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.
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.
It took a bit of tracking down, but I finally found an apparently egregious example of this sort of thing I had vaguely remembered: Iraqi citizen and legal US resident Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was sentenced last February to 14 years in prison for his role in an alleged plot to murder George W. Bush, and his involvement in smuggling terrorists into the United States. [1] But his sentencing (after his guilty plea) contains an interesting caveat: lifetime supervised release.
Why is a terrorist and would-be assassin of a former President getting lifetime supervised release? None of the media coverage of the case, going back years, makes that clear. However, a footnote in the original criminal complaint against[2] him offers a likely explanation:
"In or around the end of March 2022, United States immigration officials conducted an asylum interview with SHIHAB. After the interview was conducted United States immigration officials advised the FBI that SHIHAB may have information regarding an ISIS member that was recently smuggled into the United States."
With a little reading between the lines of the criminal complaint, a very different story emerges: Shihab never dealt with any terrorists. He was a paid middleman between two government informants or agents pretending to be terrorists. He took their money, played along, and ratted them out to INS during an asylum interview. After that, once they realized the jig was up, the FBI arrested and charged him at its earliest opportunity - for the plot they had created and paid him to participate in, and which he in turn had informed the government about.
Agreed. He willingly engaged with the alleged hitman (which ended up being the FBI contact). He didn't need to do anything or not have the thought to murder others cross his mind.
Allegedly. The 2 rules of his Fight Club were no underage sex stuff and no physical harm. That hitman claim was not part of his charges or sentencing. The heavy sentencing was to like "send a message" the judge said.
They weren't part of his sentencing because a different court entirely was pursuing the hit for hire attempt charge, but because another court in NY got the book thrown at him for running the site, they decided to drop it because it didn't seem necessary anymore.
In hindsight, the prosecution probably wished they didn't do that, since they are said to have had overwhelming evidence and proof, and there is even a Wired article about chat logs pertaining to DPR seeking services, but those are the breaks! If you don't do your due diligence, criminals can be let off on a technicality too!
I haven't looked into the case(s) for years, but prosecutors don't often just drop charges because other charges were found guilty. People get charged even after life sentences have been handed down.
And you don’t think the prosecutors consider the interests of the FBI when deciding what to prosecute? In cases where they want to use FBI evidence and probably want ongoing cooperation of the FBI for future cases?
Many people, including myself, do not believe that he really did any of the activity related to the assassination attempts. Demonstrably corrupt law enforcement agents had the opportunity to do it all themselves and it would be typical behaviour for those agencies. He is (and was) politically passionate about non-violence and it would go against everything he stood for. I cannot believe he would do it. What do you mean "openly"?
I can't say anything about these journals because I cant even remember anything about them. It certainly isn't obvious to me, since the case is incredibly complex and objectively fraught with corruption
But the feds would never attempt shading means of solving a problem that they're being heavily pressured to solve in a timely manner! Don't be a hecking conspiracy theorist.
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
- Log files found on Ulbricht's laptop with entries corresponding to the murder-for-hire events
- Bitcoin transaction records showing payments
- Messages between DPR and vendors/users about the situations
The court found this evidence admissible as:
- Direct evidence of the charged offenses
- Proof of Ulbricht's role as site administrator
- Evidence of Ulbricht's identity as DPR
- Demonstration of his willingness to use violence to protect the criminal enterprise
The court determined that while prejudicial, the probative value of this evidence outweighed any unfair prejudice, particularly since the government would stipulate no murders actually occurred.
Except the government blocked a codefendant from testifying that Ross wasn't the current DPR. The person who set up the fake murder was a Secret Service agent who went to federal prison. The target, Curtis Green, said the alleged diary was suspect. The court also kept out the role of the two convicted federal agents, not to mention 8+ other federal employees who committed crimes or unethical behavior.
And an indictment is not proof that the allegations are real or not manipulated. US Attorneys are a deeply amoral group, they don't care about truth or justice, just winning at any cost.
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.
> The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
Asserting moral equivalence between someone who ordered dozens of innocent women and children not just killed but dismembered - solely as a lesson for others. Orders which were actually carried out multiple times and DPR who was never charged, tried or convicted of conspiring with a supposed online hitman to kill a competitor (who both were actually FBI informants - clearly making it entrapment). Yeah, that's quite a reach.
Sure, DPR was no saint but why push for the absolute maximally extreme interpretation? Even asserting he "organized and operated a global criminal drug ring" is a stretch. My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so. There is more than a little nuance between 1) buying drugs from distributors, delivering drugs to buyers and collecting the money, and 2) running online forums and messaging for people who do those things. At most, #2 is being an accessory to #1.
> My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so.
Ah yes, he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means. He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all. He never contributed to the massive distribution of Fentanyle-laced dopes to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. He was just the online guy!
> he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means.
I never claimed he didn't break the law. I said the opposite, that he's guilty of being an accessory to drug dealing.
> He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all.
I said "he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers."
> He was just the online guy!
I said he's "no saint" and in an earlier post in this thread I also said he deserved a jail sentence and that "ten years was enough" for what he was charged with and convicted of as a first-time offender.
I challenged your assertion of "no difference" between DPR and Pablo Escobar as extreme and your response is to mischaracterize my position as DPR committing no crime instead of responding to my actual position that he's a criminal who is guilty and deserved ten years in jail but not two life sentences plus 40 years without parole. There is a middle ground between "completely innocent of anything" and "no different than Pablo Escobar." I don't understand why you can't acknowledge such a middle ground might exist - and that it is my position.
I think you might be a better fit for reddit than hackernews. The lack of thoughtfulness, heavy use of signalling and petty insults are more normal there.
You appear to be confused about the difference between a pardon and parole (and even parole doesn't entail monitoring "for life").
Also, your response didn't respond to what I said (which was about previously only responding to a straw man I didn't say). I like to think we strive in good faith for a little higher level of discourse here on HN. Try to do better.
Bravo to you - I don't think I could have been as mature and respectful as you in the face of these repeated refusals to respond to what you actually said.
Thanks for saying so. I'm human like anyone else but practice helps. We all need to be the change we want to see. Also, my internal goal is rarely to convince anyone who disagrees with me. My focus is articulating my position clearly along with my reasons for currently holding it. Then to understand their position and reasons. This is sometimes surprisingly difficult. Other times it's enlightening and occasionally leads to adjusting my own position.
I try to interpret what others say with maximum charity and construe their arguments in their strongest possible form, even if they weren't expressed that way. I'm interested in discovering why we disagree, not winning debate points. The hardest discussions are often those where they never seem to understand my position or are unwilling to respond to it. This leaves me with little choice but to meta-up to the 'protocol level' to re-establish productive communication.
In the conversation above, I suspect, based on hints in the last response, that the root issue may have been that a moral equivalence between Ross and Pablo Escobar was neccessary to make Trump pardoning Ross a maximally negative talking point against Trump.
If so, the discussion could never really be about what it appeared to be about: the relative criminal or moral weight of Ross' crimes or the appropriateness of the sentence. Which is a shame because it prevented ever reaching more interesting ground. For example, I wish the pardon had been a commutation instead because Ross was justly convicted of significant crimes before he was over-sentenced. The wrong which needed to be righted was the sentence not the conviction.
Tbh you probably don't know what your talking about. Silk road and fentanyl in drugs didn't over lap. Fent really showed up a couple years after the market was shut down.
PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.
DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.
Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.
It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.
True enough, but if every first step taken meant committing to that path, the world would be a much, much darker place, I would think. I know at least for me, it would.
I think if you've committed to having someone killed to the point that you have pulled the trigger so to speak, you have crossed a line that most humans do not. I sure hope you have not crossed that line before
A lot of very good people have crossed that line, and they did so -because- they were good people. They may have done it in defense of loved ones or strangers. They may have done it in service to the nation or community that they were born in.
When having these conversations, it’s easy to stand on the moral high ground and forget that we also live among monsters, and alongside organizations that turn regular people into the instruments of monsters. There are a lot of people in this world that have chosen to be incompatible with coexistence in civil society, or to be part of an organization that has chosen to be so.
These people actively do grave harm to other people. Sometimes, the only way to prevent more harm to innocent people is to remove those individuals from the world.
That said, I don’t know anything of the veracity or motivations behind the allegations brought against DPR in this regard, and for whatever reason, his legal circumstances were crafted so as to make sure that the public would also remain ignorant of the details of those circumstances.
While I do not know any of the details involved, I am deeply suspicious of the manipulations of the FBI in cases such as this, having been in proximity to some of their other shenanigans. It’s definitely inside the realm of reasonable speculation to imagine that they may have created a situation where not only was it convenient for DPR to eliminate his “competitor”, but he would be doing a noble thing in the process.
As an example , one of their “successful anti terrorist operations” a few years back involved a mentally challenged person was manipulated by the FBI into a “terrorist” plot where he thought he was “saving the world”…. So they -definitely-do that kind of thing. The Walmart judiciously wouldn’t sell him a gun (he is obviously and apparently challenged) so they sent him back to buy a bb-gun and arrested him coming out of the store.
Because of this and many other examples of behavior with depraved impunity, I am inclined to give DPR the benefit of the doubt on this, in the absence of much more specific and reliable information.
I'm sorry. Your argument sounds like it's reasonable but I can't accept it and it is full of strawmen. Very few people confuse 'good people that have crossed the line ... in defense of loved ones or strangers' with killers and murderers. Obviously killing is wrong but most people make moral allowances for such cases where it seems necessary or even for cases where it is mistaken or a so called 'crime of passion'. These are apples and oranges and not the same thing. As for standing on an easy moral high ground, uh yes, I'm reasonably certain that I will never reach the level of ordering a hit on an associate to protect my drug business so I will stand on that moral high ground, as will probably a very large majority of people. I have certainly entertained the thought of strangling quite a few people - past co-workers, strangers to death, and some of them I could even make a reasonable case at least in my mind, that they would've deserved it, but it has never crossed beyond a thought - and that is the case with most people in society, thankfully or we would live in a world of murderous chaos.
As for the FBI possibly cooking up most of it or manipulating it to look worse than it is, maybe. But from the transcripts of DPR's emails and online conversations regarding the allegations, it doesn't look very good for DPR either. In fact I think those transcripts was what soured the general public on DPR when many people like myself at first thought (and still think) the punishment seemed really excessive for what he was charged and tried for. That said I do think he has served reasonable time and the pardon at this time is not a bad thing.
I don't think anyone in here is making the case that Ulbricht is a "good person", but comparing Escobar to Ulbricht is next-level delusional.
One of these people attempted to place hits on 3-4 individuals, the other one planted a bomb on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people.
Because in my opinion the ethics of operating a drug ring is not as black as white as you state.
The existence of drug rings is an inevitable outcome from the war on drugs and I would argue the blame lands on the politicians who maintain the status quo that incentivises the creation of the black market for drugs.
He did order (and pay for) at least one murder. It just happens that both the victim and the would-be hit man were both informants so they staged the murder. Ross’ argument is that he knew it was fake, but that makes no sense in context.
It was right that they dropped the charge because it was quite obviously entrapment. But none of it reflects well on Ross Ulbricht’s character.
>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.
"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.
> A heartbreaking story is currently unfolding that’s sure to have devastating ramifications for years to come. Just moments ago, without any warning, the worst person you know just made a great point.
You shouldn't necessarily change your negative opinion of someone, just because they're right about something. To invoke Godwin's law: Adolf Hitler was a staunch opponent of smoking, in a time when many Allied cultures thought smoking was great, but that doesn't mean you're wrong about him.
imagine if your physical theory of Universe works perfectly for the Universe at all scales, all times, all places except for one small star whose behavior contradicts your theory - that means that your theory at least requires an adjustment and at worst it may be total thrash. Your smoking example doesn't have such contradiction - whether he was anti- or pro-smoker is orthogonal to the rest of the story. On the other hand Trump showing empathy and correcting gross injustice stemming from the gross government corruption doesn't fit well into my perception of Trump and thus seriously challenges it.
If your model of Donald Trump is "cartoonishly evil and incapable of empathy", then yes, of course you need to adjust your model – but that's a bad description of Adolf Hitler, too. He genuinely cared about the welfare of certain people, and opposed smoking because of the harm it caused those people: if you pegged Hitler as generally pro-death, you'd be wrong. But that does not in any way redeem him, and it shouldn't cause you to update your "Hitler wants to kill a whole bunch of people" prediction.
Suppose it's 1940. You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.
"Orthogonal" is subjective. All things are interrelated. That does not mean that our descriptions should be highly-sensitive to noise. Update your internal model of his behaviour, by all means, but if you have predictions that don't require that internal model, consider whether or not this evidence should actually affect those predictions.
>You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.
you've just described orthogonality between his stance on smoking and his real-life mass-murderous actions. And as far as i see it is very objective orthogonality.
Your perspective on Hitler is based on the work of many historians, allowing you to easily see the orthogonality – but every seeming-contradiction like this is actually orthogonal. Remember: you don't observe people's intentions, only their actions. Even if somebody does something you consider "compassionate", that doesn't mean it's based on what you'd call "compassion".
