The family of Ross Ulbricht on Friday said the founder of the illicit online marketplace Silk Road, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for extensive online criminal activity, would be released from jail in January—and thanked president-elect Donald Trump for his support.
Members of the Libertarian Party stand in chairs while chanting and demanding the release of Ross ... [+]
The family shared the message via the @Free_Ross account on X, the profile for a nonprofit of the same name that has fought for his release since his arrest in 2013.
It’s unclear if the Ulbricht family’s post comes after recent conversations with Trump since he won re-election on Tuesday, or if they’re relying on past “day one” promises to commute the 40-year-old’s sentence Trump made earlier in his campaign.
Neither Trump nor the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York have responded publicly to the family’s claim, but it comes after the president-elect promised on the campaign trail to commute Ulbricht’s sentence.
Ulbricht, who was 31 at the time, was convicted of distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents and conspiring to commit money laundering.
The #FreeRoss movement has been supported by Libertarian voters, to whom Trump promised he’d release Ulbricht if elected in a speech at the party’s national convention in May, and by the cryptocurrency community Trump spent much of his campaign courting, many of whom saw Silk Road as the first real use for the decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence, which would see him freed from the high-security federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, in which he is serving time, but not fully pardoned, or relieved of all guilt associated with his convicted crimes.
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Ulbricht, a Texas native who went by the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” founded the anonymous e-commerce website Silk Road in 2011, which law enforcement authorities would later call "the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet." The website allowed buyers and sellers to exchange goods—and pay via cryptocurrency—without any paper trail connecting them back to their purchase. The site ran on the Tor network, which allowed Ulbricht to conceal the IP addresses of computers on the network and hide their locations. Before it was shut down in October 2013, Silk Road was used largely as a marketplace to sell illegal drugs and other illegal goods, though Ulbricht’s family has maintained he himself did not participate in the illegal dealings and was simply “an entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy.” Ulbricht earned more than $13 million in commissions from illicit sales on the site and was accused by law enforcement officials of soliciting six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site, although there was no evidence that those murders were actually carried out. Silk Road was also linked to the drug overdose deaths of six people. At the time of his arrest, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara called Ulbricht "a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people."
Ulbricht has become a martyr for Libertarians who believe in limited government intervention and those who believe internet activity should be kept private. When he was sentenced, judge Katherine B. Forrest said a harsh sentence was necessary to send a clear signal to others that "you cannot run a massive criminal enterprise and, because it occurred over the internet, minimize the crime committed on that basis.” Others see him as a hero. Students for Liberty, an international libertarian organization, called Ulbricht "a hero worthy of our praise... for his courage to break the law." Filmmaker Alex Winter wrote in an op-ed for Rolling Stone that while the site was "inarguably a criminal operation, there was much more to Silk Road than its portrayal in the media... (Users) were not only there for drugs but for the freedom of an encrypted and anonymous space, to convene and discuss everything from politics to literature and art, philosophy and drugs, drug recovery, and the onerous War on Drugs." Ulbricht himself told the court he ‘wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity.”