Life without parole seems excessive. I think they're trying to make an example out of him due to how hard it is to detect and prosecute this type of crime.
The Bloomberg story[1] had some excellent excerpts from sentencing:
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan rejected Ulbricht’s claim that he was naive and impulsive when he started Silk Road as an economic experiment.
“It was a carefully planned life’s work,” Forrest told him Friday. “It was your opus.”
and:
Ulbricht, who plans an appeal, asked for mercy in a May 26 letter to the judge. He called Silk Road a “naive and costly idea” that had ruined his life.
“I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age,” Ulbricht wrote. “Please, leave a small light at the end of the tunnel.”
Truth is, it's hard to run this sort of thing without getting ripped off, and then violence is the only way to discourage people from ripping you off. Watch Godfather movies, esp. part 2... Mafias arise out of human nature and the nature of the game.
One of the many ironies of libertarian extremists is that actions which are considered illegitimate when taken by a democratic government become OK when taken by concentrated private power to protect private property.
> One of the many ironies of libertarian extremists is that actions which are considered illegitimate when taken by a democratic government become OK when taken by concentrated private power to protect private property.
Huh? Libertarian extremists do not condone murder or murder-for-hire. Most libertarian extremists also support proportional self-defense and damages doctrine (Rothbard et al) so would not consider murdering someone who steals from you acceptable.
They might consider killing someone who has threatened to reveal information to a brigade of killers that will kidnap and imprison, or outright kill people who have trusted and relied upon them to protect those people from such actions as at the very least worthy of consideration.
That was the situation here; party A attempts to blackmail party B with revealing the identities of group C to entity D which will then ruin the lives of all people within group C. Is it definitely right or wrong to hire somebody to kill party A? What duty of care does party B owe group C? Entity D exists and is not going away and will continue to behave in the fashion which party A relies upon as the stick in the equation. Attacking entity D directly is suicidal and ineffective.
If party A was directly threatening to kidnap and imprison or murder all the people in group C, I think aggressive action against them would be much less questionable, and effectively that is what they are actually doing, given the behaviour of entity D.
Putting all those pieces in place already, what is the appropriate response supposed to actually be?
Any way you look at it, it's certainly an interesting situation that people who otherwise would think there was no problem here must take into account. It's all well and good to believe the state is a gang of thieves and murderers writ large (disclaimer; I certainly do), and go about constructing a parallel strategy to circumvent them, but that strategy can't just ignore them, or the consequences of their existence, either.
Hmmh, you could be right and I could be wrong. NYT article didn't say life without parole so I wasn't sure where that came from. But other people are reporting it.
