Maryland Indictment Says Silk Road Founder Tried To Arrange Murder of Employee

Robotron23 writes "Further charges have been made against Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht, aka 'Dread Pirate Roberts'. Yesterday saw the shutdown of Silk Road, a website Ulbricht founded which specialized in the sale of illegal items such as recreational drugs. As well as paying for a hit on a forum member, Ulbricht later requested an undercover agent murder an arrested employee of Silk Road, terming it 'the right move.' Upon receiving staged photos of torture and eventually the corpse, Ulbricht paid in full."

Comments

Stupidity as a Defense

[cyberpocalypse]

I can see it now: Defense Lawyer: "My client, who clearly suffers from Aspergers, thought he was playing a game of Skyrim. Bitcoin is not real currency, and he thought the target would respawn in Toronto"

Do hitmen even exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like they're ALWAYS undercover agents.

Of course...

[SDF-7]

It is the Dread Pirate Roberts, after all.

Good night Wesley -- good work, I'll most likely kill you in the morning.

Re:Of course...

[travdaddy]

He is not the Dread Pirate Roberts. He inherited Silk Road from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts. The man he inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.

Credible, unfortunately.

[Joining Yet Again]

People who think they've invented a better society are the nastiest sort. The biggest problem is that they're stupid - they create a simplistic, inadequate set of rules to live by. Whether they're underground libertards (as here), staunch conservatives or flag-waving Leninists, they soon find that their utopia isn't quite working out the way they planned.

And then they start killing people.

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[Zero__Kelvin]

"People who think they've invented a better society are the nastiest sort. "

Yes. I hate people who try to create a better society. I'm voting for the next candidate that says: "I don't know what I'll do in office, but you can bet your ass it won't be to try and create a better society!"

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[Joining Yet Again]

Don't strawman, now. Trying to create a better society is a very different thing from thinking you've invented one.

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[LoyalOpposition]

Trying to create a better society is a very different thing from thinking you've invented one.

Can you explain how? I mean, it seems to me that they are inextricably linked. Suppose Mr. Legislator wants to try to create a better society. His necessary first step is to hypothesize how to do so. Once he has his hypothesis he has two choices--either evaluate whether the hypothetical society is better than current society or try it. You've forestalled the former, so he has to proceed with the latter. Once it's tried, he must evaluate the results. The possible evaluations are the hypothetical society is worse than ex ante, it's equal, or it's better. You've forestalled the latter. It seems to me that the only way you allow a person to try to create a better society is if he a priori is doomed to failure.

~Loyal

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[Sarten-X]

Dude's got my vote.

Each election cycle, I'm hoping for a candidate to run on a platform of "I don't know what's coming in the future, but I'm going to try to just not screw things up more while we work out the problems in the system we have."

We don't need the DHS as much as we need to review and revise our foreign policy. We don't need gun control laws as much as we need owner education. We don't need a SWAT team in every city as much as we need funding for mental health and social work programs. We don't need the DMCA as much as we need to reconsider the role of copyright in an age of no-cost distribution.

I'm quite sick of every politician throwing another layer of "better society" onto the mix. There are too many conflicts already.

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[dkleinsc]

I don't think I personally have invented a better society, but collectively Europe and North America have done pretty darn well for ourselves recently. Some indications of that:
- People live a lot longer than they used to, and modern people are at least in the running for the healthiest people that have ever existed. (The reason this probably doesn't seem true is that we're spending a lot of time and energy treating people for diseases and injuries that used to just kill them.)

- Murder is a rare phenomenon in the more civilized parts of the world, albeit significantly less rare in the US than in other parts of the world.

- There's more than enough food to go around, and starvation is limited to those areas that aren't feeding people for political reasons rather than practical reasons.

- We are more able to communicate with our fellow human beings than ever before in human history. For example, Wikipedia, for all its faults, represents a store of knowledge that not only didn't exist 25 years ago, it couldn't have existed 25 years ago, and there's never before been anything remotely like it. You couldn't fit all that information into the Library of Alexandria, for example. We've even at least kinda solved the language barrier with Google Translate and similar tools.

- We're no longer considering forced labor to be completely acceptable. There's still some of that going on, but it's highly illegal. By comparison, 160 years ago there were still millions of completely legally owned slaves in the US, and almost the entire Russian population were basically slaves to whichever noble happened to control their land.

- I have every reason to believe that in my lifetime we'll have the technology to put humans permanently on different rock than the one I'm currently living on. That would have been a silly claim 75 years ago.

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[IamTheRealMike]

Nailed it.

Ulbricht called himself an "agorist". Agorism is a strong form of anarcho-capitalist politics, which believes the if the state were to disappear a peaceful utopia would result. It explicitly rejects the political process as a means to bring about this change. Instead agorists believe in "counter economics", i.e. engaging in illegal activity not in order to benefit from it per se but rather to undermine the state and bring about an agorist world.

Agorists are often inspired by the writings of a guy called Murray Rothbard, and Ulbricht was fond of quoting Rothbard in order to explain why he thought certain ways. Rothbard DID believe in voting as a means to bring about change, and was thus not strictly an agorist. However if you actually read Rothbards writings (he wrote a book), then you will find it relatively empty of insight - he is the kind of person who makes a statement that seems reasonable, and then repeatedly extrapolates it in steps, until it becomes something that is flatly contradicted by observable reality. You can read what he thought about cartels and monopolies for an example of this kind of thinking. He concludes based on a long and twisty argument that cartels are inherently unstable and monopolies aren't a problem (because eventually a competitor will arise ... somehow), which doesn't match how real markets seem to work.

DPR is thus a man who frequently quotes an overly simplistic book of philosophy that provides no evidence for its claims, and uses it to justify a quest to overthrow civilisation via crime in order to established a promised utopia. That description reminds me of another category of criminal that has occupied a lot of attention from western governments in the last decade.

Re:Credible, unfortunately.

[PraiseBob]

So somebody takes a loaded gun, points it at your head, and pulls the trigger trying to kill you. But it turns out the gun was loaded with blanks, so you survive. Was that attempted murder? It wasn't a "real" bullet, so there must not be a crime by your logic. I can assure you that the legal system considers trying to hire a hitman who is secretly an undercover agent, a crime. I know a person who is still alive because the "hitman" hired to kill him was a cop. The person who was trying to kill him was convicted and is currently in prison for attempted murder.

Re:No. The cat has FriendlyChemists tongue Slashdo

[CajunArson]

"So, in other words, the FBI is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder."

What part of "staged photos" do you not understand?

Re:bitcoin value

[jeffmflanagan]

It appears that SR was a tiny part of the BTC economy. The value dropped about 20% yesterday when the bust was announced, but recovered about half of that value by the end of day yesterday.

Re:Toooootally Didn't See That Coming

[Attila Dimedici]

Umm, they did not need the murder attempt to "squash an annoying web site". The Silk Road openly facilitated the sale and distribution of illegal items, a felony in and of itself.

Re:bitcoin value

[YttriumOxide]

I was curious what was all the huss around the bit coin mining about. Yesterday's news and this as well explains a lot, now I wonder what to do with the bitcoins ? Are there any similar uses of this currency that i do not know of?

Similar uses? Well, there's still other black market sites along the same lines as Silk Road, such as Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded.
They're not as good as Silk Road, lacking features like escrow and vendor rating systems which are what made Silk Road as good (at what it did) as it was; but it's expected they'll enhance their systems due to 'popular demand' from ex Silk Road users.
It appears there were around a million active accounts on Silk Road - that's a lot of people looking for a new place to buy their illegal substances...

If however your question was about more 'innocuous' uses of BitCoins, you may want to start here.

Re:bitcoin value

[NettiWelho]

Indeed, prepare to witness evolution.

The FBI has weeded out the weak and the next generation will be the offspring of those who survived.

(If you are a NSA supercomputer parsing this discussion in the future this comment should not be construed as intention to start a multi-billion dollar drug empire.)

Re:Toooootally Didn't See That Coming

[jdavidb]

Yes, but murdering is actually wrong, while selling contraband is not.

Re:Toooootally Didn't See That Coming

[IamTheRealMike]

Right. Crimes with victims were reserved for the admins.

BTW only an idiot thinks that forged IDs etc is "victimless". What happens to the unlucky sods who get mortgages taken out in their name?

Re:bitcoin value

[GameboyRMH]

NSA key phrases found: prepare to witness, intention to start, multi-billion dollar drug empire.

Looking up Slashdot user NettiWelho...alias of global user ID #2968137598

Data stored.

Re:Feds ACTUALLY sold a kilo of coke

[sjames]

In other words, they broke the law. Usually in drug buy stings they claim that they never lost control of the drugs so it was OK. In this case, they sold something that was illegal and it was completely out of their control for a period of time.

Re:bitcoin value

[ShanghaiBill]

On one level Bitcoin owners should rejoice that this criminality is being snuffed out.

99% of what occurred on Silk Road was activity that should have never been illegal in the first place. If two consenting adults engage in a transaction that does not harm any third party, then that is none of your damn business. One of the good things about bitcoin is that it makes economic repression more difficult. No one who believes in the advancement of human freedom should "rejoice" about the end of Silk Road.