No. of Recommendations: 10
Silk Road to Perdition
Trump pardoned the notorious Dark Web crypto-criminal Ross Ulbricht. Why?
GREG OLEAR
JAN 28
Ensconced in a cubby in the Science Fiction section of a public library in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco, surrounded by the works of Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin, a 29-year-old Millennial sat working on his Samsung laptop. He was thin, pale, and, with his smiling eyes and Texas grin, handsome in a boyish sort of way. He looked like a graduate student—which, not that long ago, he was.
No one in the Glen Park Branch Library that brisk autumn day would have guessed at his true profession, or what this harmless-looking dork was actually doing on that laptop. His name was Ross Ulbricht. Online, he went by the handle “Dread Pirate Roberts”—a nod to the Cary Elwes character in The Princess Bride. He was the beneficial owner and mastermind of the Silk Road marketplace, the “eBay of drugs,” a sprawling criminal enterprise that operated on the Dark Web. And he was worth over a hundred million dollars (which would come as a surprise to his roommates).
On that first day of October, 2013, six FBI agents materialized in the Science Fiction section of the Glen Park Branch Library. As an undercover agent communicated with Ulbricht online, two of the agents pretended to argue, to distract him. As soon as the Dread Pirate Roberts turned his head, a third snatched his laptop—on which was all the evidence the DOJ needed to put him away for a long, long time.
“The Silk Road is an online black market that as late as last month was hosting nearly 13,000 sales listings for controlled substances, including marijuana, LSD, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy,” Brian Krebs, the security reporter, explained at the time. “Much like eBay sellers, merchants on the Silk Road are evaluated by previous buyers, who are encouraged to leave feedback about the quality of the seller’s goods and services.”
How was such a thing possible? “The Silk Road is not available via the regular Internet,” Krebs explains. “Rather, it is only reachable via the Tor network, an anonymity network that bounces its users communications across a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world.”
Tor is both an abbreviation of The Onion Router and, perhaps, a nod to the hallowed science fiction publishing imprint. I logged into it a few times myself, out of curiosity, after Ulbricht’s arrest. It was clunky and slow and reminiscent of the primitive World Wide Web of the dial-up mid-nineties—which is when it was first developed, by computer scientists from the U.S. Naval Research Lab. Whatever its shortcomings, Tor offered users a way to bypass electronic surveillance and browse the internet anonymously—useful technology during the Arab Spring of 2010, and perhaps even more useful to us now, in Trump Redux.
But in the case of Silk Road, Ulbricht hid behind Tor’s anonymity in order to flaunt the law and reap the benefits. Here is how federal prosecutors described his operation:
ULBRICHT created Silk Road in approximately January 2011, and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by law enforcement authorities in October 2013. Silk Road emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet, serving as a sprawling black-market bazaar where unlawful goods and services, including illegal drugs of virtually all varieties, were bought and sold regularly by the site’s users. While in operation, Silk Road was used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services to well over a hundred thousand buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions.
ULBRICHT deliberately operated Silk Road as an online criminal marketplace intended to enable its users to buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods and services anonymously and outside the reach of law enforcement. ULBRICHT sought to anonymize transactions on Silk Road in two principal ways. First, ULBRICHT operated Silk Road on what is known as “The Onion Router,” or “Tor” network, a special network of computers on the Internet, distributed around the world, designed to conceal the true IP addresses of the computers on the network and thereby the identities of the networks’ users. Second, ULBRICHT designed Silk Road to include a Bitcoin-based payment system that served to facilitate the illegal commerce conducted on the site, including by concealing the identities and locations of the users transmitting and receiving funds through the site.
The vast majority of items for sale on Silk Road were illegal drugs, which were openly advertised as such on the site. As of September 23, 2013, Silk Road had nearly 13,000 listings for controlled substances, listed under such categories as “Cannabis,” “Dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Intoxicants,” “Opioids,” “Precursors,” “Prescription,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.” From November 2011 to September 2013, law enforcement agents made more than 100 individual undercover purchases of controlled substances from Silk Road vendors. These purchases included heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD, among other illegal drugs, and were filled by vendors believed to be located in more than ten different countries, including the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Austria and France.
In addition to illegal narcotics, other illicit goods and services were openly bought and sold on Silk Road as well. For example, as of September 23, 2013, there were: 159 listings under the category “Services,” most of which offered computer-hacking services, such as a listing by a vendor offering to hack into social networking accounts of the customer’s choosing; 801 listings under the category “Digital goods,” including malicious software, hacked accounts at various online services, and pirated media content; and 169 listings under the category “Forgeries,” including offers to produce fake driver’s licenses, passports, Social Security cards, utility bills, credit card statements, car insurance records, and other forms of false identification documents.
Using the online moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or “DPR,” ULBRICHT controlled and oversaw every aspect of Silk Road, and managed a small staff of paid, online administrators who assisted with the day-to-day operation of the site. Through his ownership and operation of Silk Road, ULBRICHT reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars generated from the illicit sales conducted through the site. ULBRICHT also demonstrated a willingness to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise and the anonymity of its users. ULBRICHT even solicited six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site, although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out.
Ulbricht was charged with one count of narcotics conspiracy, one count of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, one of count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and one count of money laundering conspiracy; found guilty on all charges; and sentenced to life in prison. In addition, he owed the federal government a massive debt, to the tune of $156 million—which was how much money in commissions prosecutors calculated he raked in during the two years the Silk Road marketplace was up and running.
Let me stress again: Ulbricht was a huge dork. This wasn’t Gus Fring or Avon Barksdale or Tony Soprano. “Book smart,” his ex-girlfriend described him to CBS News, “not street smart. He was not at all a drug kingpin....He never even used the money he made....I mean, most kingpins buy furs and jewels and they’re living the life. He didn’t even have a car!”
Ulbricht was heavily influenced by an even bigger dork, the late Canadian economist Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004). SEK3, as he is dorkily known, developed a “new libertarian” political philosophy grounded in nonviolence and counter-economics, which he called agorism, for the agora, or open marketplace. “The society of the open marketplace as near to untainted by theft, assault, and fraud as can be humanly attained is as close to a free society as can be achieved,” Konkin wrote. “And a free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others’ values by violence and coercion.”
This is similar to what Ulbricht shared on his LinkedIn profile about Silk Road: “The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.” (That argument was more convincing before he started using the Dark Web agora of his invention to solicit contract killers.)
Almost immediately after his conviction, Ross Ulbricht became a cause célèbre for the libertarian/crypto enthusiast/douchebro set. Brian Doherty, senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, saw Ulbricht’s life sentence as “insanely harsh,” given that he’d committed “crimes that amounted to operating a web site that other people used to sell drugs”—a view widely held by Big Tech. This advocacy was self-serving. After all, if the Dread Pirate Roberts could be sent up the river for maintaining a platform for users he’d never met IRL to sell heroin, offer hacking services, or sex-traffic women, the equally-dorky CEOs of Facebook and Twitter might be held responsible for nasty content posted on those sites—and we can’t have that. Free speech!
The crypto community wanted to #FreeRoss. The libertarians wanted to #FreeRoss. Elon Musk wanted to #FreeRoss. JD Vance wanted to #FreeRoss. In his failed presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised to #FreeRoss. So did Donald Trump. And free him he did—on the second full day of Trump Redux. “I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know,” POTUS wrote on his propaganda network, Truth Social. “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.”
One of those “scum” “lunatics” was Preet Bharara, a frequent Trump foil back in the day. As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 2013, it was Bharara who’d announced the indictment of Ulbricht in Manhattan federal court.
Everything old is new again
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Freedumb………
