That's pretty riveting reading. I suspect HNers will be inclined to pit several technical nits with the affiant, which might distract from the murder-for-hire plot described in lurid detail therein.
(Alice claims to owe money to Bob, who Alice represents as a drug dealer. Alice threatens to expose SR users unless DPR pays Alice's debt with Bob. DPR asks to speak to Bob. Bob messages DPR. DPR attempts to recruit Bob to be a drug dealer on SR and, separately, asks if Bob can arrange for the murder of Alice. Bob quotes a price, which DPR says is twice the last price that DPR has arranged a murder at. DPR eventually agrees to the price, pays, and instructs Bob to take a photograph of the corpse with a random alphanumeric string in the frame, to ascertain that the photograph was indeed produced after the request. Bob reports that the murder is complete and sends the photograph, which DPR accepts as genuine. The affiant believes the likely conclusion -- that Alice and Bob are the same person and that DPR has been successfully extorted to the tune of $150,000 or so.)
This article says murders for hire usually cost way less than US$150k, especially for someone unimportant, making an actual "hit" seem unlikely.
> The FBI works undercover on an average of 70 to 90 murder-for-hire cases a year. According to bureau press releases, recent quoted fees have ranged from $25,000 to kill a spouse to $600 to kill a girlfriend ... A few years ago, the Australian Institute of Criminology and South Australia's major crime-investigation branch studied 163 attempted and actual contract killings between 1989 and 2002. The average rate received was 12,700 Australian dollars, or about $8,254. The lowest was 380 AUD (about $250), and the highest was 76,000 AUD (about $49,400).
As I understand it, however, there would have been a lot of overheads. DPR talked to middle-men mostly, so all the way down there would be cuts taken. Then translating from BTC to a regular currency would have caused further cuts, and to properly cash that out would have needed more work again. Of course, hitmen could just feel safe cashing out BTC directly, but consistent process is the best way to avoid fuck-ups
While I have no idea what actually happened, and don't think that anything in the indictment should be accepted as fact, it's still an interesting situation if we assume that DPR knew that Alice and Bob (henceforth AB) were the same person. I don't know that DPR was acting stupidly.
Supposing AB had real information that would be harmful to DPR if released, it's in DPR's interest to prevent this release. One major risk is that even if he pays, he is still susceptible to future extortion. His approach sends a message to AB (true or not) that he is a casual killer, and that it would be an unwise risk to attempt this stunt a second time.
It also further implicates AB in DPR's crimes: in the same way that DPR will have great trouble explaining in court that he was not actually arranging a murder but deterring an extortionist, it would be unwise to try to argue in court that one accepted money to commit a murder, but is innocent because the murder was not actually performed due to a complicated backstory.
Also, the extended negotiation provides DPR more opportunity to discover more information about his adversary --- rather like the 'try to keep them on the line so we can trace the call' trope. It seems likely that if there is any substance to the accusation, that AB is a Silk Road seller and not a third party. Perhaps this dance helps DPR to gain more information so as to take future action against this seller? Or buys time so as to warn others that their buyer information is compromised?
If you accepted money to kill yourself, the onus would be on the prosecutor to prove a crime was committed. A reasonable defense would be that you feared that if you didn't pretend to carry out the murder, the buyer (who knew your identity) would find an actual hitman.
A reasonable defence would be not to say anything. There is no evidence that this person who was allegedly killed ever existed in the first place.
The Canadian Investigators say that nobody by that name ever existed and that there were no homicides or deaths which they can attach to this alleged hit.
You can't commit an impossible crime. I can't murder your sister if you don't have a sister.
It's highly likely that both the hitman and the hit were the same FBI informant entrapping DPR.
Not in US law as far as I know, though there was a brief moment where that seems to have been the case in English law (between the Criminal Law Act of 1977 -- or at least, its application in DPP v. Nock, 1978 -- and the amendment to that act in the Criminal Attempts Act of 1981.)
An agreement between two or more people to commit an act which would be unlawful if the agreed-to end was realized and any one of those people taking even one concrete step toward putting the agreement into effect makes a conspiracy. (Except under the separate US federal narcotics conspiracy law, where, IIRC, the concrete act is not required.)
The question I guess is how you can take a concrete step, an actus reus, towards putting an agreement in to effect wherein the target of the action is entirely fictitious.
>an act which would be unlawful if the agreed-to end was realized //
If the person on whom the hit is called is fictional the agreed to end can't be realised. Even if it were in some way able to be realised [you pretend the person exists or don't know until the end of the act] the action itself wouldn't be unlawful except in and of itself. For example if you blew up a bridge to kill a person, but the person was made-up all along then you'd still be guilty of criminal damage and potentially of injury to bystanders and such but you wouldn't be guilty of murder. Not even attempted murder [IMV] as there was no person you tried to murder, you tried to murder an idea of a person.
Like I said in another post I see the moral deficiencies [evidenced by the mens rea (guilty mind)] in a person willing to be involved in such a conspiracy but it still appears to me to lack an actus reus which AFAICT is a cornerstone of criminal law based on the English tradition.
Your postscript on USA federal narcotics law is interesting - doesn't this mean that if you plan something with no intent that you'd be considered guilty. Would Vince Gilligan not then be guilty of drug crimes as he has planned many illegal activities they just apparently all lacked corresponding actions.
> If the person on whom the hit is called is fictional the agreed to end can't be realised.
Yes, that's the impossibility issue, which, as I've noted, is not generally in US law (and similar, but for a 3-4 year window ending in 1981, English law) relevant to whether the crime of conspiracy has been committed. The fact that it can't be realized is irrelevant to whether it would be a crime if it was realized.
> it still appears to me to lack an actus reus which AFAICT is a cornerstone of criminal law based on the English tradition.
The actus reus in conspiracy (both under the common law and the generally applicable modern English and American statutory provisions) is comprised of two things: an agreement among multiple people, and a concrete action directed toward putting the agreement into effect. Those are both acts, not mental states.
> Your postscript on USA federal narcotics law is interesting - doesn't this mean that if you plan something with no intent that you'd be considered guilty.
No, removing one of the required acts doesn't change the mens rea requirements, nor does it change the other required act; one person planning is not conspiracy (even under the federal narcotics provision that remove the second element.) Two or more people agreeing to some end whose realization would be another crime is the element that is required.
Perhaps. But against whom was a crime committed. If you pretend to have a sister and I order a hit on that figment of your imagination then have I committed a crime?
So whilst there was conspiracy it was not against a person and there was never a plan to harm an actual person. Despite there being the mens rea in the conspirators there's no crime, just moral turpitude.
It seems that if the conspiracy were against a person who never existed and were adjudged to be a crime that writers would be similarly guilty when they plan a storyline in which someone is purposefully killed. Of course there is a significant epistemological difference for the writer.
In any given sting operation, the John gets arrested, bt there was never any prostitute. The arrest occurs on the basis that, if there were a prostitute, the John would participate in the exchange. Then, at that point, he's dragged before a judge or jury, and they don't really care about the crime, they just want this guy off the street based on the character assasination. The layman/plebian juror doesn't need to involve any sophisticated thought process, because his goal is to clock out of his "civic duty" by 5PM on the dot. The patrician judge is permitted the luxury of aloof detachment, and is a fallible human being. A person with a social life, biases and any other human weaknesses, despite whatever image or persona they may project into their social sphere of influence.
It doesn't really matter whether the sting is a bomb plot, drug deal, or a setup for hookers, Johns and online chat room predators. The maguffin is there to demonstrate intent, and prove that police are doing there job, the streets are safer, when this slob gets thrown in jail, and branded with a scarlet letter.
But the slob is real, and more often than not, simply being placed in the hot seat is enough for judge and jury to usually be swayed in favor of a conviction. It really doesn't take much for a person to get slapped with a jail sentence. Neither imaginary crimes nor genuine crimes weigh heavily on the mind of your typical juror. Or rather, to the juror, all crimes are essentially the same degree of fiction.
They are tales of intrigue presented to strangers who play the role of critic for a day, while attending the performance of fatal charades.
>In any given sting operation, the John gets arrested, bt there was never any prostitute. //
I see where you're coming from however it is "soliciting" which is the crime and the perp commits that crime against someone - they just happen not to be a prostitute. At least that's how it plays out in the media.
With the [attempted] assassination of an individual you can't have a sting because the main conspirator targets a specific individual [but you can have a sting on a conspiracy charge, so I see how it applies]. It's not like they find their target's not there and decide to just kill a random person. They are only ever concerned with killing a specific person. Now if that specific person doesn't exist then there can't be a killing.
With the bomb plot, drug deal, prostitution, child abuser the targets are generalised. The particular nature of the stooge isn't important to the potential perpetrator.
If I tell you there's a bank in my town, then we plan a heist, then it turns out that there's no bank. What crime have you committed?
[I'm not totally sold on this line I'm presenting incidentally - but thanks for the response anyhow.]
It's not really about intent, there has to be a real attempt to commit a crime for your standard sting situation. Drug stings will often go as far as waiting until after a crime has happened to do the arrest.
As with any crime, it was committed against the State.
> If you pretend to have a sister and I order a hit on that figment of your imagination then have I committed a crime?
Yes.
> So whilst there was conspiracy it was not against a person
In the US (and, for that matter, most of the rest of the world) crimes don't have to be "against a person". England went through a few years in the late 1970s where a conspiracy to commit an impossible act was not a crime, but specifically amended the 1977 law which a 1978 court case found implied that effect to remove it in 1981; to my knowledge the impossibility of the prohibited agreed-to act has never been a bar to conspiracy convictions in the US.
> It seems that if the conspiracy were against a person who never existed and were adjudged to be a crime that writers would be similarly guilty when they plan a storyline in which someone is purposefully killed.
A writer planning a story line involves neither two or more people agreeing to commit an unlawful act nor one of taking a concrete action to put that agreement into effect, and so contains neither of the elements of the general crime of conspiracy, independently of the impossibility issue. So, no, they wouldn't be guilty of conspiracy, independently of the issue at hand.
DPR's responses to the murder are silly and obviously load him up on charges he doesn't need. But putting murder charge risks side, it's not a terrible negotiation tactic is it? The original guy wanted $500K, and DPR paid significantly less, while perhaps making it seem like he'd go to any lengths to stop someone.
In this scenario, the extortionist and the drug dealer are the same party. The goal of the scam isn't extort $500k. That number is as real as my uncle's Nigerian inheritance. The goal is to extort the mark of $150k, and make him a) maximally disinclined to attempt to tell about the scam (by making him complicit in a "murder", much like 419 scammers generally try to make the marks complicit in defrauding Nigeria) and b) give the scammers the opportunity to come after him again, in the future. (One possible scenario: the "hitman" "hired" by the "drug dealer" for the "murder" attempts to shake down DPR in the future, threatening to expose his involvement in the murder unless he is paid off. The hitman is still the drug dealer is still the extortionist.)
The game theory of scam artists is really simple: your expected probability of scam N+1 working goes way the heck up if you've successfully worked that mark in scam N. That's why you can literally find people selling lists of folks who've fallen for 419 scams.
I'm saying from DPR's point, was it that bad of a move? Face total failure or $500K payment (with no guarantee of not getting hassled later), versus a $150K payment that lasted a while?
Edit: To to clear, DPR could have well assumed it was the same party and figured this was one way to negotiate, instead of saying "ok, how about $200K instead of $500K"?
Why would you believe that someone has compromised thousands of your users without evidence? It's the sort of thing you'd naturally expect someone to lie about. Furthermore, if such were the case, it would be egregiously stupid of Ulbricht not to change the way he protects user identities, and there's no indication he did that either.
After all, if friendlychemist did in fact have information on thousands of drug dealers, he ought to be able to get a pretty good asking price from the government, so why would he even contact Ulbricht in this scenario?
FriendlyChemist was a vendor who somehow had a falling out, and decided to try and extort DPR who probably yanked his account. He said he would release all the information he kept on people he shipped drugs to, for the sole purpose of creating instability and FUD in the market by dropping identities all over the forums.
What DPR should have done is had his team of admins hellban the guy everytime he tried to spam the forums with names so he could waste his time however DPR never seemed to give a shit about the forum even though it was his brand being represented there.
This is why Max Vision spied on all his buyers/users because if they ever tried to extort him in the same manner he would promptly reveal that he's been inside their systems for months and knew exactly who they were.
Does the government normally pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for that kind of info? If so, I may need to start thinking about a career change...
Here's the thing. FC could have received the $150k and then CONTINUED with the extortion. Once he has an irreversible payment, he can expose the lie.... it doesn't matter. He still has user records that are worth extortion money.
This should be its own post. He allegedly requests an undercover agent to torture and kill someone who worked for him. Must be the first murder detailed in the first complaint.
I went through the evidence portion of this (page 24 onwards) and found that inspite of a pretty deep look into everything there isn't much to tie this guy to the Silk Road operation. There are a few things that could tie them together:
- The fact that the SSH KEY on the server was for frosty@frosty.com which was the same thing he changed his Stackoverflow profile to..
- The fact that he asked on stackoverflow how to curl over tor
- The fact that he apparently tried to promote Silk Road on two forums
This stuff certainly points towards him being the guy, but is this evidence enough ?
<BreakingBadSPOILER>And I'm asking this 'cause Jessie's video confession to Hank wasn't enough to get Walt... </BreakingBadSPOILER>
What the document tantalizingly avoids is how they managed to find out where the Silk Road servers are. It mysteriously states that there are several Silk Road servers around the world and the FBI gained access and got an image of the server through cooperation with one of the hosts. How did they get to the servers behind the Tor network ? This is a very interesting technical question and honestly, I'm impressed.
Following the whole Kim Dotcom debacle I'd like to see how this seriously loaded ($90MM) guy progresses through the justice system.
Explain to me, game-theoretically, what the public policy answer is for prosecuting criminal conspiracies who have amassed enormous fortunes from their crimes?
I'm sympathetic to the idea that "ill-gained funds" shouldn't be accessible to a defendant for their defense; but it does pose some moral problems.
When my dad was indicted by the FBI, part of the process (because he was a fugitive) was for them to seize all his funds. This was personally problematic because his funds were also my mom's funds (due to having a joint account); which left my mom very suddenly with no money, and two children (one of which, me, being a newborn).
I got the distinct impression (which I admit was based on only hearing one side of the story) that the FBI intentionally made life difficult for my mom in an effort to entice her cooperation in locating my dad (ignoring the fact that a husband who flees on the day of his son's birth to avoid prosecution from the FBI isn't necessarily in said wife's good graces).
If the funds had been proven to be ill-gained, then the defense would already be over (since proving that funds are ill-gained both requires proving the crime and proving that the funds came from the crime.)
So any meaningful proposal here isn't about actual ill-gained funds, its about alleged ill-gained funds, and that's the source of the problem.
It's not really germane to this discussion; I was just giving an example of the fact that it can be tricky for the government to seize assets in a prosecution (considering the fact that it can be difficult to de-complect where funds come from).
How do you differentiate a criminal spending ill-gained funds from an innocent spending his rightful property?
In those cases, usually you can distinguish ill-gained funds from rightful property only after the court decision, and the presumption of innocence would require allowing the innocent to spend his property on the defence until (and if) [s]he is convicted.
Spend enormous amounts on their prosecution. If, indeed, these guys are such a threat to public safety and order that we need to put them away, then the cost is justified. If the cost is not justified, then the defendant is not such a threat -- in which case taking their money away is unjustified.
The real problem here is that the prosecution strategy is, "prevent the defendant from exercising their rights." That is why prosecutors typically pile up the charges, to scare people into signing a plea bargain instead of exercising their right to a jury trial. Basically, these are people who think the Ox-Bow Incident was a criminal justice field guide.
Alleged criminal conspiracies. If the prosecution of an alleged criminal is undermined by his being able to afford competent defense, we've got a bigger public policy issue.
I agree with the general sense of your post, and its implications about current drug policy, but I think tptacek is right about what our focus should be in this specific trial.
To be intellectually honest about this specific case we're discussing, DPR did by definition commit most of the drug charges. Even if you believe the only morally problematic charge is 5.b of count 1 (that the defendant hired a hitman to murder a troublesome user--I do hope you find that charge problematic!), which is certainly only alleged at this point, it is fact that the Silk Road aided and abetted drug trafficking, which is criminal in the U.S.
So while I certainly agree that people need to be entitled to a competent defense (and I am glad DPR will have competent attorneys to dispute the murder charge), emphasizing the alleged nature of a criminal conspiracy that we realistically know to be largely true doesn't seem to be the best place to focus on rights of the accused. In reality, the vast majority of people wrongfully convicted are going to be the ones who can't afford competent defense. So to me this case almost raises the opposite question from yours: if the prosecution of guilty defendants is undermined by their being able to afford better attorneys than the government, and if the defense of wrongfully accused defendants is undermined by their inability to afford competent defense, then we've got bigger problems with the nature of criminal trials!
I agree with your last point, and was making it in a roundabout way. "How do we convict this guy if he can afford a good lawyer?" and "We'll definitely convict this guy because he can't afford a good lawyer." are both troubling thoughts. Why not freeze the assets of everybody charged with a felony and appoint public defenders?
The rest of your post I have some difficulty with. It's almost as though you're saying we don't even need a trial here because the facts are so obviously established. I don't believe it's yet been established in a court of law that any crime was committed, much less that this person committed it.
One answer to this is that the DOJ can't in fact freeze the assets of anybody; they have to convince a court to do so, and it's for this reason among many that the courts are an entirely separate branch of government. To the extent that you can't trust the courts to be impartial, there's really no part of the criminal justice system you can trust.
It should not in general be in the best interests of the federal court system to allow federal prosecutors to abuse asset seizures to prevent defendants from mounting competent defenses. Among other things, such abuses set judges up for costly appeals.
Civil forfeiture requires only reasonable suspicion (preponderance of evidence) and does not require criminal conviction. So the bar for taking the assets is much lower than the bar for conviction.
>>> It should not in general be in the best interests of the federal court system to allow federal prosecutors to abuse asset seizures to prevent defendants from mounting competent defenses. Among other things, such abuses set judges up for costly appeals.
It is very well in the interest of the prosecutors, in order to extort plea bargain. And appealing the guilty plea would probably have a very low chance for success.
At some stage, there is a constitutional rights issue. An attornery is a representative of the person in court. Ie, he is the mechanism for the client to express freely his position (defense). Limiting this is a free-speach issue, at some stage. You are forcing the defendent to speak through someone paid for by the government. While this is arguably true today for people in poverty, it seems a bit more uncouth to force this for each and every citizen under all conditions. Even those without resources, for example, could in theory arrange for a pro-bono intervention. But such intervention must by necessity free-ride on fee-earning clients. And without a viable business, there would be no-one to do the pro-bono work.
> Why not freeze the assets of everybody charged with a felony and appoint public defenders?
Agreed, but that would either bankrupt the government or make defense attorney a much less lucrative career and, therefore, greatly decrease the number of available defense attorneys.
> It's almost as though you're saying we don't even need a trial here because the facts are so obviously established. I don't believe it's yet been established in a court of law that any crime was committed, much less that this person committed it.
Not at all what I meant. On the contrary, I meant that cases when we the outside viewers realistically know that the defendant isn't clean are probably not the best cases for highlighting the need for a competent defense.
"If" is not necessary here - current criminal prosecution system massively (90% of cases) relies on plea bargains which often are achieved by overcharging and making defendant's life as miserable as possible until they accept the deal. Including seizures, forfeitures and other tactics that hinder defendant's ability to hire council and may ruin their entire lives even if the are proven innocent.
I stipulate that a practice of deliberately undermining defenses is problematic, but that doesn't respond to my question. What's the right public policy? Let's shift the frame to someone unsympathetic at the head of a lucrative conspiracy --- a murderous cartel, say, or an arms dealer.
It basically catches the new 'little rich' in exchange for bulldozing over the majority of people caught up by the criminal system. The ones who have personal fortunes under $10 million or have little experience with it. Taking 9/11 at face value, it's like how the response to 9/11 cost the USA so much more than the actual effects of 9/11.
After you starting dealing with the 'experienced rich' you find they start becoming skilled in hiding such financial resources. It's even harder when it's an entire multi-national organization and you are not an English speaking country or China. It's the story of marrying a wealthy daughter of some incredibly wealthy family, and finding out in the divorce she only has $5000 to her actual name, and your the one who will be paying alimony to her.
Going to the root of the problem in the first place, how do these large criminal organizations even exist? It's because government law going against technological reality have created large market opportunities to exploit in the first place. Governments have created the fertile land for these creatures to exist.
What's the policy harm in allowing them to submit a request to unfreeze assets to pay for legal counsel, expert witnesses, etc?
Do you honestly believe that proposed harm is worse for society than sham trials, where we're getting convictions simply because people can't defend themselves properly?
Flight risk isn't the issue; the issue is that if you can "cheat" society out of $40MM and then outspend the DOJ 100:1 on your defense, the incentives are set (a) for you to seriously consider doing that, and (b) having embarked on any criminal conspiracy, to "go big" at all costs.
Sounds like if you can "outspend" the DOJ and be assured of winning than A: the DOJ has very weak cases or B: the justice system is extremely non-functional.
Seizure is not a just way to hack the system back into a functional state.
So, if you're going to start a drug cartel, you should make it as big as possible to fiercely defend a war chest that you can use in the event that you're prosecuted.
I respect you, and the tone you're using with me makes me think that perhaps I am missing something here. But I'm not getting what you're attempting to hint at.
Yes, if you believe you're going to end up in court, and having lots of money is useful for defeating charges, then yes, you should try to get money. That seems pretty simple and not worthy of enacting seizure laws.
If the justice system is so broken that people guilty of massive crimes can pay $50M and get out of charges, then THAT needs to be fixed. You're not seriously suggesting that seizure is a just way to hack around a broken system?
Thomas has a very instrumentalist / consequentialist / realist view of things. It sometimes makes him sound almost amoral. He sometimes gets caught up on the "is" side of "is / ought" discussions, which, as we know, have no resolution because they're two separate worlds.
You know, this may be true (minus the instrumentalism, which is a label I think applies better to the prevailing sentiment of HN), but I don't think it's "amoral" to ask whether the operators of massive criminal enterprises should be able to use the fruit of those operations to reduce the feasibility of prosecution. If you make $10MM selling illegal firearms, the proceeds of that operations aren't "yours"; they're assets generated by criminal activity.
You may be innocent of the charges. If you are, you should get the assets back. To the extent that asset forfeiture makes that process fraught, that's a problem that deserves careful scrutiny.
I submit that I don't sound "amoral" so much as that I don't have exactly the same set of biases that most vocal people on HN seem to have. I don't start from the premise that all prosecution is unjust or malicious; in fact, I think I start from the opposite premise. So when something happens like "all the assets of a business are seized as part of a prosecution", I ask myself, "why would people who have chosen to spend a significant part of their life working at sub-market compensation to help fight crime choose to do that?" Sometimes the answers seem clear to me; in other cases, like the Carmen Ortiz-managed prosecution of Aaron Swartz, they are less clear.
I didn't mean "amoral" as an insult, and I don't think you're amoral. You just seem that way sometimes (to me) in your apparent reluctance to view things[1] from the perspective of how they might be improved (i.e. how they "ought" to be), and rather argue about consequences (the way things are), with little regard for the justice of the larger machine that generates those consequences.
[1] Social / political / judicial / law enforcement things in particular. You've argued lots of times about how things can be positively changed wrt crypto, security etc.
PS: I don't think it's bias. Your perspective is also biased; it's just differently biased than the group average here. Your perspective is welcome and often refreshing.
I feel like I'm very concerned about the justice of the overall system, but that instances of injustice within it don't generally indict the whole system.
I admittedly don't have any evidence of this, but I suspect that "lets become as big and rich as possible" is usually high on the list of priorities for cartels and mobs already, for plenty of other reasons.
What exactly does all of that money buy you for a defense?
What I mean is, are we talking about somebody using their fortune to bribe and buy witnesses? Use their wealth to construct alibis?
Or are we talking about somebody using their fortune to hire a better lawyer than the DOJ can hire? Hire better expert witnesses than the DOJ can hire?
If all of the transactions are legitimate and all that money bought him was a world-class defense.. then I say "tough noogies" to the DOJ. Being able to afford the next Johnnie Cochran doesn't seem problematic to me; the only thing that concerns me is that poor people cannot receive a similarly competent defense.
Legal strategy is only partly about manipulating the perception of truth. The other, often significantly more effective tactic, is to drown your opponent in requests and subpoenas, each of which requires non-trivial resources to respond to.
It's incredibly cash-intensive, you effectively declare legal nuclear war and just go all out. It's virtually impossible to counter without special legislation already in place to counter exactly that sort of threat, e.g. anti-SLAPP laws.
How could that do anything other than delay the inevitable? Sooner or later you are going to be in front of a judge and a jury. They can spam all they want, it isn't going to stop the trial from happening.
I think you can then use the whole charade as an argument that the prosecution made lots of mistakes, increasing the chance for a favorable outcome or conditions for appeal.
Which doesn't solve much because who then controls the spending? And in addition the spending would have to be audited and controlled in some manner that's equitable for both parties.
For example, a defense lawyer could offer reduced hourly rates but include a bonus payment at the end to skew the 1:1 comparison.
In addition, party A can affect the spending of party B, which is part of what's being complained about. Because motions filed by party A can cause party B's costs to rise significantly to the point where their operation is hindered. So it most likely then becomes a race to the top, which once again will benefit the party with the larger war chest up until all assets are used up.
A set percentage of assets would feel better in my opinion, though in extreme cases it would probably still be a pretty penny.
Freeze their assets, but allow them to use it for defense. If they hire reputable expensive lawyers, let them. If they hire disreputable lawyers, catch those lawyers on using funds for something other than legal expenses and disbar them for it. Once they are found guilty, seize the assets.
There is a known procedure that asserts control over person's or entity's finances without actually destroying their ability to conduct business - namely, bankruptcy. So, it is possible. It can be done also for the case of criminal prosecution - the funds are controlled by independent judge which allows the payments that look like legal expenses or other necessary expenses (e.g. if the defendant doesn't have money to buy food). Of course, this can be abused too, but major cases of abuse would be caught and all involved would be prosecuted, as with any law.
So I don't see the necessity to immediately block all assets for somebody prosecuted for criminal conspiracy. I think it is done with sole purpose of making life easier for law enforcement by denying the defendant the capability to hire expensive lawyers that would insist on making life hard for the prosecution.
Anyone rich knows that laundering money is a purchase and sale away: art, jewelry, plane, barge, etc.
As long as there are one or more parties disincentivized or unconcerned with participating in taxation, people will find ways to avoid handing over large sums of cash and "let the little people pay taxes." (Yup, that's how some view it.)
How about a large finders % fee for reporting cheats? Or would NARCing render it moot by social and business pressures?
This is actually extremely interesting, and a potential use for BTC that hadn't occurred to me yet -- as a flexible retainer for legal representation. You can notionally store the information necessary to access a wallet in your head, and provide it to a cooperative attorney without the need to possess anything that can be physically taken from you.
The FBI seizes money so that criminals who manage to acquire $90 million from their crimes can't use that money to pay off people in an attempt to get off. The practice is a response to organized crime prosecutions, which were historically extremely difficult because the organizations had tremendous resources at their disposal.
I agree that there is a potential for abuse, but I'm not sure I want to return to the bad old days where rich organized criminals could totally swamp prosecutors.
My understanding -- admittedly grokked from watching The Wire -- is that criminals usually have lawyers on retainer, and they pay said lawyers before their assets are seized, which in any case makes a lot more sense. There is also the case of the Antiguan bank account under a fake name that the lawyer and defendant know about.
The Dread Pirate Roberts seems to have thought he was invincible and did not take such precautions, of course.
Another poster suggests "spending enormous amounts of money on prosecutions" to counter drug funds. This is problematic because the drug trade is massive, with the market for cocaine alone estimated at >$100B/yr; estimates indicate that the illegal drug market could account for as much as 1% of all global economic activity. For comparison the NSA's budget is about $70B/yr and the DEA is more like $25B/yr.
Do you mean technically, in which case perhaps difficult, but if they've managed to track him down and take the site offline then it may well be possible, or legally, in which case surely it's no different than if a drug dealer kept his drug profits stored in gold bars rather than bank notes, and they'll still confiscate them.
I would totally expect that the $90 million is spread across and whatever they seize will be a small portion of what he has. The rest is available for him to fund his defense (he could make a deal with his lawyers to settle after the trial from these secure funds). On top of that, even if they pin a few charges on him and he spends a few years behind bars, that entire time his bitcoin holdings will be presumably appreciating in value, meaning that he'll be released from prison and could find himself still a millionaire or even a billionaire.
There's certainly enough there for a search and an arrest, which is what has happened so far. If he is actually guilty, unless he was very careful (which so far, it sounds like he was not) with him in jail and access to his property the evidence against him is only going to increase.
> Following the whole Kim Dotcom debacle I'd like to see how this seriously loaded ($90MM) guy progresses through the justice system.
He has been living in the Mission for $1000/month with roommates. I doubt he's liquid.
Cashing out that many bitcoins is hard, doing it anonymously is harder and then laundering it so that you can deposit it a bank account harder still. I can't even imagine what kind of scheme is necessary to do that. You can't just claim your local business somehow made $40 million in cash this year.
You know... spoilers mate. <BreakingBadSpoiler>...</BreakingBadSpoiler>. I thought you just wanted me to read it in the context of the program's universe. sigh
Hey no worries. Thanks for pointing it out, I just (wrongly) assumed that since the show was over everyone around the world had watched it. But definitely go ahead and get to it because it's incredible :D
The parallels between the show and what just happened with this Ross guy are pretty mind blowing.. ($80MM is a key point, then the fact about him turning from a 'nice justice oriented dude' to a total bad guy)
Actually, I'm right in the middle of season 3. I like to wait for a series to end before I watch it all at once (I can't stand waiting for serials) especially if other people say it's a great series (which it is). The hard part is avoiding spoilers -- there are heaps online! I'm looking forward to finishing it. Based on what I hear it's a really great closing.
I was glancing down through the comments and caught the whole first sentence before processing the breakingbadspoiler tag. Might want to change it completely..or just remove it. Is the show still worth watching knowing what I saw? I had Six Feet Under spoiled for me in a similar manner :-(
I'd imagine the hard evidence connecting him comes from the raids. They clearly managed to locate the hardware the site was running on, and it's going to be a bit harder to hide connections to that.
He was apparently really careful about connecting to the server. The docs state that he logged in through a VPN provider and he logged into the VPN provider at an internet cafe (which was apparently close to his house).
However, the document doesn't seem to state who the VPN provider was or if he was the customer tied to the VPN account (probably avoids this info because the VPN is account is in someone else's name). So again, can't prove via this route that it was him.
I'm curious to know how they managed to find the Silk Road server though..
"He was apparently really careful about connecting to the server. "
That is not, by any measure, careful. That's awful OPSEC, and what got him in the end. He thought Tor to be inconveniently "slow", and used VPN instead.
Aphorism: "If you owe the bank $100,000 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100,000,000 that's the bank's problem." As such, I'm sure there are a lot of influential people interested in keeping this guy out of prison.
Very good write-up indeed, managing to skip the actually superfluous technical details and focusing on the relatively simple claims. All In all, this seems to support two great truisms:
1. Committing crime is very easy. Not getting caught is hard
2. When it comes to gathering evidence, you're only as good as your biggest screw-up
I believe this is just an arrest warrant, rather than the full set of evidence they will be using to using to prosecute. Whilst the links between the elements may seem tenuous, that's exactly how forensic investigations work, and I often use similar techniques as part of investigations
This is a great read - no jargon. The special agent did a really nice job with it. I can almost visualize it all. I never thought Silk Rd would be something based out of the Valley.
I wonder how they got the location of the web server. They started getting images on July 23rd. Once they had the location of the web server and were getting images (apparently every 6 hours), he was all but caught. I wonder if there was an exploit that revealed the IP.
Isn't it well known that USA secret services have been operating a large part of the TOR network [or am I falling to conspiratorial banter]?
By analysing traffic flow as they access SR - eg by also having access to major carriers - wouldn't they be able to just push in packets and see where they pop out (to be facile about it)?
They may (or may not?) control TOR exit nodes, but that's different from controlling the TOR network as a whole. While it's possible to watch traffic exiting TOR onto the clear web, it's harder - still presumed impossible - to find a hidden service within TOR.
The traffic on the physical layer has to exit to the server housing the service though surely. The hidden service isn't distributed is it?
I read in another thread that they're reported to have hacked PHP to expose a vulnerability that gave them an admin IP address that was being allowed through the firewall. Seems reasonable.
He was caught by not using TOR to access the server to admin it, he used pretty straightforward ssh and vpns, which are a lot easier to track. They had a good suspicion that he was DPR from looking around at forum postings and the like, and the server was just the final dot that was connected.
I smell a rat over the hitman claims. If there is no evidence for a body, or other evidence such as the funds transfer, why include it in the indictment?
According to your link, "if a person is induced to commit a crime by a private citizen, he cannot use the entrapment defense".
Unsurprisingly, in the complaint there is no suggestion that a law enforcement officer was behind the threats to expose silk road accounts, such threats therefore appear to be from a private citizen, and not subject to the entrapment defense.
Further, simply agreeing to pay to have someone killed (whether they are eventually killed or not) is sufficient to be found guilty of conspiracy to murder, and significant jail time.
However, while we don't know who issued those threats, we do know that (apparently) no one was harmed as a result of the contracted "hit" being executed, despite the defendant receiving a picture of an apparent execution.
It is the discrepancy between the apparent killing and the lack of a body that raises my suspicion that there was no actual threat and no actual killing.
Edit: It occurred to me that investigators could set-up such a "sting" not specifically to entrap the defendant into a murder charge, but to provide a clear and traceable link between him and a higher-level involvement in the running of silk road, which was manifestly illegal.
Ross Ulbricht apparently wasn't smart enough to not do business at an Internet cafe a few yards from where he lived. I'm not sure he'd be that fascinating as a protagonist.
But I admit I'd still watch the first episode to find out.
Do you have a cite for them seizing bitcoins? It'd be most hilariously pitiful if a large amount of SR's money was in /root/wallet.dat with no passphrase or the passphrase in /tmp/unlock.php.
Can someone explain to me why it says New York when he was caught in San Francisco? Does the FBI not need to file a complaint in the state where he was arrested?
His alleged crimes spanned multiple jurisdictions, so they're allowed to venue shop. As to why they chose it, I imagine it's convenient for the attorneys or LEOs who worked the case.
If you read the complaint, they actually make sure to point out that agents had drugs shipped to that district to proves that it's valid.
Awesome read, but it's a little grating how many times the phrase "based on my training and experience" is used. I'm assuming it's somehow required to show that the guy isn't just spewing hearsay but is making educated deductions.
I have no sympathies for the real "Dread Pirate Roberts". He was running an enterprise whose primary purpose was to facilitate criminal activity, and he profited handsomely from it.
The criminal activity was primarily selling recreational drugs whose legality has nothing to do with morals and everything to do with the profitability of competing enterprises. The broader picture here is that the profitability of SR was the result of legitimate demand for certain products. We are not talking about racketeering here. We are not talking about robbery, kidnapping, or fraud. We are talking about victimless crimes involving the sale of goods that are highly demanded.
DPR himself may have been a mean guy, assuming there is anything to this alleged murder-for-hire plot. The reality of the situation, however, is that a much greater harm has been done to society by drug prohibition itself. Millions of people incarcerated, millions of people exposed to drugs of unknown quality, and a widespread trend of soldiers attacking civilian homes in the name of the drug war. The DEA has the power to simply declare drugs to be illegal, then arrest people who possess them. The DEA is not only a police force, but also a military force (even receiving help from NORAD and the NSA) and an intelligence agency. People in foreign lands and here in the United States are being killed by our government in the name of this prohibition.
Do not think for a moment that the law is some kind of moral compass. Drug laws have a sordid history of racism, corporate hand-outs, and widespread corruption.
I consider drug use eligitate demand, and I have no doubt the world would be better place without them. The stuff he was peddling will get you hooked fast.
Yes, and while we are at it, let's compare the effects of pharmaceutical methamphetamine and pharmaceutical opiates. The unregulated production process surrounding black market drugs causes quite a lot of damage, and that damage could be eliminated by legalization and regulation.
There are some drugs that practically can't be used recreationally without major damage to the user. Mostly these are highly addictive and lead to self-neglect and self-destructive behavior, very unlike nicotine and even alcohol.
Legalization can't change this. What it might change is a shift towards less dangerous drugs to mob up the recreational drug market. SR however is not even slightly going in this direction, so the whole objection to the criminal nature of silk road is baseless.
Not talking about fraud? Hacking tools, identity theft tools, and false id kids were also sold on SR. This was definitely a marketplace for fraud.
But hey, no need for honesty to enter the debate. Not when it undermines betterunix's precious libertarian religion.
The libertarian religion is so strong that the Libertarians on this site are, predictably, not just defending SR. They're lying about what was on it, defending the hiring of hitmen, and generally making clear that Libertarianism is solely about self-interest and has ZERO underlying ethical frameworks.
There are currently many people who are engaged in moral activities that are considered criminal by the government they are ruled by. Not saying that DPR isn't a scumbag but morality is not the same as legality.
Fine, but the site sells and even has categories for things like hitman services, ATM skimmers, fraud how-to pamphlets, and lists of stolen credit cards.
"Morality may not be legality" is a trendy thing to say but there's significant overlap, and that statement is meaningless anyway when much of the behaviour that we're on about is both immoral and illegal
(Alice claims to owe money to Bob, who Alice represents as a drug dealer. Alice threatens to expose SR users unless DPR pays Alice's debt with Bob. DPR asks to speak to Bob. Bob messages DPR. DPR attempts to recruit Bob to be a drug dealer on SR and, separately, asks if Bob can arrange for the murder of Alice. Bob quotes a price, which DPR says is twice the last price that DPR has arranged a murder at. DPR eventually agrees to the price, pays, and instructs Bob to take a photograph of the corpse with a random alphanumeric string in the frame, to ascertain that the photograph was indeed produced after the request. Bob reports that the murder is complete and sends the photograph, which DPR accepts as genuine. The affiant believes the likely conclusion -- that Alice and Bob are the same person and that DPR has been successfully extorted to the tune of $150,000 or so.)