reason he wasn't charged with those. Though those probably would've been difficult to get a conviction on in anycase, since no one knows who the "hitman" really was.
It's possible to get a re-trial on the grounds of incompetent defence, but the bar is really high. And since Ulbricht is still using the same lawyer for his appeals, it doesn't look like he's trying that route.
His defense did seem pretty poor, but given the amount of evidence against him, its not really clear what a "good defense" would've looked like.
Maybe borrow from OJ Simpson, repeatedly fail to login into the Silk Road admin panel, have him swear to find the real DPR, demand a jury of like-minded libertarian drug dealers?
From the Ars op-ed, it sounded like his best chance would have been to file a legal declaration of interest in the Iceland server and proceed to challenge its discovery- a course of action that the judge hinted at but that his attorney refused.
It's not particularly clear they could have had it thrown out in anycase. And even if they did, there was more than enough information just on the laptop to tie him conclusively to Silk Road. So his lawyer threw a Hail Mary and decided to try and deny Ross owned the server at all. It didn't work, but going the other route wouldn't have either.
I suspect a lot of the people who were pressing for Ross to challenge the seizure of the server are doing so because they're interested in the legal questions involved, rather than maximizing the chances of an innocence verdict.
But in anycase, you generally can't get a re-trial based on incompetent counsel based just on strategic decisions, even if those decisions were poor ones. You need to show your lawyer was really asleep at the switch on a basic level, like giving the client factually wrong information, or going off to Cancun for a couple weeks instead of preparing a defence.
> How could someone intelligent enough to graduate with a master’s from Penn State be dumb enough to use his own personal email to advertise an illegal bazaar on a message board as basic as Shroomery.org?
Does anyone honestly believe this is how he was caught? Or is it just parallel construction[1]? I wouldn't be surprised if Tor is completely compromised by the United States Government, and this fact is just being hidden.
Does it matter? The fact of the matter he did make that post, and several others, with his personal email clearly visible on Archive.org. Even if they caught on to him some other way, not much work is required to follow those traces right to him.
So what? My personal email is probably in a lot of random places on the internet. If I commit the crime of public urination and the authorities are able to catch me because they have video cameras in my bathroom, is it a good thing that they can then google around for my email and say "Hey look, we found this guy because his email was registered on this public urination forum! That's how we caught him!"
Back in my days of credit card fraud and identity theft no one knew what I was doing. I simply refused to talk about what I did to earn money with friends. It was kind of fun to make it like a game.
It was a little sketchy but I never seemed like a sketchy guy so maybe they suspected porn or something like that. It's not hard to have an online life that's different from the real world, that you hide from everyone.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThat may be partially true, but Ross polluted much of the goodwill the Internet community had for him when he decided to "order a hitman." I doubt he was ever that serious about hiring one. If you read the chats he had, he sounds completely out of his league, and probably never would have been capable of it if the FBI did not sort-of-entrap him with a murder-for-hire plot. Unfortunately, he really screwed himself by going down that road.
The best argument in defense of silk road and Ross, from a moral/philosophical standpoint, is that it represents a victimless crime. Indeed, by moving transactions into the online world, it may have actually facilitated a drop in real crime. Ross must have known that if the FBI ever caught up to him, he could defend himself with this moral reasoning, and at least stand a chance of acquittal in a jury trial. It's a shame that he had to completely ruin that chance by also trying to hire a hitman. He should have kept things simple and never strayed out of the territory of libertarian economic experiment.
Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.
He hasn't lost my goodwill yet.
I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.
(edited for grammatical clarity)
He also agreed to a higher price for the "hit" in Canada, as it was claimed by the CI the target lived with 3 other people and if they were to collect all his assets as ordered then everybody would have to die. Ross was totally cool with that and paid.
I also don't think this is why his fanbase on SR dumped him, they seemed more pissed that his security practices were so terribad awful it put everybody else in jeopardy. It's almost as if he read his own forum's security base and then did the opposite of what everybody said not to do like "Never order fake ID to where you live" and "Don't sit in a cafe ordering drugs off this site" (don't sit in a cafe/library and run the site either).
The money he paid to kill non existent people was way more than what they caused him to lose through scamming, he could have paid back the losses out of pocket with his huge stash of bitcoins instead of seeking vengeance. He acted exactly like a boss of a gangster dial a dope operation that orders the hit of one of their drivers they think is ripping them off.
It's a rather different thing if they entrap him with a tough moral dilemma than entrapping him with simply ordering a hit on people when it's not the only alternative to a whole bunch of other people having their lives destroyed, including targeting 3 people that just happen to live there.
> I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.
But the FBI could basically do this to anyone: try and convince them using a play that involves fabricated emotional pressure, blackmail and, if some other comments are correct (I haven't followed the case that closely), even inventing physical danger and multiple other people's lives being on the line.
The FBI could do this to anyone, do you think it's fair or desirable that anyone that could be tricked into agreeing to hire a (fictional) hitman should in fact be charged with that crime and put into jail for the rest of their lives? Because I think that would be a lot of people you'd pre-emptively have to put in jail. Especially if they deliberately put in the classic moral dilemma of saving a whole bunch of people's lives from being destroyed versus killing the single person responsible.
How many people would make the same decision if confronted with this circumstance? Should they all be put in jail, just for the fact that they would've made that choice if it had been real? Because I don't think that's a very good "test" for detecting "bad people" or people that are really dangerous for society. You can argue about the moral choice (since those victims would merely "have their lives ruined", not be actually killed), but as presented I think it's a really difficult dilemma, and I couldn't really fault a person for choosing one way or another. It's a terrible moral dilemma that I personally just hope to never have to face in my life.
So, having argued that any random person who would make this choice is not necessarily so bad they should be convicted, what differentiates Ross Ulbricht? Seems that, in this particular context, his "crime" was that because of his involvements, he was a person likely to actually face this dilemma situation at some point in his Silk Road career. That seems about the only reason to expose Ulbricht to this moral dilemma situation, instead of just any (or every) random person on the streets.
So then, really, is it reasonable to entrap and then convict someone because they are involved in business that may likely at some point in the future lead to a situation where they would have to make choices like these?
To repeat, if the hitman thing had just been about offing a competitor for financial or business gains, my whole argument above doesn't hold. But they actively put him in a situation where there was no moral right answer, and then convicted him for it.
EDIT: if this is true then that rather changes the whole story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192416
"he never had to decide in real life"
The reason he got in trouble was because he did decide it in real life. It's not like he put a hit out on a World of Warcraft character.
"put a lot of emotional pressure on him"
Emotional pressure? really? That's an elegant way of putting it.
"He hasn't lost my goodwill yet."
It's only because you support the legalization of drugs and you are letting this cloud your judgement. He is an asshole and deserves to do some jail time.
https://www.mosesandrooth.com/drug-crimes/conspiracy-to-traf...
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/...
"It's only because you support the legalization of drugs"
Oh please. Ad hominem much?
I can see the entrapment argument as a reason not to charge him for a crime here, but it's absolutely a reason to personally judge his character.
Ross Ulbricht believed harm had come to the people he'd ordered gangland executions against.
There were plenty of opportunity to come forwards and say: "Hey, I've done an incredibly bad act; here's everything I know about the people I talked to."
Obviously, doing so wouldn't end well for him; it would show some moral standing, however.
The only person responsible for these choices is Ross Ulbricht.
The only situation I can imagine where I might consent to this would be if someone were, say, physically threatening myself or my family and I had clear evidence that they intended to follow through -- and no normal civilized legal recourse.
The government guy could have said "Hey look I think this guy is going to go to the feds and we're all going to go to jail! Give me the money and I'll take care of this problem. If you don't, I'm going to come after you because I'm not going to go to jail for this."
At that point, a person might not feel that they have any choice. And the government gets to claim that "he ordered a hit"
Anyway, the 'government guy' happened to keep records of what was said, so I don't see why you'd be tied up on such a hypothetical. And Ulbricht could have argued entrapment in court, if that was contested dialog.
Ok so you're going to turn the other guy in to the feds for what exactly? How do you know this other guy? Why would him turning you in to the feds be a problem, unless you're doing something illegal?
DPR: He this guy is doing something bad, arrest him!
Feds: How do you know he's doing something bad?
DPR: Well I run the Silk Road and he told me that if we didn't do something about this other guy, that HE was going to turn us in to you!
Feds: Oh, okay well now you're definitely going to jail.
So your clever arrangement whereby you're going to use the feds to get the guy threatening you to go to jail has now fallen flat on its face, because now you're both going to jail. Which is the thing that you were both trying to avoid in the first place.
Why is the drug trade so violent? Because it exists outside the law and thus there's no one to arbitrate disputes (legally) and so people have to find their own resolution. Hence killing.
If you're willing to kill someone to avoid jail, you better believe I would be willing to turn you in if you've already decided to turn me in because I don't want to kill someone. If we DO kill them, then by the same logic, I should have you killed to.
Threatening the person you are working with to "deal with threats" is just stupid. It just means you have to be dealt with as well.
Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. I'm not saying violence in the ONLY answer, but it's definitely the only one that I can think of that doesn't involve them going to jail.
They can't sue because the thing under dispute is an ill-gotten-gain and thus the court wouldn't adjudicate the issue that is for them at hand but instead put them both in jail for stealing.
What are their other choices? Just suck it up and deal with the fact that they got screwed? Sure, but then the next time a robbery comes around, everyone knows that they can screw you and you'll just suck it up. Yay, free labor! That won't end badly for you will it?
Maybe they can pre-negotiate a contract that specifies how a certain sum of money will be distributed but which doesn't specify how it comes to be? Why would a law-abiding person write such a contract? Take them to court and you might win, but the police might investigate and again you're both in jail.
I'm not saying that there is no possible alternative ever, but your simply asserting that something is true and then providing absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up that claim isn't terribly convincing.
I never said they had recourse through the courts. I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence. If they choose to resort to violence, that's entirely their fault, and no one else can be blamed for that.
I like the idea of a microkernel government better than the monolithic thing that we currently have, where you can subscribe to police and fire and whatever. I'd prefer that the government mostly provide courts and a system by which other areas of natural monopoly are better managed (like roads, utilities, etc). But to suggest that we don't need a government at all is pretty radical.
If you can't see that "I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence" leads DIRECTLY to the government isn't really necessary, then I don't know what to say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
These people made their choices. They decided, of their own free will, to become involved in something they knew to be highly illegal. Everything that follows is their fault, and their fault alone. Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQl-qAtNwQ
> Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
Not at all! I merely show that a NECESSARY result of disenfranchising people who want to engage in a particular kind of trade which the government deems "wrong" (in the legal sense, because the government can't really determine morality) is that there are very predictable, unfortunate outcomes like this. The whole drug trade is absolutely RIFE with violence because people have no alternative to settle their disputes. I'm not saying that they are guiltless; far from it! But a modicum of thought makes it plain that the violence is due to the illegal nature of what they're doing.
Look at all the other industries that manage to grow things, distribute them, and eventually sell them directly to customers. Coffee, fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. All these industries have rates of violence which are very close approximations to ZERO. What is different about drugs? Two things:
1. They get you high (but so does coffee, sugar, etc)
2. They're illegal
Obviously I can't PROVE the causality is from 2 rather than 1, but I think a reasonable person could make a reasonable assumption that 2 is far, far more likely than 1.
They don't, but that's their own fault. If your life of crime has forced you into such a predicament that murder-for-hire is a more viable option than dealing with the authorities, you only have yourself to blame. The reason that crime pays so well is because criminals take advantage of opportunities that the rest of society agrees to abstain from for the sake of maintaining order and mutual security; if you decide to exploit those opportunities for the sake of enriching yourself, you shouldn't expect society to feel any sympathy for the fact that you one day felt forced to employ violence in order to protect your criminal investments.
But marijuana is now straight up legal with similar restrictions and regulations as alcohol in several states. And it seems like there's serious momentum to legalize in the rest of them.
I doubt we're going to see radical legalization where the drug war completely ends in the next 5-10 years but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened well within my lifetime.
"Life of crime" can have a highly temporal definition and thus introduce far, far more grey area than you're letting on by your very binary assertions.
I haven't followed this trial closely enough to know exactly what happened here, but despite the sanctimonious, performative "I'm-a-good-person" denials you're getting in response, entrapment is a real thing. If one's opponent is a pro (this is a lucrative sub-profession of "private investigators") one won't see it coming and will be lucky to avoid it. I'm sure the FBI is also skilled at this technique, which may explain why many PIs are former agents.
A family friend had disappointed some wealthy people by lawfully overcoming a do-not-compete. It didn't happen for years, but eventually she was manipulated into making statements about another person, and of course those statements were taped by the "friendly" person who was "helping" her with a family issue. The swiftness of the DOJ's response could only have been motivated by campaign contributions. And now this person is a felon.
This is a good person, certainly much more "Christian" than I've ever been. Some might say that sort of person is actually easier to entrap, since her emotional levers are more obvious, but I think everyone has levers, often closely related to their own moral codes. Ulbricht's levers were his project and potential threats to that. Of course it would have been wiser for Ulbricht to take a broader view and reject violent suggestions. It isn't the case that mere morality suffices to avoid this trap.
On January 26, 2013, Roberts asked that the former employee get "beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back." A day later, afraid that his former employee would squeal to the police, Roberts asked if it was possible to "change the order to execute rather than torture?" Roberts said he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case." The agent offered to do the job for $80,000."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...
I'm not seeing the entrapment here...
I'm not sure what's more horrific:
- Someone who orders murders.
- Someone who orders murders and doesn't think that seriously about it.
Thoughtlessly ordering someone else to commit a murder is definitively worse than ordering someone else to commit a murder after careful and deliberate consideration, presuming all other factors remain equal.
In my view, killing someone just because it benefits you in some way is worse than killing someone because you truly believe that they deserve it--even if the thought process that led to the latter conclusion is provably flawed.
Not all murders are equally bad. The condition only short circuits at murder if your ethical framework has discrete values rather than defined intervals on a continuous spectrum.
Of course, ordering a murder in a stage production where no one actually gets killed is hardly even bad at all. It's almost like doing a mission in Grand Theft Auto, or doing a shot-for-shot remake of the baptism scene from Godfather II. Or perhaps it's the inversion of Ender's Game, where rather than the ethical burden being lighter because you didn't realize it was for-realsies, it is heavier because you didn't know it was fake.
RU may be an ass for trying, but the facts remain that no one died because of him, nor was anyone at any risk of dying from his actions. The cops put him inside a fake situation, and he acted according to his assumed role as though it were real. If I were judge or prosecutor, I wouldn't want to untie that knot either.
And he did not know that it was fake. Therefore any idea that he's off the hook because no one got hurt is irrelevant. It could have just as easily been real, and then people would have died because of his actions.
We simply have different rules in our ethical systems, you and I.
I, for one, am less apt to makes crimes of someone's thoughts or intentions, in the absence of actual harm. I also feel the role of policing should be more in the nature of investigation, capture, and detention awaiting trial, rather than prophylactic protection.
I would very much like all police work to start with identifying that a crime has occurred, work backwards to find out who did it, capture that person, and then turn over the person and all available evidence to the courts. I find the trend towards identifying a potential criminal, then gathering evidence on that person until a crime can be identified, to be anathema to a free society.
Whether RU committed the crimes of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder or not, the police committed crimes themselves in exposing him, and I find it more acceptable ethically for the guilty man to go free than to allow the state's justice system to profit by its own corruption. That's the fruit of the poison tree doctrine. It's how we keep a free society free, and how we protect cops from retaliatory violence from the people who feel they are serving themselves rather than justice.
The evidence of other crimes was collected as a result. Even if he was guilty beyond doubt, that's still poisoned fruit.
They absolutely did not. It was his idea. You need to go learn what entrapment is. Hint: It's not simply when you do something and the cops happen to be involved.
Now, don't misunderstand. That was wrong of him. And it was also stupid. But there is a very important difference between finding out about an illegal transaction and participating in one.
If it were prostitution, it would be the difference between watching a john pick up a hooker and arresting them both, or posing as either a john or a hooker and arresting the other when they eventually committed to the crime. The former is acceptable. The latter is not.
It wasn't a case of a contract killer ratting his client out to the police. There never was a contract killer.
In my opinion, if the cops were a necessary component in the commission of the crime, it is entrapment. If they were simply able to exercise a degree of control over the situation such that they are able to immediately arrest all parties to a crime before anyone gets hurt, that's a little creepy, but still acceptable.
Crime requires intent, conduct, concurrence, and causation. Entrapment elides over one or more of those elements.
Now, maybe he actually did more good than bad. Maybe for every sale funding a bad organization, he helped switch 10 from a bad organization to a responsible producer. And maybe that would still have been enough to get a jury to acquit him.
So basically, to rephrase, the existence of the law is what makes the law necessary. It's almost tautological.
IF it were treated as a public health problem (Portugal apparently did this with some success), Ross might have been hailed as a leader of a new economy and the IRS coffers might have been a bit heavier. Instead, the intelligent, optimistic, apparently caring mind who wrote this, is rotting in jail: http://rossman.deviantart.com/journal/something-new-24987116...
How many of us would have at least considered hiring a hitman if someone threatened to make our black-market 100 million dollar empire go away and have us get sent to jail? More than would be comfortable admitting it, if they looked deep into their hearts, I'm guessing.
Not quite. The law against production is what makes the law against buying and selling more relevant. What makes the law against production and sales relevant is different reasoning (I am neither defending nor attacking that reasoning as that would be a long discussion either way). I wouldn't consider it tautological nor circular reasoning, but it is stacked, and if you were to legalize production, that reason for the ban on selling and buying would no longer apply. The stacked reasons, now without their base, would no longer be supported.
Are there other reasons, especially for certain drugs that are more dangerous? Maybe (once again, it would be a long discussion if they are justified or not).
Or if it were punished by death, like in Singapore.
Interesting way to describe someone who apparently tried to hire people to murder others in cold blood.
It's not like Ross hired hits on innocent people - regardless of whether that is murder or not.
The most drastic realization we'll have in the future (relative to now) is that situations determine behavior far more than any notion of free will, so avoidong creation of the situations that cause people to consider crime will become the priority.
Here is but one of MANY examples of outstanding-seeming people who were undone by their situations:
http://m.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Nowak-recalled-...
People get hung up on the hired hit thing. At that level it was him or them and no human ever makes that choice any way but one.
The American government will never release Ross. They'll also never release Brianna Manning.
But the American government probably won't outlive those two revolutionaries. At least, I have to believe it won't. The future can't be so Orwellian. I don't think humanity will let it happen.
It's pretty obvious that the specific incongruence I'm talking about is persecution of drugs.
Incongruence undermines respect for the rule of law in general (cf. "stop snitching"). It changes the calculus from "should I transgress against what society deems sacred" to "I'm already in trouble with the biggest gang around, might as well keep going".
He chose, of his own free will, to start an illegal marketplace, knowing full well what he was doing. He chose, of his own free will, to hire someone else to kill someone.
Never tried for murder.
Never charged.
Why not? That's a slam dunk if it were true. But it carries with it greater scrutiny by appellate courts, greater scrutiny by the press. Perhaps those accusations were bullshit.
Perhaps our prosecutors should be prohibited by law from making any accusations unless they're actually leveling charges. Just a thought.
In that phony hit, the FBI was on the other end and can testify they received payment and instructions from Ulbricht to kill a witness so it isn't just a textfile diary as the only evidence like in the other murder charges (which were quietly dropped after he was denied bail).
In 40 or 50 years (assuming the country doesn't become some Hollywood-movie-esque dystopia), we'll find out how they cheated to find him and lied about his crimes.
Of course I can't be sure if he was serious about the 'hitman' or not. Probably he wasn't all that serious about it BUT at some point in time he would have to become either digitally or physically violent one way or another to protect what is his.
Now, considering a guy who made loads of money bulding an illegal marketplace online the "poster boy for privacy in the information age" while having characters like Assange and Snowden around is a shame IMHO.
Since ancient Greece (e.g. Antigone by Sophocles) there is a strugle between Human law and God's law (e.g. Ethics, True, etc.). Snowden falls in that category IMHO. What Ross did was both illegal and unethical.
The ones that go home, don't get caught, and so you don't hear about it.
That said, as far as damage control, he had no choice it seems. If the blackmailer really was going to turn over many innocent people to be prosecuted, well, it was probably the morally correct thing to do. (Assuming negotiations for a payment or other settlement didn't seem feasible.) It's not like he was out trying to murder random people or competitors. He was protecting many innocent users from potentially having their lives destroyed.
I dunno about everyone else here, but that feels like it'd be a heavy burden to have to choose. Sorta like shooting an informant that's gonna leak info on a bunch of refugees. You know the informant might just be trying to get out of his own mess, or getting a safety package setup for his family or whatnot. But if you let him have his way, many people will be tortured. As sad as it is, what else can you do in such a case, even if it was your fault in the first place?
I didn't know him personally, but several of my friends did. I had a few friends in college (some of whom I still talk to) who were good friends with him. When he got arrested, I looked up his Facebook page, and I found we have 5 mutual friends listed (and I know a couple of others who knew him but didn't have him on FB). Also, when he was arrested, my then-officemate looked him up, and it turns out he met Ross at a party once and had a conversation with him (though they didn't know each other beyond that). Small world.
That stunned me, but what stunned me more was when I found out Richard Bates did most of the technical work. I knew Richard. We were in a few of the same clubs, we had a class or two, we hung out in the same friend groups, and we were almost friends for a while. Richard was a... peculiar person. He had no people skills whatsoever, and he managed to be both shy and condescending at the same time. He treated people horribly. I ended up having a falling out with him in my senior year after he cut me out of his life for trying to patch things up between him and one of my best friends, who he suddenly cut out of his life with no explanation whatsoever (that is, Richard cut my friend out of his life). IMO, he wasn't a good person. Certain... nicknames for him based on his name began floating around as people got fed up with how he treated them. I'm still absolutely gobsmacked that this guy I personally knew and disliked built the Silk Road of all things. It's still hard for me to believe (and, yes, I know for a fact that this is the same Richard Bates because his email address was published in the trial, and I recognize it as his).
UTD was a special place.
(For the record, I changed my name last year, and I seriously doubt Richard knows my new name. I have to wonder if he'll read this and think "who the hell is this person?", because there's nothing about my username here, which is based off my new name IRL, that he'll recognize.)
'Most' is a gross exaggeration. Bates helped troubleshoot a few problems by fielding some questions. The trial transcripts and exhibits don't show he wrote any, much less 'most', of the SR1-related code; he had so little contribution that he had to be told what the project was by Ross.
Other people like 'Variety Jones' or especially the hired coder 'Smedley' contributed way more. (They just managed to avoid their real names coming up, as far as we know, and avoided lying to federal agents.)
Was Richard the guy who went as a flasher at a Halloween party? Because every time I read about him testifying in court, I'm imagining him doing so in that costume, which was ... graphic.
And yeah, that was Richard. I was there. Oh god, that floppy dildo hanging out of those briefs. There are probably still pictures floating around on Facebook...
I think I also know a Richard Bates from UTD, as a co-worker (but I am not real sure that it is the same person so I won't be too specific as to company and etc.). I found this Richard Bates to be a hard worker who was detail oriented and focused on doing the right thing.
Although, to be fair, some of that 'fun" was actually pretty regrettable in hindsight. But them's part of learnin'.
I didn't know Richard well, but nothing I learned about him made him seem like he would be a bad employee, except I guess the possible personality clash, which can be true of anyone.
>> Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth.
One of the main reasons I got into software development in the 90's was the fact that software engineers were (largely) eloquent, optimistic, and down-to-earth.
It's sad that a vocal minority has sullied the image of an entire industry.
It's like just because someone slapped a label on a thing we're not allowed to do the thing anymore. We need an "Anti-Godwin's Law" that states no mention of Nazis or Hitler can be made on the internet without someone inevitably invoking Godwin's Law.
It just seems nonsensically reductive to go 'the nazis did it! therefore its bad!'
The first poster essentially said "this is so normal, even Nazis do it".
We consider Nazis to be abnormal, so if a behavior is common many groups inclusive of Nazis it can be used to imply that the behavior is something inherent to human beings or human governments or human societies.
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Corvairs approaches 1"
This law, as best as I can determine, is rubbish.
As it turns out, the person I quoted said exactly what I wanted to say. It doesn't need elaboration.
>It's a complaint at people being lazy in making arguments.
Godwin's law is a very lazy way to make that argument, I would expect.
If you read what the author wrote, he implied that as outside observer he found software engineer eloquent, optimistic and down-to-earth. So he wasn't just reflecting group bias.
I got into software engineer by finding software engineer down-to-earth at least in the sense that it seemed you didn't have to engage in the posturing implicit in finance, say.
That seems to be gone in Silicone Valley but that might be only a small sample of the whole software world.
As an aside, that's a sad little bit of commentary on the tech scene these days.
Edit: Yay! down votes!
Not relevant to the discussion, or the 01-02 burst, or salaries, or anything else.
and don't call him shirley.
I know several people who have "Renter's" resumes, where they try to sell themselves as awesome people to live with. My guess is he is remembering them only because of the renter market effects.
If anything, it's a sign of a property bubble in SF.
These people were interviewing for an apartment in a notoriously tough housing market - they were probably just "posturing" (mentioning their good jobs and money) because they thought it would help them get the apartment.
He sounds like an outlier of a landlord who prefers a sketchy semi-employed roommate to one with a guaranteed salary.
And I'm not sure in what world talking up how much money you make or the vacations you take would endear you to a potential roommate - it'll just make you sound pompous.
(in any case, you should really be signing a sublease agreement)
But then again, as long as your roommate has paid his rent in advance, one of the nicest times of the year in San Francisco is when all the burners are out of town.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/08/i-wish-you-could-stay-on-the...
I know some such people well.
I know this is converse to the way the "professional" world is and also converse to people who play along the rules of professionalism.
But dammit, it ain't real! And it needs to stop! Be who you are! And then change it from the inside out, if you need to.
I've seen fake empathy used more here to play people than legit empathy to help another adult struggling.
This isn't even necessarily "bad" objectively (though it could be bad subjectively depending on who you are). It's just how it is now.
[1]: http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentima...
The chat-logs that were evidence for all but one of the attempted murders he was indicted for were found on the server, which might be part of the reason he wasn't charged with those. Though those probably would've been difficult to get a conviction on in anycase, since no one knows who the "hitman" really was.
His defense did seem pretty poor, but given the amount of evidence against him, its not really clear what a "good defense" would've looked like.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross-ulbric...
I suspect a lot of the people who were pressing for Ross to challenge the seizure of the server are doing so because they're interested in the legal questions involved, rather than maximizing the chances of an innocence verdict.
But in anycase, you generally can't get a re-trial based on incompetent counsel based just on strategic decisions, even if those decisions were poor ones. You need to show your lawyer was really asleep at the switch on a basic level, like giving the client factually wrong information, or going off to Cancun for a couple weeks instead of preparing a defence.
Does anyone honestly believe this is how he was caught? Or is it just parallel construction[1]? I wouldn't be surprised if Tor is completely compromised by the United States Government, and this fact is just being hidden.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
It was a little sketchy but I never seemed like a sketchy guy so maybe they suspected porn or something like that. It's not hard to have an online life that's different from the real world, that you hide from everyone.