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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.
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
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.
FTFY.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
would people do this sort of thing in the USA?
There are much safer places to operate from.
When he was apprehended he was logged into his laptop... which tends to negate most encryption methods as short of using partially homomorphic encryption, you've got to decrypt your data to do most things with it.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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?
He did encrypt his laptop. The agents that arrested him watched him from a distance until he logged in. Then they moved in, making sure they didn't give him a chance to lock it.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
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
I'm not paying for that shit with my tax dollars
Yes, you will. One way or the other.
Obama?
This teaches us an important lesson: Always set up an automatic kill-switch. Were I concerned that my computer might give law enforcement evidence against me, I'd set up a reboot or wipe script to run in the background. What I actually do, since my worries in that area are minimal, is set a countdown timer for bed, for those times I'm watching a show while getting ready to go to sleep. If I don't interrupt it, it'll shut down the things that might be playing, lock the screens and turn them off.
That gets me thinking, what would I do if I were /one of the/ Dread Pirate Roberts? Well for starters, I'd run my laptop off of a bootable live CD. I'd probably remove the hard drive completely rather than risk it storing information by some unanticipated method. If it is just the FBI that I'm worried about, then I'd probably set up an an 'innocent' OS install, on the hard drive I'm not using for dastardly deeds, where I played candy-crush and logged into Facebook like a good sheeple. On the other hand, as an exercise in black-hat paranoia, personally I'd be more concerned about the NSA, and I'd expect the NSA to be more likely to mess with firmware to cause an installed hard-drive to store data.
There are plenty of things one could do in order to attract the unfriendly eye of the FBI but I think most of the time the NSA is unlikely to get involved. The FBI is scary, and I hope they never decide I'm interesting, but they paid money to hack into an iPhone. The FBI may be scary to the extent of "if they're after you, you better take serious precautions" but to me the NSA is scary to the extent of "if a machine has ever been out of your sight, consider it compromised."
As a blackhat, I'd do everything logical and possible to prepare myself against the possibility my laptop could be grabbed out of my hands while I'm using it and that I should never leave it behind. That's just logical blackhat defense against the FBI. On the other hand, as a blackhat fearing the attention of the NSA, I would be worried about the possibility that I could be drugged or any machine I might touch could have been pre-compromised. If I were a blackhat, I'd be soooo paranoid!
I'm a white-hat. I work hard to make sure I'm safe from anything seriously scary, but as a white-hat I also try to consider the perspective of a black-hat and how to protect the things I'm responsible for against them. Sometimes I have moments where I'm paranoid, worrying that some black-hat might have gone above and beyond to think of the things I didn't think of. When I'm in that mood, I try to think the way a black-hat might think. Those moments are dark. I can't imagine living a life where you're always worried that some government agency might take an interest in you. What I imagine the FBI might be able to do is scary, but what I imagine the NSA might be able to do is cold sweat, wake up screaming, did they hack my light bulbs, scary!
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Except for $5 dollar wrench security hole. https://xkcd.com/538/
I'm afraid that someone incarcerated and with powerful agencies annoyed with them can face far more than the infamous $5 wrench form of encryption cracking. These include legal and illegal threats to family, solitary confinement, lack of access to critical medical needs. They can also include more clearly illegal but available abuse such as rape, physical beatings, and starvation.
Jokes on you I'm wasting my life in a dead end job as an IT guy anyway.
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.
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...