How can we get Ross released?. It is totally insane that someone can be sent to jail for life for operating a website. The USA is actually an insane asylum and a dangerous place to live and getting more so by the day.
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He should not be freed, he was profiteering from drug dealing. Drugs do a lot of damage to peoples lives. That said he should not have gotten the sentence he did. He should have got something like 5 or 7 years, not life in prison.
Tobacco and Alcohol do much more damage to families and peoples lives than any illegal drug could. Ross has already been in jail since October 2013 and is never to be released. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
That is not really a valid argument though is it, it doesn't matter what damage Alcohol and Tobacco do (in this context) as they are legal, please don't paint this guy as some innocent web master doing no wrong, he knew what he was getting into and it is illegal. But I repeat, the punishment is way over the top for the crime. The corrupt police officers should have been given longer prison terms.
Two people, one selling one buying. What right has a government to get in the way of a transaction between two consenting adults?.
One word Tax and also if it is legal or not. Like it or not we live in a society that is governed by laws, the alternative is anarchy. Neither system is perfect but this is what we have, governments will not release this power lightly and who can blame them. I think the Ross Ulbrict argument given in the video is pretty weak in that he was just creating a marketplace for people to transact, why put it on the dark web then? We need to make governments more accountable for their actions and remove corruption, if block chain technology can do this then great. But please don't create havens for criminal activity, nobody should want that and no one should profit from doing it. None of the money Ross Ulbrict earned would have had tax taken and therefore he would not be contributing to society.
Please, not the tax argument. If the products were not classed as illegal, a tax would have been paid.
Laws were made to be broken, silly laws should always be broken. Victimless crime should never be prosecuted.
You have just shown that Ross Ulbrict knew he was acting illegally for his own gain by stating a tax would have been paid if they were not illegal. OK so if we don't have a government that collects tax and provides all of those services, people like Ross Ulbrict would donate their money to have services provided, yeah right I can see that happenening. No please not the victimless crime argument that doesn't hold water and laws are made to be challenged not broken.
Anarchy has gotten a bad name. Research is required to discover what true anarchy is all about. A good place to start is The Anarchast by Jeff Berwick and discover Larkin Rose.
History has shown making drugs Illegal is nonsense, does not work. When you research the drugs business worldwide the results are amazing.
The"WAR ON DRUGS is actually a game and when you follow the money it leads back to the CIA who is now in charge of the worlds poppy fields and cocoa plants.
Very soon all governments around the world will decide Cannabis is now legal after 70 years of telling us it's evil.
I agree, but it still needs tackling somehow.
The ONLY way to "Tackle it" is to legalise all drugs or at least decriminalise like Portugal. A small % of people will always be drug addicts like myself, others are gamblers, alcoholics, smokers etc.
Governments waste billions of tax payers money, (Trillions worldwide) fighting the war on drugs when everyone knows the biggest drug dealers on the planet are a government agency called the CIA.
It's all a game but the rules of the game are beginning to change. If we stopped playing at fighting the war we could have enough money to have every addict in a 5* treatment centre for any addict that wanted to quit. I don't want to quit, I'm happy being a professional drug addict.
EXACTLY he did NOTHING but push buttons....youre RIGHt youre SO right! theres NO way they can actually PROVE he was even behind the computer at the time of the alleged actvities! the internet makes it possible for a website to originate from ANYWHERE andits SAD that our current court system acts like it understands concepts as fragile as IP addresses etc
Rosse's case is more political than drug related.
Well, he was prosecuted for running a website that allegedly facilitated sales of "illegal" drugs. Just like Alexander Vinnik was recently arrested for operating BTC-e, which allegedly facilitated "illegal money laundering". Such things are illegal just because governments say so. And the US and its client states seem to consider that their laws apply to the entire Internet, and everyone who uses it. Like it or not, moral or not, they can do it because they have the power.
The only way for individuals to opt out of that bullshit is through tools for privacy and anonymity. Using VPNs and Tor, Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, and so on. And in doing so, they must practice good OPSEC.
I don't mean to dis Ross, but he just made too many mistakes. Especially at the start, before he realized how huge Silk Road would become. Also, he was thinking like an idealistic activist. His OPSEC was sloppy. He used his real name on Stack Exchange to ask about onion design. He promoted Silk Road on Bitcoin Forum, then used the same account to invite developer applications, and included his real-name email address. He misconfigured Apache, such that some error responses included the public IP address of the onion server.
Anyway, we can all learn from those mistakes. And from mistakes of others that governments have pwned. And we can build stuff that won't get taken down.
As far as Ross goes, I doubt that he'll get out unless some President pardons him. Maybe Trump will flame out so badly that someone sane will win the next term. But even then, I'm not optimistic. Unless drugs, and drug dealing, are legalized, anyway.
People have already learned, there are over 30 Silk Road sites operating right now. Rosse's case is more political than drug related. Watch the interviews done with Rosses mother and also the movie DARKNET
Right, people are learning. And with every takedown, there's something new to learn.
NSA tracks everything and they're weak at cyber protections