Pubdate: Thu, 18 Jun 2015
Source: Reno News & Review (NV)
Column: Let Freedom Ring
Copyright: 2015, Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsreview.com/issues/reno/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2524
Author: Brendan Trainor

THE SILK ROAD TO NOWHERE

A federal judge recently sentenced a 31-year-old man with no criminal 
record to life in prison for running a website.

Russ Ulbricht ran the Silk Road on the dark net. Many don't know that 
Google-style search engines only sweep 30 percent of the internet. 
The other 70 percent is accessible on The Onion Router (TOR) through 
a freely downloadable browser. The dark web is perfectly legal, used 
for legitimate research purposes. The dark web is anonymous, as the 
digital packets are rerouted over and over through servers in multiple nations.

The dark net has its illicit side, however. There are assassination 
sites and child porn and hacker sites. But Ulbricht was not running 
that kind of site. Ulbricht is an Agorist.

Agorism is a branch of libertarian anarchy that builds voluntary 
alternative markets to provide a way for people to exchange forbidden 
but desired items. Agorists want to decrease the violence in society 
by making non-violent black market transactions between willing 
buyers and sellers as safe and secure as possible. If you buy the 
product peer-to-peer on your computer instead of in a dark alley with 
a criminal drug dealer, the black market violence caused by 
prohibition will be significantly lessened.

The Silk Road website offered a Bitcoin encrypted exchange that 
consumers ultimately controlled by rating their satisfaction 
publicly, like Uber does.

Silk Road specifically forbade any vendors offering child pornography 
or murder or fraud. There was a vibrant forum to discuss Agorist 
ideas. The owner of the Silk Road called himself "Dread Pirate 
Roberts," based on the Princess Bride character who said he was just 
one of many DPRs. Silk Road had over 100,000 customers purchasing 
illegal drugs, banned gun products, and other illicit goods.

Then Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, saw the Silk Road website and 
was shocked-shocked!-to find this sort of thing right in the open, 
and demanded DPR's head. DPR was tracked down through an old email 
address that linked Ulbricht to him. Ulbricht was arrested in a 
coffee shop with a laptop containing a journal that linked him to 
Silk Road and the DPR alter ego. That was enough to convict.

There were allegations Ulbricht betrayed his principles to order a 
hit on a former employee, but they were never presented at his trial. 
There are corruption charges against some of the investigators for 
stealing Bitcoins for themselves.

Worse than the conviction was the sentencing on May 29. Judge 
Katherine Forest shockingly gave Ulbricht a life sentence for a first 
offense. The prosecutors produced parents who claimed their child 
overdosed on drugs purchased on Silk Road. But the defense produced 
evidence that Silk Road actually saved lives by reducing drug gang 
turf wars and violent police action. The prosecution's theory would 
charge Craigslist because someone you met there gave you an STD.

In fact, government nannies regularly try to take down websites that 
facilitate sex work. If they succeed, they only increase the violence 
in sex workers' lives. Government laws enforce a pain-oriented 
society driven by a Calvinist ethic that values work as an end in 
itself, not as a means to provide for the needs of individuals, 
including erotic and consciousness-altering needs. The judge saw only 
the law, not the harms caused by the law.

The dark web, 3-D printing, and cyber currencies are here to stay. 
They will outlast the state. If Dread Pirate Roberts is condemned, 
many new Dread Pirates will appear-indeed, they already have.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom