Silk Road Founder Loses Appeal and Will Serve Life (yahoo.com)
OutOnARock quotes a report from Yahoo: Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the darknet marketplace known as Silk Road, has lost his appeal of a 2015 conviction that has him serving a life sentence on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, according to a federal appeals court decision released Wednesday morning. Ulbricht argued that the district court that convicted him violated the Fourth Amendment -- which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures -- by wrongly denying his motion to suppress evidence, and that he was deprived of his right to a fair trial. "On the day of Ulbricht's arrest, the government obtained a warrant to seize Ulbricht's laptop and search it for a wide variety of information related to Silk Road and information that would identify Ulbricht as Dread Pirate Roberts," states the decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Downtown Manhattan. "Ulbricht moved to suppress the large quantity of evidence obtained from his laptop, challenging the constitutionality of that search warrant."
Sure, life is a bit much for these crimes. But what of this?
March 2013 â" Dread Pirate Roberts solicits the first of six murders for hire, after a Silk Road user tries to extort money by threatening to reveal usersâ(TM) identities, according to prosecutors. (The killings were not carried out.)
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Before Ulbricht was sentenced, prosecutors sent the judge a 16-page letter asking that in order to deter others he be given a lengthy sentence, one substantially above the mandatory minimum of 20 years.
Welp, I was about to setup a knockoff silk road, but given the harsh treatment of this guy, I'd better not. Good job prosecutors!
Life... for running a website.
Meanwhile rapists and murders are getting out at 2-3 years for good behavior.
Not going to convince a court that a warrant to search a computer violates the 4th. Would have been better to argue the sentence was too long. He's going to serve time no matter what because the evidence was completely against him.
Whether you are up to legal or illegal things... practice good op-sec, as the contents of your insufficiently protected PC can often be used against you in ways you may not want.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The poor guy never had a hope of getting a fair trial.
Drugs are bad.
Mkay?
I think you are being fececious, but yes, good. All of you under 30 that think you can 'handle' recreational hard drug use need to get back to us in 10 years after your renal/liver/kidney/bowel/frontal lobe failure, hepatitis C or worse, and your subsequent organ transplants (if you can afford them - I'm not paying for that shit with my tax dollars). Many of you are arrogant and can't see past your own noses, I will have no sympathy for you when you realize you 'made a mistake', and neither will my money.
He was given a life sentence for convictions on drug trafficking and money laundering. This should be unconstitutional except our cruelty has become usual.
Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
And safer too right?! It's in the public's interest to buy our $CONTRABAND from strangers, in person, down dark alleys. All that illicit safety found behind a keyboard was rotting our culture!
Sure, he tried to have a few fellow criminals bumped off when they turned on him, but consider the lives silk-road saved from a lifetime of sub-par employment after being popped on stupid drug charges, the medical bills avoided when the large cash transactions went bad, how about the power stolen from the much more violent physical black market, and the funeral costs avoided by dropping the x/1 equation waiting at the end of the followed money?
How about the dirty cops involved? where's that life sentence? That's an example better served, I think.
Dread Pirate Roberts has just provided a perfect blueprint to tax the black market, destroy huge and powerful criminal orgs, provide safety and security to something we should have all decided we cannot stop a long time ago.
He should be working in government.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
And get 5 fucking years this guy gets life for this little bit of bull shit.
We become more like China and Russia every day.
I believe eBay avoids some liability by saying they are just a place where auctioning is done.
Did he setup the storefront specifically to sell illegal things?
I'll be triple-checking my pockets every time I do the laundry from now on!
#DeleteFacebook
Or very good for those who need medication.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Each night, there won't be anyone telling him they'll most likely kill him in the morning.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
A lot of people who use hard drugs regret it after starting. Just listen to rehab stories.
Watch a documentary about him.
I have doubts that he is (the only) Dread Pirate Roberts after watching it.
Here it is: Deep Web
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Why was his laptop not encrypted and if it was in what way did it prove to be insufficient? What is the best way to encrypt a laptop and keep it safe from prying eyes?
The #1 risk factor for drug use is a high IQ. They are a coping mechanism for having to live among the retarded masses. People with high IQ can actually do BETTER in life for years on drugs before they see the side effects because it dims them to slightly above a normal person, making them infinitely more sociable and less off-putting in the process. The solution to the drug problem is the same as the solution to every other problem on this planet: allocate resources based on IQ, not based on social aptitude (i.e. not to marketing, sales, business, finance, etc professions but to research scientists, engineers, etc.)
"fececious"
I don't think that's a word, unless you were referring to the feces in your post?
lol-- "I did drugs, so you shouldn't"
The first drug I did was acid.
A friend of mine was doing it, so I spent a few weeks in the university library reading "The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs" (many many articles written over decades). I came to the conclusion: "why isn't everyone doing acid"?
Never cocaine or opiates, but Jesus, yes, alcohol is terrible. It's legal and it's terrible, but it's all that's available. If marijuana, acid, and mushrooms were legal I think there would be many many fewer liver transplants.
It really needs to be taught, the real affects of drugs. You can't just say "drugs" are bad. You have to explain how this or that drug is bad in this or that way.
Marijuana, acid and 'shrums... not bad. Heroin and coke and alcohol.. pretty bad.
we're currently selling arms to the Saudis so they can bomb the shit out of Yemen (Women, Children, Hospitals, you name it) and a guy that ran a web site and poses no further danger to the community gets life...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
would people do this sort of thing in the USA?
There are much safer places to operate from.
Casey Neistat did a review of "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road" by Nick Bilton. I haven't read it yet but looks like a good read.
https://youtu.be/7-nzTfv5IZY?t=88
That's nothing...there was one bigoted criminal that recently made it into the friggen White House...
I'm not paying for that shit with my tax dollars
Yes, you will. One way or the other.
Cases like HSBC's money laundering or Goldman Sachs screwing over their own clients, then in that case they get out-of-jail card and collect bonus.
Anyway Ross Ulbricht is an idiot, he should never have stayed in the US to begin with. Even if you are oversea like Kim Dotcom, if whatever you are doing is deemed in any way not "cooperating" with the US government then you are screwed, often for life unless you are in China or Russia.
Land of the free my ass.
Some people do fine with LSD. Many people cannot handle having the illusions and lies they've built their psyche and belief systems on torn from them.
The problem you'll encounter is once again political. Blacks consistently score lower on IQ tests so your proposal, though merit-based, will be called "racist". White people will be your most vocal critics, not because of concern for black people but because they won't be able to resist the chance to conduct intense virtue-signaling towards other whites.
They will reject your proposal because that's easy. Harder would be finding out why blacks score lower on IQ tests and working to address these causes. While that would most benefit black people, it takes effort and honesty so it will not be popular.
Otherwise I love your idea. You just need a plan to deal with this inevitable political problem or it'll never happen. What's that saying about how the biggest obstacle for a meritocracy is the fear of the mediocre of being judged on their own merits?
This is 2017 and the corruption is in our face..not only cops, cbp but mayors and governors and presidents all on the take draining the coffers of the people and in bed with the narcos
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
And yet, the narco bigs, the mass killers, brutal leaders and true kingpins, cut favorable deals.
If he is no longer in prison, where is Serafin Zambada Ortiz?
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
Osiel Cardenas Jr. Sentenced to 10 months in Supermax
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
Osiel Cardenas Nephew sentenced to 20 years in Texas
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
Sentenced 5 years in 2014 but Queen of the Pacific is ordered released
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
Daniel Barrera: Colombia "last of the great capos" gets 35 years in N.Y. sentencing
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
Life Sentence Slashed: Francisco Javier Arellano Félix becomes a "cooperating witness"
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
A life sentence is rare in drug trafficking cases, having been imposed in less than one-third of one percent of all drug trafficking cases
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/...
Yeah keep telling yourself that.....
Of maybe you need to wean yourself off whatever is giving you those delusions.
Marijuana, acid and 'shrums... not bad. Heroin and coke and alcohol.. pretty bad.
THE ABOVE IS UTTER BULLSHIT and should not be taken as any sort of advice worth following.
No one should take your advice that LSD is not bad. Your categorical statement that some drugs are bad while others are fine is the sort of thing ONLY an idiot would say. Why ? BECAUSE experiences with drugs vary widely from one person to the next. There's a saying that predates your stupid ass being born : one man's food is another man's poison.
LSD used a single time can induce a psychotic break in some people. That's as bad as it gets : you need to be institutionalized and your mind might never return to its undamaged state. But you'd tell people LSD is fine. I'm telling you right now that you're an idiot and you need to ***shut the fuck up*** before some naive fool takes your idiotic opinion as some sort of quality info.
I actually googled the claim and on the surface it seemed like there is a stuffy that actually says that in the UK.
But after reading it I would agree that who ever read the headline of the article and jump to conclusions like the guy did is probably really dumb.
First there isn't a classification on the types of drugs which basically include marijuana so fucking everything is gonna get thrown off.
The article then go on to say that those with higher IQ tend not to smoke. Because the science is there and the science in cannabis is not as strong as cigarettes.
So all it boils down to is that smart people are more open to experience and is only deterred by prove.
So they smoke marijuana, but that doesn't mean they are more likely to abuse hard drugs.
Obama?
why, only stupid fucking kids would follow his advice, good time to cull the herd and let Darwin rule....
The system punishes far more heavily the chutzpah of demanding a trial and other constitutional protections than actual serious crimes where the defendant makes life easy for the prosecution. The public defender will rarely provide adequate protection in the face of an unlimited federal prosecution budgets and the tactic of throwing every charge imaginable from the actual offense to Al Capone type tax evasion charges. With harsh minimum and maximum sentencing and a lush ecosystem of tough on crime technicality add-on charges even people who actually know themselves to be innocent on all charges take a massive risk actually demanding their right to a fair trial in the face of most juries and grand juries wanting to throw some sort of bone to the poor hard working prosecutor, or worse the need to punish someone who has to be a 'bad guy', especially if the defendant is successfully portrayed as not a 'good guy'. Our system has effectively hacked the problem of constitutional protections to a point where they have become more effective at obtaining prosecutorial success and sentencing than 1940s Nazi occupied Europe(Godwin=true) by forcing the most realistic guilty and innocent people to bypass their former right to a trial before their peers and review of evidence. It is a shitty hack to take the heat off of a tiny privileged minority in America, the well off career climbing people in the various prosecuting attorney's offices.
Back on topic, this person provided a storefront for people to buy without fear of having to commit violence or being violently targeted in what I have heard to have been a peer vetted market of psychotropic chemicals. I could see this as a way to cause less harm then street corner transactions where nobody knows what they are getting. Yet he gets a no-parole life sentence like Charles Manson or the Nazis in Spandeau Prison while actual murderers who plead out get a decade or two in prison.
Our so-called justice system has become a non-monetary bribe to voters who fear a propaganda straw man more than the loss of the constitutional rights of bad guy 'others' until they are the targeted other.
and expect to get away with it.
Alll tobacco stores owners should be jailed for life. Both my grandfathers and grandfather of my wife died on cancer caused by smoking. Thousands of people per year die on tobacco abuse.
The man tried to get people killed.
An eye for an eye.
Jokes on you I'm wasting my life in a dead end job as an IT guy anyway.
People have right and responsibility of their own actions should be able to use any drug without government control.
It is sad state when we live live in a nanny state where people are not treated as grown-ups who can so what they want (without directly harming others) and are denied access to drugs they might want.
https://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/thomas-szasz
LSD used a single time can induce a psychotic break in some people.
I don't recall reading about any instance of this where the person did not already have some sort of aberrant mental condition. This study found that psychedelic use was not an independent risk factor for psychosis. I think that the other studies I've read had broadly similar conclusions.
I'm telling you right now that you're an idiot and you need to ***shut the fuck up*** before some naive fool takes your idiotic opinion as some sort of quality info.
You must feel embarrassed to have typed that.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
True but what he was convicted of is sufficient. The other stuff just speaks of his character. He's not some libertarian hero, rather he's an asshole scumbag ready to murder people disrupting his business.
I don't think the question is whether or not he's some sort hero. The question is if indirectly helping to distribute drugs, "computer hacking" and money laundering are worth a life sentence. According to Wikipedia, they brought up evidence of the murder conspiracy at the sentencing phase, which I completely don't understand - he hasn't been convicted of that yet.
If he's found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder or whatever, then yep - he should probably go away forever. As it is, he's going away for a longer stretch then some people get for actually murdering someone.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The #1 risk factor for drug use is a high IQ. They are a coping mechanism for having to live among the retarded masses.
Interesting spin on the classic slashdot "I am so unbelievably clever that I got bored and left school early without taking any sheeple-fodder exams, which is why I am unemployed and living in my parents' basement" argument.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
We should be bombing the Saudis for spreading Wahhabism. I mean, to be honest they kill a lot more of their fellow Muslims than they do Westerners, but any religion that teaches the killing of the insufficiently faithful is a religious duty for all its followers simply needs to be eradicated.
Watching various Administrations handle them with kid gloves has been galling, but Trump has been especially provocative. The travel ban was a foolish move under any circumstances, but to enact a ban and not only exempt the biggest state sponsor of terrorism but bend over backwards at every turn to reassure them of our continued loyalty. We need that like we need to pay people to teach our enemies to make war upon us. Oh, wait.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You are not called racist because your brilliance brings out uncomfortable truths. You are called racist because your stupidity shines through in your attachment to ignorant arguments with no real world basis. It isn't political. It is common sense that attempting to create a hierarchical structure of human capability based on a subjective category that separates people based on skin color is nothing short of ignorant. I know it might help you to feel better about yourself thinking you were born a member of a master race as you slave for another man in a higher position, but let's be real, there is nothing special about you bro. You were born human like every other color of people in the world. Your position in life is not due to affirmative action, illegal immigration, or whatever other excuse you are trying to give to yourself. The political part, is when the rich ones in power convince you there is something unique you share with them that gets you to fight on their behalf. Just like the peasants going to war while the kings sit feasting, your being played by your political masters to push their propaganda. Oh what glory it must be to be a member of a master race enslaved into actually believing their is a master race. Lulz
Fucking retarded life with those charging you committing worse crimes and jury unaware judges that are dont care.
5 years more than enough for anything that no one has been murdered.
The big banks launder money all the time and usually if caught only get sanctioned or fined an affordable (for them) amount. Nobody goes to jail. This is just capitalism trying to clamp down on an increasingly popular alternative way of doing business. Links: https://www.int-comp.com/ict-v... http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/2... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... http://rense.com/general28/mon...
Drugs are good
They let you do things that you know you not should
And when you do 'em people think that you're cool
And when you do 'em people think that you're cool