Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht sentenced to life

Ross Ulbricht, creator of the underground website Silk Road, which let users anonymously buy and sell anything from drugs to hacking tutorials, was sentenced Friday to life in prison after he made a tearful plea for leniency.

Ulbricht, who is 31, was convicted in February on seven counts ranging from money laundering to drug trafficking. He could have been sentenced to only 20 years.

U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest was clear that she was making an example of Ulbricht in part to deter others from committing similar crimes

Link

I am a bit surprised other than the part about making an example. Heck of a lot worse money crimes without much jail time.

He didn't have enough time to get to 'too big to fail' it seems.

a reply to: roadgravel

woah, a life sentence... and he didnt even kill anyone! lol.... all this over a website!

a reply to: roadgravel

Make an example?

Of what a flawed legal system?

You are not allowed to buy and sell without our mark--err, stamp of approval.

a reply to: Kapusta

That may well be the case. Sad how the system works without a person having fame and fortune.

I think it also comes down to taxs, the powers that be p##s their pants if the little people are making money without paying taxs.

Well...I think his sales were attributed to 5 or 6 deaths. Either way, the guy was a slimeball so no real sympathy from me here. He may have had a couple of advanced degrees, but he was stupid enough to set up shop in the US....not a smart move for an online drug dealer....not really sure what he expected.

a reply to: roadgravel

I am pretty sure public deterrents don't work. It's just something bureacrats come up with, thinking they are helping to "make a difference". As far as I understand, Silk Road was back up and running within a few months of being taken down anyways!

originally posted by: combatmaster
a reply to: roadgravel

woah, a life sentence... and he didnt even kill anyone! lol.... all this over a website!

im not saying i agree with the term and you are right, he didnt kill anyone but he did try.

wired magazine just ran a 2 part article and it dove into that a bit.

he was talking to a guy on his site and the guy was an under cover dea agent. ross wanted the guy(the agent) to go a hit for him and paid him 30 grand to do it. he sent payment and the agent staged the whole death scene and sent pics to ross as 'proof' of the hit.

after that he paid someone else 100 grand to do another hit. of course the hit never happened but he thought it did.

so yeah, he didnt kill anyone but he sure did pay to have people killed.

silk road started out as one thing and morphed into another and this ross dude definitely was a scum bag.

life in prison though. i dont know.

forced him to give up almost 200 mili as well

a reply to: corsair00

2.0 was but that got shut down too.

i have not been on tor in a while but last time i was and i went to the hidden wiki, most of the sites are down.

im sure they or others like it are back up though. im not some tor/dark net frequent user though so i really wouldnt even know how to find the sites. it took me a while just to get on the hidden wiki.
curiosity got the best of me.
there was definitely some crazy stuff on there.

i read an article that said the web is like the ocean. what people browse normally with their browsers and google and such would be like skimming only the top 5% of the ocean. 95% of the content on 'the web' is underneath, on the 'deep web'

a reply to: roadgravel

To make an example they gave him a life sentence.


How I read that is. He was given a life sentence for publicity. And it will remain a life sentence until the headlines fade. After that he will move for a sentence reduction that in all likelihood be granted partly because of the judges speech.

I would like to see some politicians and CEOs held to this standard. Dreaming of course.

originally posted by: combatmaster
a reply to: roadgravel

woah, a life sentence... and he didnt even kill anyone! lol.... all this over a website!

He did nothing to hurt anyone outside of the fact that he attempted to order the murder of other people.

If it was just black market drugs, then a tragedy.

If he brokered assassinations, then he's a scumbag... or scummier than the average bear.

I love the Silk Road's idea, in theory, as a free marketplace of ideas and expression... and people's chemical ingestion is their own dang business... but things like slavery and violence, nah... he lost me there.

a reply to: Mugly

Yeah, I recall seeing a Wiki list myself. It was on par with entire areas for people to sell stolen credit card numbers and to set up, apparently, hit-men and the like. I recall seeing a documentary on some European TV show that had a "huge scoop" on Silk Road, and even showed people how to use it and got one of their crew to order '___'. It got to the point, as a result of such publicity, that the regular web was having this Silk Road stuff posted all over. So, I guess it's no wonder it got shut down. I think there's a documentary devoted to the investigation of Silk Road itself. They were all proud of their undercover, from what I remember - an agent even had a double persona for a while etc.

I am not sure if 95% of the web is underneath, but there must be vast networks out there...

a reply to: Baddogma

That's one of the things that happen when regulations are not in place and some thing is anonymous. It's the world we live in.

Lot's of people are scumbags, is life in prison ok for them too? Being a scumbag isn't a crime. Breaking the law is. The problem is the discrepancy in sentencing. People have been sent to death row for less, and others have received a jail sentence of less than two years for committing crimes a lot worse.

a reply to: roadgravel

He did hire a hitman to torture and kill someone, sending video evidence as "proof of suffering", though.

Not exactly a standup guy.

originally posted by: combatmaster
a reply to: roadgravel

he didnt even kill anyone!

Not through lack of trying.

originally posted by: Baddogma
If it was just black market drugs, then a tragedy.

If he brokered assassinations, then he's a scumbag... or scummier than the average bear.

I love the Silk Road's idea, in theory, as a free marketplace of ideas and expression... and people's chemical ingestion is their own dang business... but things like slavery and violence, nah... he lost me there.

he did pay people for hits. according to the article i read, he paid 30 grand for one and a hundred grand for another. again, these murders didnt actually happen but he paid for them and thought they did.
i like the idea behind silk road too. from what i read it seems that pirate roberts had those same kinds of thought on expression and ideas at the silk roads inception but along the way , he went off course with the ordering of hits and such.
it went from a simple marketplace to a marketplace where you could order heroin and have it delivered to you. that was not the intention when it was started.

corsair, i dont remember where i read that about the size of the web vs size of the dark web and have no way to verify if they were true figures anyway.
either way you slice it though, i think only a small portion of the actual web is visible via normal browsers.

en.wikipedia.org...

In the year 2000, Michale Bergman said how searching on the internet can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed.[10] Most of the web's information is buried far down on sites, and standard search engines do not find it. Traditional search engines cannot see or retrieve content in the deep web. The portion of the web that is indexed by standard search engines is known as the surface web. As of 2001,[needs update] the deep web was several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web.[11] An analogy of an iceberg has been used to represent the division between surface web and deep web respectively.

those accounts are from 2001 but i would imagine it is still about the same as far as relative size goes

It is impossible to measure, and hard to put estimates on, the size of the deep web because the majority of the information is hidden or locked inside databases. Early estimates suggested that the deep web is 400 to 550 times larger than the surface web. However, since more information and sites are always being added, it can be assumed that the deep web is growing exponentially at a rate that cannot be quantified.