Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
https://twitter.com/Free_Ross/status/1881851923005165704Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)
So while wolfgang42 wasn't there when Ulbricht was actually arrested, their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
In short: they were reading about an old event, but it happened to occur in the same spot they were sitting at that moment. Hope that clears it up!
Glad that ChatGPT, probably like GP themselves, is a visualizer and actually can create a "vivid mental image" of something. For those of us with aphantasia, that is not a thing. Myself, I too was mighty confused by the text, which read literally like a time travel story, and was only missing a cat and tomorrow's newspaper.
He clearly states that he was reading an article, he uses past tense verbs when referring to Ross, and to the events spelled out in the article. If you somehow thought that he could be reading an article that ostensibly has to be describing a past event as he was seeing it in real time that is a logic flaw on you.
It has nothing to do with what you can or cannot visualize. All you have to do is ask yourself could he have been reading an article about Ross’s arrest while watching it? Since nobody can violate the causality of space time the answer is no.
This isn’t just you this is everybody in this thread who is reading this and going this is a little confusing. No it’s very clearly him speaking about a past experience reading an article about a past event.
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
The problem is that two past events are being described, so tense alone cannot distinguish them. Cut the readers some slack; the writing could have been better.
"Then when Ulbricht..."
That "then" always does a lot of heavy lifting in English prose.
On a similar note--I've noticed that HN comments are often overwrought, like the commenter is trying to sound smarter than they actually are but just end up muddling what they're trying to say.
Perhaps these things are connected.
Maybe in 10 years we can blame poor reading comprehension on having a decade of computers reading for us. But it’s a bit early for that.
> Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes
And the metaphor / tense shift caught me by surprise and made my eyes retrace to the beginning. I still got it, but there was a little bit of comprehension whiplash as I hit that bump in the road.
In some ways, we're treated to an experience like the author's as we hit that sentence, so in that sense it's clever writing. On the other hand, maybe too clever for a casual web forum instead of, say, a letter.
I don’t think we can infer anythin about how LLMs think based on this.
Two, I have aphantasia and didn't picture anything. I got it the first time without any confusion.
Are you seriously asking ChatGPT to read things for you? No wonder your reading comprehension is cooked. Don't blame aphantasia.
Generatove AI has all but solved the Frame Problem.
Those expressions where intractable bc of the impossibility to represent in logic all the background knowledge that is required to understand the context.
It turns out, it is possible to represent all that knowledge in compressed form, with statistical summarisation applied to humongous amounts of data and processing power, unimaginable back then; this puts the knowledge in reach of the algorithm processing the sentence, which is thus capable of understanding the context.
The problem turned out to be that some people got so fixated on formal logic they apparently couldn't spot that their own mind does not do any kind of symbolic reasoning unless forced to by lots of training and willpower.
The brain has infinite potentials, however only finite resolves. So you can only play a finite number of moves in a game of infinite infinities.
Individual minds have varying mental technology, our mental technologies change and adapt to challenges (not always in real time.) thus these infinite configurations create new potentials that previously didn’t exist in the realm of potential without some serious mental vectoring.
Get it? You were just so sure of yourself you canceled your own infinite potentials!
Remember, it’s only finite after it happens. Until then it’s potential.
No, it doesn't. The brain has a finite number of possible states to be in. It's an absurdly large amount of states, but it is finite. And, out of those absurd but finite number of possible states, only a tiny fraction correspond to possible states potentially reachable by a functioning brain. The rest of them are noise.
Not to mention, it's highly unlikely anything at that low a level matters to the functioning of a brain - at a functional level, physical states have to be quantized hard to ensure reliability and resistance against environmental noise.
The rules for translation are themselves the result of intelligence; when the thought experiment is made real (I've seen an example on TV once), these rules are written down by humans, using human intelligence.
A machine which itself generates these rules from observation has at least the intelligence* that humans applied specifically in the creation of documents expressing the same rules.
That a human can mechanically follow those same rules without understanding them, says as much and as little as the fact that the DNA sequences within the neurones in our brains are not themselves directly conscious of higher level concepts such as "why is it so hard to type 'why' rather than 'wju' today?" despite being the foundation of the intelligence process of natural selection and evolution.
* well, the capability — I'm open to the argument that AI are thick due to the need for so many more examples than humans need, and are simply making up for it by being very very fast and squeezing the equivalent of several million years of experiences for a human into a month of wall-clock time.
Minds shuffle information. Including about themselves.
Paper with information being shuffled by rules exhibiting intelligence and awareness of “self” is just ridiculously inefficient. Not inherently less capable.
As with so many matters of crime, punishment, and high dudgeon, the physical reality of the situation always feels so banal. Dread Pirate Roberts’ lawless dark kingdom, where he commissions trans-national assassinations… looks a lot like a nerdy dude’s laptop on a municipal library table.
Surprise: OP time traveled.
And there's nothing in the following sentences that corrects this garden path assumption.
>Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
Would not confuse as many if you wrote
>At the time of his arrest Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
Or even clearer
>At the time of his arrest Ulbricht had walked into the public library and sat down at the table which was now directly in front of me
The comment you refer to is just poorly written.
The focus wasn't on the exact timeline and facts of the situation. It was on what it felt like as he read the piece.
Even just adding one word "Then Ulbricht had walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me" would be enough of a clue.
If you read it one way, it's almost impossible to not be misdirected, because the following sentence works with both meanings.
If you include the had this would be enough of a clue to correct the incorrect assumption. Although it still might make for slightly bumpy reading.
You mean "when I read the part where the FBI agents stopped to have a drink I thought"?
This part makes your comment super confusing. Where you there then or later?
Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.
The interlude during which some pushed for "they" to be exclusively plural, was a mere brief blip in the history of the language.
It's also a couple of centuries older than singular "you", so if you want to complain about a pronoun changing between singular and plural, that's a better candidate.
Here it's clear the word is referring to a singular stranger.
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Alternately:
> Ulbricht had walked into the public library
gives the game away.
If you still want to play around a bit:
> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.
To go into the meat of this: he is imagining it while reading in the same location as the incident happened. This is a style of writing. It's definitely not wrong.
Many of us can't. Personally, for nearly three decades I thought the ability to vividly experience a book this way was just some overused and extremely exaggerated metaphor - and then I discovered aphantasia is a thing, and I score close to top of its severity scale.
So perhaps it's less about your starting point, and more about describing a frame of mind some in the audience don't have, and can't relate to.
Curiously, I don't recall ever seeing this particular style of writing before, in any of the books I ever read.
I think the problem is that I took an artistic style in an attempt to paint a picture for the reader, but I did it in a long thread on a technical forum where people are probably mostly skimming rather than engaging in literary criticism, so I should maybe have anticipated this would be a problem.
Or they show that GP wrote an ambiguous piece of text.
I don't know the original reasons for his apparent perma-dead'ing (users can option to "show dead" and see these comments) but I suspect it's due to going fully Australian wih swear words and invectives when he gets a bit passionate about something .. or even just adding colour for a lark, as we do.
I'd also argue he almost certainly saved a huge number of lives with Silk Road: the ability to view eBay style feedback and chemical test results makes buying illegal drugs far safer than buying them on the street. On Silk Road people could buy from a reputable seller with a long history of providing unadulterated products, and could view testimonials from other buyers who had sent the products for chemical analysis.
I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings. Given the anonymous nature handling bots spamming fake reviews would be even harder to catch here, and you ultimately don’t know who ended up addicted/hooked/DUI’s etc from the easy availability this provided. I’m not sure the total effects could ever be qualified, but it’s not like unadulterated drugs are automatically safe. Just look at how many lives pharma-grade opioids ruined, even though they were “safe”.
That’s also not to mention guns and all kinds of other dangerous & illegal parts of it.
I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
I know this is probably as minority view, but I think if adults consent to buying and using any drug, that should be both fully legal, and their right and responsibility- any negative consequences are 100% their own fault, not the person who sold them. It's probably true that making drugs easier to buy made more people buy them, but I was only considering the ill effects of fraudulently adulterated products. Do the math differently if you don't see it this way.
I don't know how Silk Road was designed, and have never actually used it or anything like it- but I imagine it would be possible to eliminate fraudulent reviews with proper design, and they may have done so. eBay, for example, is almost free of fraudulent reviews because posting a single review is very expensive- you'd need to sell an item to yourself for full price, and then pay eBay their full (rather large) cut to post a single fraudulent review.
As a buyer, you should be able to take a single high effort review that contains something like mass spec chemical analysis results, and further confirm that the reviewer themselves has a credible history of making purchases and reviews broadly across a lot of different sellers. An impossibly expensive to fake signal. This could also be done automatically by the platform- by making the more credible reviews display first.
> I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
I explained this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787217
Trump is not an idealist- he will promise anything to anyone if it gets power and attention. Previously, he had attempted a political career as a leftist, and switched to the right because it was getting more traction.
I'd agree with you if the people that used these drugs did so rationally. That's not the case mostly though from what I've heard. Trauma is often the root cause and that's out of many people's control. From then on it's ub to society to help them.
If a high performing exec wants to buy drugs to function better, sure maybe that's ok but I doubt that's the majority of people.
It is very clear from what you’ve said that you haven’t used it :) I have browsed it when it was active and I was very pro tor. You’re making a lot of assumptions that simply don’t hold for silk road.
This is a critical point. His explicitly goal is to be an autocrat, there is no other ideology other than what works.
That's why I think the only real bit of him is the one that admires Putin. That is who he wants to be.
It's why his moves seem so random.
If I remember correctly, there were comments from both the prosecution and judge that would basically prove that point- and they allowed evidence related to those other crimes in the trial. If they could prove this misconduct, they may even be able to argue double jeopardy.
The judge said during sentencing that she was giving Ulbricht an incredibly harsh sentence to make an example of him to others who think that facilitating selling drugs is a victimless crime, and she was also angry at the huge stack of nice letters that people sent to the court in support of Ulbricht.
The murder for hire bit was always the most bullshit of all the charges. Not only were the fbi agents that were part of that later jailed for their own actions related to the case (including theft and hiding/deleting evidence), it was never real and no one was ever in danger.
https://bsky.app/profile/filmgirl.bsky.social/post/3lgcck6i6...
1 DEA agent for extortion, money laundering and fraud. 1 Secret Service Agent for money laundering. 2 Key advisors in the case.
Chris Tarbell, the guy who arrested ross, talks about it on this podcast https://risky.biz/RB770/ 37:08
In the absence of any other context it's assumed these were acts of "intent to murder" but that's about it .. logs that look like a duck and probably were a duck.
But no actual murders that anyone could find, no bodies, etc.
After Ulbricht ordered the hit on one of his forum moderators, the FBI visited him, took all of his computers, told him they were going to be "him" from now on online forever, had him "pose" in a bathtub where they hosed him off and doused him in ketchup to take fake trophy photos, had the "hitman" send the photos of Ulbricht, who famously commented "It had to be done."
It's just unfortunate that Trump, and now, excessive pardons are politically polarized, which could cloud the fact that justice was done today. I don't credit Trump in any way for doing "the right thing" or even having a principled position regarding Ross' case. Clearly, others with influence on Trump convinced him to sign it. It doesn't matter how the pardon happened. Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Although the murder-for-hire charges were dropped, transcripts published by Wired in 2015[0] show Ross Ulbricht openly discussing contract killings: he haggles over price, suggests interrogation, and even provides personal details about a target’s family (“Wife + 3 kids”). These charges were dismissed partly because he had already been sentenced to life in New York, making further prosecution moot—but the transcripts themselves factored into his sentencing. No killings occurred (he was likely scammed), yet the conversations challenge the notion that his crimes were purely non-violent. He was willing to have someone killed to protect his idea.
[0]: https://archive.is/pRG3U.
In addition you have the guy that was supposed to be murdered also claiming that it could not have been Ross.
The murder for hire case was very weak and then in addition you had the two federal agents working the murder for hire case charged for stealing bitcoins.
For example, for a while most prostitution and sex work seemed to be online, on places like Craigslist right next to ads for used furniture and jobs. And it seemed to be really effective in getting prostitutes off the streets.
Now that those markets were shut down, I'm seeing here in Seattle we're having pimp shootouts on Aurora and the prostitutes are more brazen than ever. Going after Craigslist has had a negative effect on our cities and has increased crime, and I suspect going after SilkRoad has had a similar impact.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.
You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
These are not comparable institutions.
more or less than those who bought drugs from street dealers?
could it not be possible the silk road saved the lives of many more teenagers who would have died from street drugs otherwise?
Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.
If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.
Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.
Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.
Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.
Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.
I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.
He wasnt some hands off executive who had no idea. Smart people should be able to not equate an illegal market place with a legal market place
this isn't controversial to say, the governments just go for the laziest intermediary lately
but there is the choice of doing actual investigations for time tested crimes. those dealers just went to other darknet markets, which are far far bigger than Silk Road ever was
That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.
The guy operated a marketplace for illegal goods in order to enrich himself. The illegality wasn't just incidental, it was literally his business model -- by flouting the law, he enjoyed massive market benefit (minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc) by exploiting the arbitrage that the rest of us follow the rules.
Said a different way, he knowingly pursued enormous risk in order to achieve outsized benefits, and ultimately his bet blew up on him -- we shouldn't have bailed him out.
Life imprisonment, no parole.
You have to be a complete and utter wanker to think his punishment was justified.
I don't have a horse in this race but the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear "we shouldn't have bailed him out" is silicon valley bank and its depositors. That to me was the biggest show of hypocrisy by silicon valley.
Those allegations were used to deny him bail and influenced public perception, they were not part of his formal conviction or sentencing.
He was convicted on non-violent charges related to operating the Silk Road website, including drug distribution, computer hacking, and money laundering.
Does this change your opinion of sentencing being well-deserved?
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...
https://pbwt2.gjassets.com/content/uploads/2017/05/15-1815_o...
The US Attorneys made a lot of publicity out of the murder-for-hire conspiracy allegations against Ulbricht in their indictments and in pre-trial media ("although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out." as the indictment itself obliquely says).
Ulbricht's defense could have come up with a plausible alternative explanations that he knew redandwhite was a scammer trying to extort him with a story involving nonexistent people, and was just playing along with him for whatever reasons.
[*] If the prosecution had not actually dropped those charges at trial, it would have been confirmed at trial which of the six identities were fictitious/nonexistent and whether all the accounts were managed by the same DEA agents. Hard to imagine that at least one juror wouldn't have formed a skeptical opinion about government agents extorting a person to conspire to kill fictitious people (why didn't the indictment just focus on nailing him on the lesser charges?). If this wasn't a Turing Test on when is an alleged conspiracy not a real conspiracy, then someday soon we'll see one.
ArsTechnica covered these facts in 2015:
[0]: "The hitman scam: Dread Pirate Roberts’ bizarre murder-for-hire attempts. On the darkweb, no one is who they seem." 2/2015 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/the-hitman-scam-...
[1]: Silk Road’s alleged hitman, “redandwhite,” arrested in Vancouver https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...
Is it? Preponderance of the evidence is basically “more likely than not”
Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!
There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.
Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?
Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.
Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?
Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?
And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?
It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.
See, e.g.
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-... for the faux forum moderator killing
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w... for the other faux five killings (another scam on Ross - he thought he was having extortionists killed? he kept getting confirmations?)
So you can’t agree with the original sentence and then say he “absolutely deserved to be released.”
Without the chance of parole, a pardon from the president is one of the few ways he could get out of jail.
He seems to be denying that he hired hitmen:
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
And you didn't bother to address that he ran a market for illegal goods and services, for some reason.
So many people are in jail for crimes they didn’t commit, or for non-violent offenses that were committed out of hardship and a need to eat.
They gave evidence he tried to have someone killed, and that he saw confirmation it had been done.
Even if the accusation is somehow false and he didn’t order that killing, how many people did he actually kill just by running Silk Road?
I’m so sick of the narrative that aww shucks he’s a good kid from a good family and he just made a boo-boo and didn’t mean to build a multi-billion dollar illicit fortune from trafficking deadly drugs and outright poisons all over the world.
If this dude wasn’t a money-raised white kid from California no-one would care.
People generally don’t get locked up for life even if they do kill someone (in civilized countries), as long as they can be rehabilitated.
Why is he pardoning a drug trafficker?
It's better to ignore the rational reasons to oppose them and focus on the emotional ones. For starters, people are repulsed by their cruelty.
To anyone who voted for Trump because he said he'd be hard on drug dealers: how do you feel about him pardoning a top level drug dealer?
The rise of the morally bankrupt in America.
People need to stop thinking of politicians as their friends and having parasocial relationships with them. They're public servants and should be treated as such.
On the other hand, it's clear to me that the correct amount of jail time wasn't zero either, given everything else he allegedly did.
[0] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
[1] I think about this in the same way that we accept the possibility of bad things happening because people can have private conversations in their own home, or are able to have complete control over potentially dangerous tools and vehicles. IMO the risks are worth the trade-offs and these are important rights to protect in the relationship between people, technology, and government (or whoever wields power).
according to Trump: "A promise made is a promise kept", he is keeping his promise to his constituents.
enjoy your CNN propaganda.
A developer builds a platform like eBay but without censorship that can be used by the drug trafficker
It's not the same thing
I’d argue the President should not be allowed to issue pardons that are:
(1) Preëmptive (i.e. absent conviction);
(2) To himself, his current or former Cabinet members, or to any of the foregoing’s current or former spouses or children or grandchildren (or their spouses); or
(3) Issued after the presidential election in the final year of their term.
Furthermore, pardons for violent offences or corruption should be prohibited; provided, however, the President should retain the power to commute such sentences, and the Congress should have the power to regulate the manner in which the President may commute such sentences.
(Notably, I don’t believe this would apply to Ulbricht. He wasn’t convicted of a violent crime.)
I think this is necessary class of pardons. A hypothetical example of a good preemptive pardon would be Congress repealing an unjust law, and the president pardoning anybody who broke that law before the repeal.
>(2) To himself, his current or former Cabinet members, or to any of the foregoing’s current or former spouses or children or grandchildren (or their spouses)
Agree on not pardoning himself or cabinet members. Maybe could extend that to include all political appointees. Politicians shouldn't enjoy special privileges like these. But I'm less convinced about preventing family pardons. Those people (generally) aren't politicians. And, if they plan to abuse the president's pardon to commit crimes, they'd either be asking after the crime and risking the president refusing, or asking before and leaving the president open to conspiracy charges.
>(3) Issued after the presidential election in the final year of their term.
I've grown too cynical about the voters to believe this would matter. Most people don't follow politics closely enough to know who's been pardoned, what they did, and any political/personal connections they had with the president.
If I may suggest a limitation, how about allowing the House or Senate to veto a pardon with a 2/3 majority?
Congress could do this when they pass the law. If they didn't, they specifically chose not to.
> less convinced about preventing family pardons. Those people (generally) aren't politicians
What if we invert the question: in what case would the family require a pardon such that their spouse or parent in a position of massive power couldn't help them out of a legitimate scuffle?
> Most people don't follow politics closely enough to know who's been pardoned
Then why do most of the controversial pardons come in this envelope?
> how about allowing the House or Senate to veto a pardon with a 2/3 majority?
I like this much better.
Edit: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...
Now??? Its been just as painful to use without an account for around 10 years now.
Back in 2017, I could still read public profiles, their tweets, and look at the replies, all without logging in.
Now I can't even look at an account page without logging in.
Ulbricht later sent ELLINGSON $150,000 worth of Bitcoin to pay for the purported murder. ELLINGSON and Ulbricht agreed on a code to be included with a photograph to prove that the murder had been carried out. In April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged messages reflecting that ELLINGSON had sent Ulbricht photographic proof of the murder. A thumbnail of a deleted photograph purporting to depict a man lying on a floor in a pool of blood with tape over his mouth was recovered from Ulbricht’s laptop after his arrest. A piece of paper with the agreed-upon code written on it is shown in the photograph next to the head of the purportedly dead individual.
Later in April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged additional messages regarding a plot to kill four additional people in Canada. Ulbricht sent ELLINGSON an additional $500,000 worth of Bitcoin for the murders. ELLINGSON claimed to Ulbricht in online messages that the murders had in fact been committed.
50,676 bitcoins, today valued at 5,3 billion USD.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h...
I’m all for the freeing him of his crimes when it comes to his crypto anarchic philosophy. But I find it hard to pardon someone for contract killing essentially. Also I’m not an apologist for the FBIs handling of this case either.
Apparently, there is something in Lorance v. Commandant, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks that indicates that accepting a pardon does not imply guilt, but I am not very knowledge on that.
This could have waited until after the midterms.
On the contrary, he can just bury it in the first 48 hours. This will fade into the background soon enough but that group is kept happy.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/deli...
He promised to pardon the rioters during the election and it didn't hurt him. I think he decided it wouldn't hurt him (and Trump cares bout that first) and if he thought about the midterms ... maybe won't hurt then either.
Congress isn't directly involved in any of this anyway.
One of the big reasons I voted for him. He actually keeps the promises he made as far reality will allow.
What's really stupid is that keeping promises made isn't the norm for politicians, of all kinds.
She was a tireless advocate for his release from the start, and it became a part of the libertarian cause to see him released.
It worked. Trump courted the libertarian vote, and this was his most popular promise to them.
She's an inspiring woman. I'm so glad she lived to see this.
The tweet:
How do republicans in Idaho (who don't even have medical marijuana on the books), defend Trump pardoning someone convicted of drug trafficking?
You could ask the same of any deal: Why not instead of years ago? Because the deal wasn't available years ago.
Substantiating my obliterated sibling comment:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...
the mormon ones would be the most likely that would object, but even plenty of the republican/libertarian mormons i know are happy to have the massive government overreach corrected.
Trump isn't up for re-election. It's his act alone.
He promised in the election to pardon other criminals and it didn't hurt him.
I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.
He's not getting off lightly!
It's just that, in layman's terms, a pardon means "you did nothing wrong", whereas a commutation means "you did something wrong but were sentenced too harshly". As far as I know that's also what it more or less means legally (with some nuance).
I'm absolutely not a fan of "tough on crime" sentencing, but he absolutely did do something wrong, even if we ignore the contended "murder for hire" claims he should have been sent to prison for a number of years (personally, I'd say about 5-10 years). This is also by Ulbricht's own admission by the way.
I suspect that the idea originally was to give some safety valve but if it is used more than a few times by a President, it makes a mockery of it and it should be removed as a power. How can a President ever decide that the entire legal process is flawed and their opinion is right? If the sentence was too long then change the sentencing guidelines.
On its own it is not that bad an idea for someone who carries a mandate of the majority of the population to be able to grant pardons.
Taken to the extreme, we could have an impartial legal system putting in prison criminals from an even mix of society, and then the president pardoning everyone from the majority group, leaving in prison only the minorities.
If we assume that both you and MLK were right, but that different policies better suit different conditions, then your proposal could maximize meritocratic effectiveness in an already-very-fair society, whereas MLK's way (the Voting Rights Act) provides a better minimum standard of human rights (similar to 1st and 2nd Amendment protections for people).
https://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm#litbkgnd
Sorry for the snark, it's just a very hard problem because we'd end up in a situation where the voters would decide who is part of their club.
The idea has been around for a bit and I call it interesting, but also with huge potential of misuse.
Change the test slightly, so your target audience will yield better results, giving you a better result.
Either way, as long as climate change and darwinism are controversial topics, I see it hard to implement in a meaningful way.
[0] A big if, I know…
I don't know the differences but also from my perspective they don't seem to differ that much. Might as well be that Trump said "yeah and pardon that guy Ulbricht ... " while doing tons of other stuff wielding his new powers like he's doing now and his word was taken exact, given there's little difference
He killed children.
- "During the sentencing hearing, Forrest heard from the father of a 25-year-old Boston man who died of a heroin overdose and the mother of a 16-year-old Australian who took a drug designed to mimic LSD at a post-prom party and then jumped off a balcony to his death. Prosecutors said the two victims were among at least six who died after taking drugs that were bought through Silk Road."
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/silk-road... ("Silk Road Mastermind Handed Life in Prison for Drug Bazaar" (2015))
It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin*. Most (?) Asian countries *execute* people who sell heroin. Trump himself has proposed, multiple times over the years, executing US heroin dealers[1,2]—which underscores the incredible degree of hypocrisy behind this pardon.
*(It's also within some people's Overton windows to contemplate the opposite of this, in a framework of harm minimization. I can't steelman this argument in the specific case of Ulbricht. Is it harm reduction to sell heroin? Is it harm reduction to sell fatal drugs to high-school age kids?)
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43465229 ("Trump urges death penalty for drug dealers" (2018))
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1152847242/trump-campaign-exe... ("Trump wants the death penalty for drug dealers. Here's why that probably won't happen" (2023))
That's very unlikely to be true in the case of the high-school kid who died buying a synthetic drug off the internet. They almost certainly did not have a dealer connection sophisticated enough to sell that. They almost certainly would have lived, if Silk Road were not available to them at that point in their life.
You're advancing an argument about drug markets and personal autonomy in the general case, but it's a very poor fit to the concrete facts in the specific situation we're looking at.
"If I don't do it, someone else will" - I suppose this is a convenient excuse that can be applied to anything unsavory, from the little guy selling shrooms at the street corner to nation states making nasty biological and chemical weapons?
Not saying there isn't truth to it, just wondering how as a society we seem to accept that doing unsavory things is a necessity because others are doing it (or they will be doing it soon, so we better be the first)
> He killed children.
Nit: People died, who may not have died, because of his actions but he didn't kill them. Very few people are forced to take drugs.
[1] https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/insights/internet-dr...
EDIT: Added citation for commenter who couldn't be bothered to use a search engine. Link contains links to multiple studies.
I'm surprised they didn't call in the witness who thought they were a glass of orange juice.
The concept of justice must include an element of proportionality, I would argue that Ross's sentence, for a first time non-violent criminal, was over the top. Without proportionality justice becomes arbitrary, based more on luck and your connections to power.
We punish those we can punish: the little guy. Whilst those running governments, corporations and networks that facilitate repression, hatred and genocide go scot free.
I don't know what the appropriate sentence for Ulbrecht, but I think your claims about proportionality are missing the fact he didn't just direct commit a few crimes, such as trying (unsuccessfully) to hire a hitman, but he facilitated hundreds of thousands of crimes. Maybe you think selling drugs and guns to randos should not be illegal, but that is a separate question of whether or not he broke the laws as written.
As for your last point, I don't disagree that the wealthy/powerful/connected live under a different justice system than everyone else.
The police, DEA and Secret service have vast power they can use against the populace. If those same agents are committing crimes then it taints the entire investigation and prosecution. If a cop is found to have planted drugs on past arrestees, quite often a good portion of his other cases are thrown out as well as he has corrupted everything he touched.
It likely doesn't rise to the legal doctrine of "fruit from a poisoned tree" but its in the ballpark.
For the people downvoting me for some reason:
A DEA agent involved in the investigation "was sentenced to 78 months in prison for extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice"
A secret service agent involved in the investigation "was sentenced to 24 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco following his earlier guilty plea to one count of money laundering."
Ulbricht's right-hand-man Roger Thomas Clark, who was involved in one of the murder-for-hire conversations, admitted the conversation was real during his trial:
"In his own remarks, Clark didn't comment on that murder-for-hire conversation—which he at one point claimed had been fabricated by Ulbricht but later conceded was real."
https://www.wired.com/story/silk-road-variety-jones-sentenci...
However, the Silk Road allowed me to try LSD as an 18 year old in a safe(r) way than those that came before me.* It was those experiences that revealed I’d been depressed most of my life, and that it also didn’t have to be that way, by way of experiencing what that would feel like. I went on to seek new experiences, make new friends for the first time in my life, engage with professional mental health support, went to university, and started multiple businesses. It also introduced my staunchly-atheist self to the experience of spiritual/transcendental experiences, and how those can exist separately from, and don’t require, belief in deities or religion.
It can’t be said where I’d have wound up without those experiences, but my own understanding of myself feels pivotally tied to something I couldn’t have gone through without Ross’ actions. Still, I acknowledge it appears more likely that not he tried to have people killed, and regardless of the circumstances surrounding this, that is condemnable.
*Had it not been for an anonymous group at the time, The LSD Avengers, posting reviews using gas chromatography mass-spectrometry and reagent tests of suppliers on the site, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to take the risk of trying what I’d received. LSD is physiologically safe, not to say anything of any psychological risks, but knowing the dose allowed me to enter into the shallow end of the pool, so to speak. Common substitutes however cannot have the same said of them.
If I’d lived in a time and place that allowed for state-funded drug testing (something my own state has in fact recently abolished despite wildly successful trials), perhaps things would’ve not required a Ross Ulbricht to exist in my case, but I see this as a failure of the system and of drug prohibition as a whole.
Ross would’ve existed one way or another I believe, for better or worse, by another name, had he chosen another path. Now he gets the chance to try his life again. I felt the same way.
Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted, while the facts of the case did not. There is a really cultural shift visible in how this issue is seen on here.
I wouldn't argue that both sides have gotten more extreme, rather the political spectrum curve has flattened. There is much less rational discourse in general.
Reddit is a great example. Even 10 years ago you could have mostly rational discussions. Now its no better than Facebook. I saw a post today about people being upset the government is giving OpenAI half a trillion dollars. They didn't even realize it wasn't government money. They didn't want to be corrected.
I wish we could run some sort of sentiment analysis to see who was pro and anti the sentencing then vs now.
Ridiculous hyperbole about Ross ‘inventing the Dark Web’ or ‘Trump freed a sex trafficker’ is a great reminder that for some people, their ideological opposition can never do anything right and they’ll condemn anything they do without even a second of consideration.
I’m not an avowed Trump supporter (or even American) but believe this was the right call to make. The sentence was overly harsh and he has both served his time and reformed. I’m glad he has been released.
Presidents of both parties abuse pardon power with monarchic glee. The president now has full immunity. The incoming president and his wife launched crypto-tokens whose only utility is to allow foreigners to send billions of dollars to them anonymously (of course with full identification of the buyer in private communications thanks to the crypto private key, so you can be sure of who sent the bribe).
People are obviously tired and overwhelmed. It's hard to pay attention because Trump has recently threatened so much more: invading foreign allies, military trials for political opponents, using the army against citizens, and so on. When he carries through with just 20% of what he said, it's supposed to be no big deal. But the institutions and norms are destroyed and they don't magically come back if the other party wins.
> "full and unconditional pardon for any crimes related to drugs".
Does "any crimes related to drugs" include the murder for hire allegations? Does this mean new charges related to that could be brought against him?
(Silk Road 2.0 already existed. The guy running it is in prison now, I think.)
edit: ah seems Silk Road 3.0 existed too. So, 4.0 then
https://rossulbricht.medium.com/decentralize-social-media-cc...
If he had been running an IRL drug and gun facilitation marketplace in my city, I would have said 20 years was appropriate.
But when the feds make it a techno-political issue, I feel the urge to push back.
All these people here saying his sentence is deserved. It's just sick. How is your crime rate going? Declining...right? ....nope
Starting a business that accepts crypto payments is going to be a tell.
though he was very stupid with how he did it, I am happy he is a free man
1. Ross Ulbricht the ultimate entrepreneur?
2. Ross Ulbricht was a freedom fighter?
Why do they still have courts in the US again?
Given that Trump didn't pardon Ulbricht during his first presidential term, why now?
What does Trump, who is notoriously transactional, get in return for this? Alternatively, what signal is he sending and to who?
I recommend you read the HN thread when Ulbricht was sentenced [0] first, then come here and read all the "Honest, genuine question, why?"s
Then start practicing not letting politics influence your thought process
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138691127416...
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
That said - There is no evidence that anyone was ever killed, there is pretty thin evidence that he actually ever intended to hire any hitmen (though he may have defrauded people who thought they were hiring hitmen), and a life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking seems draconian. I certainly don't think this should have been one of Trump's priorities (I'm guessing it came through Vance, Musk, or someone else in the crypto community), but I don't have a big problem with it.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
In 2021, presumably during SBF's (big Democrat donor) FTX scam, Trump thought that Bitcoin was a scam:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734
Now he is best friends with the "crypto", AI, and H1B bros.
They will sell their souls to a man who would grind them into a paste and sell that paste as a protein snack to his cultists-- in exchange for a hollow, symbolic win that either impacts them in no way whatsoever or maliciously hurts people they don't like.
At least with other political groups you have to, you know, BRIBE them.
Libertarians are so used to receiving absolutely nothing that they will mistake the scent of a steak for a full meal.
I would've expected responses like this for Aung San Suu Kyi or Dawit Isaak or someone, but _this guy_? Really?
Oh, I guess he is an e n t r e p r e n e u r... I get it now.
In the long run letting political influence trump (no pun intended) the criminal justice system is a very bad thing.
By world standards our criminal justice system is a strength of the country. A pity if we lose that.
All of the death threat allegations were never proven.
He did not deserve to rot in prison for life for creating a website.
He successfully created a tool to undermine one of the most unjust and predatory policies of the US State - the policy of drug prohibition.
He's a damn hero. I don't understand why Trump, who most of the time seems like a simply awful human being with no end of appetite for state power, has chosen to do this, but I'll certainly take it.
It's beyond obvious that voting and other mechanics of representative rule have not succeeded at simple policy change such as ending prohibition. I look forward to several decades of truth trumping power in the form of the internet undermining states, until the asinine mode of political organization known as the nation state is deprecated entirely.
He was punished for the crime of attempting or conspiring to commit murder. Without ever having been found guilty in a trial by jury of his peers determining beyond reasonable doubt that the facts met said crime.
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
The war on drugs has always been farcical, deliberately engineered to target minority groups who were opposing power dynamics at the time. It’s why - despite popular opinion to the contrary - cannabis remains broadly illegal at the Federal level and enforced globally through a web of treaties. It’s always been about creating the means of entrapment for those inconvenient to power.
Pardoning Ross smacks of a gift to cryptobros to earn their loyalty to the current powers that be, rather than an acknowledgement of a past mistake. It is nakedly political, pardoning a white man from an otherwise good background while others languish in prison on far less serious charges or convictions. Were any of the drug dealers on his black market similarly pardoned? Were any of his consumers? Of course not, because Ross was a Capitalist making profit in an untapped market, and the others were individuals who were not.
The entire thing is nauseating, and is enough to wash my hands of all involved were the need to dismantle this farce of a war not so grave.
In contrast: Biden didn't pardon Leonard Peltier, the president commuted his sentence. Peltier maintains his innocence.
Also if you try to overthrow the government you get pardoned which I would have guessed approaches treason.
These are pardonable offenses and conditions.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-don...
This kind of divisive nonsense is purposeless and doesn't productively add to the conversation.
Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
the real criminals for that prank were never even tried.
2. There is no evidence anyone else ever said this, either
The closest you get is MLK.
See https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
But MLK also talks about moral obligation and not other forms of obligation.
He was not trying to create a free for all where everyone gets to decide which laws are okay or not, because he (and jefferson) were not complete morons.
>Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
He was trying to create a more just, egalitarian society. I don't understand how you can consider acting in accordance with leading research on successful drug policy "moronic"?
Don't take my word for it though, the monticello folks looked into it too - https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
It is a fun quote though, because it's one of those quotes that people want to use to justify their own dumb behavior.
"If you don't like the law, feel free to ignore it" - Albert Einstein
Of course Trump's platform was enormously based on law & order and combatting the drug trade, which he seems to think should still be actually illegal and is not ending the war on drugs so, I don't know - make of that what you will.
Ross though? The government alleged it but never bothered to prove it. Furthermore the government agents involved were laughably corrupt, so anything they alleged needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. For all anybody here know, they fabricated the entire assassination story to distract the public from their plot to loot Ross's money (which unlike the assassination stuff, has been proven in court.)
But, I can't see how this becomes net beneficial in Congress, or in the wider economy. At best it's providing lower friction movement of goods and services. They tend not to go to Federal Tax collecting exchanges, so I cannot for the life of me see how this helps the exchequer, but maybe thats the point?
Ross ran an online marketplace for drugs and other illegal materials for personal profit.
The life sentence was ridiculous, but they're not he same at all.
It's the difference between Chelsea Manning or Snowden leaking state secrets and someone who sells on state secrets to the Russians or Chinese.
He didnt sell anything, so your metaphor doesn't correlate at all.
Also Aaron las literally a CEO of a company. Im not complaining about Aaron, he did have higher thoughts on how to help society but my point was about entrepeneurship.
If you want to come onto a ycombinator forum and say "hey this website creator was bad", then argue the case without comparing him to "user" of the site, which was my pretty simple point. Otherwise you just make yourself look bad.
I do not agree with his behaviour, I am saying he made a site, and got into trouble because of what happened on it. This sets a precedent that affects startup entrepeneur. Its a simple concept I am discussing. So dont strawman this.
I want you to convince me, but if you need to be logical.
It seems questionable Trump even understands or cares what Silk Road did or how it worked.
B. Orange is not a hero. I don't bow down to Kim Jong Un/Hitler wannabees.
C. Tor is a three letter honeypot.
For all his talk of being progressive and cultivation of a youthful maverick image of his own, you would have never seen such a move from Obama and forget about it under the mealy mouthed Biden or a hypothetical Hillary administration. With Trump, rather uniquely and singularly, it happened.
Ulbricht made many mistakes, less so morally but definitely legally, of the kind with which he could have expected to cause punishment to rain down upon him, but the way in which his case was managed and the way in which he was sentenced truly were both disgusting in numerous ways.
They were classic examples of prosecutorial and political vengeance and give much truth to Trump's own description of the same as "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
If you in any way mistrust heavy-handed government prosecutions and persecutions, it's hard to disagree much, even if it's also not hard to imagine Trump being just as abusive in other contexts where prosecution of enemies would suit his interests and personal vengeance.
Now if we see him pardon Snowden too, i'd happily give a standing ovation.
Before someone here smugly chimes in about how Ulbricht also tried to hire out a murder by contract, bear in mind that this accusation was riddled with holes, suspicions of entrapment and in any case wasn't formally used for his sentencing, AND still wouldn't justify the kind of onerously grotesque sentence that was dumped on him. Pedophiles who committed child murders have been sentenced to less than Ulbricht was.
you forgot Chelsea Manning; so I stopped reading there
I agree Assange should not have been pursued at all.
You can't directly compare the two situations. Manning was a US citizen, serving a sentence in the US. During Obama's term, Assange was not yet accused of any crime in the US, so there was no presidential pardon to be had, though Obama could have dropped the extradition request.
Biden did eventually reach a deal with Assange that allowed him to count time served -- essentially the same as commuting a sentence, so along the lines of what Manning got -- and return to Australia.
So in the end, Assange and Manning were both freed after serving time.
Whether or not you think he deserved the prison time, the problem here is how utterly brazen Trump is in accepting bribes.
What he did care about were libertarian votes. There was a deal that libertarians will support Trump if he promises to free Ross. This is on record, you can find it.
The messages show he wanted and thought he was getting people murdered. But that's perfectly OK because it was actually the evil FBI he was talking to!