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My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

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Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#131

Post by msandford »

vectorpush wrote: post #126
msandford wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry, but that idea that because it exists outside the law, people can't settle disputes with anything other than murder is complete horseshit. Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. I'm not saying violence in the ONLY answer, but it's definitely the only one that I can think of that d…

> Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. They don't, but that's their own fault. If your life of crime has forced you into such a predicament that murder-for-hire is a more viable option than dealing with the authorities, you only have yourself to blame. The reason that crime pays so well is…

I hear you on most of that, and largely I agree.

But marijuana is now straight up legal with similar restrictions and regulations as alcohol in several states. And it seems like there's serious momentum to legalize in the rest of them.

I doubt we're going to see radical legalization where the drug war completely ends in the next 5-10 years but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened well within my lifetime.

"Life of crime" can have a highly temporal definition and thus introduce far, far more grey area than you're letting on by your very binary assertions.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#132

Post by spinlock »

kurotetsuka wrote: post #127
bduerst wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zike's Law: Whenever Nazi's are mentioned on the internet, someone inevitably mentions Godwin's Law.

Is there a law for mentioning Zike's law? (kinda serious)

I believe that's Kurotetsuka's law.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#133

Post by spinlock »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #27
chatmasta wrote: post #2

"Sure, we wanted Ross to go free. We wanted him to be innocent, to be a hero: the poster boy for privacy in the Information Age." That may be partially true, but Ross polluted much of the goodwill the Internet community had for him when he decided to "order a hitman." I doubt he was ever that serious about hiring one. If you read the chats he had, he sounds completely out of his league, and probably never would have…

Is it really victimless? I'll admit that for something like pot, that is responsibly grown and used, there is no victims (well maybe with second hand smoke, but you get that just as much from cigarettes). But many drugs being sold do not come responsible producers. Instead, they come from groups that cause a lot of harm in order to acquire the money from selling those drugs. Yes, legalizing responsible production wou…

Pot actually accounts for most of the income of Mexican drug cartels.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#134

Post by tedks »

lectrick wrote: post #80
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really victimless? I'll admit that for something like pot, that is responsibly grown and used, there is no victims (well maybe with second hand smoke, but you get that just as much from cigarettes). But many drugs being sold do not come responsible producers. Instead, they come from groups that cause a lot of harm in order to acquire the money from selling those drugs. Yes, legalizing responsible production wou…

> Instead, they come from groups that cause a lot of harm in order to acquire the money from selling those drugs. Yes, legalizing responsible production would largely fix this problem, but a current purchase still funds a horrible group. So basically, to rephrase, the existence of the law is what makes the law necessary. It's almost tautological. IF it were treated as a public health problem (Portugal apparently did…

> Instead, the intelligent, optimistic, apparently caring mind who wrote this, is rotting in jail: http://rossman.deviantart.com/journal/something-new-24987116....

People get hung up on the hired hit thing. At that level it was him or them and no human ever makes that choice any way but one.

The American government will never release Ross. They'll also never release Brianna Manning.

But the American government probably won't outlive those two revolutionaries. At least, I have to believe it won't. The future can't be so Orwellian. I don't think humanity will let it happen.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#135

Post by chrismarlow9 »

nashashmi wrote: post #104
rottencupcakes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an absurd statement by the author. These people were interviewing for an apartment in a notoriously tough housing market - they were probably just "posturing" (mentioning their good jobs and money) because they thought it would help them get the apartment. He sounds like an outlier of a landlord who prefers a sketchy semi-employed roommate to one with a guaranteed salary.

Actually, I will pick somebody to be real over "posturing." I hate people who try to be "showy" more and refrain from easing up occasionally. I know this is converse to the way the "professional" world is and also converse to people who play along the rules of professionalism. But dammit, it ain't real! And it needs to stop! Be who you are! And then change it from the inside out, if you need to.

The problem is if "who you are" is a quiet, fairly shy person, you will get run over by everybody in SF. Just my opinion. I've been to 40 different states and met people from all of them. The SF crowd has very little empathy towards other adults. Abandoned dog? Theyll adopt right away. Child with a peanut allergy? Theyll murder every peanut in sight and ban peanut butter city-wide. Grown adult trying to just find a place to live or get a decent job? You're entirely on your own.

I've seen fake empathy used more here to play people than legit empathy to help another adult struggling.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#136

Post by simplicio »

dbbolton wrote: post #130
simplicio wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to get a re-trial on the grounds of incompetent defence, but the bar is really high. And since Ulbricht is still using the same lawyer for his appeals, it doesn't look like he's trying that route. His defense did seem pretty poor, but given the amount of evidence against him, its not really clear what a "good defense" would've looked like.

From the Ars op-ed, it sounded like his best chance would have been to file a legal declaration of interest in the Iceland server and proceed to challenge its discovery- a course of action that the judge hinted at but that his attorney refused. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross-ulbric...

It's not particularly clear they could have had it thrown out in anycase. And even if they did, there was more than enough information just on the laptop to tie him conclusively to Silk Road. So his lawyer threw a Hail Mary and decided to try and deny Ross owned the server at all. It didn't work, but going the other route wouldn't have either.

I suspect a lot of the people who were pressing for Ross to challenge the seizure of the server are doing so because they're interested in the legal questions involved, rather than maximizing the chances of an innocence verdict.

But in anycase, you generally can't get a re-trial based on incompetent counsel based just on strategic decisions, even if those decisions were poor ones. You need to show your lawyer was really asleep at the switch on a basic level, like giving the client factually wrong information, or going off to Cancun for a couple weeks instead of preparing a defence.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#137

Post by dreamdu5t »

s73v3r wrote: post #116
lectrick wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, they come from groups that cause a lot of harm in order to acquire the money from selling those drugs. Yes, legalizing responsible production would largely fix this problem, but a current purchase still funds a horrible group. So basically, to rephrase, the existence of the law is what makes the law necessary. It's almost tautological. IF it were treated as a public health problem (Portugal apparently did…

" Instead, the intelligent, optimistic, apparently caring mind" Interesting way to describe someone who apparently tried to hire people to murder others in cold blood.

Let's not pretend the people he attempted to murder weren't aggressing on him in the first place. He hired hits on people who were trying to extort him (for money claimed to be lost that couldn't be repaid to Hells Angels, implying that exposing Ross' information would make him a possible target).

It's not like Ross hired hits on innocent people - regardless of whether that is murder or not.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#138

Post by simplicio »

dublinben wrote: post #84
andrewpi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ineffective assistance of counsel is a very difficult appeal to win.

I doubt that would be the question of law the appeal hinged on, but some of the procedural issues with the case. The government never fully explained how the evidence abroad was legally located or acquired, which could unravel the entire case.

Most of the case was based on evidence found on the laptop seized when Ulrich was arrested. Even if the Server evidence was thrown out (which itself doesn't seem likely, IMHO) Ulrich still would've faced substantially the same case.

The chat-logs that were evidence for all but one of the attempted murders he was indicted for were found on the server, which might be part of the reason he wasn't charged with those. Though those probably would've been difficult to get a conviction on in anycase, since no one knows who the "hitman" really was.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#139

Post by rhizome »

bsbechtel wrote: post #25
api wrote: post #21

"I felt relieved: gone was the posturing so obvious in the previous candidates. They worked in advertising, at startups—Twitter employees who talked about how much money they made and the exotic locales where they took their vacations. Ross was a techie, but he didn't act like one. He seemed eloquent, optimistic, down-to-earth. He seemed trustworthy." As an aside, that's a sad little bit of commentary on the tech sce…

Sounds like what I've heard about 1999. Sign of a bubble?

There were tons of insufferable dotcom jackasses in SF in 1999, but the industry was smaller so they weren't EVERYWHERE.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#140

Post by tindrlabs »

amyjess wrote: post #3

So, I went to college with Ross. He was a year ahead of me. I didn't know him personally, but several of my friends did. I had a few friends in college (some of whom I still talk to) who were good friends with him. When he got arrested, I looked up his Facebook page, and I found we have 5 mutual friends listed (and I know a couple of others who knew him but didn't have him on FB). Also, when he was arrested, my then-…

Ross lived above me my Freshman year. UTD was a special place.
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