Ross Ulbricht
Ross William Ulbricht is an American convict best known for creating and operating the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013. The site was designed to use Tor for anonymity and bitcoin as a currency. Ulbricht's online pseudonym was "Dread Pirate Roberts" after the fictional character in the novel The Princess Bride and its film adaptation.
In February 2015, Ulbricht was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics by means of the internet. In May 2015, he was sentenced to a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole. Ulbricht's appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2017 and the U.S Supreme Court in 2018 were unsuccessful. He is currently incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson.
Early life and education
Ulbricht grew up in the Austin metropolitan area. He was a Boy Scout, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. He attended West Ridge Middle School, and Westlake High School, both near Austin. He graduated from high school in 2002.He attended the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship, and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He then attended Pennsylvania State University, where he was in a master's degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography. By the time Ulbricht graduated, he had become interested in libertarian economic theory. In particular, Ulbricht adhered to the political philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, supported Ron Paul, and participated in college debates to discuss his economic views.
Ulbricht graduated from Penn State in 2009 and returned to Austin. By this time Ulbricht, finding regular employment unsatisfying, wanted to become an entrepreneur, but his first attempts to start his own business failed. He tried day trading and started a video game company. His mother claimed that his LinkedIn profile referred to a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, not a darknet market, when it stated, "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." He eventually partnered with his friend Donny Palmertree to help build an online used book seller, Good Wagon Books.
Silk Road, arrest and trial
Silk Road used Tor and bitcoin. Tor is a network which implements protocols that encrypt data and routes internet traffic through intermediary servers that anonymize IP addresses before reaching a final destination. By hosting his market as a Tor site, Ulbricht could conceal its IP address. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency; while all bitcoin transactions are recorded in a log called the blockchain, users who avoid linking their identities to their online "wallets" can conduct transactions with considerable anonymity.Ulbricht used the Dread Pirate Roberts username for Silk Road. However, whether he was the only one to use that account is disputed. Dread Pirate Roberts attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace as "Alongside Night and the works of Samuel Edward Konkin III."
Ulbricht began to work on developing his online marketplace in 2010 as a side project to Good Wagon Books. He also sporadically kept a diary during the operating history of Silk Road; in his first entry he outlined his situation prior to launch, and predicted he would make 2011 "a year of prosperity" through his ventures. Ulbricht may also have included a reference to Silk Road on his LinkedIn page, where he discussed his wish to "use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind" and claimed "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." Ulbricht moved to San Francisco prior to his arrest.
Ulbricht was first connected to "Dread Pirate Roberts" by Gary Alford, an IRS investigator working with the DEA on the Silk Road case, in mid-2013. The connection was made by linking the username "altoid", used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname "altoid", asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name. In October 2013, Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI while at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and accused of being the "mastermind" behind the site.
To prevent Ulbricht from encrypting or deleting files on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, two agents pretended to be quarreling lovers. When they had sufficiently distracted him, according to Joshuah Bearman of Wired, a third agent grabbed the laptop while Ulbricht was distracted by the apparent lovers' fight and handed it to agent Thomas Kiernan. Kiernan then inserted a flash drive in one of the laptop's USB ports, with software that copied key files.
On August 21, 2014, Ulbricht was charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. He was ordered held without bail.
On February 4, 2015, Ulbricht was convicted on all counts after a jury trial that took place in January 2015. On May 29, 2015, he was sentenced to double life imprisonment plus forty years, without the possibility of parole.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people, allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise. Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred. Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder-for-hire, but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations. The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence. A separate indictment against Ulbricht in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees, was dismissed with prejudice by prosecutors in July 2018, after his New York conviction and sentence became final.
After the conviction
Ulbricht appealed his conviction and sentence to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in January 2016, centered on claims that the prosecution illegally withheld evidence of DEA agents' malfeasance in the investigation of Silk Road, for which two agents were convicted. Ulbricht also argued his sentence was too harsh. Oral argument was heard in October 2016, and the Second Circuit issued its decision in May 2017, upholding Ulbricht's conviction and life sentence in an opinion written by Judge Gerard E. Lynch. In a 139-page opinion, the court affirmed the district court's denial of Ulbricht's motion to suppress certain evidence; affirmed the district court's decisions on discovery and the admission of expert testimony; and rejected Ulbricht's argument that a life sentence was procedurally or substantively unreasonable.In December 2017, Ulbricht filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the United States Supreme Court, asking the Court to hear his appeal on evidentiary and sentencing issues. Twenty-one amici filed five amicus curiae briefs in support of Ulbricht, including the National Lawyers Guild, American Black Cross, Reason Foundation, Drug Policy Alliance, and Downsize DC Foundation. The U.S. government filed a response in opposition to Ulbricht's petition. On June 28, 2018, the Supreme Court denied the petition, declining to consider Ulbricht's appeal.
In 2019, Ulbricht attempted to vacate his life sentence, based on a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel by his defense lawyers; this attempt was rejected in August 2019.