Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road sentenced to life in prison

Lem posted about this twice, October 2013 and January 2015. The verdict is in and the conviction is for all seven counts and the sentence is the harshest possible. Murders such as Jordan Van Der Sloot get less in 3rd world countries than Ulbricht received in the United States. The conviction is made by a jury, the sentence is delivered by a judge. This judge was particularly not taken with Ross Ulbricht's defense. Citing the six deaths related to drugs purchased through his site she told Ross he didn't differ from any other criminal although he does not fit the profile for one, he is still no better than any other drug dealer.

Drug broker.

Judge Forest said the harsh sentence is necessary to show others that may follow that there are very serious consequences.

Make an example.

Commenters on Twitter are 100% against the case, the conviction, the ruling, the sentence. The page is endless.

It is a jealous god, government. It brooks no other deities. It does not like artificial scrip in place of its own artificial scrip, it brooks no commerce within its space that it does not regulate or tax.

It wasn't a web site for drugs, it was a web site for anything black market, drugs being the largest category. His own emails are damning indeed. He was paying $50,000 a week to hackers who threatened to take down his site. Cherubic and attractive and as privilege-y Puritanically white and sweetly gay as he appears, he still contracted for the murder of people who threatened his Silk Road, one of them being a federal agent.

But the agencies have their own problems with the case. Agents for both the DHS and the Secret Service are also indicted for embezzling bitcoins related to this case.

Judge Forest has a point. Sweeping away Silk Road cleared the way for its competitors, not following in Ulbricht's footsteps, rather, already there and already competing, ready to fill the void. Not a dent is made in demand nor in supply and if its imagined that violence is reduced then that would be wrong.

Probably not the best way to present this data but you get the idea.

The items that were sold across Silk Road are outrageous. Once you flip through and see all the drugs, serious drugs, and all the rest of the things entered as evidence then you start thinking maybe shutting it down is not such a bad idea.

Silk Road homepage.

Marijuana was the biggest drug by far. Firearms and hacking kits are problem.

Beyond Ross Ulbricht, a Map of Dark Net Arrests Around the World. Click on a circle on the interactive map and details of the case open. You can see why authorities want to shut down Silk Road and all others like it.

"Ulbricht denies all allegations. He is not the Dread Pirate Roberts"

"The prosecution insists off the bat that Ross Ulbricht = the Dread Pirate Roberts, and the Dread Pirate Roberts = Ross Ulbricht. The grand jury indictment is premised on that equation."

The Dread Pirate Roberts could not have picked a better pseudonym. The name is taken from a character in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (later made into a film in 1987)—a dastardly masked man in black who later turns out to be the female protagonist’s childhood sweetheart Westley in disguise. In the novel and the film, “The Dread Pirate Roberts” is itself a pseudonym without a stable identity. Westley inherits the name from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, who hands it over after retiring. The Dread Pirate Roberts is not so much a single individual as it is a persona, a reputation, a mask.

In the Silk Road case as well, there are rumors that the Dread Pirate Roberts was actually multiple people. It remains to be seen what the Ulbricht defense’s exact theory of the case is, or whether they will completely flesh out an alternative theory.

Adding to the strange ephemerality of this case is how the bulk of the evidence seems to be electronic in nature: digital footprints, IP addresses, e-mail accounts, chat logs, Internet postings, messages, Bitcoin transactions. Much of this evidence comes from the laptop that Ulbricht had open at the time of his arrest, so it is not as though the government’s case is impossibly flimsy. But the nature of the evidence still undermines their efforts to make the allegations sound as serious as possible. The evidence they present inevitably makes it all sound like a video game, or a recap of an Internet forum dispute in which the community manager bickers with other moderators and ends up permabanning them from the site.

Have you ever heard of Silk Road or the Deep Web?

"On Wednesday the federal government raided and shut down online drug marketplace Silk Road and arrested its alleged proprietor, Ross William Ulbricht. Silk Road had been in operation since roughly January 2011, but was obscured from normal web traffic because it was hosted on something called the “Deep Web.”"

Time