Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon

https://twitter.com/Free_Ross/status/1881851923005165704

by Ozarkian • 1 year ago

1864 2103 1 year ago

twitter.com

mbStavola• 1 year ago

Without any snark, why? What's the motivation?

lostmikeys• 1 year ago

There's probably still some SR btc they wanted the keys to.

mannerheim9• 1 year ago

Possibly a deal with the Libertarian Party, which chose not to run their candidate in several states to help Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY

qqqult2• 1 year ago

It was one of the promises he made at a Bitcoin conference he attended a few months ago. It has been a popular issue in crypto circles

foogazi7• 1 year ago

Just feels all around

mythrwy• 1 year ago

Two life sentences was a bit harsh. 11 years seems about right to me.

I suspect the idea beyond "Free Ross" in some circles was that his conviction wasn't so much about drug dealing, but rather it was more a political prosecution for popularizing real uses of cryptocurrencies.

anotherhue• 1 year ago

Paraphrasing an aphorism I saw elsewhere: "Crime is legal now".

l0ng1nu512• 1 year ago

“If a law is unjust a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so” - Thomas Jefferson

mmcwilliams3• 1 year ago

Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.

clueless• 1 year ago

so we all individually can just decide a law is unjust? that'll be fun

adriand3• 1 year ago

Is it unjust to prohibit the sale of illegal drugs, weapons, etc.? Society has good reasons for regulating certain goods. I regularly see people in my community who are enslaved by fentanyl and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. The society I live in decided to make selling it illegal. What is unjust about that?

Aloisius2• 1 year ago

He tried to have multiple people murdered.

bdangubic• 1 year ago

lol

DannyBee13• 1 year ago

1. There is no evidence jefferson ever said this

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.

lq9AJ8yrfs• 1 year ago

Maybe Thoreau? That's more authentic and gets at similar themes. On more than one level considering his circumstances and run-ins with law enforcement.

”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

silverquiet• 1 year ago

I wonder how this sentiment is going to play out in Luigi Mangione's trial.

rhabarba• 1 year ago

Providing online forums is legal now.

pavel_lishin• 1 year ago

Hiring a hitman is legal now.

llamaimperative7• 1 year ago

Given there are at least thousands if not millions of people who "provide online forums," and pretty much this single one is in prison, I have to wonder if there's something unique about this case?

I don't know anything about this guy. Is there really nothing unique about his case?

daveguy3• 1 year ago

Running an elicit drug and whatever else you want to sell market is legal now.

gitaarik9• 1 year ago

Crime has always been legal for the ones with money and the right connections.

Biden pardonning his son and other criminals also made this clear.

Most people are becoming aware most politicians are actually criminals in suits.

maplant2• 1 year ago

I had no idea this was a campaign promise. Why? I don’t understand.

acegopher• 1 year ago

because the crypto bros love him

1oooqooq3• 1 year ago

who else will buy new treasury DOGE coins?

defrost8• 1 year ago

* Ulbricht's conviction became a cause célèbre in American libertarian circles.

* In May 2024, candidate Donald Trump said that if re-elected President, he would commute Ulbricht's sentence on his first day in office

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht

I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).

While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.

apsec112• 1 year ago

RFK Jr is definitely not a libertarian (even compared to someone mainstream like Gary Johnson or Jared Polis), he supports strong state intervention in many areas of the economy and society

godshatter• 1 year ago

It's odd because libertarian candidates usually only garner 1% to 3% of the votes. It does appear that there are a lot of libertarians that vote Republican because of the stigma third parties have, though. As someone who often votes for libertarian candidates, I can't understand it. Republicans are about as libertarian as a cheese sandwich.

monero-xmr5• 1 year ago

I am active in libertarian circles and Ulbricht was a cause celebre. The 2024 election was a game of inches, and many libertarians I know voted Trump purely on this issue. It is possible this was a key way Trump eked out a victory.

dralley6• 1 year ago

Libertarians are very hard to take seriously because of shit like this. Nothing about Donald Trump is Libertarian.

UniverseHacker13• 1 year ago

Trump went around to a huge number of niche communities and promised to fix their core concerns in exchange for their support. The crypto and libertarian communities are obsessed with freeing Ulbricht. It was honestly a brilliant strategy, and probably the reason he won. Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.

llamaimperative7• 1 year ago

Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.

Ironic? It's the oldest trick in the book bro

exoverito4• 1 year ago

Unfortunately you could level the same type of name calling towards Democrats. It's now public record they colluded with all the major media outlets, coerced big tech to censor and debank opponents, imprisoned whistleblowers, violated bodily autonomy with unconstitutional mandates, weaponized the courts to conduct lawfare, and now issued an unprecedented number of pre-emptive pardons for unspecified crimes committed by Fauci, Hunter Biden, et al.

I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.

Spooky238• 1 year ago

It’s not ironic at all. The MAGA movement is really similar to how Mussolini came to power.

The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.

Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.

npteljes6• 1 year ago

Trump went around to a huge number of niche communities and promised to fix their core concerns in exchange for their support

Very interesting insight, thank you for sharing it. Do you happen to know other examples as well?

duxup7• 1 year ago

It's a trite thing to say, but when it comes to Trump it fits the pattern of inside dealing ... I'm guessing he personally will profit from this somehow / someone promised a donation / money.

hilux2• 1 year ago

To the libertarians.

heavyset_go• 1 year ago

Wouldn't be surprised if he is sitting on a billion dollars of hidden crypto somewhere.

stevenwoo• 1 year ago

If you meant Trump, it's not hidden, they released a Trump meme coin and the rug pull was after the inauguration timed with the release of the Melania meme coin, though entirely speculatively makes more sense for the investors to be foreign governments buying influence less obviously than the last Trump administration like Saudi Arabia hiring his son in law.

beeflet10• 1 year ago

It would have to be bitcoin, which isn't very hidden

TeaBrain2• 1 year ago

Crypto currency proponents benefit from the existence of dark net marketplaces because they are some of the main places for the non-speculative use of crypto currencies. I think Ross and his pardon represent a sort-of metaphor in crypto-currency proponents' eyes for the government's toleration of these dark net crypto marketplaces.

yuppiepuppie• 1 year ago

Wasn’t he in jail for hiring a contract killer?

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.

mannerheim9• 1 year ago

He was in jail for running a darknet drug marketplace. Hiring a contract killer was a crime he was neither charged with nor convicted of.

Aloisius2• 1 year ago

Ulbricht was indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge.

The case was dropped after NY conviction since he was sentencing to life, so there was little point in continuing.

Clearly that was a mistake if a lack of an attempted murder conviction helped him get a pardon.

meowface3• 1 year ago

The judge factored it into the sentencing, though. He likely did actually try to hire a contract killer - twice. In both cases he sincerely believed the murders were successfully committed, and he sent a lot of money to the assassins after being sent (doctored) "proof" of their killings.

I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.

I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).

l0ng1nu512• 1 year ago

I haven't reviewed the info for a while but it was pretty clearly entrapment as I recall.

macinjosh7• 1 year ago

Yes the FBI had root or admin access to the Silk Road system and could have very easily changed or otherwise affected logs/record IDs that the technical case rested on. Two of the FBI agents on the case were later punished for corruption on the case.

mmooss7• 1 year ago

Didn't Ulbricht actually run the Silk Road? Did someone from the FBI persuade Ulbricht to do it?

cratermoon4• 1 year ago

By accepting the pardon the accused concedes to guilt in the crime.

cbg06• 1 year ago

It was not entrapment. There is mention of undercover purchases and a controlled delivery by law enforcement, but these are not entrapment. Most of the evidence came from his own laptop.

hypeatei2• 1 year ago

No, that charge was dropped. IIRC, it was on shaky ground and they were just trying to throw the book at him.

tzs5• 1 year ago

The charge was dropped, but the court did hold a hearing on it when deciding on sentencing. They heard the evidence for and against and ruled by a preponderance of the evidence that he did in fact do it.

cbsmith11• 1 year ago

It had a lot to do with the fact that they already had him for more than long enough on other charges, such that it would have been a waste of time.

UberFly• 1 year ago

Some info from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33045520

adrianmonk• 1 year ago

According to Wikipedia[1], he was convicted of charges related to hacking, narcotics, money laundering, and more.

But during the trial, evidence was presented that he made murder-for-hire payments, the court found that he did by a preponderance of evidence, and the court took this into account when sentencing him.

So, he wasn't convicted of it, but it is part of the reason he was sent to jail for a very long time.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht

l0ng1nu512• 1 year ago

Absolute no brainer, he should be celebrated. Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform. Of course if we had less draconian drug policy, it wouldn't be necessary but here we are.

maplant2• 1 year ago

There is absolutely no way harm reduction was the reason Trump pardoned him.

l0ng1nu512• 1 year ago

It's absolutely one of the reasons why it was politically beneficial for him to enact the pardon.

Devasta3• 1 year ago

He tried to hire multiple hitmen.

bdndndndbve• 1 year ago

Does trump also support needle exchanges and safe consumption sites?

vkou4• 1 year ago

As well as online drug marketplaces? Or would running one without legal trouble require a campaign-contribution booster pack?

What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.

It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.

[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.

woodruffw5• 1 year ago

Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform.

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.

Devasta3• 1 year ago

No no no, he is right. Its safe because if you receive a bad batch of drugs you can leave a negative review on the page of the drug cartel that has your name and address, no chance of that having any repercussions for you at all.

l0ng1nu512• 1 year ago

The overwhelming majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities.

shadowgovt5• 1 year ago

Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs. Most of them were likely "fell off the truck" samples from the original manufacturers being sold by people with an in on the supply, but no otherwise-easy access to an out on the demand.

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).

potato37328426• 1 year ago

Yup. Drugs and the accompanying business disputes (there's a reason street dealers are armed or have armed people around) that would be normal in any other industry are sooo many people's (who would other wise not be violent criminals) entry point to violence. Letting parties remain at arms length yet transact successfully is such a huge step forward compared the prior status quo. Anything that gets buyers and sellers (either at the retail or distribution level) in illegal industries farther from each other is a win as far as I care.

s1mon• 1 year ago

I really wonder who benefits from this. Trump only does things that are good for him, or those close to him. I realize he's been making connections to the crypto world, and has his own meme coins. Does pardoning Ross somehow make crypto more valuable?

tonymet2• 1 year ago

Trump made the deal at the Libertarian National Convention to garner their support.

SV_BubbleTime2• 1 year ago

It’s almost a scandal that politician followed through on a campaign promise.

mannerheim9• 1 year ago

A video from Reason magazine a few days ago[0] mentioned a deal between the Libertarian Party leadership and Trump in which they selectively didn't run their candidate in several states in order to help Trump. If this is true, Trump could have reneged, but evidently decided whatever political blowback for pardoning Ulbricht (which is probably small potatoes at this rate) wasn't worth the credibility cost.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY

orionsbelt• 1 year ago

It’s also just good politics. There are a vocal group of voters that are in favor of this, so it gets those people on his side. And no reason not to (politically), as most people just don’t care about this topic, or if they do and disagree with the decision, this isn’t going to be the action that moves the needle for them on how they feel about Trump or the Republican Party.

drak0n1c• 1 year ago

Partisan caricature is not a reliable starting point for logical inference or deduction. To answer your question - on the campaign trail he attended a convention of libertarian organizers and promised them that if he won he would free Ross, and has followed through on that promise today.

qdhazEWT• 1 year ago

Trump refused to pardon Assange and Snowden. I suppose he has priorities.

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.

llamaimperative7• 1 year ago

“All my Republican donations were dark,” [SBF] said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.

https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...

sidibe3• 1 year ago

Among other things this guy was trying to have people murdered.

UncleOxidant2• 1 year ago

I guess this is why he was upset about Mexico sending drug dealers and murderers - he didn't want competition for our homegrown drug dealers and murderers.

johnneville4• 1 year ago

I would find this easier to celebrate if it was a commutation and not a pardon, or if it was a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke.

ktallett10• 1 year ago

Because their isn't a change in law doesn't mean the convictions were secure and bound by law before.

umanwizard• 1 year ago

a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke

Trump doesn't have the power to unilaterally change laws (fortunately!)

hypeatei2• 1 year ago

This is a rare Trump win. There are many things to criticize him for, but this pardon isn't one of them. I don't think anyone, after researching this case, would be okay with the life sentence handed down to Ross.

wkat4242• 1 year ago

Life no but probably more than he did in the end. He was really turning into a syndicate boss. The deep ars technica article was pretty depressing.

latentcall• 1 year ago

Most people in real life don’t even know who this guy is. This is a guy that online people know. I will agree it’s a win, he was unfairly sentenced. I just wish I would have been able to buy from SR. I did get to browse it before it was seized.

kevinsync• 1 year ago

I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!

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

Jtsummers• 1 year ago

I have nothing in particular to say about the dead comments in this very young thread, but they're sort-of-interesting comments to have been killed so quickly!

[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.

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."?

dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.

qqqult2• 1 year ago

Nothing wrong with HN in particular. Every polarising discussion on a platform with moderation or up/down voting system ends up this way. This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics

Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats

potato37328426• 1 year ago

This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics

No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.

There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.

Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.

dang2• 1 year ago

Jtsummers is correct.

Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.

steve_avery• 1 year ago

Well, I think that justice has been served. The feds' prosecution of Ulbricht was the epitome of throwing the book at someone to make an example, when the government's case was pretty flawed, in my opinion. 10 years is enough time to pay the debt of running the silk road.

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.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

wasn't there evidence of hiring a hitman to commit a murder in furtherance of the Silk Road? that's not part of "the debt of running the silk road"

alt1873• 1 year ago

The hitman was a conman for a murder on a fictitious person. While he fully believed he was committing a real assassination, you can't convict people for killing imaginary people.

lionkor• 1 year ago

Yes but he did get scammed as that wasn't a real hitman

zik3• 1 year ago

There wasn't any evidence that actually happened. It appears that it may have been fabricated by the same investigators that later robbed him of some millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Then when it went to trial the murder-for-hire charges were completely dropped due to lack of evidence.

He was convicted of:

  1. Conspiracy to traffic narcotics
  2. Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) (sometimes referred to as the “kingpin” charge)
  3. Computer Hacking Conspiracy
  4. Conspiracy to Traffic in Fraudulent Identity Documents
  5. Money Laundering Conspiracy

sebzim45005• 1 year ago

Wasn't that charge dropped though?

zanek3• 1 year ago

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???

buckle80172• 1 year ago

Body parts? huh

golly_ned2• 1 year ago

He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.

cortesoft• 1 year ago

People have died from things bought on Amazon, too

Also, Ross wasn't selling those things. He was just operating a market where other people sold things.

loeg10• 1 year ago

People regularly die from drinking alcohol. Should liquor store owners be doing life in prison? (And why are Australians special?)

bogota• 1 year ago

Maybe spend a little less time reading propaganda.

tomjen33• 1 year ago

People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.

But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.

Jensson• 1 year ago

Manslaughter is at most 10 years, he served 12 years, I feel its fair to release him now.

throwawaythekey• 1 year ago

As an Australian who had friends who bought product on silk road my understanding was:

1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.

2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).

Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.

kybernetyk5• 1 year ago

Smart people can differentiate between a market place and the sellers themselves.

nurumaik2• 1 year ago

Idk about silk road, but hydra (russian online marketplace) was the best thing that happened to russia drug market. It had very good reputation system and even labs that did random testing of drugs being sold

Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs

suddenlybananas• 1 year ago

You have to understand that half of the people here are libertarians who never grew out of their teenage philosophy.

gosub1002• 1 year ago

Did you just make a "think of the children" argument? Teens are well known to engage in risk taking. Why not prosecute the parents?

shawabawa3• 1 year ago

Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road

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?

knodi5• 1 year ago

drugs is one part, but silkroad facilitated more than drug, guns, fake documents, stolen data, money laundering, fake currency, contract killers... the list goes on.

yieldcrv6• 1 year ago

The government should have investigated the people that listed and sourced the drugs

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

slashdev• 1 year ago

Plus he tried to hire a hitman to kill someone. Ten years sentence seems a little light for that alone.

goosejuice• 1 year ago

Coltec, Sterigenics, UCC/UCIL, DuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, Dow, Mallinckrodt, Imperial Sugar, BP, A.A.R. Contractors, W.R. Grace, PG&E, Perdue Pharma.

So much corporate/gov negligence leads to permanent environment damage, cancer, death. In most cases it's a slap on the wrist. Maybe some exist, but I'm having a hard time finding an example.

Show me one executive that served this kind of jail time despite direct links to the deaths of multiple individuals and evidence of negligence leading to those deaths.

You can certainly make an argument that the sentencing was warranted but there's a whole lot of history of being sentenced, if at all, to far less for far more egregious crimes.

tomn• 1 year ago

Real justice would be changing the laws and sentencing guidance (through a democratically legitimate process), and re-evaluating the sentences of everyone affected.

Whatever you think about the outcome in this case, it is the moral equivalent of vigilante justice. It is unfair to others convicted under the same regime, who don't happen to be libertarian icons who can be freed in exchange for a few grubby votes.

cakealert• 1 year ago

I wonder if he is going to be able to launder and cash out whatever crypto he squirreled away. His finances are probably going to be closely watched.

Starting a business that accepts crypto payments is going to be a tell.

ktallett10• 1 year ago

He has admitted his wrong doings and made efforts to change whilst in prison. I doubt he will go straight back to a life even remotely close to before. He was doing good in prison for other inmates and I imagine he will continue doing the same now he has this second chance.

notyourwork2• 1 year ago

What the future holds for someone who was pardoned is likely decided based on very different rationalization compared to how one acts while serving a lifetime prison sentence.

johnneville4• 1 year ago

does he even need to launder it ? The pardon may cover any proceeds given Trump described it as "a full and unconditional pardon"

notyourwork2• 1 year ago

Pardoned from the crimes convicted of? Or pardoned from any crime. I found the Biden pardon to be particular egregious because of how vague it was.

trillic• 1 year ago

If he’s smart he’ll go Jordan Belfort style and make money with book, speaking, and movie deals.

threeseed• 1 year ago

That's the old way of doing things.

Now it's all about podcasts, energy drinks and crypto coin rug-pulls.

guywithahat• 1 year ago

I'm wondering that too. I think there's three options: he either has secret money hidden away, is going to get a cushy job in tech by some fan, or he's going to be working as a walmart greeter in 3 years.

Honestly I'm hoping he gets an X account so I can follow him and see which it is lol

lupusreal7• 1 year ago

This conversation is presently flagged. Why? When Ross was sentenced HN had a discussion about it with more than 600 comments. His conviction has been discussed numerous additional times in other threads throughout the years. His pardon is plainly on-topic for HN, and this discussion is a necessary followup to those previous discussions.

dang2• 1 year ago

Of course it's on topic. Why did users flag it? Probably some combination of not liking the event itself and fatigue with political stories. But that's just a guess.

In any case, we turned the flags off when we saw it.

foldr3• 1 year ago

Is it more on topic than the Musk Nazi salute thing, which you chose not to unflag? The comments are equally predictable in both cases.

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

https://archive.today/FNvkp

bb8820• 1 year ago

Genuine question: Of all the people to pardon, why him?

hilux2• 1 year ago

According to Trump, he is doing this to get libertarian support.

macinjosh7• 1 year ago

Trump promised to do this at the Libertarian Party convention. This case is very important to the libertarian crowd. He is a martyr for many of their ideals. After Trump was so well received at the convention the LP, recently taken over by the right faction of the party, put forth a candidate specifically chosen to not get votes so that members would vote for Trump. Trump seems to be a man of his word.

bb8820• 1 year ago

Voters wanted a better economy first, not pardons for drug traffickers and violent offenders.

This could have waited until after the midterms.

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

Trump seems to be a man of his word.

when there's political gain, sure

jdjdjfhfkeksnc• 1 year ago

This is 100% true. I am posting from an anon account (obviously), but I was heavily involved in this. I worked with members of the party to push part of their strategy - mainly the coalition with trump and an effort to get vivek and elon involved. We spoke about this in 2023. I didn't care about Ross, had my own motivations, but I wrote some of their playback with AI and it worked. I didn't know about certain things (like the losing candidate for example). I wrote strategy that seems to have made its way all the way to Trump's team.

Dalewyn• 1 year ago

Trump seems to be a man of his word.

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.

orblivion3• 1 year ago

The LP candidate was nominated due to some fluke/shenanigans/dealings between candidates. Based on the right-leaning demographics you would not expect him to win. It just happened to work out perfectly to get the people who would never vote for him anyway to vote for Trump. (Meanwhile the chairwoman encouraged Biden supporters to vote for the LP candidate).

Also, Trump actually got a mixed reception at the convention at best.

RockyMcNuts• 1 year ago

man of his word, ok. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/660639

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

Presumably musk pushed for it. Not sure who else in/near the administration would even have him on their radar

Havoc• 1 year ago

Musk is definitely a fan recreationally chemistry

tomhoward• 1 year ago

It’s been a campaign of Mike Cernovich’s for a long time.

freddi333• 1 year ago

Trump promised it when he attended the libertarian convention

silisili• 1 year ago

Whether or not he was the sole or even primary reason, he knew about it beforehand as seen by his tweet last night saying it was coming soon. Love him or hate him, it's a bit concerning that he has that level of access IMO.

The tweet:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881524296386031892

ty685312• 1 year ago

What do you mean? Trump just pardoned or commuted pretty much all of the J6 crowd. One guy convicted of crimes that don't require proving violence beyond a reasonable doubt is pretty tame in comparison. He is one of thousands.

bb8820• 1 year ago

What? All crimes were proved beyond a reasonable doubt according to a jury of our peers. (Or they plead guilty).

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

Trump know the Jan 6 rioters and supported them. Pardoning is important to justify his claim that nobody did anything wrong as that the election was "stolen by the Dems".

I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.

beeflet10• 1 year ago

because it was a promise he made to the libertarian camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8ofi6U0eWE

orblivion3• 1 year ago

He upgraded from commutation to pardon, I wonder about what happened there.

Spooky238• 1 year ago

They seem to be pandering to the more libertarian tech community. This guy appeals to that and to the more radical maga types who want a revolution. I’m sure we’ll see more.

The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.

cbsmith11• 1 year ago

The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.

I'd argue promoting that narrative was ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.

SamPatt• 1 year ago

It's because of his mother Lyn.

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.

y0ssar1an• 1 year ago

Yay the drug trafficker and hitman hirer is free! What a happy ending! /s

ttyprintk10• 1 year ago

Someone with that dedication can now move on to remedying the damage done by a free-for-all gun marketplace.

xwolfi• 1 year ago

Trump explains it eloquently:

"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," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"

macinjosh7• 1 year ago

I am happy to see that Trump is a man of his word. I voted for him just because of this campaign promise. I would have voted for almost anyone who promised this.

llamaimperative7• 1 year ago

What were your number 2 and 3 issues, out of curiosity?

Were there any accompanying policies that you would say, "despite promising to free Ross Ulbricht, I don't think accompanying Policy X would be worth it?"

dimator2• 1 year ago

This one act was more important than the Paris agreement?

macinjosh7• 1 year ago

Immensely more important than an ineffective agreement on an overblown problem.

tomjen33• 1 year ago

Not OP, but yes, immensely. Two different galaxies.

The Paris Agreement is a joke; it has done nothing. It's just a bunch of big-ass politicians and a few celebrities bloviating about not solving the problem.

Look, I'm not disputing at all that global warming is an issue, or that we need to solve it, or that humans cause it, or whatever. But the Paris Agreement and those all other agreements are all about big idiots pretending to do stuff.

Probably the most effective thing we have done globally to combat warming is changing to electric cars, and that's NOT the Paris Agreement. Not even close.

The Paris Agreement is the ultimate politician's move. Global warming is a technical problem and must be solved by technical means.

Ironically, the one person who is doing more than all the politicians combined to solve this is backing the current administration. Twitter is nuts over if he did a Nazi salute, while doing nothing to focus on solving what they believe is the biggest issue in our lifetimes.

ernst_klim• 1 year ago

If Paris agreements cannot prevent tariffs on Chinese EV and Chinese solar panels, which are basically battling climate change on Chinese money, these agreements don't justify the cost of paper they are written on.

thfuran• 1 year ago

How could that possibly be the most important political issue?

shadowgovt5• 1 year ago

Unless it's your day job: never try to unpack the priorities of a voter. You'll just get sad.

(For consideration on this topic: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/th...)

plsbenice345• 1 year ago

I am very sympathetic to the idea of voting just for Ross. It is unclear to me which candidate would be better, since neither of them are close to my political beliefs at all. It is a deadlock and I seem completely unrepresented. The consequences of voting based on any big issues I care about seems completely unpredictable; politics is a game of lies, smoke and mirrors. So I would perhaps rather vote for the candidate that would definitely save one person's life that is important to me.

thrance• 1 year ago

How do you feel about him backing down on H1B visas, price of groceries, peace in Ukraine...

npteljes6• 1 year ago

Trump is a man of his word.

Trump's history contradicts this.

macinjosh7• 1 year ago

Not in this case and this is the only one I care about. So pound sand?

subsection1h• 1 year ago

I voted for him just because of this campaign promise.

LOL. You're a conservative Christian[1] who thinks climate change is a hoax[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29187368

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:macinjosh+...

macinjosh7• 1 year ago

LOL!

You don’t know me. Seems you are pretty bigoted towards people not like you. How not progressive of you.

FergusArgyll• 1 year ago

This thread is a great lesson in "Politics is a mind virus"

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626985

rcpt• 1 year ago

The main thing I notice is that back then we were writing paragraphs.

zoklet-enjoyer4• 1 year ago

I mostly stopped typing in paragraphs because I use a smart phone for most of my internetting. It's a lot easier to write your thoughts on a keyboard

pizza2• 1 year ago

The value of the <EOS> token has gone up since then.

JHonaker• 1 year ago

Wow. I thought you were being glib, but the average comment length is noticeably higher in the linked discussion. While length isn’t necessarily a valid proxy for meaningful conversation, this was definitely an eye-opening contrast to the current thread.

Trasmatta• 1 year ago

Or it could be different people commenting than on that original thread? And people might have changed their minds? HN is not a monolith. Humans are not static. You don't need to blame it on "politics being a mind virus".

ktallett10• 1 year ago

Based on the sheer number of posts that have misrepresented the charges or misunderstood why he was actually in prison, it appears to partially be a lack of knowledge on the case, likely due to time hazing some of the memories. Of course someone will change their mind, and some may have their view influenced by who happens to support him.

latexr• 1 year ago

Exactly. If anything, the one thing that’s guaranteed in these types of threads is that someone will make this same tired argument of “aha, but HN back then said differently” as if it’s some kind of gotcha. I used to always look, and not only was it never the same people but the threads are largely more balanced than the original poster let on. It’s like the contrarian dynamic, which dang has to explain over and over and over and over and over again.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

brookst3• 1 year ago

But “mind virus“ is such a cool phrase, and it implies that people who disagree with you are not just wrong, but diseased. Great bit of rhetoric.

wisty• 1 year ago

This is often a bit of a cop-out.

Any time a criminal is caught, people want them to do hard time, but people believe we're too hard on crime if you don't use examples. People think the government should spend less, but are far less likely too agree to any specific cut. People thought Musk was a genius until they realised he is also a jerk.

And while it's sometimes different people, it's suspiciously reliably consistent in what you see said and upvoted.

amrocha• 1 year ago

It’s different people commenting on each post. There’s no “mind virus”.

tayo426• 1 year ago

It was pretty out of left field and seemingly uncharacteristic for the him to do this. It's fair to ask why. I think Trump is terrible in every way, think the pardon is fine, but can't help but wonder why and other questions about it

smallmancontrov• 1 year ago

"Politics" is a dismissive word for crypto's evolution over the last decade. North Korea ransoming our hospitals, industrial scale gambling and scam enablement, wealthy kingpins buying self-serving policy. Crypto grew up. So did our opinions.

That doesn't change what Ross Ulbricht did, but we can now see him as continuous with a great evil that we couldn't see at the time. With more information, our opinions changed, and they were right to change.

throw124121276• 1 year ago

I don't see anything special about that thread. There are in fact more people there who believe the contract killing allegations than now.

steele• 1 year ago

Donald literally cites Mommy Ulbricht's political inclinations...

Terr_7• 1 year ago

Could you post the literal text? I don't really want to make a Doubleplustruth Social account, and it doesn't seem to be in other news excerpts.

LeafItAlone• 1 year ago

Well, that thread is almost a decade old. HN a decade ago was a very different vibe than today.

You are insinuating one thing, but perhaps it is also possible reason is that the same people with those old views of the crimes have grown and their views changed. I know mine certainly have gone that way. I’d have to imagine other users have grown with me.

santoshalper2• 1 year ago

Man, that shit is so old. Even if you're right, which I don't think you are, you are adding nothing to the conversation but cynicism.

yieldcrv6• 1 year ago

At the time of sentencing, did we already know that the murder for hire plots were created by corrupt Secret Service and DEA agents on trial next door? and all of that was withheld from the defense and the jury?

because that's where the story really jumps the shark. I'm all for some accountability - such as the 12 years in prison already - but that particular case should have been dropped for several reasons, I've seen cases dropped for way less.

andrewmutz• 1 year ago

Nah social media is just about engagement. People who are happy with the article don’t bother to comment. Those who are outraged comment. It’s just two different groups of people commenting

swat535• 1 year ago

What exactly are you trying to say here?

That people can't change their minds? That HN is a hivemind ? (news flash: it's not , it's more diverse than you actually think) or that everything is attributed to "Politics is a mind virus" ? if so, what do you mind by this term specifically?

I personally, find little substance in such comments. If you have an opinion on the matter (which seemingly you do), then please share it so that we can have a discussion about it.

So.. care to elaborate?

entropyneur5• 1 year ago

I believe they are implying that people are disapproving the pardon because it was done by Trump.

lom2• 1 year ago

The craziest part about that thread is how much the attitude around drugs has changed in the past years. 10 years ago the comments felt a lot more optimistic about drugs and liberalization.

I guess since then, the fentanyl crisis has happened and shown that drugs also have more negative impacts

BurningFrog2• 1 year ago

Keep in mind that he spent 11 years locked up.

He's not getting off lightly!

bb8820• 1 year ago

It's still not enough.

mplewis4• 1 year ago

What do you mean "lightly?" He ran an illegal drug market and tried to assassinate a competitor. We gave him the punishment that society has determined one should receive for this. Revoking his punishment is "light."

TheAmazingRace5• 1 year ago

Hence why, if DPR was going to get off somehow, a sentence commutation would have been better rather than an unconditional pardon. The latter implies he did absolutely nothing wrong, which hilariously runs counter to Trump's supposed tough on drugs and crime shtick he has.

timewizard5• 1 year ago

The judge issued the punishment at their sole discretion. The legislature sets the laws often without any input from the constituency.

Meanwhile a sizable campaign has materialized around this case and many people do feel he has done enough time and should be free without any restrictions

tdb7893• 1 year ago

I'm just shocked it was a full pardon instead of a commutation or something. I don't think the US is gaining a ton from keeping him locked up but he still did run an organization he knew was used for selling drugs and other illegal things and a full pardon for that seems weird. I feel like I mainly heard people talking about commuting his sentence

timewizard5• 1 year ago

Is there some reason he should not be allowed to vote, own a firearm, or receive federal benefits?

liquidify• 1 year ago

He built a website. He didn't dictate how people used it. That was the point. He was charged as a drug kingpin with mobster era consequences. His sentence didn't fit whatever crimes he did or didn't commit.

BurningFrog2• 1 year ago

I agree that a commutation would have made much more sense.

But "always make sense" doesn't seem to be in Trumps OKRs...

That's mostly a symbolic difference though. The practical end result is the same

ggm• 1 year ago

I don't see how this benefits the American economy, jobs, or national security. I do see that for a cohort of people in the Libertarian community this was held to be a central Tenet: Ulbricht was their "hostage" just as the Proud Boys thought their leader was.

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?

jsphweid• 1 year ago

From wikipedia:

"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?

zeroonetwothree2• 1 year ago

Seems like it.

hsuduebc22• 1 year ago

Wasn't charges about paying a hitmen dropped?

jmkni• 1 year ago

IIRC it was to do with the conduct of the FBI agents posing as hitmen? I think they ended up in prison too, so a prosecution would be hard.

jMyles5• 1 year ago

Given the farcical nature of those allegations and all that we now know, including that others with access to the Dread Pirate Roberts account assert that the DEA agent making the allegations (who is himself now in prison for attempting to steal some of the silk road bitcoin) had access as well, it will be wonderful if DoJ attempts to bring charges, just to further clear Ross' name.

There are not a shred of evidence that Ross ever had the slightest thing to do with those conversations, and it seems much more likely that the DEA used the DPR account to frame him.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

At the same time he is threatening to tariff China 10% due to their responsibility for fentanyl, lol

zoklet-enjoyer4• 1 year ago

Fentanyl wasn't big yet when Silk Road was around. And besides, people were buying straight from China off the clearnet

asveikau• 1 year ago

I think they're pointing out the hypocrisy of wanting to crack down on drugs while doing this.

I see so many Trump adjacent folks demanding we lock up drug dealers, deport them, whatever. But they want to let this one go.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

I think serious jail for running an illegal drug marketplace is good, even if he used lots of neat tech to do so..

nozzlegear3• 1 year ago

Mr. Trump isn't exactly known for making distinctions like that.

ethagnawl2• 1 year ago

I knew people who were wringing it out of medicated patches and sniffing it out of Afrin bottles during high school in the 90s. I also knew someone who ODd and died from tainted/fake pills they bought from one of The Silk Road's (immediate) successors.

Some number of people also OD on "traditional" street drugs every day. So, this is really not a sound argument.

bdhcuidbebe4• 1 year ago

Will he get his possesions back then?

50,676 bitcoins, today valued at 5,3 billion USD.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h...

ktallett10• 1 year ago

I am not sure of the legality around his possessions but they are long gone. Even the ones stolen by FBI officers during the course of the investigation.

mmooss7• 1 year ago

I think that requires convincing evidence. Also, how is it relevant to the question?

misiti3780• 1 year ago

Hey may have other wallets...

konfusinomicon• 1 year ago

with a name like DPR id have to assume its buried treasure

bigiain2• 1 year ago

I suspect there'll be a lot of people very carefully watching for transactions from wallets with some sort of links to Silk Road that have been dormant for 12 years or so.

bb8820• 1 year ago

If they were from the commission of a crime, then no.

idlewords2• 1 year ago

It's a full pardon; there is no crime.

arcticbull5• 1 year ago

No, generally a pardon does not eliminate any civil liability or entitle you to refunds once the assets have been transferred to Treasury. He would still have to answer Yes to having been convicted of a felony and he would still not be entitled to vote in states that do not permit felons to vote.

Where a person has paid a monetary penalty or forfeited property, the consequences of a pardon depend in part on when it was issued. If a monetary fine or contraband cash has been transferred to the Treasury, a pardon conveys no right to a refund, nor does the person pardoned have a right to reacquire property or the equivalent in cash from a legitimate purchaser of his seized assets or from an informant who was rewarded with cash taken from the pardoned person before he was pardoned.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/presidential-pardons-sett...

joering2• 1 year ago

This is obviously incorrect. Actually pardon means the charges filed has been voided, hence anything happening afterwards has had no merits and court decisions made are now rendered moot. For example, Roger Stone was charged and found guilty of multiple crimes and Trump pardoned him; he still brandish guns and was "proudly voting Trump" in 2024 in state of Florida. Getting pardon is literally like it never happened in the first place.

throwaway657656• 1 year ago

Until now I oddly never questioned how any government could seize someone's bitcoin and how a government keeps the private keys of their crypto wallets secure.

yieldcrv6• 1 year ago

a lot of known best practices were not followed in 2013.

Every advancement in crypto was done after the government made a move. And all subsequent moves netted the government less.

Now it takes more agencies to seize darknet markets, and most merchants and consumers get their money back because it was a multisignature transaction and the server stored nothing. Even domains have been seized back from the government.

The crypto space calls it "antifragility", as in the idea - and now history - that the asset class and infrastructure improves under pressure.

yapyap3• 1 year ago

obviously not.

Scoundreller• 1 year ago

Was that profits or users’ deposits?

notfed• 1 year ago

I don't think it's crazy to suspect that Ulbricht knows a password or two and cut a deal here.

osrec6• 1 year ago

Yeah, something's a little fishy about the whole thing.

ttyprintk10• 1 year ago

I expected those would come out sooner, by rubber hose technique in prison.

pazimzadeh• 1 year ago

those are not his possessions. user account balances are included in that sum

tayo426• 1 year ago

The laws should change too. Legalize and regulate drugs and access.

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

[flagged]

zoklet-enjoyer4• 1 year ago

I don't understand how she's not in prison and SBF is

steveBK1235• 1 year ago

Pretty sure she is currently in jail.. if not, she's finished doing the time she was sentenced.

Her husband took the fall, whatever the facts actually are, and got a longer sentence.

SBF - well the scale, number of laws violated, duration, number of victims, profile of victims, complete lack of contrition, etc would be why he got a much longer sentence.

vvpan• 1 year ago

When Snowden, is my question. RFK put a lot of words into "if I am in charge that'll be my first thing". Yeah, he's not the president but he's also not nobody anymore.

bbor3• 1 year ago

NGL it would be pretty funny if Snowden gets to return to the west but we hadn't actually fixed any of the stuff he brought forward in the meantime. Not sure what I would do in his shoes... I guess a pardon is pretty impossible for future presidents to get around, TBF

andirk5• 1 year ago

The courage a lot of these whistleblowers have shown is admirable. How the American public outrages, though: Facebook has targeted ads. How they don't outrage: their government is illegally tracking their own citizens' movements and communications including overseas.

Not going to say Ulbricht is a hero like some of the others, but he trail blazed like none before him! And he deserves his freedom years ago.

mikrotikker2• 1 year ago

I'd be worried about the Russians putting him in jail if the US pardoned him.

sapiogram• 1 year ago

I don't think Putin would want to taint his relationship with Trump on his first week on the White House.

toyg7• 1 year ago

Why? He did nothing to deserve punishment in Russia. If anything, if Snowden left, I think Putin would be relieved he doesn't have to treat a potential nuisance with utmost care anymore. At the moment he can't really disappear him and has to waste resources monitoring him.

mimerme• 1 year ago

private intelligence still has a few ways to go before whistleblowers don't have all their rights stripped by the state

dylan6043• 1 year ago

For someone that likes to take top secret documents and share them with unauthorized people, Snowden sounds perfect for this guy to pardon

Cornbilly3• 1 year ago

Oh that’s going to be good if it happens.

Everyone will celebrate Trump’s good deed while he funnels more government money to companies like Palantir to do things similar to PRISM.

toyg7• 1 year ago

The right gets to power and the first thing it does is to pardon its friends and allies.

The left goes into power and does basically nothing.

And then we wonder why one side is winning.

popcalc4• 1 year ago

The elite are winning. This isn't football.

scudsworth2• 1 year ago

In one message, Ulbricht informed ELLINGSON that “[the murder target] is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed.” In another message, Ulbricht stated: “[the murder target] is causing me problems . . . I would like to put a bounty on his head if it’s not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him?” ELLINGSON responded, “[the p]rice for clean is 300k+ USD,” and the “[p]rice for non-clean is 150-200k USD depending on how you want it done.” ELLINGSON further explained, in part, that “[t]hese prices pay for 2 professional hitters including their travel expenses and work they put 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.

brcmthrowaway• 1 year ago

That is table stakes for Trump

holuponemoment• 1 year ago

James Ellingson is a convicted federal criminal charged with numerous crimes related to this case.

Tasked with investigating Silk Road he ended up in jail himself, along with his co-workers.

There's a very good reason none of this stuff ever went to trial, it would be incredibly embarrassing for the agencies involved to see the light of day.

scudsworth2• 1 year ago

im familiar with the case. ross still attempted to hire a killer multiple times.

loeg10• 1 year ago

Any non-twitter reporting on this?

Edit: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...

par• 1 year ago

it's in nytimes

dredmorbius12• 1 year ago

Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/ross-ulbrich...>

CNN: <https://lite.cnn.com/2025/01/21/politics/silk-road-ross-ulbr...>

NPR: <https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5270051/trump-pardons-d...>

MSN: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-pardons-...>

Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...>

AP: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-pardons-...>

yieldcrv6• 1 year ago

and Truth Social

honestly guys, its time to download Truth Social so you can see what the President and the right is really saying

by the time it hits your feeds elsewhere, it is often times altered just to inflame you and whatever segment of the algorithm's tree you are already pigeonholed in

Cub3• 1 year ago

It seems a lot of reddit communities are starting to block xitter as it's painful to use now without an account. Should HN do the same?

loeg10• 1 year ago

Nah. I just wanted to see a source I trusted to be legitimate before sharing a sensational story.

psygn89• 1 year ago

No. Let us decide how we want to handle it. Most of us could handle it ourselves through scripts and extensions if it really bothered us anyway.

hbbio3• 1 year ago

Of course not, the tweet here is _the_ original source for that news

easterncalculus• 1 year ago

The main reason all the subs made this change today is because of the elon nazi salute, not the fact that twitter is hostile to unauthenticated user agents.

weberer3• 1 year ago

it's painful to use now without an account.

Now??? Its been just as painful to use without an account for around 10 years now.

dschuetz• 1 year ago

Thanks.

nikolay• 1 year ago

Trump freed him because libertarians voted for him - he openly said so. Meanwhile, he's waging a war on fentanyl! He should've freed Snowden instead.

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

Interesting. I wonder who pushed Trump to do this. Gotta be Musk. Who else?

zeroonetwothree2• 1 year ago

The LP presumably

jazzyjackson• 1 year ago

Obligatory "This is good for bitcoin"

rappatic5• 1 year ago

I think his original sentence was absolutely deserved—even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped, I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein. Even if you support his original pursuit of a free and open online marketplace, I think most people would agree he took it a bridge too far in the end.

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.

nadermx2• 1 year ago

What has always sat odd with me regarding this, is we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this. They stole, so it's not hard to imagine they planted evidence too.

mplewis4• 1 year ago

What evidence would you have even needed to plant? He ran the largest internet drug market and openly tried to assassinate a competitor.

VWWHFSfQ3• 1 year ago

Ross Ulbricht was not a good person. Full stop.

He organized and operated a global criminal drug ring and conspired to have people killed. The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.

potato37328426• 1 year ago

I assume that the feds corruption is as bad as it is in every other high profile case case involving fed informants and politically charged topics. Randy Weaver, all the muslims they radicalized and then goaded into doing terrorist things post 9/11, the Michigan Fednapping. It seems like every time these people have a chance to entrap someone they do, but they do it in a "haha, jokes on you we run the system so while this probably would be entrapment if some beat cops did it the court won't find it that way" sort of way. They just can't touch anything without getting it dirty this way and the fact that that is a 30yr pattern at this point depending on how you count speaks volumes IMO. While I'm sure they can solve an interstate murder or interstate fraud or whatever just fine I just don't trust them to handle these sorts of cases.

It seems like all of these people they wind up charging probably are questionable people who wanted to do the thing and probably did some other lesser things but they probably would have given up on the big thing if there wasn't a federal agency running around doing all the "the informant says the guy is lamenting not having explosives, quick someone get him some explosives" things in the background.

lettergram• 1 year ago

As part of the FBI conviction they were accused of tampering user logs and taking over accounts. So… literally none of it can be used as evidence imo.

trhway4• 1 year ago

we don't truly know the extent of the fbi's corruption in this

the corruption what we do know about already tainted the case to the point that it should have been thrown out.

I don't care about Ulbricht, and whether he is guilty of all or some of the charges or innocent. What bothers me in this case is that the government can get away and in particular can get its way in court even with such severe criminal behavior by the government.

Rare case when i agree with Trump:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7e0jve875o

"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," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening."

Trump even personally called Ulbricht mother. I start to wonder whether i have been all that time in blind denial about Trump.

daveguy3• 1 year ago

According to Reuters he was found guilty of "charges including distributing drugs through the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering." In addition to running an illegal market bazaar for 4 years.

slt20212• 1 year ago

- sackler family engineered opioid crisis and went unscathed - hacking is a bogus charge applied to everything touching PCs - money laundering is another victimless crime that very few actual money launderers gets charged with, for some reason

beezle4• 1 year ago

What a travesty. Maybe life was too long a sentence but this was far too short.

LarsDu88• 1 year ago

People have served more time for selling less drugs and attempting to murder fewer people than Ross Ulbricht did.

Just because he was decent with computers does not mean he should be busted out of jail.

rappatic5• 1 year ago

What makes you think I support those people being locked up either? Also, afaik Ulbricht didn't sell drugs himself, he simply provided an unmoderated marketplace.

scarab923• 1 year ago

The attempted murder charge was dropped.

Under our system that means he should be considered innocent of it.

This conversation is messy mostly because people are refusing to do that, which is akin to vigilantism.

A good faith discussion should only involve the charge he was convicted of and pardoned for, which is the narcotics charge.

eviks2• 1 year ago

People also served no time for selling more drugs and actually murdering more people.

bko4• 1 year ago

Ross Ulbricht was not sentenced for murder-for-hire charges.

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?

karlgkk• 1 year ago

It does not change my opinion that the sentence was well deserved in the eyes of the law. Those are all things, that independently, can lead to serious jail time. The scale of his operation was also substantial.

cmdli• 1 year ago

He was found during sentencing to be guilty of hiring a hit on a competitor using a preponderance of evidence (lower then presumption of innocence). While this is a lower standard than a conviction, it is still a higher standard than most apply in public discourse.

rappatic5• 1 year ago

Did you read my comment? I said:

even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped

Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it. In fact, reading the chat logs makes his guilt pretty clear. Of course, because the whole operation was a scam, there's little he could have been convicted of. Yet just because the murder was never carried out doesn't mean he didn't intend to have someone assassinated. In my book, paying someone money to kill another person is definitely grounds for imprisonment.

duxup7• 1 year ago

The other user directly addressed that in his comment.

nuclearnice3• 1 year ago

This opinion [1] from the judge in his case indicates that the murder-for-hire evidence was admitted during his trial. The document outlines the evidence for all 6 murder for hire allegations and explains why, although not charged, the evidence is relevant to his case.

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...

lmm2• 1 year ago

I don't see how that should change anyone's opinion on whether the sentence was deserved. Whether it was legally/procedurally correct, sure. Whether he didn't get the day in court he should have had, sure. But given that no-one seems to seriously dispute that he did try to pay to have the guy killed, what he deserves is a long prison sentence, and whether that's imposed by a court doing things properly, a court doing things improperly, or a vigilante kidnapper isn't really here or there on that point.

(The rule of law is important, and we may let off people who deserve harsh sentences for the sake of preserving it, but it doesn't mean they deserve those sentences any less)

empathy_m2• 1 year ago

Honestly any time I read the procedural history of this stuff I get nerd sniped by the bizarre details and I lose track of the big picture. I feel like the whole thing could be three competing Dateline NBC style six-part crime specials and I still wouldn't get tired of it.

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?)

chrisco2554• 1 year ago

Does anyone know if Ross had a jury trial and if not, why not?

pg52• 1 year ago

Couldn't you buy stuff on Silk Road that would ruin your life, like meth or heroin? If true, not exactly a victimless crime to run the site.

77pt772• 1 year ago

has done great work during his time in prison

What work?

sunnybeetroot• 1 year ago

He set up an excellent in prison market

reg_dunlop• 1 year ago

I'm more interested in the subtext of the pardon.

Why this person specifically? And why at this time? Perhaps the discussion shouldn't be about the actual subject of the pardon, and perhaps more about the motives of the pardoner...

Y_Y• 1 year ago

Bitcoin

orblivion3• 1 year ago

Trump came to the Libertarian Party convention and specifically promised to free Ross if he got their support. He actually promised a commutation; I wonder why he upgraded to pardon. He also promised a libertarian in his cabinet; oh well.

The LP chairwoman has made very interesting political moves this election.

jyap• 1 year ago

His original sentence was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

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.

rappatic5• 1 year ago

Good point, you are absolutely correct. Then I suppose life “with the possibility of parole” would have been a more appropriate sentence, though I don’t know if that’s typically given. In any case, I feel prisons ought to release prisoners if they demonstrate exceptional rehabilitation and remorse, as Ross has, though of course that’s a difficult line to draw in practice.

ec1096852• 1 year ago

Commuting is the typical response for “he was totally guilty but sentenced too long”.

ttul• 1 year ago

As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.

A sentence must balance the gravity of the offense with the circumstances of the offender, while still allowing for hope and redemption. A life sentence without parole forecloses this balance.

It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.

Canada's explicit rejection of life sentences without parole (LWOP) through decisions like R v Bissonnette more closely aligns with Jesus's teachings about redemption and mercy. In Canada, even those convicted of the most serious crimes retain the possibility of parole - not a guarantee of release, but a recognition of the potential for rehabilitation that echoes Jesus's teachings about transformation and second chances.

This philosophical difference manifests in several ways:

- In Canada, the emphasis on rehabilitation over retribution is reflected in the term "correctional services" rather than "penitentiary system"

- Canadian prisons generally offer more rehabilitative programs and education opportunities

- The Canadian system places greater emphasis on Indigenous healing lodges and restorative justice practices that align with Jesus's focus on healing broken relationships

- Canadian courts have explicitly recognized that denying hope of release violates human dignity, which parallels Jesus's teachings about the inherent worth of every person

The contrast becomes particularly stark when considering multiple murders. While many US jurisdictions impose multiple life sentences to be served consecutively (effectively ensuring death in prison), the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled this practice unconstitutional, maintaining that even the worst offenders should retain the possibility - though not guarantee - of earning redemption through genuine rehabilitation.

This doesn't mean Canada is soft on crime - serious offenders still serve lengthy sentences, and parole is never guaranteed. But the maintenance of hope for eventual redemption, even in the worst cases, better reflects Jesus's teachings about grace, transformation, and the limitless possibility of spiritual renewal.

The irony is particularly pointed given that the US has a much higher proportion of self-identified Christians than Canada, yet has adopted a more retributive approach that seems less aligned with Jesus's teachings about mercy and redemption.

But hey, you just have to wait for the right president to be elected and you might get your chance. So I guess that's something.

soulofmischief2• 1 year ago

These two thoughts are incompatible though, aren't they? Politics and shenanigans around the case aside, the original sentence should have taken into account the possibility of rehabilitation. But he got life without parole.

That said, it was entrapment and everyone involved should be deeply ashamed and prosecuted. At least those two agents did get some wire fraud charges [0], but the entrapment angle got explored because the charges were dropped.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged...

soulofmischief2• 1 year ago

*never got explored

bdcravens• 1 year ago

A 10 year prison sentence was apt. He did knowingly break the law (the marketplace defense doesn't really apply, since admins had to create the categories that were obviously illegal). A life sentence was ridiculous, and added punishment for unconvicted crimes, however likely, is a gross violation of constitutional protections.

pmarreck5• 1 year ago

Ross Ulbricht was widely regarded by friends and family as a fundamentally decent and idealistic person—if admittedly naïve about the implications of his actions. Those who knew him personally describe him as thoughtful, intelligent, and motivated by a vision of a freer and more equitable society. His philosophical motivations were rooted in libertarian ideals, particularly the belief that consenting adults should have the right to make decisions about their own lives, including the substances they consume.

I just learned that he was an Eagle Scout.

Not exactly the résumé of someone getting locked up and the key thrown away.

GIFtheory• 1 year ago

This argument is problematic because it implies that a person from a different background who committed the same crimes (e.g., a poor, black, uneducated person without any fancy philosophical ideals) /should/ be locked up and the key thrown away. It doesn’t work that way. The law applies the same to all, and that’s the way I like it.

WrongAssumption6• 1 year ago

No rewrite that from another perspective saying someone was a devout man rooted in Christian ideals. I just learned he was a choir boy.

This is why we try not to sentence the way you are suggesting.

Peanuts99• 1 year ago

Then why did he run a site which allowed people to order hits on people? If it was just an online drug marketplace, that would have been a different matter.

jMyles5• 1 year ago

I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein

It is clear as mud. We now know:

* At least four other people had access to the DPR account, by design.

* One of those people (the person whose murder was supposedly ordered, who has vehemently defended Ross!) asserts that he knew that Nob (who we know who was a DEA agent) was one of those four people.

* Nob is a serial liar, and is now in prison for having stole some of the bitcoin from this operation.

...what about that make clear that Ross was within a mile of this supposed 'murder for hire' business?

outside4155• 1 year ago

[flagged]

zik3• 1 year ago

They dropped the contract killer charges - it appears that they were fabricated to try to turn public opinion against him and get him jailed. But as soon as they went to trial the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

xadhominemx2• 1 year ago

They were not fabricated although it may have been challenging to secure a conviction and in any event Ross was going to be sentenced to many decades in prison.

offsign• 1 year ago

"he took it a bridge too far" is a massive trivialization.

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.

celticninja• 1 year ago

Not sure it was high margin as much as it was low fees on a large number of transactions, coupled with bitcoin appreciation this meant he made a lot of money.

ty685312• 1 year ago

Trump is a bit of an agorist is well. It's part of the American wild west mythical psyche, to the point America made a sport from moonshine running cars. Not hard for me to see how he half won and walked away with an unconditional pardon.

silver_silver3• 1 year ago

His sentence was excessive and cruel to make an example out of him. There’s a serial child rapist in the same prison serving less time.

pixxel• 1 year ago

he enjoyed massive market benefit

Life imprisonment, no parole.

You have to be a complete and utter wanker to think his punishment was justified.

sneak2• 1 year ago

There were no victims of his conduct.

The idea that possession of drugs is or should be illegal is purely arbitrary, and is used thus to justify massive violations of human rights. It is literally insane that the state claims authority over what you are allowed to do to your own body.

No victim, no crime.

agumonkey• 1 year ago

I'm afraid that the current administration is fond on this business model. Borderline criminal business models behind curtains.

glerk• 1 year ago

he knowingly pursued enormous risk in order to achieve outsized benefits

Like it or not, this makes him a heroic figure in the eyes of many people.

we shouldn't have bailed him out

Bailing him out comes at no cost. Letting him rot in prison provides no benefit to anyone.

potato37328426• 1 year ago

minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc

Those benefits don't come from nowhere. You're basically getting compensated to take on the risk, same as any other business. The difference in this case is that the risk is that a bunch of thugs with guns will show up and either kill you or put you in a cage in addition to the usual financial ruin.

cluckindan2• 1 year ago

Many criminal gangs from biker groups to foreign cartels are doing the same thing and reaping profits in the $100Bs scale annually.

Your argument is not an argument for incarceration, it is an argument for abolition of prohibition and regulating the sales of some psychoactives.

The same stone would hit the fentanyl epidemic, it would hit the pushers of ”zombie drug” laced cocktails, it would hit cross-border trafficking, to name only a few. Society would massively benefit. So would the economy.

pooper• 1 year ago

》 we shouldn't have bailed him out.

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.

paulddraper4• 1 year ago

"Exploiting arbitrage" is not high on my list of concerns.

The rest of it is.

gloosx• 1 year ago

The illegality wasn't just incidental

The illegality of drugs is a government reaction, since governance failed to do anything with the problem by action. No-one deserves a life-long sentence in prison for that. This market, as well as minimal competition, lack of regulation, and high margins was created by the same power which sends people to jail.

bhawks• 1 year ago

The most prolific drug dealers who sold on silk road have served their sentences and are out of prison.

Ross was given a life sentence without possibility of parole an incomparable sentence in relation to all other parties that were involved.

highwaylights4• 1 year ago

I don’t see why he deserves to be released.

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.

Aeolun2• 1 year ago

He didn’t deserve to be imprisoned that long in the first place, ergo, he deserves to be released. The fact that nearly half the US prison population deserves to be released doesn’t change anything about this guy being deserving too?

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.

belter4• 1 year ago

He might even run for President....

Spacemolte• 1 year ago

What? - whatever nasty stuff happened because of those drugs being distributed and sold still falls back on that guy, and lets be real, some shitty stuff has to have happened with a direct link back to those drugs.

herbst6• 1 year ago

This was the first time many people had access to clean drugs in a comfortable way. It's easy to blame him, but the reality is that the alternatives are worse for customers.

627467• 1 year ago

I personally find it ridiculous that people agree with the sentencing when you compare to sentences for tobacco industry practices, opioid epidemic, etc..

butlike14• 1 year ago

I think his original sentence was absolutely deserved

The original sentence was two life terms. TO be pedantic, it sounds like you meant to say he deserved sentencing, but not the original sentence.

npvrite• 1 year ago

A. His prison sentence was totalitarian and three letters stole his crypto and illegally convicted him.

B. Orange is not a hero. I don't bow down to Kim Jong Un/Hitler wannabees.

C. Tor is a three letter honeypot.

cbg06• 1 year ago

[citation needed] on those items

wolfgang425• 1 year ago

Tangentially related: I had the disconcerting experience of reading a Wired article about his arrest[1] while unknowingly sitting about six feet from the spot where he was apprehended. When I read that the FBI agents had stopped at Bello Coffee while preparing their stakeout, I thought, huh, interesting coincidence, I just had a coffee there.

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.

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.)

paulsutter• 1 year ago

Wait, you were reading about his arrest while he was being arrested? That article was written after his conviction?

j-bos• 1 year ago

He first read the article while sitting where Ulbricht was when Ulbricht was arrested.

EricRiese• 1 year ago

Plot twist: wolfgang42 is Ulbricht

syspec• 1 year ago

Sorry, it went over my head a bit, you read about his arrest while he was being arrested?

wolfgang425• 1 year ago

He was being arrested in the article, not IRL. When I say “Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me” I mean that I read

He went... past the periodicals and reference desk, beyond the romance novels, and settled in at a circular table near science fiction, on the second floor... in a corner, with a view out the window and his back toward the wall.

and realized that I was in the Glen Park public library, at a circular table near science fiction on the second floor, in a corner with my back to the window, and facing directly towards where the article had just said he had sat.

Satam• 1 year ago

I had the same confusion initially, interestingly chat GPT gets it:

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!

kordlessagain• 1 year ago

That’s because they are describing the inner workings of their visualization systems.

They saw him walk in because he was where it happened. The image of Ross, and others, was in mind, however.

racl101• 1 year ago

Yeah, whoosh for me.

Evidlo• 1 year ago

Then he realized that he was Ross Ulbricht all along.

remram• 1 year ago

When the FBI agents stopped to have a drink I thought

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?

inopinatus3• 1 year ago

I believe they are suggesting an experience of imaginatively visualising the events of the arrest linearly as they were narrated in their read-through of the article, serendipitously aided by being physically present at the same location, and are referencing the article's narration partially in the present tense to similarly immerse us in medias res as we follow their remark.

Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.

wolfgang425• 1 year ago

I thought that starting my story in media res would make for a better dramatic effect, but it seems I overestimated my audience and went a little too heavy on the narrative ellipsis.

coldtea5• 1 year ago

It's obvious what is meant given the context...

beejiu• 1 year ago

I assume you mean "I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in" figuratively?

wolfgang425• 1 year ago

I mean, it’s possible that the library had rearranged their chairs in the intervening years and that exact one was now at a different table, but it was certainly a chair in the same location.

coliveira• 1 year ago

The responses to this comment show that people's ability to read and comprehend text has decreased dramatically in the last few years. Frightening...

inopinatus3• 1 year ago

I was afraid of this too but it turned out to be presbyopia

internet2000• 1 year ago

If every reply is pointing out how confusing it is, maybe the original comment is just poorly written.

chimeracoder• 1 year ago

The responses to this comment show that people's ability to read and comprehend text has decreased dramatically in the last few years

Or they show that GP wrote an ambiguous piece of text.

rpmisms5• 1 year ago

An engineering forum may not be the place for creative prose, too.

throw37263• 1 year ago

Or HN just has a lot more international readers now and English isn't their first language.

pcdoodle• 1 year ago

Aaron695's comment are always fun to read. For some reason he's kinda 86'ed here.

mergy• 1 year ago

Give it up for Glen Park.

cush• 1 year ago

Before I got to the edit I was convinced you were in The Neverending Story

pyuser583• 1 year ago

This is why I love SF. It’s so small.

You can walk anywhere, and there’s a good chance something big happened nearby.

nick34432• 1 year ago

You did a Boondock Saints!

beeflet10• 1 year ago

THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT

Unearned5161• 1 year ago

for the record, I appreciated your creative prose and enjoyed the trippy narrative

DrBenCarson• 1 year ago

Maybe the single most confusing comment ever

2-3-7-43-18072• 1 year ago

also single most irrelevant comment ever

lee-rhapsody3• 1 year ago

Not really. If you've ever read fiction--like, at all--it's intuitive.

alwa• 1 year ago

Just as an additional datapoint, since I’m confused by fellow commenters’ confusion—I thought your narrative was clear, colorful, and entertaining, and I hope you’ll keep things so literary and engaging in your future contributions too :)

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.

pests• 1 year ago

Yes, I thought it was an interesting blend of past and present. If this were a scene in a show or movie it could be edited beautifully - the reader, sitting alone in a corner, looks up and in a lucid, almost psychedelic way, the past comes to life with Ulbrict sitting in front of him, that unfold as he continues reading.

smcameron• 1 year ago

I also wasn't at all confused.

Nevermark7• 1 year ago

Until you looked over his shoulder at his Bitcoin account balance rising dramatically in real time.

Huge amounts of income can even make something as boring as an online digital scrapbook tech sexy.

siamese_puff• 1 year ago

I understood exactly what you meant and that is an awesome experience

pineaux2• 1 year ago

Yes

Nevermark7• 1 year ago

This is so off topic. Or maybe not.

I once walked home after an evening of some friends and beer.

As I came up to my house it was dark but I clearly saw a little person walking through my back garden. About 3 foot tall, at the most, it seemed. And they were holding the hand of a smaller person half their height. Walking together, no hurry at all.

I just froze and watched them walking away, and turn a corner.

The feelings of disbelief, but wanting to believe were crazy.

I came out of my shock. Ran the length of my home and managed to see mother and child raccoons now walking on all fours.

They must have walked 20 feet on their back legs together, holding hands.

For a minute of my life I was actually Alice in Wonderland and there were tiny people who walked gardens at night.

keepamovin5• 1 year ago

You may be interested in looking at your experience though this lens: https://youtu.be/y61vpQ9cZ8s?si=jMXF35v6-2t5w0cj

ews• 1 year ago

I used to live in Glen Park at that time and I vividly remember seeing Ross working as a cashier at the Canyon Market, helping me bag my groceries. It was probably around the time he was starting the Silk Road. The place where he was arrested was also my favorite table at the Public Library, where I used to go work. It is incredible to be that close to history.

palata2• 1 year ago

I liked the way you wrote it, I could picture you sitting in the library, picturing the arrest yourself :-).

The reactions remind me of a philosophy class I had, where the professor went for a thought experiment in order to explain an idea. "Imagine a world where ...". There was a physicist in the class who kept interrupting the professor, saying "well that's not possible because of how physics works". I would have asked him what he thought about Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings; could he enjoy them at all? But he ruined the class for me so I didn't :-).

alex1138• 1 year ago

Imagine a world where I grab you by the shoulders and throw your smug ass out of the classroom!

carlmr3• 1 year ago

Regarding your edit. The first paragraph kind of lines up with you reading about it. But the second one is kind of confusing, and I think it's because "then" can mean two different things here. You meant "at the time of his arrest". If you casually read it without cross referencing the first paragraphs context, you might think it means "as I was sitting there".

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

oharapj4• 1 year ago

His writing employs a little bit of poetry in order to capture his feeling. Not all writing benefits from being as clear and bland as possible. HN should probably read some non-fiction books from time to time

johnfn• 1 year ago

Wow, you've totally cracked the mystery. This explains why all the commenters are at each other's throats - half of them are reading it one way and half are reading the other way, and only one of the two ways makes any sense.

kelvinjps10• 1 year ago

But now It doesn't feel the same as the original comment

stephen_g• 1 year ago

Yes, it took three reads before I worked out what the story was trying to say.

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.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

It would be morbidly neat if that article is printed out and put on the wall over there.

ErikBjare• 1 year ago

I had a similar experience years ago when I read about the same thing in an Airbnb less than a kilometer from the library.

simonvc• 1 year ago

i had a similar experience working in copenhagen. read an article about copenhagen sub orbital rockets, looked up and out my window and my eye landed on the rocket i was just reading about. weird.

etothet• 1 year ago

It was almost you not you!

jraines• 1 year ago

I had a similar experience watching Mr. Robot. There’s a scene where it shifts to first person PoV and the voiceover says something like “am I seeing this? Is this real?” … and it was EXACTLY the PoV I had every day walking out of my office on 36th st back then.

dekhn2• 1 year ago

My kids used to go to that library! We lived in the neighborhood (Glen Park- one of the "gems" of San Francisco) and the downtown is almost like a little village (except with California levels of traffic and trash). It was a bit weird to think that my kids were probably reading books while this guys was, uh, transacting his business nearby.

hluska• 1 year ago

This is unrelated but you just did a wonderful job of explaining why I love history so much. There’s something so exciting (to me) about deeply researching an event, going to where it happened and seeing the land (or library) come alive with images of the past.

Good writing!

Henchman21• 1 year ago

Literacy and nuance is hard with written words — especially when a large chunk of your audience is either a non-native English speaker or and Adderall addict. I feel like this community is heavily laden with both, and surely there must be some significant overlap between those groups.

In other words, it was too well written

MattSayar• 1 year ago

I read this article when it was first published years ago, and it is written so well I still "see the movie" in my head when I think about it. Your experience must have been next-level.

moj• 1 year ago

I'll share my experience, too: I live near Glen Park and was in Bello that day, taking up one of those coveted seats, as all this was happening. I recall being aware of a lot of police cars outside, and perhaps seeing the phalanx around Ross as they walked past the window. Clearly something big was going on, but I stepped outside and the street was already back to normal. Shrug, perhaps I'll hear about it on the evening news. Not a peep. :-)

It was only some months & years later that I heard about Glen Park, the library, and Bello being part of the drama, and other local landmarks. To this day I keep hearing about other local details. (I learned a few months ago that his group house was on Monterey Blvd, not far from the conservatory).

Looking back, I had noticed a number of 'out-of-town' business people in Bello around that time. Glen Park is a busy local scene, but gets very few visitors, so they stuck out. Clean cut, business casual, but not FiDi types. They were cheerful but not interested in chatting. Who would go to a cafe and not want to socialize, I wondered? I thought perhaps realestate people.

I went to Bello frequently then, and must have seen Ross there a few times too, but I only vaguely recall once or twice. Something drew my attention to his laptop, maybe it had an EFF sticker on it? But he likewise didn't seem interested in conversation. I do recall once he was talking with an older man, in his 50's or early 60's, about libertarianism.

mrandish10• 1 year ago

This is wonderful. I've never argued that Ross shouldn't have served time but it's always been clear his prosecution and sentencing were excessive and unjust. The prosecutors asked for a 20 year sentence, which seemed disproportionate given the sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender and the non-violent charges he was convicted of. But the judge sentenced Ross to TWO life sentences plus 40 years - without the possibility of parole. There's no doubt Ross made a series of unwise and reckless decisions but serving over ten years of hard time in a FedMax prison is more than enough given the charges and his history.

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.

arp2422• 1 year ago

Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Biden did commute the sentence of several other non-violent cases just last week or thereabouts, and Trump has been talking about Ulbricht for quite some time so it's not a complete surprise.

I guess the whole "murder for hire" thing excluded him from the "non-violent" category. But how that got tacked on seems very odd; the judge basically said "we didn't really handle it in the court case and it wasn't a charge, but it was mentioned a few times and it seemed basically true, so I included it in the sentencing". Like, ehh, okay?

To be honest, I don't really understand much of the logic ("logic") of the US justice system....

mrandish10• 1 year ago

Judges are allowed to consider some evidence during sentencing which was not presented at trial. The standard for this evidence is lower than the "beyond a shadow of doubt" standard required for a criminal conviction. This is allowed because during sentencing the judge is considering information related to the history and character of the defendant. The 'hiring an online hitman' (who was an FBI informant) allegation was never charged or tried. Even if it hadn't been obvious entrapment, it might well have evaporated under discovery and cross-examination by a competent defense.

Including such evidence in sentencing consideration is not uncontroversial in the U.S. However, it can cut both ways, in that a judge can consider extenuating circumstances in a defendant's life to reduce sentencing. We want judges to evaluate cases and make sentencing adjustments where appropriate. So, I don't think I'd do away with the practice. The real issue is that this specific judge went absolutely bonkers far beyond the 20 years the prosecution asked for during sentencing (which was already very high) and sentenced Ross to two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.

Most of us who are happy that Ross was pardoned agree that he was guilty and deserved a jail sentence for the crimes he was convicted of. The only problem is the sentence was so wildly excessive for a non-violent, first-time offender. Compared to guidelines and other sentences it was just crazy and wrong. Ross has served over ten years. Now he's free. That's probably about right.

etc-hosts17• 1 year ago

I was at the sentencing, I do not remember the judge mentioning the murder-for-hire cases. To me it was obvious that the prosecution defense and judge had agreed beforehand to not mention it. The judge gave plenty of other reasons for the harsh sentence.

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

Madoff got 150 years for non-violent charges (and he didn't even try to have anyone killed). Died in prison.

t-writescode• 1 year ago

It is wildly harmful and an escalation of monstrous practices to look at one or several unjust actions and/or sentences and declare that those who do worse than the person who was dealt out such a retribution should receive an even longer sentence.

If someone gets 10 years for smoking weed, the solution is not to put someone in prison for 20 years for punching someone.

loeg10• 1 year ago

Madoff stole $20-35B, but by some measures a human life is only worth $10M. I am not really asserting those figures are comparable, just that Madoff stole a lot of money.

jandrese• 1 year ago

Madoff stole from the rich. That is a sure fire way to have the book thrown at you. Smart criminals steal from the poor, because they don’t fight back as much and the justice system doesn’t care.

butlike14• 1 year ago

The rule is: do whatever, but don't make the federal government look bad.

AKA file your taxes, essentially.

CSSer3• 1 year ago

non-violent charges

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.

Springtime• 1 year ago

These charges were dismissed partly because he had already been sentenced to life in New York

It was further complicated because a couple of the law enforcement officers involved with setting up one of the six murder-for-hire scams* stole the Bitcoin Ulbricht paid and it was also felt that trying to prosecute based solely on the other chat logs would have been difficult. The FBI agent who arrested Ulbricht was interviewed about it recently[1].

* The other five are said to not have been law enforcement, which makes it curious the number of times Ulbricht was scammed in this manner.

[1] https://risky.biz/RB770/

sschueller• 1 year ago

The murder for hire was done with the admin account which was called "Dread Pirate Roberts" from the novel "The Princess Bride". The thing about the name is that is passed on over and over. The admin has claimed multiple times that he is not the original nor first administrator (Ross) of the silk road.

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.

kernal3• 1 year ago

I don't credit Trump in any way for doing "the right thing" or even having a principled position regarding Ross' case.

This is probably the most ridiculous comment in this thread. Trump even spoke at the Libertarian convention and specifically mentioned how unjust the sentence was and that he would pardon Ross as one of his campaign promises and he delivered. Trump saw parallels between the attack on Ross and the politically motivated law fare the democrats attacked him with. I think the real issue you have with this pardon is that Trump did it and not some democrat.

cbg06• 1 year ago

Trump saw parallels between the attack on Ross and the politically motivated law fare the democrats attacked him with.

How exactly was it politically motivated law fare?

mrandish10• 1 year ago

Actually, I support neither major political party. I'm probably closest to a moderate "free markets, free minds" libertarian (note: the small "l" means I'm not in, or aligned with, the national Libertarian Party). I haven't voted for any candidate from either major party for decades. I greatly disapprove of Biden, Harris and Trump equally, along with almost all state and federal politicians of both parties. There are less than a handful of national-level politicians I would trust to dog sit, much less run my country.

Interestingly, I get hate from nearly everyone whose bought into either side of the political mainstream, and not because I dislike their candidate (few serious people would argue even their favored candidate doesn't have significant negatives). No, people can't stand that I don't dislike the other candidate/party more than I dislike their preferred candidate/party. It's bizarre because it seems entirely reasonable to have concluded that all the major party presidential candidates are so flawed, each in their own uniquely terrible ways, that they are beneath any serious comparison of which may be less bad. It's simply beyond reasonable discourse to engage in evaluating whether a dog shit sandwich might taste better or worse than a cat shit sandwich. They are all animal shit sandwiches.

I'm responding because you're objecting to my mild statement about Trump's likelihood of having a principled position regarding Ross' case and thus you may have assumed I favor the other candidate or party. Hardly! This is especially galling because I've had to defend Trump, who I dislike as much as Biden/Harris, against reflexive "Orange Man Bad" attacks - if only to point out, sometimes Trump does things which are good. And the same was true of Biden. Both of them have done good things - even if only in the sense of a broken clock being right twice a day.

To be clear, my observation about Trump not basing many of his political positions on long-held, fundamental principles applies equally to both major parties. Neither party is grounded in principle. In recent decades, both parties have abandoned so many of their own long-held, traditional "left/right" pillar positions judged by how they actual govern when in power, if not in their campaign claims, as to now be mostly incoherent. Neither party can seriously claim they arrive at their current political positions by deriving them from deep, unchanging principles. Once again, I'm not making a partisan judgement for or against either. This is simply a factual statement. Neither party's platform positions or political actions over time are self-consistent enough to be grounded in principle. At most, they try to later market the political calculations they've made for pragmatic, contextual reasons as aligned with some principle - but that's just transparent retconning to pander to their base. This is obviously true because no voter can reliably predict what their own party's (or candidate's) position might be on some enitrely new issue in advance.

In the case of Ross, Trump came very close to granting a pardon at the end of his term in 2020. He ultimately didn't pardon Ross due to the uncharged, untried allegations of Ross hiring an online hitman. Trump pardoned Ross now despite the same things still being true. The reasons Trump cited for the pardon were the excessive prosecution and sentence, but those things were also equally true in 2020. So, while I think it's just that Ross is free after over 11 years in a FedMax prison, that's why I don't believe Trump's reasoning was grounded in principle. And it has zero to do with liking Biden/Democrats more or Trump/Republicans less (because I dislike both equally). If Biden had pardoned Ross it would also not have been for principled reasons.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

TWO life sentences plus 40 years - without the possibility of parole

IMHO convicting somebody of such a thing is a crime in itself. Simply not excusable. Especially when the crime is essentially a form of white collar crime at best. Bank robbers, drug dealers, and some actual murderers often get more lenient sentences than that.

I think this was a case of the justice system being abused to make a political point. Casually destroying somebody's life to make a political point should be criminal in itself (with appropriate sentences and public disgrace). I don't agree with Trump's politics. But this seems like he's righting a clear and obvious wrong; so good for him. Regardless of his motivations.

vasco3• 1 year ago

The numbers of pardons granted per president is interesting: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-statistics

mrandish10• 1 year ago

It is interesting but, if I'm understanding the stats being tracked there, it's about petitions received and granted. However, many of the recent pardons by both Biden and Trump were unusual and controversial because they were either never petitioned, preemptive (in the case of Biden's family, staff & political allies) or granted to broad groups (in the case of Trump Jan 6th protesters). I'm not sure they are reflected on the site, or at least not yet, and if/when they are, how the site would reflect one pardon impacting dozens or hundreds of people.

In general, the recent wave of pardons in the last month reflect the trend over the last 20 years of pardons by both parties being increasingly political, self-interested and granted to connected donors who mount targeted campaigns. Sadly, it's not a great look. Yet I believe the pardon process can, and should, serve an important function of being a final check and balance to correct prosecutorial and judicial excess when it occurs. I'd be happier if the majority of pardons were commutations of grossly excessive sentences in cases most people have never heard of.

Hopefully, many of the more unusual and controversial recent pardons were a final paroxysm in response to the increases in politically-related prosecutions or threats of such prosecutions by partisans on both sides. Regardless of the validity (or lack thereof) of these prosecutions (or threats), it's clear many were pursued more aggressively, timed or conducted with at least one eye on either influencing political optics or retribution. Overall, it's certainly not been a shining moment for our republic. Both parties share the blame and need to do better.

leobg• 1 year ago

Most Pardons: Clinton & Reagan (4/month). Fewest Pardons: Bush senior / Biden (1.5/month)

Since Reagan.

jjallen5• 1 year ago

But he’s only served a tiny fraction of what you say was an unjust sentence. So the jury’s still out as to whether he’s served enough time. Other hard drug dealers get way more time than Ross has served.

Its astonishing that granting pardons to drug dealers and attempted murderers is something Trump sees as one of the more urgent matters affecting the most powerful nation on Earth.

I wish this weren’t true.

slavik812• 1 year ago

He's served over ten years. That's 1/8th of an average lifespan. It would be a fairly normal sentence for second degree murder where I'm from.

psychlops• 1 year ago

Highlighting the polarization and weaponization of the justice system is worthy subject matter for the most powerful nation on Earth. It needs to be set onto a new path that is fair to all involved.

microtherion2• 1 year ago

Maybe Trump is counting on Ulbricht starting a blockchain based online grocery chain to bring down the price of eggs.

ezee2• 1 year ago

Trump owed the libertarians for their support. This is what they got in return. It's bizarre seeing Trump designate the Mexican drug cartels as terrorists a few hours earlier while Ross facilitated billions in sales of the same products.

knodi123• 1 year ago

sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender

First time offender?!?!? Applying that term to a guy who spent years traveling around the world under multiple fake IDs while using state-level security on his hardware and racking up law violations every single day seems like an absurd stretch.

I mean, come on. By that logic, Al Capone was a first time offender when the feds finally nailed him for the first time. Pablo Escobar was a first time offender when he finally got nabbed. Good lord.

"First time offense" applies to your _first offense_. Not relevant when you've committed thousands of offenses over years while living on the run.

ricochet11• 1 year ago

those thinking this is a criminal who shouldn’t be released i recommend reading this thread https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1641931312385888256

yapyap3• 1 year ago

finally! let’s go!

though he was very stupid with how he did it, I am happy he is a free man

foogazi7• 1 year ago

Wait, is he smart or stupid ?

yapyap3• 1 year ago

I am surprised Trump pardoned him, not unhappy bout it tho!

foogazi7• 1 year ago

How are cartels terrorist organizations but online drug markets are not illegal ?

presentation2• 1 year ago

They aren't illegal?

ricardonunez• 1 year ago

The difference is the terrorizing and beheading part.

UltraSane7• 1 year ago

Presidents and governors should NOT have the power to pardon people. And if they do it should be ONE pardon per term.

dylan6043• 1 year ago

Until you can prove to me that all courts, judges, attorneys, and juries are above reproach and no innocent people are imprisoned there absolutely should be a method for someone to pardon. Sometimes a pardon will be issued for people you disagree with, but that’s part of it. Just like somebody will say something that pisses you off, but that’s the cost of free speech

UltraSane7• 1 year ago

A single person should never have the sole power to undo an unlimited number of lawful convictions. It seems like a power designed for corruption.

macintux2• 1 year ago

The authority to pardon is one of the most direct indicators we have for the moral character of an executive.

UltraSane7• 1 year ago

So?

dredmorbius12• 1 year ago

Less that than that the obviously corrupt, criminal, and/or treasonous should be kept from office at all costs.

Either way, obviously, the system has failed.

Or as the commonplace goes, is working as designed.

santoshalper2• 1 year ago

Disclosure - I immensely dislike Trump and think Ross Ublricht deserved to be convicted.

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.

PKop2• 1 year ago

Since no one is posting it, here's Trump Truth Social post on the matter:

"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!"

mmaunder• 1 year ago

I wonder if Assange will get the pardon he’s campaigning for:

https://www.action.assangecampaign.org.au/

dynamite-ready• 1 year ago

I'd wager the chances of that happening are much lower under this current administration. Surprised Biden didn't consider it though.

toyg7• 1 year ago

Neither Obama nor Biden would ever pardon Assange, because it would not win them any votes with the constituencies they are really after. At least Manning carried some trans votes.

sidcool2• 1 year ago

I'm indifferent to him being pardoned. But people saying he didn't deserve any punishment seems weird to me.

blast• 1 year ago

To me too. But life without parole seemed weird as well.

sophacles2• 1 year ago

That's why commutation is a thing. The courts have ruled this as within the pardon powers. His sentence could be changed to reflect something much more aligned with other convictions for the same crimes.

sidcool2• 1 year ago

Yeah. That was harsh, I agree.

osrec6• 1 year ago

To me what is weird is the "complete" pardon from a president that is supposedly going after immigrant drug dealers and murderers.

Basically, if you've done something wrong, but can drum up enough support for the winning political candidate, you get a chance to cut a deal and wipe the slate clean.

To those that say he's rehabilitated etc, I'm sure there were other worthy prisoners too, but why does this particular guy happen to get the pardon on day one?!

Same with the pardoned capitol rioters.

It just feels like a very slippery downwards slope, where political back scratching trumps everything else.

ezee2• 1 year ago

It's weird he received a full pardon from the president that is on record saying drug dealers should get the death penalty.

Aurornis• 1 year ago

It’s always interesting to see how he’s become a folk hero to some people who can do a lot of mental gymnastics to downplay the fact that he tried to hire a hitman to kill people. It’s weird to read all of the comments trying to discount the attempted murder because it didn’t actually happen.

ReptileMan2• 1 year ago

Weren't the people he tried to kill his collaborators? That kinda puts it in a nothingburger in my book.

ReptileMan2• 1 year ago

He served 12 years. Feels about right for the crimes he committed. Depending on your political association feel free to put quotation marks somewhere in the previous sentence.

npteljes6• 1 year ago

Me too. 12 years seems like enough, especially considering the sentence lengths other people get. If he tries again, they can catch him again. But running an illegal marketplace with clearly allowing whatever goes, and not receiving any punishment for it? That is wild.

underseacables• 1 year ago

I thought it was a ridiculously long sentence compared to what other people have received. 10 years was right. That's enough time. I know that he was accused of hiring a hitman, but he was never convicted of that. It should have never been used in his sentencing. I think the government tried to make an example out of Ross Ulbrich, and it was a miscarriage of justice.

YPPH• 1 year ago

The solution is a commutation, not a pardon.

MPSFounder• 1 year ago

These discussions are very interesting. So many red flags from Trump (this pardon, ending birthright citizenship...), and people try to justify these things. America is unfortunately heading for a very dark time. Politics aside, I am rather uncomfortable with the power the president possesses. We were always mindful that there are systems of checks and balances. However, given the current court overturned a precedent (Roe), I am unsure what the future holds. This pardon makes me very uneasy.

sidibe3• 1 year ago

The sympathy for this guy from so many of you makes me sad.

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!

77pt772• 1 year ago

Surely you must understand that he was also white and solid middle class.

And he was able to code sloppy LAMP code.

sidibe3• 1 year ago

Ah I hadn't seen his photo. Could have been me after a night of drinking, lets not ruin the poor guys life just because of a few callous decisions.

yalogin• 1 year ago

Is SBF next in line for a pardon?

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

SBF lost a lot of money for a lot of rich people; he's not getting off so easy as someone selling illegal drugs and ordering hits on competitors

nostromo• 1 year ago

I think the attacks on some of these black and gray markets has increased violent crime in the real world. I wish the federal government would stop shutting them down and instead use them as tools to build cases against people breaking the law.

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.

bloudermilk3• 1 year ago

I don't think much changed, really. The contraband and services offered on these marketplaces has always been backed by criminal enterprises. Mostly the markets provided level of indirection that made purchasing palatable and gave a false sense of safety.

anon84873628• 1 year ago

Sure, but the point is about secondary effects. If pimps are "competing" online then they need to compete on, well, marketing and UX. If they compete in real life then it is about who controls physical territory.

There are lots of studies about the unintended consequences of prohibition.

joe_the_user2• 1 year ago

Online markets for sex work allowed women to operate far more safely than "the street" allow. I had friends who were affected by the crackdown on craigslist etc.

aftbit• 1 year ago

Ask an actual sex worker what they think about that.

outside4155• 1 year ago

[flagged]

brohee• 1 year ago

Illegal online marketplaces absolutely do reduce "turf wars". It's argueable that there is harm reduction compared to street dealing. Then I suspect it creates new consumers so there is that too.

cogman102• 1 year ago

I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.

I would much rather the police be focused on stopping violent crime rather than these victimless crimes.

Legitimizing drugs/prostitution makes is easier to regulate and ultimately make safer. Shoving this stuff into a black/gray market is what ultimately creates violent crime.

rib3ye3• 1 year ago

I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.

We tried that in SF, I was a supporter. Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me. Dumping money into people who aren't ready to convert back into tax payers (even in the most basic sense) while schools got the back burner was enough. Not to mention the tents.

LAC-Tech• 1 year ago

Those won't stop the problem at the root, right?

The inflow/manufacture of narcotics won't be affected at all. You'll still have a constant new influx of junkies, and it you'll essentially by funding this widescale and expensive solution forever.

Much better to simple make drug trafficing and manufacture a capital offense. It's been extremely effective in a lot of jurisdictions. Even if you're squeamish about the death penalty, a back of the envelope calculations will tell you you're saving a lot more lives than you spend due to decreased overdoses, drug wars etc,

floydnoel5• 1 year ago

no victim means no crime. victimless "crimes" are just 'arbitrary rule' violations (like going 56mph in a 55mph zone) or infractions. the twisting and distortion of language by the state is counterproductive to society.

azinman217• 1 year ago

Portland tried this. It was a resounding failure.

user3939382• 1 year ago

I think you meant decreased crime, judging by the context of the rest of your comment.

pawelmurias• 1 year ago

Pimps dying is great. The government should arresting, convicting and executing way more of them.

herbst6• 1 year ago

Coming from a country where prostition is legal and drugs heavily decriminalized, all with plenty of help programs for people who need it. I can only say that the problem is not the platforms but forbidding things that people won't stop using is simply delusional.

munificent• 1 year ago

getting prostitutes off the streets.

By this, do you mean "reducing the total amount of prostitution occurring" or "making prostitution less visible"?

Your third paragraph implies the former, but I suspect the answer is actually the latter. There is probably less total prostition now, but what's there is more visible.

You talk about "increased crime" in reference to pimp shootouts, but you know prostitution and sex trafficking are crimes too, right? If thousands of women and girls are suffering but you can't see it because it's all organized online, that's not necessarily better.

johnnyanmac13• 1 year ago

It could be much worse. Some parts of Onlyfans picked up the mantle for that sort of "service".

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

So does this mean the war on drugs is finally over and we're going to stop mass incarceration for non-violent drug offenses? If so, that _would_ be good news.

ecocentrik3• 1 year ago

He also just classified drug cartels as terrorist organizations so drug dealers are now technically facilitating terrorism. Apart from liberating this white collar drug dealer, all of his other actions have escalated the war on drugs. While he was signing these orders, he claimed that drug cartels were responsible for up to 300,000 American deaths annually (a completely fabricated number.)

mr_00ff00• 1 year ago

https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp

Feel like you have already made up your mind on what you want to believe, but he has actually helped a lot with non-violent drug offenders. That’s part of the reason poor communities (especially Latino) have voted for him despite harsh border policies.

tveita5• 1 year ago

Not going to post this link to every post where it's relevant, but:

  Trump returned to that theme in November 2022, when he officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign. "We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts," he said.

https://reason.com/2023/10/24/trump-who-freed-drug-offenders...

You'll note there are comments here saying saying that he generally keeps his campaign promises. On the bright side I don't agree, but on the other hand I think he does often enough, especially for the "well of course he didn't literally mean that" ones.

olalonde3• 1 year ago

I wonder if the decision to drop the "murder for hire" charges was originally influenced by his existing life sentence, and whether the pardon now alters that reasoning. Is it still possible for him to be prosecuted on those charges?

aksss3• 1 year ago

I think they were dismissed with prejudice, which if true, is a “no”. That said, all prior charges and attempts were federal charges, and nothing in a pardon or federal dismissal prevents an individual state from bringing charges, IIRC. Would be a heavy lift though without cooperation from feds to turn over investigation materials.

cratermoon4• 1 year ago

Just a reminder: the condition for accepting a pardon is acknowledging that you did commit the crime in question and accept the court's finding of guilt.

In contrast: Biden didn't pardon Leonard Peltier, the president commuted his sentence. Peltier maintains his innocence.

johnneville4• 1 year ago

Can you share more about your first point? A brief search shows the 1915 Burdick supreme court case said that accepting a pardon can imply guilt. However, it doesn't seem to say that acknowledgement or acceptance of guilt is a requirement by the recipient of the pardon.

plsbenice345• 1 year ago

Do you have a source for that condition? How does that work for Biden pardoning Fauci for crimes that havent been revealed yet?

cratermoon4• 1 year ago

classic whataboutism.

smashah• 1 year ago

All I can think about after reading this is "Rest In Power Aaron Swartz"

spiritplumber• 1 year ago

Legalities aside, is it more evil to hire a dude to kill your enemy, or to go kill your enemy yourself? (I'd go with the former because if you go kill your enemy yourself you're at least accepting that it may go the other way).

southernplaces73• 1 year ago

For all his many defects and cloudy motives for doing it, Trump deserves applause for this. It's with actions such as this that he also shows why he's a genuine maverick of a president, with who it's genuinely possible to expect deeply unexpected actions (for better or worse).

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.

yownie• 1 year ago

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

he pardoned Chelsea Manning I think you're forgetting.

dimator2• 1 year ago

the fact that he will never pardon Snowden tells you all you need to know: this pardon was pandering and suits his own purposes. there are no higher principles here besides quid pro quo.

jimt1234• 1 year ago

I wouldn't even call it pandering. He straight-up said the pardon was because the libertarians supported him.

southernplaces73• 1 year ago

Trump is literally into the second day of his presidency, nobody can know whether he might or might not pardon even Snowden for some reason of his own. I had zero expectation of a pardon for Ulbricht yet here it is and it's more impressive than Obama's pandering (but to me still applause-worthy) pardon of Manning, though none came for Assange.

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

you would have never seen such a move from Obama

you forgot Chelsea Manning; so I stopped reading there

toyg7• 1 year ago

Pardoning Manning while still going hard after Assange was a new level of pandering to the LGBTQ lobby. Pretty disgusting in its own right, I agree.

southernplaces73• 1 year ago

Those of you downvoting this comment, I sincerely wonder if it's because you really think Ulbricht deserves to rot the rest of his life in prison despite a deeply flawed, openly vengeful trial and a sentence that simply doesn't usually correspond to any of what he was convicted of in most cases, or because you simply can't, emotionally, approve of anything Trump might do, even if you'd otherwise agree with it.

I'd say either posture is an insult to your own capacity for reasoned thinking, but I am curious about which kind of insult it is.

agentultra• 1 year ago

Is this president extremely concerned about drug dealers and gangs in the US?

Why is he pardoning a drug trafficker?

smt882• 1 year ago

I understand your point, but it has become a waste of energy to try to point out hypocridy and ideological inconsistency among that group.

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.

krige2• 1 year ago

I disagree, the lukewarm emotion driven campaign ("we're not the other guy!") and lack of any rational strategy or arguments from the oppositon is how these people won in the first place.

knodi5• 1 year ago

Yes, yes but children detention center which separated kids from their parents and then lost the paper work connecting them back to their family, even some kids died of neglect in the detention center...cruelty.

The rise of the morally bankrupt in America.

shoxidizer• 1 year ago

Pardoning Ulbricht was a campaign promise he made at the Libertarian National Convention in response to it being a popular demand among the libertarians.

noirbot3• 1 year ago

And more importantly, among the crypto crowd that dumped millions into his campaign. Libertarians have essentially no clout or money on their own. This was a pardon bought by Coinbase and Gemini and A16z.

ttyprintk10• 1 year ago

I’d like to know who wrote that speech. A lot of talk about how libertarians are domineered and persecuted. Something like “after criminal prosecutions, if I wasn’t a libertarian then, I sure am now” in front of a very idealistic audience whose skepticism of government is unrelated to how many billionaires it fingerprints. So, they booed and heckled him, and in hindsight I wonder if he was grasping for concessions.

barnabee3• 1 year ago

No love for Trump or libertarians but I am a cypherpunk[0] at heart. I'm on board with the idea of ensuring that things can happen online outside of the jurisdiction of any nation[1], so for his part in building towards that I'm happy Ross is free.

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).

hbbio3• 1 year ago

A drug trafficker sells drugs

A developer builds a platform like eBay but without censorship that can be used by the drug trafficker

It's not the same thing

_s• 1 year ago

I make and sell soap. The soap contains an ingredient that anyone can use to make bombs. Some people buy my soap only for that purpose. I know because they literally tell me how they use my soap. I can remove that ingredient but I would loose a lot of sales.

The police finds my soap in the lab of someone who blew up a building. Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?

kube-system2• 1 year ago

If you set up what is clearly a perfect marketplace for drugs, and you know it's going to fill up with drug dealers, and it does fill up with drug dealers, and there's one goofball that decided to sell a hamburger.... you're not an innocent guy who is running a hamburger marketplace.

highwaylights4• 1 year ago

It’s not not the same thing either.

The purpose of eBay isn’t to facilitate illicit transactions, doing so is abusing the platform.

SR was very much for illicit transactions.

insane_dreamer18• 1 year ago

No no no, my friend. Ulbricht was not a lowly drug trafficker (also, incidentally, not black or latino). He was an _entrepreneur_ who built a _marketplace_ that would bring together buyers and sellers, cutting out the middleman, and driving _efficiency_! Basically trustedhousesitters.com, just for illegal drugs instead of pets ;)

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

To appease the broligarch technologists, who all enjoyed buying LSD with cryptocoins.

outside4155• 1 year ago

[flagged]

kubb5• 1 year ago

Basically he’ll do anything to get the votes he needs, there’s no morality behind it.

kube-system2• 1 year ago

Trump clearly values favoritism to a high degree. He is doing exactly as he has promised, running the country like a businessman. If you scratch his back, he will scratch yours. Principles take a back seat to "getting the job done". For other examples, see his changed stances on TikTok, various foreign interests, cryptocurrencies, EVs post Elon support, etc. And in the opposite vein, he abandons support for anyone who challenges his authority on principles.

a2128• 1 year ago

That sounds like corruption

AlexandrB2• 1 year ago

Principled politicians are very rare. Do you think the outgoing administration was particularly principled?

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.

IMTDb2• 1 year ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

cbsmith11• 1 year ago

s/businessman/gangster/

Principles are much more important to a businessman than a gangster.

tasuki2• 1 year ago

Don't online drug marketplaces lead to reduced gang activity?

One does not need a gang and violence to sell drugs online. Selling drugs offline, gangs and violence will get involved.

KeplerBoy3• 1 year ago

There are gangs and violence all along the supply chain. The online marketplace only removes the last (few hundred) miles.

cbsmith11• 1 year ago

Don't online drug marketplaces lead to reduced gang activity?

Online isn't the important factor here.

One does not need a gang and violence to sell drugs online.

Gangs and violence aren't there to support a marketplace. They don't help you find customers or customers to find you. They don't improve the efficiency of exchange. They're there to enforce outcomes. Selling drugs leads to outcomes that don't care whether the buyer and seller found themselves online.

bilekas• 1 year ago

I mean, I don't know why it's a full pardon, IMO Ulbricht's sentence was far too long and harsh, I'm sure it was to make a point that others should not replicate it, but wouldn't a stay on the remainder of his sentence been a better option here ?

highwaylights4• 1 year ago

You’re assuming the reason for the pardon is “the sentence was unfair” rather than “some people that cheered at my rally said they would like me to do this”.

gitaarik9• 1 year ago

Creating a website where you can trade (potentially illegal) stuff is not the same as being a drug trafficker.

ohashi• 1 year ago

Are we pretending the silk road was actually a legitimate marketplace and a few bad actors might have used it for things that break the law?

jmcgough• 1 year ago

I don't think he knows who RA is, I'm betting the cryptobros who ran his rug pulls and NFTs for the last year have his ear after making him millions of dollars.

dead_gunslinger2• 1 year ago

He said he would do this during his campaign as a promise, a lot of libertarians voted for him based on this. He delivered on the promise after he won a convincing majority. I'm not sure why democracy offends you this much.

unobatbayar• 1 year ago

Words can't describe how happy I am.

RomanPushkin• 1 year ago

Explain to me like to five year old why when I create a _successful_ drug marketplace that sold whole bunch of illegal drugs should be pardoned?

arittr• 1 year ago

Now that I didn’t expect

xeckr• 1 year ago

Good.

liamwire2• 1 year ago

Genuinely thought we’d never see the day. My feelings on Ulbricht are mixed and have evolved over the decade he’s been in prison.

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.

clutchdude• 1 year ago

Question - did you need drugs such as LSD to have that experience or did it lower the barrier to entry?

liamwire2• 1 year ago

Great question, I’m not sure about the answer. I’ve heard those that meditate describe similar experiences, and have had some profound perspective shifts trying it myself years ago. I can’t also rule out the age I was at the time, being one where’d you’d expect to go through new and transformative experiences anyway by virtue of still growing and maturing.

But my intuition says no, it really does feel like those were peak, pivotal experiences that still stand out as some of the most significant in my life. Not to say it’s not possible, but maybe more so that in my little corner of the world with the relatively limited experiences available to me at the time, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have simply continued to tread the very uninspired life path I was on.

In a way it felt like waking up in the middle of a dream, and realising I could go back to sleep, or get up and change my circumstances. Probably a bit of a cringe analogy, but it feels about right — it was still work and a conscious choice to make positive changes, but prior to then it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could. It’s not lost on me that for positive stories like mine, there’s many people that could counter with negatives.

Drugs aren’t safe, but neither is a life unchallenged I think. In my case that was what I needed I suspect, a challenge to my own views on myself, other people, the world, and what’s possible. Therapy might’ve gotten me there too, for all it’s worth, but I don’t know that I would’ve considered it prior.

jMyles5• 1 year ago

It's baffling to me that there are actually comments on Hacker Gosh Darn News of all places suggesting that Ross justly belonged in prison.

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.

robertlagrant3• 1 year ago

It's hard to know why he wouldn't - he conspired to have people killed, and facilitated illegal activity, i.e. the sale of all sorts of drugs. You might be saying "well, drugs shouldn't be illegal", or even, "well, conspiring to kill people shouldn't be illegal", but they were illegal at the time.

starspangled2• 1 year ago

Seems like a legal slight-of-hand, and also unjust and unethical and absolutely ripe for government abuse.

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.

Whatarethese2• 1 year ago

Hope he goes on Dark Net Diaries.

amac• 1 year ago

The right decision.

nodesocket• 1 year ago

Ross just posted this photo on X. Man served 10 years, time for him to be free.

https://x.com/Free_Ross/status/1881925029497377104

nullbyte808• 1 year ago

I regret not voting for Trump. Hopefully most of his BS will be contested and the good stuff he does sticks.

pjbeam• 1 year ago

DPR is free!! I'm very happy for him and hope he makes good on this second lease on life.

andsoitis• 1 year ago

Ross Ulbricht on X: https://x.com/realrossu

presentation2• 1 year ago

If you're wondering like I was why he is able to tweet from prison, this article explains that he's dictating tweets via phone to his family, and they are sending back comments to him via mail. [1]

[1] https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2018/08/16/silk-road-founder-r...

metadat• 1 year ago

I wonder if this action was executed at the suggestion of Mr. Musk?

It seems questionable Trump even understands or cares what Silk Road did or how it worked.

DrFunke• 1 year ago

I laundered money on The Silkroad (sent birthday cards filled with cash for bitcoin). It was a level of criminality I was fairly comfortable with. I do retain some fear that my door would be kicked in some day. Lawyers of HN, Am I in the clear now too? Ross tried to have a guy murdered, after all.

beeflet10• 1 year ago

That depends, did you send the cards on their birthday?

IANAL, but I think you should be in the clear as long as you left a big red lipstick kiss on the bottom of the card.

palad1n• 1 year ago

I can’t believe Trump did something right. If Harris were prez he’d be languishing there till who knows when.

upmind• 1 year ago

Was there anything said about pardoning Snowden?

notananthem• 1 year ago

This thread really shows how unhinged the community is. Dude hired contract killers and ran the most prolific darkweb forum for whatever. He's not some martyr. He's just a bum.

rib3ye3• 1 year ago

It's very hard to square his sentencing.

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.

belter4• 1 year ago

May I respectfully and humbly suggest to this community to avoid posting Twitter links?

weberer3• 1 year ago

People have been fighting that uphill battle for close to 10 years now. I don't see it happening.

dewey• 1 year ago

This is the first time I’ve seen it and in the pre-Elon years there was also not much reason to do that. I don’t think the perception was bad more than > 5 years ago.

sherburt32• 1 year ago

What's wrong with twitter links?

belter4• 1 year ago

First you can only read if you create an account, second its owned by this person: https://preview.redd.it/vpt4ycl43eee1.gif?width=480&format=m...

Prbeek• 1 year ago

Fantastic news for the guy probably responsible for the wide adoption of bitcoin. I hope curl php no longer troubles him.

pavlov• 1 year ago

The US constitution increasingly seems like the principles of the Roman Republic after Caesar — a quaint relic that gets regular ceremonial lip service but provides no checks and balances on the leaders.

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.

fbnlsr• 1 year ago

This might be a minor thing, but does anyone know if a full pardon will allow him to use an electronic device or access the internet? Often times, people convicted of crimes related to an online activity are forbidden this right, and I wonder if that's the case for him, and if so, what his life would be in this day and age.

ropejumper2• 1 year ago

With a full pardon it's as if he never did anything in the first place.

WrongAssumption6• 1 year ago

That’s an expungement, which is not a power the president has. He can grant a pardon, which is forgiveness, but does not erase that a crime was committed.

sharpesttool• 1 year ago

Hard to square the circle with this. Trump is against China's drug imports (and more generally China's imports), but releases someone convicted of running a "import some drugs from China" business because... well crypto money. Oh money that's it. No contradiction!

dredmorbius12• 1 year ago

There is no circle. There is no square. There is unbridled and unanchored self-interest, power-lust, and opportunists.

lbriner• 1 year ago

Someone might have already pointed it out but for me, the sentence of RA is not the main issue, the issue is allowing a single person to stamp through an entire legal system and undermine all of the time and money that is invested in it, even if that person is a president.

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.

varsketiz6• 1 year ago

I tend to think this way about ideal leadership, but in reality big systems I can see end up having exception paths, or even processes

contravariant2• 1 year ago

The main failure here is the failure of the elections system to elect anyone reasonable.

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.

kortilla7• 1 year ago

All of the presidents pardon tons of people unpalatable to the other side of the political spectrum. They usually just save it for the end of their term so it doesn’t cause too much noise.

falcor842• 1 year ago

Why is it not a bad idea? Isn't it then just an example of Tyranny of the Majority?

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.

Escapado4• 1 year ago

Honest question/thought experiment: if we only elected people who are qualified for their job (assume we can measure competence at least in some dimensions like we do for a myriad of other professions before we allow people to work in them) and if the election process was set up in a way where when casting your ballot you have to take a multiple choice quiz which tests for basic knowledge on what you will vote for and the country you’re in (as in “what is the household budget roughly, is this candidate in favour or against x, did the crime rate increase or decrease nominally” take these as rough examples of what I mean), to ensure that the people who vote for something have some clue what they are voting for and the broader context it’s embedded in (we require a license to drive a car, this would be akin to have a having a license to vote) would that remedy the situation a little? The idea would be that informed people would vote for informed people. Could you imagine this being a net benefit or not? I would assume it would make democracies significantly better than they are now. Imagine going to a doctors office to find out your doctor is a Plummer and he was voted into this job and that the people working for him and handling your prescription is a random assortment of people he seems to like.

tchalla• 1 year ago

On its own

The reality is in front of you. So, you can't look at this "on its own".

barnabee3• 1 year ago

Assuming a sufficiently functional congress[0], why not require that pardons go through congress as well rather than be unilateral presidential actions?

[0] A big if, I know…

namlem2• 1 year ago

Yep. The problem is the system of elections itself. Biden and Obama also issued a lot of dubious pardons and commutations. The incentives of elections naturally favor short-termism and populism. Instead of having the people vote on candidates, we should randomly select citizens to an elector jury, which would carefully research and deliberate on the candidates before choosing.

https://www.electionbyjury.org/

gadders4• 1 year ago

Did you say this about Biden pardoning his whole family for their crimes, or just the ones Trump issued?

dehrmann• 1 year ago

Not GP, but yes.

varsketiz6• 1 year ago

Not GP.

I think Bidens family pardons are problematic as well. I can understand why he did it.

I dont understand the argument for pardoning Ross.

Terr_7• 1 year ago

I suspect that the idea originally was to give some safety valve

That reminds me of the early 2000s, where there were a lot of US debates around around terrorism and "harsh interrogations" i.e. torture.

A certain bloc of politicians and commentators kept bringing up a hypothetical scenario where there was a nuclear bomb counting down, and some guy wouldn't admit where it was hidden in a major city. My favorite response to that involved presidential pardons, something along the lines of:

1. "So what? If everything you say is true, then the authorities would simply torture the guy and seek a pardon afterwards. We already have an exceptional mechanism for those exceptional situations, meaning that's not a reason to change it."

2. "Conversely, any interrogator who isn't confident of a pardon is on who does not believe it's at ticking-bomb situation, meaning they cannot justify torturing someone anyway, they just want to do it to make their job marginally easier. That's bad, so it should stay illegal."

murphy1312• 1 year ago

It is a relic from the time when most countries had kings who could pardon people.

lolwatter• 1 year ago

Maybe the legal system shouldn't have been used to go after individuals based on political reasons? Wouldn't that be a good start? Fed always win, so send Fed after someone and they will be in jail soon. It doesn't matter what they did or didn't do, this is sadly the way it's done now.

1500 in jail for protesting in DC? Really, less than that in jail after months BLM riots afaik. Sure, jail a few bad boys, but 1500? No way.

Throw a rock at people in power and go jail. Rape and murder is fine, no threat to DC.

realaleris149• 1 year ago

The number of people is irrelevant. What is relevant is what each one did. If they did something illegal that is punished with prison time, they go to prison.

ngetchell2• 1 year ago

Trying to justify stealing the election, then trying to rewrite history saying the other side broke stuff when they prostested is the laziest sort of whataboutism I've seen on this site.

Trump and his minons tried to undo the results of an election. An election he lost. Lost even while abusing his power as president (see his calls in Ukraine and Georgia as evidence).

Nobody on the left supports looters or rapists. If there is evidence someone committed a crime, prosecute them. Trump is the only person I know that supports rapists (see Epstien and Gaetz). He says if you are loyal to him, you don't have to face the consequences of your actions. That to me is what is most scary.

FilosofumRex• 1 year ago

It's part of the separation of powers and the system of checks & balances against powers of branches of government.

Congress makes laws and impeaches presidents, courts judge constitutionality of laws and try cases of treason and presidents appoint judges and grant pardons.

You can't have impeachment without pardon, otherwise, there wouldn't be a check against judicial tyranny.

rafaelmn• 1 year ago

Legal system is very often at odds with public perception of justice, changing the law is slow and does shit for people currently in jail - having veto power for elected officials is a good safety mechanism and helps perception of justice.

account42• 1 year ago

Bidens pardons have been even more absurd - pardoning people for unspecified crimes before they have even been charged. Including his family.

vidarh• 1 year ago

In the context of a deeply vindictive successor surrounded, it seems like the entirely rational choice to make.

It's not one that should be needed or acceptable, and had his successor been someone who seemed to respect law and order I'd have agreed with you, but in the present circumstances it'd seem crazy not to.

sofixa2• 1 year ago

Because of very legitimate threats of politically motivated prosecution against them. Hell, his son was was prosecuted and dragged through the mud publicly, including in fucking Congress, for run of the mill regular crimes. Why was there such a treatment for a regular criminal?

keepamovin5• 1 year ago

Still something tells me you have zero problem with the thousands of pardons Biden issued, correct?

Don’t dress up your stance in fancy garb when it comes down to something baser.

varsketiz6• 1 year ago

This is not in any way related to Trump pardoning Ross or the fact that president can issue pardons at their discretion.

What you are doing here is a distraction from the topic - whataboutism.

keepamovin5• 1 year ago

I see that it’s still not possible to be pro Trump in YCombinator in 2025. One must still toe the line here. How sad.

that_guy_iain7• 1 year ago

They literally gave the power of pardons so that one person could right wrongs. Previously, it was used a lot more than it is now. There are lots of people in prison on unfair sentences which are technically legal but still wrong. Sentencing guidelines are just guidelines.

sebzim45005• 1 year ago

He's a single person but this was a campaign promise of a campaign that 77.3 million americans voted for.

tonymet2• 1 year ago

Is this a complaint about Trump or Biden ? So far Biden has pardoned more than 20x Trump , and Bidens recipients were Much more controversial

samatman• 1 year ago

It's a system of checks and balances. The Presidential pardon power is specifically a check on the power of the Federal judiciary.

Regimes have toppled in response to popular uprising against imprisonments perceived as unjust. Having a system of governance without a way to rectify that seems unwise to me.

The check on Presidential authority, in turn, is impeachment. It's not a perfect system by any means, but in my estimation it's a good one.

gigatexal4• 1 year ago

So are online illegal drug marketplaces legal now if they’re run entirely on crypto?

leftcenterright• 1 year ago

A full unconditional pardon is one thing, reduction of sentence through judicial processes is another. He never pardoned Snowden and Assange .

Why do they still have courts in the US again?

karel-3d• 1 year ago

Silk Road 3.0 here we come!

(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

freehorse• 1 year ago

So Trump keeps his promises to the ones who supported him. Makes one think how what other promises he has made to other people and groups having funded and supported his campaign.

omnibrain2• 1 year ago

Who's next? Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes?

dead_gunslinger2• 1 year ago

These ones are left for the next Democrat administration, current one is probably hostile to them given their political leanings.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

We need pardon reform.

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.)

tallanvor2• 1 year ago

While I would tend to agree with the first one, and preventing someone from pardoning himself or herself, the rest is a bit much. But it's a moot point anyway. At this point amending the constitution is virtually impossible.

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

the rest is a bit much

The Cabinet or the lame-duck pardons?

Cabinet members are close to the President and in commanding positions of authority; if they’re scared of a law they should work to change it.

Lame ducks, on the other hand, aren’t subject to the single veneer of a check on Presidential pardons: popular outrage. Limiting it in that span, when a President is unaccountable, and where we have ample history of silliness, seems warranted.

Note that I’m not proposing restricting commutations in any of those cases. (I suppose we should add a clause prohibiting the President from preëmptive commutations, too.)

amending the constitution is virtually impossible

Not true. We’re probably closer to the end of our Constitutional stasis than at any time in our lives.

Hell, you might be able to ram something like this through today if you added a clause that nullifies past pardons per those standards.

quasarj• 1 year ago

What? Trump just did it with an executive order!

vharuck• 1 year ago

(1) Preëmptive (i.e. absent conviction);

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?

JumpCrisscross4• 1 year ago

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

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.

sharperguy• 1 year ago

An example of someone who could be pardoned would be someone committing an act of violence towards police to prevent them from enforcing a law which was later considered to be unjust and worthy of revolt against.

chromatin2• 1 year ago

Preëmptive

amazing use of the diaresis

Regarding the substance of your comment, we do not have (IIRC) established judicial precedent for the constitutionality of preëmptive pardons. The practice originated with Ford pardoning Nixon, and has not yet been challened nor withstood judicial examination.

Personally, I'd like to see some of Biden's pardons challenged.

(3) Issued after the presidential election in the final year of their term.

This is an interesting one for those who are seeking a second term but are at risk of losing

mschuster91• 1 year ago

Nothing better showing how much Twitter has utterly degenerated than a gold checkmarked scam account (letter confusion) as the top reply [1].

[1] https://x.com/Frecs_Ross/status/1881968595632377962

dredmorbius12• 1 year ago

For those who cannot / prefer not to click through: top reply is a new "coin" launch.

decentralised• 1 year ago

This is just. If a president can pardon people preemptively then they can pardon someone retroactively as well.

Fokamul• 1 year ago

Ross deserved prison 100%, but 2x life + 40 years in American prison, which is hell on earth on purpose. That's just beyond fc** up.

All these people here saying his sentence is deserved. It's just sick. How is your crime rate going? Declining...right? ....nope

Ylpertnodi2• 1 year ago

...and the chemicals he would have supplied are being sliced and diced (padded out, to make more money), and you have to (in my country) go to some pretty dodgy areas to get what you want.

eddie_catflap• 1 year ago

It seems like a lot of the opposition to this I’m seeing online is because Trump is the one that granted it.

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.

DrNosferatu2• 1 year ago

Some questions, as many of us are from another continent and are only marginally aware of the matter - so, for many here at HN:

1. Ross Ulbricht the ultimate entrepreneur?

2. Ross Ulbricht was a freedom fighter?

Ylpertnodi2• 1 year ago

As a eu-er, yes and yes. (For me, and many of my friends).

DrNosferatu2• 1 year ago

Wow - really surprised.

- So, what about the exploitation, violence, and devastating addiction that results from no-rules drug purveying/trafficking?

(how would you compare Ross Ulbright to medical opioid purveyers/traffickers? If the same, what are they morally?)

- Isn't murder for hire outright objectionable?

throwaway2037• 1 year ago

This is a general question for any reader here who disagrees with the original prison sentence. (Ignore the Presidential pardon for a moment.) What is a reasonable prison sentence for his crimes? 10-20 years?

2-3-7-43-18072• 1 year ago

can't wait for him to star on joe rogan podcast!

gadders4• 1 year ago

Original story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626985

I wish we could run some sort of sentiment analysis to see who was pro and anti the sentencing then vs now.

peter_retief• 1 year ago

I always thought the sentence was too extreme, he broke some laws he should do some time. Not life without parole.

varispeed• 1 year ago

This is amazing. Well done.

gigatexal4• 1 year ago

What’s the overall take of HN here? Was the government overstepping? Is everyone supporting this undoing of his sentence? Are we generally pro free drug trade? Or are we more anti-FBI?

varsketiz6• 1 year ago

My grasp of the sentiment in the comments - majority of folk here seem to think Ross did enough time for his crime.

gigatexal4• 1 year ago

thanks for summarizing

ozim• 1 year ago

I don’t support the undoing.

Government wasn’t overstepping, facilitating bad stuff on such scale has to be taken down with big consequences.

There is no „I was just running a site and people used it for bad stuff” he had all intentions and he profited from it.

gigatexal4• 1 year ago

I agree. The lengthy sentence likely was such that it stood as a deterrence to other upstarts / would-be drug marketplace kingpins.

aksss3• 1 year ago

“We”? Examine your own principles, review the facts, come to your own conclusion.

dredmorbius12• 1 year ago

The overall take of HN is that a sober discussion of this situation isn't possible on this site.

Karrot_Kream2• 1 year ago

This wasn't the case in the older thread. I've seen you mention that you think HN hasn't changed that much but I think juxtaposing this comment thread against the older one is illuminating. HN has drifted more toward a general news site than anything particular special. Like most news sites, comments are characterized by short, overly emotional comments that argue in borderline bad faith. Comments aren't particularly interested in discussion but instead just cathartic emoting.

nsajko• 1 year ago

Is Trump not supposed to be tough-on-crime? How does pardoning a drug dealer factor into that? Is Trump against the war on drugs?

TriangleEdge• 1 year ago

I'm genuinely surprised of the reactions on this thread. Trump just announced that cartels down south are terrorist organizations. This means that some of the members will likely die by the hand of the us govt. How is running an open market for drugs, weapons, etc different? Seems contradictory to me, what am I missing?

dools2• 1 year ago

This pardon is corrupt. Ross' parents donated to Trump and he pardoned their son as a favour.

Whether or not you think he deserved the prison time, the problem here is how utterly brazen Trump is in accepting bribes.

jgilias• 1 year ago

Trump doesn’t care about Ross’ parents or their donations much.

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.

SV_BubbleTime2• 1 year ago

So, I’m seeing politician followed through on promise to voters. I’m sure this can swing to some orange man bad, I’m just not seeing it.

rnernento• 1 year ago

In 2021, Ulbricht's prosecutors and defense agreed that Ulbricht would relinquish any ownership of a newly discovered fund of 50,676 Bitcoin (worth nearly $5.35 billion in 2025) seized from a hacker in November 2021.[78] The Bitcoin had been stolen from Silk Road in 2013 and Ulbricht had been unsuccessful in getting them back. The U.S. government traced and seized the stolen Bitcoin. Ulbricht and the government agreed the fund would be used to pay off Ulbricht's $183 million debt in his criminal case, while the Department of Justice would take custody of the Bitcoin.[79][80]

dbspin3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

haswell3• 1 year ago

What are you suggesting here? That the earlier bitcoin seizure somehow led to this pardon? I’m not following.

jdhzzz• 1 year ago

Well an upper bound anyway. Maybe, "The Art of the Deal" could have gotten it a lot closer to $1.2 B.

lvl155• 1 year ago

Bingo. US always has been about commerce and money. It wouldn’t shock me if Ross has at least a few million hidden in some “lost wallet” printed out in a vault some where. He was smart enough to know he would get caught one day.

Workaccount24• 1 year ago

It's unlikely he has a hidden stash that is truly hidden. Back then the government wasn't all over the blockchain (compared to today) and obfuscation was not like what is available today.

So even if he does have a stash, it is likely marked, and he will get a knock on the door real fast if it starts moving.

scotty792• 1 year ago

Wow. Suddenly the pardon makes perfect sense.

haswell3• 1 year ago

Why does this make the pardon make sense?

liendolucas• 1 year ago

I think that we have to agree that anyone doing this today will definitely go to jail, and is my personal opinion that there must be a punishment. Now, the discussion could be if a life sentence is a fair sentence or not. I personally feel that a life sentence is a disproportionate punishment, moreover if the subject shows a different attitude after being in jail for more than a decade. Ten years time to medidate about what you did is plenty of time to change someone's mind, obviously if you are a person willing to do things differently.

aksss3• 1 year ago

Wasn’t it _two_ life sentences plus forty years?

honeybadger1• 1 year ago

can we all just agree that he was given a ridiculous sentence and trump did a good thing, is that so hard.

chocolateteeth2• 1 year ago

How is the thread basically off topic?

giantg2• 1 year ago

I'm curious, what are the arguments for or against him being pardoned?

I_am_tiberius2• 1 year ago

I know he wasn't convicted of hiring a hitman, and I know the attempt didn't succeed, but he still tried to kill other people. Moreover, during a Bitcoin conference, he gave a live talk from prison via phone and still lied, claiming they planted the log on his laptop. A full pardon is ridiculous. It's unfair to so many people, including his partners like Variety Jones, also known as Thomas Clark. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure he won't do anything like this again.

HlessClaudesman2• 1 year ago

Actual murderers get out in the time that Ross served.

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.

Algent2• 1 year ago

Wasn't silk road selling way more than just drugs ? Like, pornography and gun, worldwide. When you facilitate both sex trafficking, organized crime and potentially terrorism you can't exactly be surprised you get hit with everything.

NovemberWhiskey6• 1 year ago

We punish people all the time for non-violent, white-collar crime; often very severely. Bernie Madoff got sent to prison for 150 years and died there and, as far as I know, he never solicited a murder for hire.

immibis6• 1 year ago

Yeah, but in that case, we should pardon all people convicted of drug possession or distribution, not specifically Ross.

pc86• 1 year ago

"Actual murderers get out in less than a decade" is a reason to put actual murderers in prison forever, not to let everyone else out even sooner.

tasty_freeze2• 1 year ago

If a Mafia boss never strong armed a merchant, never busted any kneecaps, and never pulled a trigger but simply paid other people to carry out various crimes, should the law give him a short sentence because he was non-violent?

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.

graemep• 1 year ago

I once noticed (in the UK) that two people who I read news stories about in the same week got similar sentences. One for breach of copyright, one for sexually assaulting a teenager.

That said, I think Ross did knowingly enable violence?

johnwheeler2• 1 year ago

I don’t think he should have been sent to ADX Florence, but gen pop in San Quentin seems reasonable. Give him 10 more years in Jail me says!

rossfan• 1 year ago

Because the federal government would never plant a log on his computer in order to obtain a conviction. Next people will be saying the CIA killed JFK. How can we lose faith in the judicial system, fuck, the very government considering how consistently benign and trust worthy its been time and time again.

snapcaster2• 1 year ago

I honestly have no idea what the truth of the case was, but it is crazy to me how people never seem to update their priors on what the US gov is capable of. Everytime they get caught doing something like this people go "wow thats crazy" and then immediately go back to telling everyone saying non-mainstream ideas to take their meds

lvass2• 1 year ago

Poe's law.

perihelions5• 1 year ago

He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the proceeds of.

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))

JohnnyLarue• 1 year ago

Yes, but Ulbricht is a very different case. He's white, you see.

cedws• 1 year ago

Ulbricht didn't kill those people. Those people took drugs under their own autonomy and died as a result.

that_guy_iain7• 1 year ago

He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the proceeds of.
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.

itsoktocry3• 1 year ago

It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin.

Some of us see a major difference between selling heroin to someone, and building the marketplace from which these victim's freely bought drugs.

I think he is owed some responsibility, but he didn't kill them.

valval• 1 year ago

He was not the dealer.

cheeseomlit4• 1 year ago

"He killed children" is a pretty massive leap- he didn't sell heroin, he sold shrooms. Other vendors on the site sold heroin. And there is the matter of personal responsibility to consider- nobody forced those people to take heroin, and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere. The Sacklers are responsible for far more human misery in that regard, to an almost inconceivable degree, and they never have and never will see the inside of a cell

ty685312• 1 year ago

Wait until you hear how many people home swimming pool salesmen kill, and their victims are even younger children.

Hell at least illegal drugs can be lifesaving. No one needs a home swimming pool.

stickfigure5• 1 year ago

This is so stupid. By this standard, automobile manufacturers kill 44,000 people in the US every year, including countless children. 3,500-4,500 people in the US are murdered by swimming pool contractors every year.

busymom09• 1 year ago

Other than the fact that he was not a drug dealer and other criticism others have already pointed out, Carnegie Mellon University's researchers did an analysis of Silk Road gathering data on a daily basis for eight months before it was shut down. Some of their findings include:

“‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8)
“The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12)

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU...

2+ life sentences for a website which sold weed is just outrageous. Also note that since 2012, people have become a LOT softer on weed and even other drugs have been legalized since then. Trump himself has said that he has friends who have benefitted from weed.

butlike14• 1 year ago

Isn't the australian other story _LITERALLY_ the age-old "a friend of a friend's cousin jumped out of a window on LSD because they thought they could fly?"

I'm surprised they didn't call in the witness who thought they were a glass of orange juice.

maxlin4• 1 year ago

Ridiculous? He was in prison for 10 years.

I_am_tiberius2• 1 year ago

A full pardon means the individual gets their legal record cleared (as if the crime never happened).

Thorrez4• 1 year ago

Then commute his sentence to time served. Don't pardon him, which says he wasn't guilty to begin with.

HWR_142• 1 year ago

A pardon is not used when you think the crime occurred but the punishment is too harsh. That's a commutation (which the president also has the power to do). It can replace the punishment with a lighter one or none at all.

A pardon is used when you want to erase the criminal record on top of that.

wonderwonder2• 1 year ago

The issue is that so many of the officials that investigated him were corrupt. How can we be confident any of the evidence was real. He is obviously not innocent but when at least 2 of the investigators went to jail for crimes committed during this investigation it casts serious questions on the validity of the case as a whole.

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."

verteu4• 1 year ago

A few moments' research reveal many reasons to think the evidence was real, eg:

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...

rco8786• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure he won't do anything like this again.

Famous last words, eh?

NovemberWhiskey6• 1 year ago

On the contrary, his not guilty plea, his ongoing insistence on his innocence, and libertarian true-believer tendencies etc. suggest the opposite.

LincolnedList• 1 year ago

Next time he will double check the hitman is legit

moogly2• 1 year ago

What's even going on? Why is everyone treating this guy as some kind of political prisoner all of a sudden?

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.

andyjohnson02• 1 year ago

Non-USian here. I'm interested in why.

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?

mardifoufs5• 1 year ago

To be honest if Trump would've pardoned him in his first term it would've been way too short of a sentence for what he did. Though I hate the usual libertarian defense that makes him out to be an innocent martyr, I think that 10 years is somewhat enough for what he did. It would have been a normal sentence in a lot of countries outside the US.

andyjohnson02• 1 year ago

Thanks. I appreciate your view on the sentence, but I'm interested in why Trump would issue a pardon.

I'm unconvinced that Trump in 2020 thought Ulbricht's total sentence was okay, but four years later has apparently changed his mind. So who's the client here? It doesn't seem to be Ulbricht - is it libertarians in general? Why does Trump, as a second term president, actually care?

grey-area• 1 year ago

For my friends, anything. For my enemies, the law.

constantcrying• 1 year ago

Here is what the discussion looked like almost a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626985

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.

skylurk• 1 year ago

Seems kinda the same to me?

aspect0545• 1 year ago

Now people complain about the pardon, back then people complained about the sentence. People love to complain.

tim333• 1 year ago

I guess people feel ten years in prison was adequate punishment.

reactordev• 1 year ago

I don’t disagree but I also don’t agree with the life sentence. If he was charged properly with the crimes stated during his trial, maybe that would be warranted but he wasn’t charged with it, only the website charges and conspiracy. Which some of them could apply to meta or craigslist if you got creative.

immibis6• 1 year ago

What I don't understand is why Donald Trump, of all people, is being lenient on drug traffickers.

cess11• 1 year ago

Crypto commodity grifter gets known crypto commodity laundering expert out of jail.

Nevermark7• 1 year ago

There is a high correlation between his condemnation of drugs and characterizations of families, many poor and desperate, illegally crossing the border.

Most illegal drugs by far go through regular border crossings, but he hasn’t obsessed about them in the same way.

diggan9• 1 year ago

AFAIK, it wasn't done because he wants to be lenient on drug traffickers, but because the overall case of Ross Ulbricht is huge in certain political circles that he was pandering to during the presidential race, so seems he's "paying back" for those votes or something.

acdha• 1 year ago

He’s famously flexible based on whatever he thinks is advantageous now. This could be as simple as his claims to have been unfairly persecuted by law enforcement, it could be part of his wealth gained from cryptocurrency, or it could simply be that he thinks it’ll make his opponents angry. Rich people often act on whims just to show that they have the power not to need to justify their actions.

hoppp3• 1 year ago

Basically he did it to get the vote of the right-libertarians. He made a promise to them.

They idolize Ross for creating a drug market because they view it as freedom of speech.

tasty_freeze2• 1 year ago

It was a big cause that many libertarians cared about. I'm sure all the crypto people who have Trump's ear have been pushing him on this. There are also rumors that some state-level libertarian leaders promised not to promote their candidate if Trump promised to free Ulbrecht.

cpursley• 1 year ago

Trump has never been a big drug warrior (against drug users). His social views are basically late 80's 1990s Democrat and not out of line with Clinton, etc.

dekhn2• 1 year ago

Trump is predictable. This was his side of a transaction designed to secure support from a voter contingent. His personal opinions don't matter much when he is making a deal.

echoangle17• 1 year ago

Can you explain the differences you see? People found the sentence too harsh at the time, too, it looks like.

rescripting2• 1 year ago

I'd be wary of drawing correlations like this. The people who commented on that thread are not going to be the same people commenting on this one. The topic isn't even the same; in the first thread the topic is his sentencing, and in this its his pardon.

The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain, and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned. Its not necessarily a cultural shift, just an artifact of the types of discussions people have online.

smeeger7• 1 year ago

its crazy to look at this old thread and know that i almost certainly left a comment in it. although ive created and left behind hundreds of accounts in the meantime. i first got on HN feb 2015 when i read an article about “famed god” getting arrested in las vegas… his shirt had “hack the world” written on it and when i googled “hack the world famed god,” not knowing about the movie reference, it gave me a HN thread about the incident. and then HN became my home for almost ten years… i didnt have facebook or instagram or vine. i literally just spent all my time on HN. now that the displacement of programmers by AI has begun, somehow my interest has waned.

at the time, the murder for hire accusations seemed legitimate and they still do today. hopefully they charge him with attempted murder if the statute of limitations isnt up.

diggan9• 1 year ago

The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain

I mean, I won't admit it openly but something like that yeah. It doesn't help either that the way to show you disagree is by sharing what you disagree with (which is great) but the way you show you agree is by upvoting (which others don't see).

So one comment with three complaints in the replies but 100 upvotes might look like "people wholeheartedly disagree with this person" but in reality, most readers actually agreed. Comments that are just "I agree" are kind of pointless, so I prefer how things are, but useful to not read too much into "X people said Y" on HN.

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

Making a distinction of whether individuals have changed perspective on the topic, and whether a community has are different levels of examination, and both may provide insights. In this case, Hacker news is an emergent phenomenon of individuals; it's OK to examine its evolution as whole.

gspencley• 1 year ago

and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned.

You can also hold both positions simultaneously without contradiction. That is to say that you can think that his sentence was too harsh while at the same time being of the opinion that what he did was a crime (and should be a crime) and that he should remain convicted and un-pardoned, just with a different sentence than the one he was given.

modeless2• 1 year ago

The people who commented on that thread are not going to be the same people commenting on this one

This is the point. HN readership has changed dramatically in the intervening years. I don't buy at all that the difference is solely due to comments tending to contradict the article.

krisoft• 1 year ago

Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted

I'm not sure. I have two questions on that. Is there the appearance of a sentiment shift? I see plenty of people arguing both against and for incarcerating him in both this thread and that old one.

And then if there is an appearance of a sentiment change (which I'm not sure about) is that evidence of a sentiment change or just selection bias? People who are okay with an outcome are much less likely to write a comment than people who are upset. That alone would change the bias of the comments.

MisterTea• 1 year ago

I see the same arguments: too harsh, not harsh enough, he tried to have people murdered, etc.

rhatsgf2• 1 year ago

The facts are: Trump now does NTF and coinschemes himself and got talked into this by his new entourage. That is what most people here complain about.

And he does this to distract from the fact that he will not stop the Ukraine war, not stop H1B etc.

Many of the same people also complain about the Biden laptop and Biden's pardons.

Projectiboga2• 1 year ago

He just fired or transfered everyone government involved in supporting Ukraine in their defensive war.

jonnycoder• 1 year ago

He just revoked Biden’s Eo that strengthened h1b

canjobear• 1 year ago

It seems like the same set of arguments to me.

epr• 1 year ago

As someone who's been following this since the beginning, the most striking difference is the assumption that Ross was in fact the DPR ordering hits, which he repeatedly denied. Obviously, he could be lying, but that's the main question for me. Since people now assume he was the one and only DPR (I wonder if people didn't get the concept from The Princess Bride), they assume DPR chat logs where murder-for-hire occurred must have been him as well.

meowface3• 1 year ago

Both threads seem to share a similar sentiment: he should not serve much time for the drug marketplace but should for the murders-for-hire. There's just a difference in how many people believe those allegations and to what extent they should factor into the sentence given the charges were dropped despite the allegations almost certainly being true.

efficax• 1 year ago

life in prison was too harsh, but a full pardon is too lenient.

eschulz• 1 year ago

Perhaps, but I'm of the opinion that if a sentence is unjust, or if the means to convict violated the defendant's rights, then the defendant should walk. While this may seem unreasonable, it's the only way to check the state which has unlimited resources when it decides to go after somebody.

I don't really have an opinion on this case because I'm not completely familiar with all the details. It's certainly going to be contentious.

WaitWaitWha2• 1 year ago

Just to be clear, a pardon does not expunge or erase one's criminal record.

life in prison was too harsh, but a full pardon is too lenient.

I think you should compare it as: life in prison was too harsh, but 10 years is too lenient.

whimsicalism2• 1 year ago

yes, HN is becoming increasingly hyperpartisan and not even in a very interesting way

knodi5• 1 year ago

Yes, by cultural shift if you mean, moral bankruptcy.

robswc• 1 year ago

To suggest there hasn't been a cultural shift is insane, imo.

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.

whimsicalism2• 1 year ago

the internet has a lot more people on it, it is much less self-selecting than in the past. even this website is a lot less self-selecting than in the past

eric_cc• 1 year ago

Reddit started off libertarian in its early days and has since gone radically far left. And similarly, HN has slowly drifted further and further left.

%-wise there are just fewer libertarian-minded people here these days.

runarberg• 1 year ago

This debate about IQ could have been had yesterday, and I‘m pretty sure I saw a pretty similar debate a few months ago on this site. Not much has changed there at least.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629493

modeless2• 1 year ago

Most interesting post here. A good indicator of the real change in HN readership over the years. For the worse IMO.

namirez2• 1 year ago

I don’t get it. Was every non-violent drug offender in federal prisons pardoned or only this guy? If so, why?

kundi• 1 year ago

Is Donald also refunding everyone’s deposits on Silkroad?

jerlygits• 1 year ago

If I wanted to know this, I’d visit Reddit.

subjectsigma• 1 year ago

The amount of doublethink, false-flagging, misinformation, and “looking the other way” in this thread is just absolutely disgusting.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

More people should get these “pardons” instead of the parole process based on the similar criteria on how they are pardoned.

ubermonkey• 1 year ago

I'm just assuming any pardons issued since Monday are probably to bad people.

sys32768• 1 year ago

I wish this thread were discussing how in America you can get drunk in a bar, step into a 4,000 motorized bullet, kill someone or an entire family, and get a slap on the wrist.

major505• 1 year ago

Didnt he paid a hitman to kill a dude, and ended up being an fbi agent ?

charlieok• 1 year ago

Ross, you can set up identities on decentralized social platforms now!

https://rossulbricht.medium.com/decentralize-social-media-cc...

stego-tech• 1 year ago

I’m not necessarily going to comment on his behaviors directly, as everyone else has already stated that in part or in whole. My grievance, my perspective, is that it’s yet another white man getting a slap on the wrist for wrongdoing while doing nothing to correct any of the underlying problems or pardon others who engaged in similar or lesser behaviors.

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.

jashper• 1 year ago

This is the best news I've heard in a while

UniverseHacker13• 1 year ago

I feel torn about this because it seems there was good evidence for attempted murder- and I cannot understand why they never tried him for that (seemingly larger) crime. However, for the crime he was actually found guilty of, the sentence was unfair and unreasonable. It seems they unethically sentenced him for crimes he was not even ever charged with.

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.

azinman217• 1 year ago

Not going to comment on the murder part as that’s well discussed here.

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.

mtoner23• 1 year ago

i think this points to a bunch of weird crypto people are actually in charge of a lot of this administration

grayhatter3• 1 year ago

I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.

why do you believe he's anti-drug or anti-cartel?

UniverseHacker13• 1 year ago

I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings.

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.

hedora3• 1 year ago

Historically, many anti-drug / anti-cartel leaders are actually members of a rival cartel, and want to use law enforcement to fight their wars for them.

The Mexican government has a long history of this. The LAPD’s (well documented for over 50 years) do the same thing.

Trump is a convicted felon with lots of ties to organized crime. Nothing about him pardoning members of some criminal organizations but not others is surprising.

In related news, he signed an executive order forcing prosecutors to seek the death penalty when police are killed, and in the same day pardoned 132 of his supporters that were convicted of assaulting police officers during an event where officers were killed.

rmah• 1 year ago

Well, now you probably understand that Trump is not really anti-drug/anti-cartel. Nor do I think he's pro-drug/pro-cartel. I think he doesn't actually care except in how those issues affect his political career and public profile. Many of Trump's more ... let's call them "random" seeming statements and actions make much more sense if you look at them through the lens of "he doesn't actually care one way or the other".

diggan9• 1 year ago

That’s also not to mention guns and all kinds of other dangerous & illegal parts of it.

I think it isn't mentioned because Silk Road didn't actually facilitate any selling/buying of weapons or any items "whose purpose was to "harm or defraud."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Produc...

I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.

He's the candidate that was preferred by Christians, yet probably he was the least Christian-like candidate. Just today/yesterday he criticized a Bishop for values that are clearly Christian, people seem to swallow it. I'm pretty sure trying to add logic/reasoning to the choices he makes is a lost cause.

napkin3• 1 year ago

(SWIM’s experience with Silk Road):

For LSD there existed a third-party forum, where a group of (supposedly) vendor-neutral, unaffiliated individuals would purchase samples from vendors, send them to private or state-sponsored labs around the world and publish/discuss the results (often with online links to lab results).

Yes, of course vendors could have also attempted to infiltrate these forums. But as enough of these functions were provided by/for the community, the profit incentive tilts. If you ran a vendor account on the Silk Road, your effort was better spent maintaining/improving good infosec and mail/postal security. Some techniques they developed were quite innovative, the professionalism was evident.

Ross’s story is fascinating and tragic- as everything that’s said for and against his character is generally true. Silk Road was built on naive yet admirable ideals. It fostered a special community, some of which really did reflect those ideals. He got in over his head, and really did try to have someone killed.

Though, the details on that latter point are a bit more complicated- authorities had infiltrated Ross’s inner circle- the motive and the ‘hitman’ himself were fictional. Ross still took the bait though, which is pretty damning. Until that point, they weren’t sure they had a sufficient case on him.

armandososa• 1 year ago

he is just anti-mexico.

hinkley• 1 year ago

Something anyone with an addict in their life needs to know:

While substances can efficiently help someone destroy their life, keeping them away from drugs won’t stop them from destroying their lives. There’s something already broken in these people that they need to fix before it’s too late.

There are perfectly legal alternatives that can be just as effective with a little more effort. Putting heroin in your arm is just quicker than downing a fifth of vodka, or chasing dopamine at the dog track.

sweeter• 1 year ago

Its purely transactional. The Libertarians gave him their endorsement and one of the things they wanted in return was this pardon and deregulation.

Beijinger2• 1 year ago

It was a promise to his libertarian voters....

dutchbookmaker• 1 year ago

I can only go off what I read in American Kingpin but from that book, to pardon Ulbricht is absolutely insane.

Not to mention lets compare what Ulbricht did to say Snowden?

Are you kidding me?

It is like we live in some idiot version of the Twilight Zone.

johnwheeler2• 1 year ago

The guy is a crook.

garyfirestorm• 1 year ago

They can try now! Because he is pardoned for the existing convictions not for future convictions

UniverseHacker13• 1 year ago

That is interesting. I'd suspect he could possibly be found guilty of attempted murder, and have the sentence reduced or eliminated by arguing that his previous sentence unjustly assumed guilt for this as well, and factored it into the sentence he already served.

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.

sebzim45005• 1 year ago

Good luck, when the main investigators have since gone to prison for crimes related to this investigation.

hedora3• 1 year ago

Unless Trump screwed up the paper work, he’ll have been pardoned for past crimes, which includes the murder.

Pxtl2• 1 year ago

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.

So will the Trump admin be making any moves on legalization or safe supply? Especially since between Musk and Kennedy's admitted drug use, the white house pharmacy report, and the allegations about the Trump family itself, it seems obvious that the White House appreciates the usefulness of illegal stimulants?

Or is this another case of "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"?

smeeger7• 1 year ago

the benefit wasnt really unique to silk road or ross. it was just a very convoluted, roundabout demonstration of how safe drug use can be when its done in the right environment. legalization would be even safer…

trey-jones2• 1 year ago

Safer for buyers and users I guess. Based on being able to smell marijuana coming from so many car windows just walking around town, I'm not sure it would be safer for the public. I'm not anti-legalization by the way - I think it's similar to gambling: a mixed bag.

doctorpangloss4• 1 year ago

You are feeling the same thing that some people felt who wanted OJ Simpson exonerated.

no-dr-onboard• 1 year ago

How so?

karlzt2• 1 year ago

As for the murder part Christina Warren knows best:

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...

verteu4• 1 year ago

it was never real and no one was ever in danger.

Because one of the hitmen he hired was a scammer, and another was an FBI agent. Still clearly a crime to hire them for murder.

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."

selfmodruntime• 1 year ago

Wow! There have been multiple (astoundingly so) arrests of agents who were present in the Silk Road case. As far as I can see:

1 DEA agent for extortion, money laundering and fraud. 1 Secret Service Agent for money laundering. 2 Key advisors in the case.

chandler55552• 1 year ago

that was only one of the 6 murder for hires

Chris Tarbell, the guy who arrested ross, talks about it on this podcast https://risky.biz/RB770/ 37:08

billiam• 1 year ago

I just can't fathom the lack of self-awareness of people who championed Ross Ulbricht's cause, seemingly because he looks like them, codes like them, and sat in the same public library they frequent or became associated with a techno-libertarian identity. Hundreds of drug and gun dealers are sentenced every week, some certainly unjustly. Where is the outrage for them?

doctorpangloss4• 1 year ago

Ha ha, it turns out that there is affirmative action, for libertarians!

stickfigure5• 1 year ago

Those people that championed Ulbricht's cause are for the most part also the people championing the cause of drug dealers and other victims of New Prohibition. If you genuinely care about this cause, you might ask yourself whether alienating other supporters is the best approach.

If you're just looking for someone to feel superior about, find another forum.

mcv8• 1 year ago

My impression is that a big part of the outrage is directed not at the conviction, but at the disproportionate sentence.

I'm not surprised or upset at all that he went to prison, but unless I'm missing a ton of details (and I probably am), 12 years is plenty for what he did.

4866838642• 1 year ago

There was literally no evidence of an attempted murder. Just an empty and unsubstantiated accusation.

etc-hosts17• 1 year ago

The lengths the FBI went to in one of the murder for hire cases is interesting.

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."

Beijinger2• 1 year ago

"for the crime he was actually found guilty of, the sentence was unfair and unreasonable."

Was it? Based on current law in the US?

While I do not know English Common law well, in many jurisdictions, every part of the drug dealing is drug dealing. Even if you never touch a drug and just provide payment processing services, transport or whatever, as long as you are aware of it and profit from it, it is drug dealing. So every transaction on Silk Road would also be his crime. And there were many, many many. On the other hand, for non-first degree murder, in several jurisdictions his sentence would have maxed out at 15 years. First time offender, he could have walked after 10.

blitzar• 1 year ago

In most of Asia the sentence would have been death (back to back multiple sentences if that is possible).

some_random2• 1 year ago

The cybersecurity podcast Risky Business interviewed an FBI agent who was deeply involved, I'd highly recommend listening to it if you want that perspective. If I remember correctly, the agents who were investigating the murder for hire stuff were later found to have been stealing some of the bitcoin they were confiscating and the prosecutors fro the Ulbricht case decided they didn't need to bring up those charges to get a conviction (which they obviously didn't).

chandler55552• 1 year ago

yup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7iPp5QaHmI , starts at 36 minutes or so

the bitcoin stealing was only one of the 6 murder for hires, so even if you think thats invalidated, there were still 5 others

kylebenzle• 1 year ago

What you are saying is nothing short of the manifestation of pure evil.

Innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until a random hunch is resolved.

The federal government has a long history of manufacturing evidence and this is no different.

Again, pure evil what you are saying.

UniverseHacker13• 1 year ago

What are you talking about? I specifically said it was unethical that they seem to have sentenced him for crimes he was never even tried for- but deserved a fair trial for. You appear to think I was saying the opposite of that?

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

I know values and priorities change over time. that gets reflected in the party platforms. But ee are in a weird place politically... where Republicans are now soft on crime? It's weird.

subpixel• 1 year ago

I will take this opportunity to reflect on the fact that I spent some time considering a purchase of certain controlled substances on Silk Road, but failed to recognize that my own purchasing impulse was a pretty good indicator that the currency involved might be worth a casual investment.

impalallama• 1 year ago

This is the same president that wants to give the death penalty to Drug Dealers but I guess that's fine so long as you use crypto.

entropyneur5• 1 year ago

I don't think he should have done any time for the drug-related charges. And 10 years is more than enough for a murder-for-hire in which nobody got hurt. So this seems... just.

knodi5• 1 year ago

Curious what your thinking behind "he should have done any time for the drug-related charges"?

entropyneur5• 1 year ago

I believe the responsibility for the harm caused by addictive drugs lies on the user to such great extent, that whatever remains for the people who facilitate the sale is not enough for it to be a criminal offence. It's still immoral the same way it's immoral to operate a gambling shop.

But in Ulbricht's case I'd say even this part is mitigated by the fact that facilitating the trade of dangerous drugs was a side effect of running a useful service for responsible drug users.

anonu• 1 year ago

So is SBF next? FTX customers were made whole and he didn't try to kill anyone or facilitate the narcotics trade.

cleandreams• 1 year ago

I think this pardon just reflects Trump's transactional politics. Ulbricht has sympathizers in high places now because crypto is all over this administration.

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.

CuteMemeCoin• 1 year ago

Ulbricht was unfairly sentenced.

All of the death threat allegations were never proven.

He did not deserve to rot in prison for life for creating a website.

Gothmog69• 1 year ago

And yet the Ross Ulbricht case was a huge injustice. Biden should have done it.

idunnoman12226• 1 year ago

Hacker news absolutely loved this 1700 comments which makes me want to list all hacker news threads ordered by most comments because these are usually the best ones

AcerbicZero• 1 year ago

Based.

lulznews• 1 year ago

Trump haters in absolute shambles here.

snakeyjake2• 1 year ago

Libertarians are the cheapest fucking buys of all time.

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.

mannerheim9• 1 year ago

That hollow, symbolic win could have been given to them by anyone other than Trump. If nobody else thinks a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when they start chasing after the tiniest morsels.

jjallen5• 1 year ago

So if you start a website and facilitate thousands of drug deals and get lots of people to ask the president to pardon you, and you’re white, you can get a pardon. But for everyone else you can’t. Even if you’re in prison for possession of drugs for more than ten years.

Also if you try to overthrow the government you get pardoned which I would have guessed approaches treason.

These are pardonable offenses and conditions.

aerostable_slug2• 1 year ago

There's no reason to bring race into this. Trump has pardoned PoC convicted of drug offenses, e.g. Weldon Angelos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weldon_Angelos_case

jjallen5• 1 year ago

He’s white and that can’t be left out of it. Let’s not pretend race doesn’t matter in any of these things. It is a fact that he’s white and I’m guessing ALL of the Jan 6th people are too.

bmelton• 1 year ago

I felt the same when Biden pardoned the judge who put kids in jail for pay, or the nursing home CEO who took money away from the elderly to buy yachts, but I'd decided that pardons were effectively for sale (tho likely by barter) -- seeing Biden close out his term and Trump open his term with pardons has been kind to those who'd like to compare and contrast, but they both mostly just appear to be paying down debts.

bastardoperator• 1 year ago

We're just letting sex traffickers of children off the hook now? Gross. Putting my head in the sand for the next 3 years and 11 months.

throwaway3141552• 1 year ago

...her?

0xbadcafebee• 1 year ago

Gentle reminder that we have 1,459 more days of this shit. We really don't have to upvote every crazy fucking thing this guy does, or HN will be nothing but that for the next four years.

WesternWind• 1 year ago

A full pardon should mean that he can get all his bitcoin back, as I understand it.

RobinHirst11• 1 year ago

deserved the pardon. privacy should be for all, not just the billionaires.

TrapLord_Rhodo• 1 year ago

i wonder if he'll pardon snowden.

Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon

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