I'm amazed at how often the defence story in these cases, "He had a stellar, 15-year career with the DEA except for this one blip.", is accepted at face value. I imagine a smart, experienced, undercover DEA agent would be very difficult to catch breaking the law.
Near where I live we have a police chief who was sentenced to ~five years in prison back in 2005.
>> "U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein told Sam Jimmie Mann, 64, that he imposed a sentence at the lower end of the sentencing guidelines because of Mann's long record of good conduct before his crimes."
Which is a laughable farce because: The crimes he was found guilty of occurred continuously over three years. They were investigated a number of times and were infamous for being one of the worst speed-traps in the state going back two decades.
>> "That town has been known as a speed trap for 20-plus years and this county doesn't need a speed trap. And the county doesn't need the liability associated with this type of contract," Wright says.
Wright was a local sheriff, and a former Texas Ranger who had previously investigated Mann but was unable to make a good criminal case against him.
>> "Mann and Davis ran what prosecutors called their "own private toll road," on a section of U.S. 59 in Kendleton, a town of about 500 about 40 miles southwest of Houston, between November 1997 and May 2000."
To translate, they were stopping motorists, writing bogus tickets, using fake warrants, threatening arrest, demanding cash, taking any cash they found, and keeping some of it for themselves. They were IRL brigands.
There are only two kinds of criminals. The "long history of violence and trouble" type and the "honors student with a lapse in judgement" type.
Same thing whenever somebody goes on a shooting rampage. All the neighbors either say "I always knew there was something strange with that boy" or they say "I can't believe it, he was such a sweet kid".
What are the odds that he decides his first and last heist is multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of bitcoin? I'd bet anyone dinner this asshole has been stealing from drug busts routinely for years.
If he's smart the odds are pretty good. The "best" type of crime you do just once and never again, and if you do a crime once you might as well make it a lucrative one.
He almost certainly was just too lazy or too stupid. I don't mean unintelligent here. I mean that he didn't give it enough thought, either because he is lazy, or because he didn't know he should have been more careful. The technology those people use isn't magic, and for someone on the inside, it is completely trivial to circumvent. It can't have just been a matter of misjudging the technological capabilities of his peers. And I completely agree that he has probably been dirty for years and years and only recently got caught. People are either dirty, or they're not. I have a very hard time believing that people can slowly become dirty cops over time. That kind of moral compass is hard to recalibrate outside of some kind of psychological trauma. I mean, based purely on anecdotal evidence, of course.
Among the crimes he confessed to, Force said he had agreed to a contract with 21st Century Fox last year to help make a film about the Silk Road investigation, without the permission of his supervisors. That deal called for him to be paid up to $240,000.
Force also invested in a company that brokered Bitcoin and served as its chief compliance officer while still with the DEA.
During his time with the company, Force used his position to seize $300,000 from a customer and transfer it to his private account, authorities said.
This guy was dirty, probably from the get go. It really makes you wonder if this will give Ulbricht more life in a new trial. I mean, this guy did stuff that was flat out against the law, and really compromises his integrity with regards to the trial. There's no telling what other sketchy stuff he did to get this conviction.
And he's not the only dirty cop who was on the case either:
US Secret Service special agent Shaun Bridges will plead guilty to charges of money laundering and wire fraud stemming from the government investigation into the illicit online black market Silk Road.
Can you be specific about how this compromises the Ulbricht trial? Start from the indictment, make a list of the facts that the prosecution had to establish, and find the places where they relied on Force.
From what I can tell, this case was over as soon as they managed to get Ulbricht's unlocked laptop.
In sentencing, prosecutors submitted a number of comments alluding to Ulbricht's alleged but not proven in trial murder for hire plots. The assumed motive for these alleged murder plots was the actual theft of bitcoins which we now learn was perpetrated by government agents and witnesses against Ulbricht.
There were multiple criminal cases filed against Ulbricht by separate jurisdictions for wholly separate crimes. Force was involved in only a single criminal case (the alleged murder-for-hires), and that case was dropped when Force and another investigator in that case were arrested.
I think this is also somewhat inaccurate, as Ulbricht was charged for the murder-for-hire scheme in the indictment that ultimately convicted him. There is a very popular misconception that he wasn't convicted for the hit-man scheme, but he was; it just wasn't a murder charge.
Nope, you're completely wrong. It's not a misconception that Ulbricht wasn't convicted for the hit-man scheme because that wasn't part of the New York indictment. A person is "charged" with "counts" of specific crimes. The murder-for-hire is mentioned only as an alleged overt act in pursuance of a Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy count with which Ulbricht is charged.
Someone else has already provided the indictment in the New York court case. http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=126792875&... Nowhere in the New York indictment is Ulbricht charged with attempted murder or murder-for-hire.
The murder-for-hire charge was part of a Maryland court case in which Force and the other convicted investigator participated and which was subsequently dropped because of their malfeasance. See Count 2 of the Superseding Indictment. https://ia601904.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.238....
Other commenters have already pointed out your error. Don't compound it by trying to argue legal semantics you clearly don't understand.
I have no idea why you think a citation to the Maryland case involving Force is some kind of mic drop. What part of this analysis of the New York case that I wrote a month ago do you disagree with? Can you be as specific as possible? You've identified yourself in the past as a criminal defense lawyer (I am not a lawyer), so you should have no trouble knocking it down.
I only know about the one case. Care to fill us in?
>Force was involved in only a single criminal case (the alleged murder-for-hires), and that case was dropped when Force and another investigator in that case were arrested.
>>In sentencing, prosecutors submitted a number of comments alluding to Ulbricht's alleged but not proven in trial murder for hire plots. The assumed motive for these alleged murder plots was the actual theft of bitcoins which we now learn was perpetrated by government agents and witnesses against Ulbricht.
No, I don't believe it is of much consequence, since the evidence that convicted Ulbricht was not derived from Force's investigation.
Again: Ulbricht used full-disk encryption and nothing else to protect his data (OPSEC lesson: don't do that), and was captured with his laptop unlocked. There was a glittering dragon hoard treasure trove of evidence on that thing. It's practically the case that everything he was charged for, he confessed --- in detail --- to his journal about. His journal! The case was over as soon as they imaged the laptop.
Is it possible for the court to revisit sentencing without a new trial? Because I am not at all impressed with prosecutors making use of the murder plot stuff in sentencing after federal agents provoked the whole bit (not excusing Ulbricht's part in it, mind you). I think we're all a lot better off if the gov't is restrained from engaging in that kind of behavior, or taking advantage of this kind of gambit in any way.
Sentencing can be appealed, but you'd need to prove that excluding the evidence would result in a substantially different outcome. It seems unlikely the appeals court would agree that the life sentence was a result of this evidence alone.
No! Not in a different case! In the case he was convicted for! Read the actual indictment. It's staggering to me how people can be so firmly convicted of things about this case that are refuted by even a casual reading of the primary sources. Come on. You not only repeated a meme that is contradicted by the most basic filing in the whole case, but constructed a whole narrative about specific prosecutorial misconduct based on that meme.
Count One, Overt Acts, section b.? I saw that, but I don't see any charge or indictment of "murder-for-hire" they just sort of threw it in there. The crime charged is Title 21 section 846 "Attempt and conspiracy". Title 21 United States Code is the Controlled Substances Act.
It's not "just thrown in there". It's an overt act supporting the conspiracy charge. It was introduced into the case in such a way that rebutting that claim would harm the prosecution's case --- which is not something they were required to do, given the enormous wealth of evidence they collected for all manner of other overt acts.
It is literally the opposite of what you've been claiming it is. It was ventured by the prosecution as a formal piece of the case. The prosecution actually staked part of their case on it being true.
Okay, just so we're clear here, you're no longer claiming that Ulbricht was indicted with a charge of "murder-for-hire" or conspiring to hire a murder in USA v. Ulbricht, Case No. 1:14-cr-00068-KBF New York Southern District Court. Is that correct?
>It is literally the opposite of what you've been claiming it is.
I'm going to borrow a quote from you here:
>Read the actual indictment. It's staggering to me how people can be so firmly convicted of things about this case that are refuted by even a casual reading of the primary sources. Come on.
Indeed. Come on. You're mistaken. Stop digging. I hope this saves you further embarrassment. No need to thank me now. Good day.
>It was ventured by the prosecution as a formal piece of the case. The prosecution actually staked part of their case on it being true.
Sounds like a good argument for re-sentencing or maybe even a new trial; and also a good argument for prosecutors not to try to include such shabby evidence in their cases lest they risk an otherwise strong case.
I really can't tell what you're trying to argue here. Ulbricht was indeed indicted for conspiring to hire a murder, in the case in which he was convicted; he was convicted of conspiring to hire a murder, among other things. The defense failed to rebut the alleged facts.
>Ulbricht was indeed indicted for conspiring to hire a murder, in the case in which he was convicted
There is no need for you to repeat that statement again without showing me where in the indictment document Ulbricht is actually indicted with a crime entitled "murder-for-hire". I don't see it. I've given you a link to a copy of the indictment for USA v. Ulbricht, Case No. 1:14-cr-00068-KBF, New York Southern District Court
And I've asked you to point out where in the document the indictment for "murder-for-hire"; I certainly could've missed it and I wouldn't mind clearing it up.
An indictment is a formal charge of a specific crime. The murder-for-hire plot was alleged in the New York indictment but only as an overt act in furtherance of the actual charge of Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy.
This would seem to me to be a meaningful rebuttal if Ulbricht hadn't been charged with an inchoate crime. But he was charged with conspiracy, a parameterized charge, and so the overt acts listed in the indictment do in fact matter. See, for instance, model jury instructions for the crime of "Conspiracy" with "overt acts".
You're hung up on whether he's charged with murder, conspiracy, hacking, or whatever. I'm not. I don't care. The only thing I'm here to rebut is the pervasive meme that the Ulbricht murder-for-hire scheme was introduced informally by the prosecution in order to taint the jury and the judge. As you can plainly see, it wasn't: it was introduced in one of the most formal ways possible, in a manner that meant that its rebuttal at trial would have harmed the prosecution's case.
> I mean, this guy did stuff that was flat out against the law, and really compromises his integrity with regards to the trial. There's no telling what other sketchy stuff he did to get this conviction.
I had wondered what would happen to the DEA agent mentioned in the big Wired stories[0][1].
As a Bitcoin novice, I was left wondering: is it a common misconception that Bitcoin is anonymous? Or rather, just how easy is it to trace someone's transactions if you know their wallet ID?
The bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger. Unless a mixing service is involved, you can trace back each transaction to an origin easily. If that origin can be linked to a person (e.g. through a trade service that knows bank details and other personal data) then you are no longer anonymous.
Moving coins around a few times to different wallets/addresses makes plausible deniability easier and the trace harder, but if you are a high profile target, you probably want to be more thorough with obfuscating and/or outright disrupting the path through the blockchain that eventually leads back to you.
A mixing service will basically perform money laundering for you, disrupting the direct path back to your initial transaction.
tl;dr: It can be anonymous, but by default it's not really.
Especially if you move your coins through different wallets a few times to obfuscate, and then consolidate them back into the same wallet where you attempt to convert it into cash... obfuscating the intermediary wallets isn't going to do you much good if it can be shown you control the starting and ending wallets. headdesk
Thanks for the detailed followup. Is there any case precedent for prosecuting money laundering like this? It seems to me that the path can still be rebuilt. I guess the criminality depends on the crime and the jurisdiction? (And the law. Obviously I'm not a lawyer, lol.)
don't know about the legal side, but from a technical side, the laundering services pool all of their client's money together in one churning pot. Which makes it very difficult to see whose money is actually going where.
> is it a common misconception that Bitcoin is anonymous?
On a practical level its anonymous. Its trivial to move coins around to various exchanges that makes it difficult or impossible to trace. Jurisdictions come into play here as well. If I steal some coins in the US and move them to a Latvian exchange, then a Russian one, then a Swiss one, then finally cash out in a Chinese one, who will be even able to track me down? Who will respect all these warrants?
A real life example is what's going on with cryptolocker-like malware. People are paying hundreds of dollars in bitcoins to these ransomwares for almost two years now, yet there have been zero arrests.
I imagine laundering bitcoins is easy to do as well by trading value in a shared pot. Hell, you could just trade one 'hot' wallet for another and again and again. Now the path is even more obfuscated.
Yes, I read /r/sysadmin, Brian Krebs, /r/netsec, etc everyday (Sysadmining and securing our environment is one of my job responsibilities) and its not only out there, its gotten bigger. I see it blocked on my firewall, filtered out in our mail, etc. More players have entered the market (there are several active variants now) and the malware is smarter. The malware uses new tricks to infect (html file in a zip file that just does a redirect to a exe hosted on the web), bundled with 'crimepacks' that perform multiple exploits at once (java, flash, etc), running as a word macro, running fully in memory to avoid disk write restrictions, etc. We've shored up our defenses significantly but unless we move to a whitelisted-only executable environment, then it will probably get through eventually.
One of my chief complaints about Windows 10 is that it does absolutely nothing to solve the "download invoice.pdf.exe" problem Windows suffers from. At least in Linux that file needs to be given a +x and in OSX non-Apple signed executable need to be approved in the system settings. Windows is still the wild west. Its a shame MS didn't use Win10 as a way to lock things down to address today's threats. Signature based AV cannot move faster than a certain speed and malware like Cryptovariants move much, much faster than that. Heuristics are terrible for some reason on popular AV's and everyone is constantly getting infected.
Yeah, leave exceptions for power users and enterprise, but by default it should not allow untrusted unsigned content to run by default.
I told myself that if I ever start my own company that actually allows me to quit my dayjob it would be 100% OSX environment on the client-side. MS just doesn't take security very seriously, its targeted badly, and even the pro-netsec people at MS that want to be better with security are knocked down by the other politics of having 20-30 years of legacy support for ancient apps and not breaking anything. Its just not able to keep up with modern threats. Its a shame Win10 isn't shipping with a Windows store only policy for installs and some kind of OSX-like exception in the control panel for whitelisting. Devs would hate, IT departments would lose their shit, but in a few months we'd all be used to it and the internet would be much safer.
There are various GP solutions available to lock down Windows and if you're a really large scale environment I think Active Directory is pretty respectable.
Except they don't work, or at least anymore. We have a generic one about blocking certain filetypes from being run in a zip (which is the standard vector for now) but all the other ones about blocking certain parts of the user's profile don't work. The malware just keeps trying different locations if its denied write access somewhere.
A Bitcoin transaction between two parties is itself pretty obscure. As others have said, "mixing" techniques like CoinJoin [0] allow for much greater obscurity. The big misunderstanding is with services that use Bitcoin; for example, the agreement to send $50k in Bitcoin was probably in a message log in a Silk Road database.
As far as I know, all dark net markets (including Silk Road when it was around) strongly recommend that you encrypt all text containing sensitive information using PGP.
If PGP was used, I wonder with what security each party guarded their PGP key. I could imagine DPR's PGP key getting compromised following his arrest. This would reveal half of the conversation -- likely enough to spawn an investigation of the DEA agent.
There is no concept of "wallet ID" in Bitcoin transactions as transmitted over the wire. There are only input and output values in transactions (which do have an ID number).
If you know someone is connected to a given input, then you can trace them through any outputs to other parties.
So it's not quite as simple as a "wallet ID". The transactions in given Bitcoin wallet software may be connected to each other (by the mechanism I describe above), but are not necessarily connected, particularly if you generate a new address for each transaction for which you are the receiving party (and/or take additional precautionary measures). It's entirely possible to have a wallet full of untraceable transactions.
You can also use a tumbler, which is basically where you and several other people all run your coins into one wallet, and then withdraw random amounts up to the amount you put in. Obviously the issue there is someone needs to keep track of who has how much in the tumbler, but I imagine there's services out there.
That would be a bad tumbler design. A better design pays you out in bitcoins that have no connection to the bitcoins you paid in. Say you pay into wallet A and someone else pays into wallet B then you could get paid entierly out of wallet B. Then the only person who could follow the path would be the owner of wallets A and B.
If you're guaranteed to not get any BTC back you put in, then that seems like it could reveal information in itself. Perhaps a better design would be it totally randomly redistributes.
I see -- I think the above argument is that the tumbling service, i.e. owner of wallets A and B, has the evidence of laundering. Concentrated in one place it's easier to protect, and easier to attack, I guess?
No, it has nothing to do with where it's concentrated; I don't know of any tumbler designs that aren't concentrated in one place.
It has to do with that if Alice gets a Bitcoin by selling uncensored newspapers in China, transfers it to wallet A in the tumbler, and then the tumbler transfers that to Alice's Coinbase account, Alice is going to jail. The transaction record tells us that Alice's Bitcoin came from the uncensored newspaper through an intermediary. The Chinese government can then arrest Alice on suspicion of selling illegal newspapers. At that point Alice must either prove somehow that wallet A in the tumbler is owned by the person who really sold the newspapers (which will be impossible), or admit that she sold the newspapers and used a (bad) tumbler in an attempt to hide her transaction. That is to say, if there's a chain of transactions connecting Alice to the newspaper sale, the tumbler has provided Alice no anonymity.
Contrast this with a more realistic tumbler design: the tumbler owner (let's call him Troy) deposits a bitcoin from Coinbase in wallet A. Alice is the first user of the tumbler, so she gets a bitcoin selling uncensored newspapers in China and deposits it in wallet B. The tumbler owner then forwards the coin from wallet A (minus a fee) into Alice's Coinbase account. Now Bob, as the second user of the tumbler, comes along and deposits a coin he got from selling LSD on the Silk Road into wallet C. Troy then sends the coin Alice got from selling uncensored newspapers (minus a fee) to Bob's Coinbase account.
Alice now has a coin from Coinbase, Bob has a coin from Alice's sale of an uncensored newspaper in China, and Troy the tumbler operator has a coin sitting in wallet C waiting for the next person to use the tumbler. The Chinese government has no way to track the transactions to Alice. IF Bob lives in China the Chinese government could come and accuse him of selling uncensored newspapers, but the accusation would make no sense; he has alibis for some of the days newspapers were sold, he's not educated enough to write, etc., because he didn't sell the newspapers. Bob can even say he used a tumbler, but he used it because he purchased a lot of bondage pornography: embarrassing, but not illegal. But more likely than not, Bob won't even be accused of Alice's crimes, either because he lives in a different country or because the accusations won't make any sense. Both Alice and Bob's anonymity has been protected.
Great explanation, I understand it better from a technical perspective.
I assume Troy is hidden to the authorities, who only have the Blockchain ledger and no other information to go on? That's waht I meant by "concentrated" above -- how likely is it that the Chinese government would find Troy and extract the information out of him with legal threats or with a heavy wrench?
I don't think the owner of the tumbler has any motivation to keep records (after each transaction is complete). So he deletes the records and spares himself the heavy wrench.
If Troy is trustworthy, he'll delete the transaction history.
However, there area number of attacks possible from Troy's perspective. He can keep a transaction history and use it to blackmail Alice and Bob. He can simply keep coins sent to the tumbler and send out nothing. It's very important that Troy be a trusted actor.
> IF Bob lives in China the Chinese government could come and accuse him of selling uncensored newspapers [...] Bob can even say he used a tumbler, but he used it because he purchased a lot of bondage pornography: embarrassing, but not illegal.
Not relevant to the example, but this is totally illegal.
bitcoin is pseudo-anynomous, since the blockchain is a public ledger of all transactions. Mixing services exist to help anonymize transactions, for example.
For a technical solution on bitcoin privacy and providing anonymous bitcoin transactions, see: http://zerocoin.org/
This entire story was very weird, if you give Wired 100% credibility.
It felt to me like Feds wanted to do everything in their power to put him down for lifetime, and I wouldn't be surprise if more skeletons come to the light.
Namely, the part about him hiring a hit man was very fishy. First it was his coworker that agreed to helped Feds to play dead, but then you had some bikers performing multiple hits (supposedly all successful) on people Ross wanted dead. Uhm, so basically a motorbike gang agreed to play along with Feds, plus many "victims" agreed to disappear and play dead for months so that Ross is convinced all that money he paid the gang were for successful hits. Maybe in a Grisham book, but in real life things like that don't line up this good.
Then Feds didn't hesitate to tell judge about all this, but then they decided not to use "evidence" of Ross ordering hits, and focus only on his drug business.
So basically you have a judge that looks at a person that supposedly order multiple hits, who also created website to exchange some drugs. No wonder he got lifetime behind bars.
I don't think drug dealers go to jail for lifetime.
Another thing that struck me was allowing testimony of parents of a teen that drug himself to dead. Seriously? Sure, had not SR, he probably would have never found access to drugs somewhere else.. NOT. How about looking into the quality of their parenthood? Environment he lived in? His school and friends problems? etc etc. But no! Just exactly when was the last time you seen a family trying to shut down Ford car company and put the CEO behind bars because their two young children burnt to death in a car accident caused by a Ford vehicle??
EDIT: my point about Ford was that when did you see last time a car company CEO being found guilty and put in jail for lifetime because his company's vehicles are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including young children.
It is simply not true that the DOJ declined to use evidence of the murder-for-hire scheme in their case. Not only did they do that, but they built a whole leg of their case on it. Ulbricht was charged with attempting a murder-for-hire scheme. That scheme was one of the explicit actions used as the basis for his conspiracy charge. It was presented to the court as something that Ulbricht's defense could (and was obligated to) refute.
This notion that the DOJ tainted the case by telling the judge about a murder-for-hire scheme without charging it is a meme that simply will not die. By repeating it, you're essentially broadcasting that you didn't even bother to read the Ulbricht indictment.
> Just exactly when was the last time you seen a family trying to shut down Ford car company and put the CEO behind bars because their two young children burnt to death in a car accident caused by a Ford vehicle??
I've always secretly wanted the death penalty (insert other serve punishment) for cases like these. This type of corruption & abuse of power systematically reduces our overall faith in the government and should be treated as a high crime (i.e. Treason). We commonly use deterrence as a means to justify strict punishments when convicting drug crimes, but politicians\law enforcement\etc seem to avoid these dragnets. Why can't we hold them to a higher standard? I mean... there's something 'bone chillingly' wrong about an oath-taking public servant poisoning the well.
Agree with the sentiment but I think the death penalty is increasingly problematic when it concerns government corruption (like have your political opponents executed problematic).
>Why can't we hold them to a higher standard?
Because we trust them to police themselves, their peers.
It would be interesting to compile an analysis of exactly such sentences. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that judges do hand down harsher sentences precisely because law enforcement officers should know better. I think there are many impediments to prosecuting corruption, but once it gets to sentencing, my gut instinct is that it's not easy on the guilty.
And for significant corporate crimes too. Often government employees don't get paid like corporate executives so I think it'd be unfair if they alone were held to a higher standard.
I'm with you. And now that eventual movie will have to include the parts about the planning of an initial movie for which payments to the DEA agent went unreported.
Is anyone really surprised by this turn of events? I thought it was common knowledge that the DOJ is irredeemably corrupt, that they don't care about the rights of their citizens (let alone human rights outside our borders) and that they cannot be trusted with anything.
I always thought everyone knew that neither the FBI/NSA with their massive domestic spying campaigns, the DEA with its fallacious war on drugs, nor local police with their rampant violence (esp. towards minorities) can or should ever be trusted.
Did people really not expect this outcome?
Civil forfeiture really should have made the case that law enforcement is nothing but crooks and scoundrels.
>I thought it was common knowledge that the DOJ is irredeemably corrupt,
That is essentially the opposite of the common knowledge of the DOJ. In the legal world, they are seen as very good lawyers who only take on cases they can win. They are also civicly minded because they could make WAY more money in private practice.
Sounds like you are treating people who disagree with you on some issues as irredeemably evil.
"Good lawyers who only take on cases they can win" doesn't exclude corruption. They are very talented and they know how to win in court; all you've claimed is that they are powerful, not that they are not corrupt, and in fact usually power and corruption go hand in hand.
And I think it's equally as feasible to suggest they give up the money in private practice for the power, not out of some moral calling. Federal prosecutors/investigators are some of the most powerful people in this country; they can destroy lives at will with a single glance. That is attractive to many kinds of people, some of whom aren't well-meaning selfless volunteers.
If you want civicly minded people look to the public defender's office, that's full of heroes who do the right thing without high pay or wielding enormous power, just the satisfaction of knowing they may have helped save innocent lives.
> In the legal world, they are seen as very good lawyers who only take on cases they can win. They are also civicly minded because they could make WAY more money in private practice.
The legal world. Hah. Like the legal world is seen by the public as any measure of integrity. The DOJ does all sorts of stupid shit like the Aaron Swartz debacle and the public hates them for these sorts of tactics.
They may have meant the various agencies under DOJ (DEA, FBI, ATF, etc.) and not the US Attorney's office, but then again HN often finds plea bargaining irredeemably evil too.
It's not the plea bargaining itself, it is the wide gap. The way to fix that is if someone is offered a plea deal, and doesn't accept it, then put a cap on the max sentence based on the rejected plea bargain. After all, if a prosecutor was fine with someone getting off on 2 months, why is it necessary to try to lock them up for 20 years if the case goes to trial?
Plea bargaining is not irredeemably evil, setting laws so that a plea bargain is the only reasonable course of action even when you're innocent is evil.
Anyone in law enforcement is in the business of destroying lives. They don't protect people (you can't really, in a free society), they punish people after the fact in an attempt to reduce antisocial/immoral/"impure" behavior. Doing their jobs correctly and with moral forthrightness is making absolutely sure the lives they destroy are lives that deserve to be destroyed. But as it turns out they are human and want to keep their jobs so they inevitably focus on "winning" cases -- that is, not failing to destroy lives, rather than being appropriately cautious with the power they are given.
Cartoonish villians? No. It's more the opposite; they think of themselves as cartoonish superheroes and have a hard-on for "punishing the wicked", and often forget that the wicked aren't always so wicked and maybe the extreme and brutal punishment associated with even being touched by the US justice system isn't appropriate -- but why give up a case you can win and tank your career? The guy in the cubicle next door is happy to get the commendation and promotion if you won't take it.
No, Ulbricht screwed himself when he decided to document, in excruciating detail, every event of his life (including all of his crimes).
I'm talking more abstract: Police brutality against anyone poor or black, the FBI's war on hackers by exploiting the vagueness of the CFAA, etc.
Sometimes the DOJ dogs (including federal prosecutors) direct this incredible destructive capability at people who, arguably, deserve it. But not always.
My question wasn't about Ulbricht. It was simply, "Is anyone really surprised that Force (and other agents involved in this case) turned out to be corrupt?" I'm only surprised they're being prosecuted for it. :P
I want to remind international readers that confessions by a defendant in an American often have little to do with truth, but with calculated odds. One should not assume that just because a defendant "admits" to having done any particular act, that they actually did so. While the confession provides some evidence that the defendant is guilty of something (to the extent that this makes them more likely to be found guilty by a jury of a particular set of charges) the exact details of a confession should be trusted less than the details that result from a full trial.
The confession is a charade, usually coordinated in advance with the prosecution. Almost never is the confession made because the defendant suddenly realizes that wrongness of their actions, and simply wants to avoid burdening everyone with the effort of a lengthy trial. Instead, the defendant is threatened with a terrible punishment, and told that unless they cooperate the chances are high (regardless of their actual guilt) that this punishment will occur. They are offered (or offer on their own) a "plea bargain", where if they confess to a subset of the crimes with which they are charged, they can willingly accept a smaller (though often substantial) punishment.
The contents of the admission are a negotiation between the defendant and the prosecutor. If the prosecutor demands that you confess to being a witch, and that if you don't confess to being a witch there is a high likelihood that you will spend the rest of your life in jail being raped by unpleasant men, you don't quibble about whether or not you are actually a witch. You weigh the chances of a potentially unjust conviction with a horrible outcome against the chances that your lawyer will convince a jury that the charges are false, and if the odds are against you, you confess to being a witch in all the detail the prosecutor requests.
The harsher the punishment the defendant willingly accepts in the "plea bargain", the more likely the admission was made under the duress of an even more severe punishment. The accuracy of the details of the confession are equivalent to a confession under torture. In torture, the punishment begins and in agony you are willing to confess to anything in hope that the punishment will stop. In the plea bargaining system, you are threatened with a terrible punishment and confess to anything in hopes that the punishment will not start. In neither case should the details of the confession be treated as true.
So while I presume this agent did lots of bad things, and probably stole the bitcoins in question, realize that the details of the admission are a just a plausible story written by someone wielding great power, signed under duress by a defendant justifiably scared of this power. In the absence of outside evidence, the exact details should no more be treated as "true" than the dying confessions of a man broken on the wheel.
I am not a lawyer but I wonder about the legal basis behind it. Bitcoins are not a legal currency. If you copy a software it is also not "stealing" but has to do with copyright and special laws (in the codified law systems) had to be made up for this.
I am curious if we have a lawyer here who can comment on this from a legal perspective. Again, Common Law and codified law may be very different here.
Should the US prosecutor be allowed to withhold evidence of this crime when the SilkRoad founder was tried and sentenced..I say no as oges towards the idea of entrapment, etcf
Can you expand on how this would relate to entrapment? The story doesn't seem to indicate that the scam induced DPR to commit a crime he otherwise might not have engaged in.
He was enticed into a the murder for hire scheme by the agent who was stealing from the evidence, by pinning the theft on the object of the murder for hire plot. Doesn't get much dirtier than that.
No. Ulbricht was charged in multiple jurisdictions for multiple crimes. Force was not involved in the trial in which Ulbricht was convicted, and the murder-for-hire charges were not brought up during the trial.
The murder-for-hire charges were brought up during the sentencing phase (after guilt was adjudicated). Normally, judges generally use the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to determine the length of a federal prison sentence, so that sentences are "normalized" across crimes and defendants. (The Guidelines are no longer mandatory, after the 2005 Booker case.) Judges will also consider evidence calling for a reduced (or extended) sentence than the Guidelines would impose.
In this case, the Guidelines called for life imprisonment. The murder-for-hire charges were introduced at the sentencing hearings to counter evidence provided of Ulbricht's good character. Even if the murder-for-hire charges had not been brought up at sentencing, Ulbricht still faced life in prison. Bringing them up in sentencing merely sealed his fate.
>No. Ulbricht was charged in multiple jurisdictions for multiple crimes.
So you keep saying.
>The murder-for-hire charges were brought up during the sentencing phase (after guilt was adjudicated).
Guilt of crimes which according to you are not related.
>The murder-for-hire charges were introduced at the sentencing hearings to counter evidence provided of Ulbricht's good character.
Maybe they affected sentencing then? And since the testimony has been reduced from "let's convict Ulbricht of murder for hire" to "character witness hearsay from disgraced and corrupt federal agents who themselves provoked the alleged crimes by stealing many hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ulbricht"; can sentencing be revisited by the court, or is a new trial required?
>No. Ulbricht was charged in multiple jurisdictions for multiple crimes.
So you keep saying.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. You agree in other threads that Ulbricht was charged of separate crimes in New York and Maryland courts.
Guilt of crimes which according to you are not related.*
I'm not saying the crimes were unrelated at all. I'm saying that the sentencing phase of a trial is different from the guilt phase. In sentencing hearings, the normal rules of evidence are relaxed, so evidence that was excluded from trial can be considered.
Maybe they affected sentencing then?
That's exactly what I'm saying, and that's the reason those allegations and underlying evidence were introduced at the sentencing hearing: to show that Ulbricht deserves to be locked up for a long time.
And since the testimony has been reduced from "let's convict Ulbricht of murder for hire" to "character witness hearsay from disgraced and corrupt federal agents who themselves provoked the alleged crimes by stealing many hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ulbricht"; can sentencing be revisited by the court, or is a new trial required?
Separate case. Ulbricht was convicted of several counts, each of which by themselves would justify a 20+ year sentence or life sentence. It wasn't even necessary to bring up the murder-for-hire allegations. The prosecution only did that because Ulbricht's lawyer tried to argue that he was really just a good guy.
The sentencing can be appealed, but there's a 0% chance that he would succeed at reducing the sentence given that it's well within the established guidelines for crimes of this nature. It's also possible to appeal the underlying conviction, but there's almost 0% chance of that as well, since the murder-for-hire allegations and the acts of the corrupt Maryland federal agents were not relevant to the New York convictions.
There was an earlier plea for a new trial and claims of a Brady violation (withholding this? evidence) that was denied.
But the prosecutors' letter to the judge for sentencing was peppered with comments alluding to the alleged murder plots, which are directly related to the work done on the case by agents Force and Bridges. http://cryptome.org/2015/05/ulbricht-256.pdf
