Uploaded January 2017 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Alex Winter: "I made contact with probably 30 to 40 of the core architects of the Silk Road and winnowed that down to about six to ten that I felt really had been instrumental in putting it together. And those were my sources. ..there was an agenda to keep Ross identified as a lone individual in charge of all of this. So that made the sentencing a lot more extreme and I would say unarguably unjust.
They wanted to bag a trophy. Certain people within the government made that very clear about Ross in the very beginning: that they had found this guy in San Francisco, he was the reason for all these horrible things happening on the internet, he was the reason that there was this terrible, evil thing called the Darknet that was filled with terrible people, we have to hang this guy from the highest tree. And that was, sadly, was why I knew the case was going to go down the way that it did– I knew that in 2013 because it was evident then that the government was adamant that they pile as much as their animus and their fear on this individual. And then what is more grotesque and Kafkaesque is there’s a cost component. The federal government doesn’t usually bring something to trial unless they’re 100% sure they can win, and win swiftly and simply. So why would they start going after all the other people who were behind the Silk Road who were scattered all over the place -- in Thailand, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Spain? They were all over the place. And the government knows this because they’ve actually gone after a number of those people on much lesser charges. It benefitted them to put as much of the onus of this on one person who they could as swiftly and cheaply as possible – sad to say someone’s life is in the balance – run through the system and sock them away for as long as humanly possible, tag as much of a sentence on them as they can so that it hopefully acts as a deterrent.
It’s tragic for a number of reasons, I would argue. I didn’t like sitting in the courtroom and watching someone get sentenced to double life sentences without possibility of parole, one of the most depressing things I’ve ever witnessed in my life. You know, there’s a person behind all this who’s in jail, ostensibly for the rest of his life, and that is a tragedy and it’s wrong and the sentence is wrong and there really does need to be activity around this and awareness around it.
And on top of that, you know, the government is expanding ever greatly their powers to prosecute and to criminalize in all these different areas. So people are losing their rights day by day by day. We lost a ton of them under Obama. I can’t imagine that Trump is going to be helpful in this regard. So these are really serious issues, and they really do need to be addressed. So I think that Ross, sadly, found himself at the intersection of a number of areas that are over-prosecuted – cybercrime (people don’t understand it); Cryptocurrency (financial regulators are terrified of it which is what just happened with the IRS and coin base); and the Drug War.
Silk Road was very similar to Napster. There had to be something that brought the community together, and this idea of an online marketplace where you could literally access (almost) anything, made a lot of noise and brought a lot of people together. And if you were on the forums, which I was, the forums were talking about art, politics, philosophy, music, you name it, and they were very robust. And the people who were most saddened from that community when it went down were mostly saddened because they’d lost that community. They’d lost that thread and they started to rebuild it in different ways. That doesn’t go for every Darknet market, but again Darknet markets are a tiny fraction of the Darknet and a miniscule fraction of any kind of trade, period. But the loss of community was significant. "
Alex Winter: "I made contact with probably 30 to 40 of the core architects of the Silk Road and winnowed that down to about six to ten that I felt really had been instrumental in putting it together. And those were my sources. ..there was an agenda to keep Ross identified as a lone individual in charge of all of this. So that made the sentencing a lot more extreme and I would say unarguably unjust.
They wanted to bag a trophy. Certain people within the government made that very clear about Ross in the very beginning: that they had found this guy in San Francisco, he was the reason for all these horrible things happening on the internet, he was the reason that there was this terrible, evil thing called the Darknet that was filled with terrible people, we have to hang this guy from the highest tree. And that was, sadly, was why I knew the case was going to go down the way that it did– I knew that in 2013 because it was evident then that the government was adamant that they pile as much as their animus and their fear on this individual. And then what is more grotesque and Kafkaesque is there’s a cost component. The federal government doesn’t usually bring something to trial unless they’re 100% sure they can win, and win swiftly and simply. So why would they start going after all the other people who were behind the Silk Road who were scattered all over the place -- in Thailand, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Spain? They were all over the place. And the government knows this because they’ve actually gone after a number of those people on much lesser charges. It benefitted them to put as much of the onus of this on one person who they could as swiftly and cheaply as possible – sad to say someone’s life is in the balance – run through the system and sock them away for as long as humanly possible, tag as much of a sentence on them as they can so that it hopefully acts as a deterrent.
It’s tragic for a number of reasons, I would argue. I didn’t like sitting in the courtroom and watching someone get sentenced to double life sentences without possibility of parole, one of the most depressing things I’ve ever witnessed in my life. You know, there’s a person behind all this who’s in jail, ostensibly for the rest of his life, and that is a tragedy and it’s wrong and the sentence is wrong and there really does need to be activity around this and awareness around it.
And on top of that, you know, the government is expanding ever greatly their powers to prosecute and to criminalize in all these different areas. So people are losing their rights day by day by day. We lost a ton of them under Obama. I can’t imagine that Trump is going to be helpful in this regard. So these are really serious issues, and they really do need to be addressed. So I think that Ross, sadly, found himself at the intersection of a number of areas that are over-prosecuted – cybercrime (people don’t understand it); Cryptocurrency (financial regulators are terrified of it which is what just happened with the IRS and coin base); and the Drug War.
Silk Road was very similar to Napster. There had to be something that brought the community together, and this idea of an online marketplace where you could literally access (almost) anything, made a lot of noise and brought a lot of people together. And if you were on the forums, which I was, the forums were talking about art, politics, philosophy, music, you name it, and they were very robust. And the people who were most saddened from that community when it went down were mostly saddened because they’d lost that community. They’d lost that thread and they started to rebuild it in different ways. That doesn’t go for every Darknet market, but again Darknet markets are a tiny fraction of the Darknet and a miniscule fraction of any kind of trade, period. But the loss of community was significant. "
