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My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

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Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#161

Post by s73v3r »

logfromblammo wrote: post #157
s73v3r wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The police did not commit crimes in exposing him.

They solicited him to buy a murder for hire. It's a crime when you do it. It's a crime when the cops do it. It's a crime when Richard Nixon does it. The evidence of other crimes was collected as a result. Even if he was guilty beyond doubt, that's still poisoned fruit.

"They solicited him to buy a murder for hire."

They absolutely did not. It was his idea. You need to go learn what entrapment is. Hint: It's not simply when you do something and the cops happen to be involved.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#162

Post by msane »

mindslight wrote: post #99
msane wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying the justice system has some flaw(s) which make it not "congruent with morality", not being specific, so it's ok to put hits out on people?

Nope, try a different straw man. It's pretty obvious that the specific incongruence I'm talking about is persecution of drugs. Incongruence undermines respect for the rule of law in general (cf. "stop snitching"). It changes the calculus from "should I transgress against what society deems sacred" to "I'm already in trouble with the biggest gang around, might as well keep going".

So you're saying that drug laws are responsible for making him put a hit on someone?

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#163

Post by logfromblammo »

s73v3r wrote: post #161
logfromblammo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They solicited him to buy a murder for hire. It's a crime when you do it. It's a crime when the cops do it. It's a crime when Richard Nixon does it. The evidence of other crimes was collected as a result. Even if he was guilty beyond doubt, that's still poisoned fruit.

"They solicited him to buy a murder for hire." They absolutely did not. It was his idea. You need to go learn what entrapment is. Hint: It's not simply when you do something and the cops happen to be involved.

My understanding of the situation is that he contacted someone advertising contract killing services on his own darknet. The person he contacted was a confidential informant (undercover cop, or someone working with the cops).

Now, don't misunderstand. That was wrong of him. And it was also stupid. But there is a very important difference between finding out about an illegal transaction and participating in one.

If it were prostitution, it would be the difference between watching a john pick up a hooker and arresting them both, or posing as either a john or a hooker and arresting the other when they eventually committed to the crime. The former is acceptable. The latter is not.

It wasn't a case of a contract killer ratting his client out to the police. There never was a contract killer.

In my opinion, if the cops were a necessary component in the commission of the crime, it is entrapment. If they were simply able to exercise a degree of control over the situation such that they are able to immediately arrest all parties to a crime before anyone gets hurt, that's a little creepy, but still acceptable.

Crime requires intent, conduct, concurrence, and causation. Entrapment elides over one or more of those elements.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#164

Post by spinlock »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #149
spinlock wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is why I mentioned acquiring responsibly produced pot. The issue with buying it in an anonymous online black market is that it is really hard to verify who it is coming from.

I feel like there's an analogy between medical states and first-world-problems here. I went to grad school in a red state and pot was really hard to find. I did have a guy who was great and always on the ball but you could tell his product wasn't locally sourced. I was always ambivalent about my purchases. On the one hand, I was supporting a small business owner who was fantastic. On the other hand, I was bankrolling bad people. At the end of the day I think our legal system makes a much bigger difference than I ever could.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#165

Post by msandford »

s73v3r wrote: post #156
msandford wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to that logic we don't need courts, police, government, etc at all. I think it's a great idea, but practically speaking it's not awesome. I like the idea of a microkernel government better than the monolithic thing that we currently have, where you can subscribe to police and fire and whatever. I'd prefer that the government mostly provide courts and a system by which other areas of natural monopoly are bet…

I'm not saying anything like that at all. And I do not respect any argument that mentions the "monopoly on violence" bullcrap. These people made their choices. They decided, of their own free will, to become involved in something they knew to be highly illegal. Everything that follows is their fault, and their fault alone. Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give t…

Even Candidate Obama (now President Obama) acknowledges that the state is the institution which has a monopoly on violence. To try and dispute this is akin to arguing that they sky in not in fact blue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQl-qAtNwQ

> Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.

Not at all! I merely show that a NECESSARY result of disenfranchising people who want to engage in a particular kind of trade which the government deems "wrong" (in the legal sense, because the government can't really determine morality) is that there are very predictable, unfortunate outcomes like this. The whole drug trade is absolutely RIFE with violence because people have no alternative to settle their disputes. I'm not saying that they are guiltless; far from it! But a modicum of thought makes it plain that the violence is due to the illegal nature of what they're doing.

Look at all the other industries that manage to grow things, distribute them, and eventually sell them directly to customers. Coffee, fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. All these industries have rates of violence which are very close approximations to ZERO. What is different about drugs? Two things:

1. They get you high (but so does coffee, sugar, etc)

2. They're illegal

Obviously I can't PROVE the causality is from 2 rather than 1, but I think a reasonable person could make a reasonable assumption that 2 is far, far more likely than 1.

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#166

Post by tripzilch »

mbillie1 wrote: post #6
q7 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody. Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it. He hasn't lost my goodwill yet.

> Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody. I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expec…

> > Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.

> I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.

But the FBI could basically do this to anyone: try and convince them using a play that involves fabricated emotional pressure, blackmail and, if some other comments are correct (I haven't followed the case that closely), even inventing physical danger and multiple other people's lives being on the line.

The FBI could do this to anyone, do you think it's fair or desirable that anyone that could be tricked into agreeing to hire a (fictional) hitman should in fact be charged with that crime and put into jail for the rest of their lives? Because I think that would be a lot of people you'd pre-emptively have to put in jail. Especially if they deliberately put in the classic moral dilemma of saving a whole bunch of people's lives from being destroyed versus killing the single person responsible.

How many people would make the same decision if confronted with this circumstance? Should they all be put in jail, just for the fact that they would've made that choice if it had been real? Because I don't think that's a very good "test" for detecting "bad people" or people that are really dangerous for society. You can argue about the moral choice (since those victims would merely "have their lives ruined", not be actually killed), but as presented I think it's a really difficult dilemma, and I couldn't really fault a person for choosing one way or another. It's a terrible moral dilemma that I personally just hope to never have to face in my life.

So, having argued that any random person who would make this choice is not necessarily so bad they should be convicted, what differentiates Ross Ulbricht? Seems that, in this particular context, his "crime" was that because of his involvements, he was a person likely to actually face this dilemma situation at some point in his Silk Road career. That seems about the only reason to expose Ulbricht to this moral dilemma situation, instead of just any (or every) random person on the streets.

So then, really, is it reasonable to entrap and then convict someone because they are involved in business that may likely at some point in the future lead to a situation where they would have to make choices like these?

To repeat, if the hitman thing had just been about offing a competitor for financial or business gains, my whole argument above doesn't hold. But they actively put him in a situation where there was no moral right answer, and then convicted him for it.

EDIT: if this is true then that rather changes the whole story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192416

Re: My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

#167

Post by tripzilch »

pakled_engineer wrote: post #37
mbillie1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody. I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expec…

He hired CIs posing as hitmen a few times. His diary/movie script/fictional book on his laptop they found claimed he tried to kill an employee who had potential to snitch, and a scammer in Canada that ripped off many users. He also agreed to a higher price for the "hit" in Canada, as it was claimed by the CI the target lived with 3 other people and if they were to collect all his assets as ordered then everybody woul…

Got a link for the claims in those first two paragraphs for us? Because if that is true, it changes a whole bunch of things, including the argument about entrapment I made in a sibling thread.

It's a rather different thing if they entrap him with a tough moral dilemma than entrapping him with simply ordering a hit on people when it's not the only alternative to a whole bunch of other people having their lives destroyed, including targeting 3 people that just happen to live there.

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