The INCONCEIVABLE Silk Road Thread

Donal

Philosopher
Donal
Joined
Sep 8, 2006
Messages
8,790
Ross Ulbricht, aka The Dread Pirate Roberts, has been found guilty on all counts and faces a sentence of 20 years to life. The kingdoms of Floren and Gilda both rejoice as this terrible scourge finally faces justice.

To my understanding, this was pretty much a slam dunk. they found what they believed to be his servers with the help of officials in Iceland and when they arrested him, he was logged into an admin section of the Silk Road. He claimed he had set up the SR originally, but handed off its administration to others since it was stressing him out. He claims he intended it as an economic experiment and had no knowledge of any crimes being committed through it.

The journal that was confiscated after his arrest paints a very different picture (seriously, he kept a journal of his criminal activities). He admits to lying to investigators when asked about it.

He also attempted to hire hitmen (one of whom turned out to be a federal officer and another was...the guy he wanted killed) and pay them with Bitcoin.

When it comes to criminal masterminds, this guy seems less Don Corleone and more Cobra Commander (the cartoon version).

Anyway, my main question has to do with the plea offer: I haven't heard of one. Probably because they had him dead to rights and this was a high profile, career making case. No reason to give him any quarter.

Could he have offered anything?

If all the transactions were anonymous, then the only crimes he'd have direct knowledge of are his own. And anything they could get from him in terms of procedures and trails, they could probably just gleam off what they confiscated.

What could Ulbricth have given in exchange for some type of leniency?
 
I should also mention that a big part of the investigation hinged on those servers in Iceland. Apparently, the way they were confiscated violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the owner. All Ulbricht had to do was claim ownership of the servers and they would have been thrown out of court. that probably wouldn't have kept him out of jail, but might have prompted a plea bargain or got him out of a few charges.

The only way it would have bitten him is if he testified, which the prosecution had no way of compelling him to.

Which, I realize, leads to another question: Why wouldn't Ulbricht claim ownership? IF he couldn't be compelled to testify, what possible downside would there have been? Its not like he'd be more guilty.
 
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His supporters are the ones that blow my mind;the fools outside the courtroom with the "having a website is not a criminal offense" signs.
It's not about his having a website;it's about his website being used for criminal purposes and with the idea that he did not know what was going on being ridiculous.
ANd it was not just drugs deals, Silk Road was being used to move stolen merchandise, the selling of hacked Credit card numbers. etc.
If you let your business be used for criminal enterprises.you are an accompalice.
Agreed Ulbritch was not the brightest bulb in the criminal world, but being a stupid criminal does not make you a lesser criminal.
 
Ya, I've seen comparisons to Aaron Schwartz and people trying to make this a referendum on the War on Drugs.

No, he's just a little snot who tried to get rich facilitating criminal activity and then got into said activity himself.
 
carlitos said:
Why would the Fourth Amendment apply to a property seizure in Iceland?
Click to expand...

Don't think it does. Especially since the ownership was in question but the purpose of the machine was not. This is like finding a bomb, defusing it, and taking it into evidence without knowing the first thing about the ownership of the device. Of course this is A-OK.
 
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May have to do with the way it was traced, I'm not sure. I just read that he just had to claim ownership of the devices in question, and they would get thrown out. And since he wasn't going to testify about their contents, claiming ownership wouldn't hurt him in the trial.
 
Donal said:
Ya, I've seen comparisons to Aaron Schwartz and people trying to make this a referendum on the War on Drugs.

No, he's just a little snot who tried to get rich facilitating criminal activity and then got into said activity himself.
Click to expand...

Which is idiotic considering the amount of other criminal activity being done on Silk Road,a lot of which would be illegal in any country on earth.
 
BenBurch said:
Contracting for hit men would be enough by itself to jail him for life in my book.
Click to expand...

And as someone who has had to get a new credit card from my credit union three times in the past 18 Months because of a store being hacked I have little sympathy for people who sell these numbers.
 
It was an online "underground" marketplace. Because of its emphasis on anonymity (you had to use TOR to access it), it attracted a lot of people who did not want their activity to be traced. Also, because of its anonymity requirement, most, if not all, transactions were done with Bitcoin.
 
Donal said:
It was an online "underground" marketplace. Because of its emphasis on anonymity (you had to use TOR to access it), it attracted a lot of people who did not want their activity to be traced. Also, because of its anonymity requirement, most, if not all, transactions were done with Bitcoin.
Click to expand...

In other words, it was tailor made for criminal transactions.
And apparently Ulbritch,the founder, was fully aware of what was going on and was knowingly profited from the criminal activities.
 
Is what I've heard a couple times on TV true- that the underground internet is 500x as big as the bona-fide net? Herd to believe that number.
 
casebro said:
Is what I've heard a couple times on TV true- that the underground internet is 500x as big as the bona-fide net? Herd to believe that number.
Click to expand...

It would be hard to measure the size of the Internet. For example how can you measure the size of the members only area in this forum unless you are a member here?
 
casebro said:
Is what I've heard a couple times on TV true- that the underground internet is 500x as big as the bona-fide net? Herd to believe that number.
Click to expand...

In a general sense, it's true, but it's kind of misleading. It doesn't mean there are all these secret websites that you have to be super savvy to access, it just means that most of the Internet is private data that requires special credentials to access. Such as the membership section of this forum, as someone above pointed out. Or the internal web pages of corporations and so forth. Or just huge repositories of data that belong to various people and entities.
All that data adds up.

An analogy is that the number of books and files held in private libraries (universities, institutions, homes) is much greater than the number of books and files held in public libraries.
 
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casebro said:
Is what I've heard a couple times on TV true- that the underground internet is 500x as big as the bona-fide net? Herd to believe that number.
Click to expand...

Doghouse Reilly said:
In a general sense, it's true, but it's kind of misleading. It doesn't mean there are all these secret websites that you have to be super savvy to access, it just means that most of the Internet is private data that requires special credentials to access. Such as the membership section of this forum, as someone above pointed out. Or the internal web pages of corporations and so forth. Or just huge repositories of data that belong to various people and entities.
All that data adds up.

An analogy is that the number of books and files held in private libraries (universities, institutions, homes) is much greater than the number of books and files held in public libraries.
Click to expand...

This confused people quite often (and journalists especially I think).

Deep web refers to pages on the internet, unavailable via normal to anonymous browsers and indeed, the deep web is far larger than the public internet.

Hidden web or Dark internet can refer to separate sites and pages that do not exist on the internet as you know it at all. They are accessible only via specialist software or browsers. TOR sites and freenet fall into this category.

The number of these sites is insignificant.
 
Octavo said:
This confused people quite often (and journalists especially I think).

Deep web refers to pages on the internet, unavailable via normal to anonymous browsers and indeed, the deep web is far larger than the public internet.

Hidden web or Dark internet can refer to separate sites and pages that do not exist on the internet as you know it at all. They are accessible only via specialist software or browsers. TOR sites and freenet fall into this category.

The number of these sites is insignificant.
Click to expand...

That is about what I expected.
 
dudalb said:
In other words, it was tailor made for criminal transactions.
And apparently Ulbritch,the founder, was fully aware of what was going on and was knowingly profited from the criminal activities.
Click to expand...

I recall reading about this from an earlier thread. He did attempt to hire a hitman, as mentioned upthread. These attempts were hilariously inept.

I can't remember enough details to search for them - they were pretty special though. And being useless is not a defence.
 
Ah, found one:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/20...e_did_the_alleged_silk_road_kingpin_lose.html

ETA: or this:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...cult-than-dread-pirate-roberts-imagined.shtml

Now, since five of the six "hits" were all "done" by the same guy -- and those last four really look like him just taking advantage of a gullible Ulbricht -- perhaps this isn't so much about the difficulty in hiring a hitman online as it is about how easy it is to fool Ross Ulbricht. Still, it strikes me as somewhat revealing that someone could pay significant sums of money to conduct six assassinations, and not a single one of them actually occurred. Once again, not everything people claim online turns out to be true.

That said, there is so much more evidence now being presented against Ulbricht, including his journal that covers the whole plan from the start up until his arrest, that Ulbricht's claims that it's not him are looking very, very weak. It also appears to disprove the claim that has been made by some that Ulbricht didn't start Silk Road, but was merely one in a line of DPRs. That appears to simply be a myth that Ulbricht used, playing off of his username and its namesake in The Princess Bride.
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Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht has received a full pardon.
  • President Donald Trump granted Ross Ulbricht a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday.
  • Ulbricht founded Silk Road, an online drug marketplace.
  • In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
 
Ulbricht is a dispicable and greedy drug and weapon dealer with a lot of blood on his hands. No wonder Trump likes him.
 
marting said:
Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht has received a full pardon.
  • President Donald Trump granted Ross Ulbricht a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday.
  • Ulbricht founded Silk Road, an online drug marketplace.
  • In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Click to expand...
Good work finding this old thread with the search function disabled!

Here's another link, this one from Al Jazeera. It has a quote from Trump:

www.aljazeera.com

Trump pardons Ross Ulbricht, creator of dark web marketplace Silk Road

Ulbricht was given two life sentences, plus 40 years for running a site that allegedly facilitated $183m in drug sales.
www.aljazeera.com www.aljazeera.com

“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
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Hmm, some sort of score-settling with federal prosecutors? "The scum" he called them. That's some pretty purple language for a sitting president. Not that any of this comes as a surprise anymore.

Who will be next? Sam Bankman-Fried? Maybe not. Maybe he hasn't done enough to suck up to Trump or denounce his enemies. But he is a crypto bro and Trump seems to be favorably disposed toward crypto bros.

After Ross Ulbricht, Polymarket users bet on which crypto individuals Trump may pardon
 
Good history of Silk Road and Ulbricht for those not familiar with 'Dread Pirate Roberts' as he was known.

 
Andy_Ross said:
Good history of Silk Road and Ulbricht for those not familiar with 'Dread Pirate Roberts' as he was known.

Click to expand...
The irony is that if Ulbricht had accepted the plea deal he was offered, he would probably have been released before now. But his ego, combined with stupidity, resulting in him believing he would walk.

Anyway, I can’t see him staying out of trouble for long.
 
lionking said:
The irony is that if Ulbricht had accepted the plea deal he was offered, he would probably have been released before now. But his ego, combined with stupidity, resulting in him believing he would walk.

Anyway,
I can’t see him staying out of trouble for long.
Click to expand...
Does he has to? He's one of the "tech bros" - and they've got the President and Trump to cover for them.
 
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