End Of the Silk Road

Last Friday, Ross Ulbricht received a sentence of life in prison in a New York City federal courtroom.  His crime was drug dealing on a massive scale through a "dark-web" Internet site called Silk Road.  Prosecutors showed how Ulbricht, a libertarian with a master's degree in material science, brokered drug deals worth millions and got paid in the online currency called bitcoin.  In October of 2013, the FBI caught him as he was administering the site from a San Francisco library.  He was convicted in February of this year and sentenced last week.  His lawyers say they will appeal.

Ulbricht had some interesting things to say after hearing his sentence.  What he said shows that he is an extreme case of what can happen when an educational system gets so compartmentalized that it can produce people with massively developed technical abilities along with huge blind spots in their moral views.  Ulbricht apparently saw the drug laws of the various countries in which the Silk Road customers lived as intrusions upon the supreme value in his moral universe, which was freedom.  He rationalized that because these laws stood in the way of those who wished to use drugs, he was actually striking a blow for freedom every time someone used his site to buy illegal drugs.  And of course, he got a tidy profit from the transaction too. 

According to prosecutors, Ulbricht believed so strongly in his right to spread his kind of freedom, that he paid FBI undercover agents to assassinate someone who threatened to make public a list of his customers.  The glaring contradiction between Ulbricht's espousal of freedom and his attempt to take the life of a fellow human being apparently never occurred to him, at least not until he had lots of time to think about his actions in jail.  According to a New York Times report, Ulbricht reflected after he was sentenced that "the laws of nature are much like the laws of man. . . . Gravity doesn't care if you agree with it—if you jump off a cliff you are still going to get hurt.  And even though I didn't agree with the law, I still have been convicted of a crime and must be punished.  I understand that now and I respect the law and authority now."

We will never know for sure if a different educational experience could have stopped Ulbricht from doing what he did.  He grew up in Austin, Texas, graduating from high school there in 2002, and must have picked up some of the sky's-the-limit entrepreneurial atmosphere of the place, because before he went over to the dark side, he operated an online used-book site that donated some of its proceeds to charity.  But the inner compass, conscience, moral fiber, or whatever you want to call it, that keeps the vast majority of ordinary people on the good side of the law most of the time, was missing in his makeup and education.  For all I know, he may have taken an ethics or philosophy course in college, but in his case, it obviously didn't take.

Ulbricht used technologies that were designed at least in part to promote freedom.  Bitcoins are a form of digital currency that is designed to be untraceable, and Silk Road used Tor, a subset of the Web that the U. S. Navy developed to allow secret communication with, for example, freedom fighters in totalitarian countries.  But as Ulbricht himself has learned, freedom is not an absolute virtue, taking precedence over all others.  If you try to act as though it trumps all other values, you can end up in jail.

Ulbricht committed the same sort of error that many fringe sects do:  they take one virtue and put it on a pedestal above all others.   While some might argue with his comparison between the laws of man and the laws of nature, Ulbricht got that one absolutely right.  The moral law is just as objective and real as the law of gravity.  Ulbricht erred in seizing upon one part of that law—the goodness of freedom—to the neglect of the rest, including the Golden Rule:  do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  If he'd been the person threatening to reveal the names of customers, I don't think he would have liked it if someone put out a contract on him. 

This kind of moral reasoning is not rocket science.  But Ross Ulbricht's case shows that a highly intelligent person can get all the way through a complex educational system in the U. S. without being able to bring himself to reason morally in a way that most twelve-year-olds can.

All that human law can do is to try to model the moral law, whose ultimate source is God.  To the extent that it does so, it can serve as a teacher, though sometimes its lessons are painful to learn, as Ross Ulbricht has found.  A high priority in libertarian circles these days is liberalization of drug laws, and some states such as Colorado have already found that the effects of practical legalization of marijuana are not all good.  While drugs, like the Internet, can be used either for good or harm, I think Ulbricht now has a different view of human laws after his experiences than he did in his more innocent libertarian days.  Yes, some people will abuse drugs no matter what kind of laws are passed.  But if people are taught, both in school and by the laws, that some things are right and other things are wrong, maybe more of them can choose the right paths.  And we won't see as many Ross Ulbrichts running Silk Roads in the future.

Sources:  The news of Ross Ulbricht's conviction was carried by many news outlets such as the New York Times on May 30, 2015 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/nyregion/ross-ulbricht-creator-of-silk-road-website-is-sentenced-to-life-in-prison.html.  I also referred to a New Yorker online article by Joshua Kopstein posted on Oct. 3, 2013 at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-the-ebay-of-illegal-drugs-came-undone.  I blogged on Ulbricht's Silk Road on Jan. 20, 2014.  For more on the absolute nature of the moral law, see C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, available in numerous print editions and online at https://archive.org/details/TheAbolitionOfMan_229.

Wearing a Mask on the Web

There are lots of reasons to wear a mask, some good and some not so good.  On Halloween, kids have mostly harmless fun by donning masks and dressing up as their favorite cartoon characters, or anything else their imagination (and their parents) can come up with.  But criminals also wear masks to conceal identity for nefarious purposes.  At least in Western countries, I'm not aware of any law against simply wearing a mask, although you have to choose your circumstances carefully.  Outside of Halloween or a costume party, a person walking around in a mask may be suspected of either serious eccentricity or illegal doings.

When you go online these days, your identity is as obvious to websites you visit as it is in person.  Cookies and easily purchased commercial databases make it easy for both individuals and companies to identify you and figure out things about you that you may not even be aware of yourself.  So wouldn't it be convenient if there was some way to wear a mask on the Internet?  It turns out that there is:  a type of freeware called Tor, which was developed with support by, believe it or not, the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory, and still largely supported financially by the U. S. government.  Tor has recently been used for a lot of underhanded doings, most prominently the Silk Road affair.

A fellow going by the online name of Dread Pirate Roberts (a character who always wears a mask in the cult-classic movie The Princess Bride) designed a clandestine website called Silk Road to deal in illegal drugs and other illicit material.  To protect both his own identity and those of his customers, he required users to communicate with him using Tor, which virtually guarantees anonymity on the Web.  The medium of exchange on Silk Road was bitcoin, a virtual currency that is also (virtually) untraceable and often used for illegal transactions.

Dread Pirate Roberts, whose real name was Ross William Ulbricht, eventually made enough mistakes online, such as using his real email address on occasion, to allow the FBI to catch up with him last October.  He is now awaiting trial on numerous charges, and may wish that he'd never heard of Tor.  So why is the government supporting software used by criminals?

Just as kids at Halloween usually don't mean any harm by wearing masks, there are legitimate reasons to be anonymous on the Web.  Suppose you are a dissident in a country run by a nasty dictatorship.  Using Tor can allow you to communicate over the Internet with fellow dissidents or supporters outside your country.  Law enforcement agencies do not care to have their confidential online activities viewable or traceable by all and sundry, and I'm sure that domestic and international security issues were an important driving force behind the Naval Research Lab's support of Tor.  But because it's cross-platform freeware, just about anybody with a computer and enough knowhow to install a Web browser can don a Tor mask online and instantly become very hard to trace.  It's a little like a digital invisibility cloak, and we all know what happened to the Invisible Man:  nothing good.

That is not to say that anyone using Tor will inevitably develop bad habits of flaming websites anonymously and dealing in child porn or crystal meth, payable in bitcoin.  But the developers who decided to make Tor widely available as freeware were making a decision that they may not have explored the full implications of.  Just to move the situation in imagination to the physical world, suppose Wal-Mart came up with a good, cheap invisibility drug and decided to make it free for everybody, and the Wal-Mart greeters handed it out as you walked in the door.  I'm sure there are legitimate reasons to be invisible, but my guess is that the vast majority of people who decided to take advantage of the offer would do things that are inadvisable at best, and more probably illegal, immoral, and maybe even fattening.  (Don't like the way you look?  Become invisible and who can tell?) I'm not liking where that fantasy is going, so I think I'll stop here.

No one I have read on this subject is saying that defects in Tor led to Ulbricht's arrest, or that we should rethink whether Tor ought to be freely available.  The fact that it's not that well known makes it unlikely that we'll see a rash of online crimes committed by newly invisible Internet users.  But Tor enables the existence of what various news articles on the Silk Road incident have referred to as the Deep Web or the Dark Web, because Tor renders a website invisible to the usual search engines and so on.  For most commercial websites, their problem is increasing their visibility, not the other way around, so they have no incentive to use Tor.  But for sites dealing with unpopular, persecuted, or illegal activities, Tor is still available.

Ulbricht is awaiting trial, so I should refer to him as the "alleged" mastermind of Silk Road, although the evidence pointing to him is pretty convincing.  Whatever the other facts of the case may be, Ulbricht's use of Tor did make it harder for the FBI to catch him, just as masks make it more difficult to identify a guy who knocks over the convenience store down the street.  But there are other ways to catch crooks, and it looks like we will all just have to get used to a world where you can wear a mask on the Internet as well as in real life.

Sources:  I referred to articles on the Silk Road affair published in the online version of Time magazine at http://nation.time.com/2013/10/04/a-simple-guide-to-silk-road-the-online-black-market-raided-by-the-fbi/ and by the website Verge at http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/2/4795502/the-fbi-busted-silk-road-but-not-the-dark-web-behind-it, as well as the Wikipedia articles "Tor (anonymity network)" and "The Princess Bride."  My blog "Bitcoin:  Currency of the Future?" appeared on Oct. 16, 2011.