Subject: OUTRAGEOUS: Founder of the Silk Road drug marketplace sentenced to life in prison Sat May 30, 2015 1:57 am
The convicted mastermind behind the world’s largest online narcotics emporium has been sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge, Bloomberg reports. The judge also ordered Ross Ulbricht, 31, to forfeit $US184 million dollars. The estimated that roughly $US1.2 billion in illegal drug transactions took place on Silk Road. Ulbricht, faced anywhere from 20 years to life in prison for his role in running Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Ulbricht was convicted in February of all seven counts including trafficking drugs on the internet, narcotics-trafficking conspiracy, running a continuing criminal enterprise, computer-hacking conspiracy, and money-laundering conspiracy, according to Bloomberg. Parents of drug overdoes victims reportedly spoke before sentencing, and Ulbricht started crying as he apologised. “I never wanted that to happen,” he said. Last week, Ulbricht and 97 of his friends and relatives wrote letters to US Judge Katherine Forrest pleading for the most lenient sentence possible — in this case, 20 years. Ulbricht’s own letter is significant given his decision not to testify during the trial. In it, he showed public remorse for his actions for the first time since the trial began in early January. “Even now I understand what a terrible mistake I made,” he wrote. “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age. Please leave me a small light at the end of the tunnel, an excuse to stay healthy, an excuse to dream of better days ahead, and a chance to redeem myself in the free world before I meet my maker.”
The challenge for the prosecution throughout the trial was to prove that 30-year-old Texas native Ross Ulbricht is in fact Dread Pirates Roberts — the person who was running the black market e-commerce site Silk Road when the FBI shut it down in 2013. While Ulbricht’s defence attorney, Joshua Dratel, never denied that Ulbricht had founded Silk Road, he argued that Ulbricht left the site at its peak for quite some time and only rejoined right before his arrest. Dratel repeatedly claimed that somebody else took over the site after Ulbricht started and expanded it into the massive narcotics emporium it became. However, the defence struggled throughout the trial to come up with alternative “DPRs” — especially as the journal entries and chat logs found on Ulbricht’s laptop (in which he refers to Silk Road as a “criminal enterprise) continue to incriminate him. Throughout the trial, the prosecution, led by Assistant US Attorneys Serrin Turner and Timothy Howard, attempted to characterise Ulbricht as a ruthless drug kingpin who was “motivated by greed and vanity,” and whose website resulted in countless addictions and multiple drug-related deaths because of the ease with which it allowed people to purchase drugs. Most shockingly, prosecutors alleged Ulbricht had hired assassins to murder six targets that threatened the existence of Silk Road. Ulbricht was denied bail on the basis of these accusations, but the murder charges were never actually filed. It remains unclear why the prosecution dropped the charges, although one reason may be the lack of evidence that these alleged murders ever even occurred.
Dratel insisted the murder-for-hire charges were fabricated, and that there was no way to link any drug-related deaths to Silk Road. If anything, he argued, the website had provided a platform for buying and selling drugs that was “far safer” than traditional drug-dealing on the street. Dratel refuted the prosecution’s characterization of Ulbricht as a ruthless drug kingpin by capitalising on the 31-year-old’s compassionate nature and admirable personal traits. In its sentencing memorandum, the defence noted how Ulbricht was an Eagle Scout and “excelled in school,” and has “a unique set of skills and traits that will enable him to become a valuable asset to his community.” The memorandum also included letters from Ulbricht’s fellow inmates, who described how Ulbricht had taught them yoga and meditation while tutoring others in maths and physics. In his letter to the judge, Ulbricht noted how his motivations for creating Silk Road were more ideologically than financially motivated. “I created Silk Road because … I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else,” he wrote.
The prosecution wrote in its own memorandum, however, that Ulbricht’s personal traits are not significant mitigating factors. Prosecutors argued that the now-31-year-old “was well aware of the dangers inherent in the products he was selling” and “ cultivated a darker side of his personality” during his years running Silk Road “that his friends and family would have found shocking.” In his letter, Ulbricht wrote of his “love for humanity” — a conviction he promised he would not lose during his years of imprisonment. The case has been hailed as the most significant — and maybe even the first — of its kind, as it is the first time the government has ever expanded the statute of money laundering to include digital currency (bitcoins).
Worryingly to advocates of internet freedom, the trial was also one of the first times an individual has ever been charged for building a website. Many of Ulbricht’s supporters fear the trial could open the door to criminal liability for web hosts, who are supposed to be protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Ulbricht will be relocated to ____.
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
Subject: Re: OUTRAGEOUS: Founder of the Silk Road drug marketplace sentenced to life in prison Sun May 31, 2015 7:13 pm
The Deeply Tragic Sentencing of Ross Ulbricht
If you didn’t know it already, the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht, life in prison, underscores the point. There are deep structural injustices that take place in the United States under the cover of law and justice. This is one of the most egregious I’ve seen.
This brilliant and creative young man has been put away for performing a much-needed digital experiment. He opened an open-air market in the digital cloud and thereby demonstrated to the world that there is a better way than the state’s deeply destructive war on drugs. For having done so, he is now sentenced and put away. Yes, the whole thing makes me deeply sad, and very angry.
All over the world, economists are working on advanced applications of what is called experimental economics. It is an attempt to run controlled experiments on issues of human choice. The Nobel Prize committee has rewarded these attempts. The ongoing problem with the field, as the practitioners all know, is that they take place in artificial environments. You can simulate trade and choice but you cannot recreate the authentic risk, ownership, and daring that are required in real markets.
What Ross did in founding the Silk Road, a darknet market, is take this whole field to a new level. He sought to conduct an experiment. What would happen if there were a realm of exchange that completely bypassed all elements of coercive control, regulation, and taxing? Would people use it? Would it be orderly? Could it make a dent in the vast global underground economy that is currently controlled by drug lords and other criminal elements?
The results were marvelous. People from all over the world used private browsers to access the private website and traded billions in an entirely peaceful way. The drug lords must have been running scared. Yes, most of the products were illegal drugs, but keep in mind that during these years, the dominant product, namely marijuana, became legal in many places. Ross is being jailed for being ahead of his time!
More importantly, what Ross found is that there is massive pent up demand for products that are wrongly made illegal all over the world. The war on drugs has empowered drug lords, corrupted political systems, militarized the police, and led to countless deaths, and, meanwhile, done nothing to stop the spread of narcotics. Ross’s solution was a peaceful market in the cloud, where buyers and sellers could exchange peer to peer. His experiment proved that a new system could actually work.
Ross did not create a black market. He provided a peaceful alternative to the one that already exists, and he brought to it producer accountability, user ratings, and quality control. He began the process of toppling the drug lords from their perches of power. This is a huge innovation on the level of many other peer-to-peer technologies of our time. Yes, he took risks to do this but he acted out of love for liberty and drive to innovate.
So this is the system. If you are a tenured professor performing artificial trading experiments in a classroom and publishing your results in expensive journals, you are toasted as a genius and sometimes given prestigious prizes. If you innovate with venture capital funding and the backing of large tech firms, you are rewarded with riches and fame. But if you are a quiet geek who creates a more realistic experiment online, one that actually benefits humanity, and never sought funding from any establishment source, you are swept up in a sting operation and imprisoned for life. I don’t see how this has anything to do with justice.
As for the online markets themselves, the jailing of Ross does nothing to stop them. They are now larger than ever. The old Silk Road is still around, under its 3rd iteration, but there are now many more. Indeed, there are dozens. They are doing a bang up business, and not making the same mistakes that Ross did. Meanwhile, there are vast and legal operations of selling pot that are active in all parts of the country. Entrepreneurs in this sector are getting rich, and meanwhile the earnest and brilliant Ross is taken from us and holed up in a prison.
Yes, this is unjust. I can’t say whether Ross was in technical violation of the law, but it doesn’t matter. Let us just say it: what’s wrong is the law itself.
https://tucker.liberty.me/the-deeply-tragic-jailing-of-ross-ulbricht/ _________________ Anarcho Capitalists Retail , OZschwitz Downunder BoutiqueAnarcho-Capitalists,AnCaps Forum,Anti-State,Anti-Statist,Inalienable Rights Defenders,Non-Aggression Principle,Non-Initiation of Force Principle,Rothbardians,Anarchist,Capitalist,objectivism,Ayn Rand,Anarcho-Capitalism,Anarcho-Capitalist,politics,libertarianism,Ancap Forum,Anarchist Forum,Vulgar Libertarians,Hippies of The Right,Forum for Anarcho-Capitalist,Forum for Anarcho-Capitalists,Forum for AnCap,Forum for AnCaps,Libertarian,Anarcho-Objectivist,Freedom, Laissez Faire, Free Trade, Black Market, Randroid, Randroids, Rothbardian, AynArchist, Anarcho-Capitalist Forum, Anarchism, Anarchy, Free Market Anarchism, Free Market Anarchy, Market Anarchy
Subject: Re: OUTRAGEOUS: Founder of the Silk Road drug marketplace sentenced to life in prison Sun May 31, 2015 7:26 pm
Quote :
Let us just say it: what’s wrong is the law itself.
Down with statists' oppressive edicts!
_________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis,OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann
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Subject: Re: OUTRAGEOUS: Founder of the Silk Road drug marketplace sentenced to life in prison
OUTRAGEOUS: Founder of the Silk Road drug marketplace sentenced to life in prison
Subject: OUTRAGEOUS: Founder of the Silk Road drug marketplace sentenced to life in prison 
Sat May 30, 2015 1:57 am
