They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? It's not even in their effective jurisdiction, if this indeed is a Russian national. Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate?
I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that.
> They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead?
The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.
That is not political, it is purely a service offered at a price. There is no specific political agenda behind these pardons (i.e., they don't pardon only folks who are, for example, Evangelicals or anti-immigration or whatever), the only criteria is payment.
> Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
I don't know how much more obvious I can make this for you. Bribery is political.
Bribery is political. But it's not taken to be a usual part of politics in the West. (Similar to how the Roman word for ambush was the same as their word for treason. Treason isn't taken to be a usual part of politics. Ambush, for them, not a usual part of warfare.)
Basically, you're both right because what is and isn't political is itself a political question.
Word meanings evolve. Virtue literally means "manliness" in Classical Latin but only a pedantic dick would insist we use it in that sense. Polis and it's related words meant something different to the Greeks than they do to us.
Right, "Politics" evolved from "affairs of the cities" to "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.".
Selling pardons for money is inherently a very political act. It means that you are aligning yourself with moneyed interests, which is clearly the heart of Trumpist politics. Setting ideology aside even, the open selling of pardons sends the message to the moneyed interests in general that he's on their side, even if they don't need a pardon at this exact moment. It serves both practical (get rich people to like you and therefore donate money to your campaigns and causes to help them succeed) and ideological (supply-sider-esque doctrine going back to at least the protestant reformation says that rich people should be in charge because they're rich, QED) purposes.
The hypothetical pardon was promised by then candidate-Trump in a speech at the Libertarian Party convention.
The specific political agenda was to get support from libertarians, who lean conservative, but don't like Trump much - because he rejects libertarianism.
That's as political as you can possibly get. It wasn't a behind the scenes thing. It was literally announced at a political convention.
I am pretty sure that they only pardon people who are pro or at least neutral to Trump. I doubt that he would part on anybody who's an outspoken critic even if they offered him a bribe.
In 2019, Giuliani's assistant chided John Kirakou that pardons couldn't be discussed in his presence but that the fee was $1 million for Giuliani and $1 million for Trump. Given inflation, I'd bet that pardons now cost around $3 million.
I guess OP means to say it is not idealogical reasons.
Op means to say this type of pardon is not to meant to win votes or satisfy the demands of constituents, Like with convicted cops or people with weed related crimes etc or pardoning draft dodgers after Vietnam or civil war and so on .
While money is involved deeply in politics and financial corruption is there , occasionally idealogical (political) actions without direct financial benefits also happen.
It is hard to say whether this pardon of Silk Road founder was motivated by libertarian, or crypto community pressure or by financial donations to the party etc both are possible even at the same time but they are different considerations
> I guess OP means to say it is not idealogical reasons.
“Government exists for the personal benefit of the leader” (or simply “for my personal benefit as the leader”, with even less generalization beyond that) is an ideology, actually.
It’s not one that is popular to embrace publicly, but, that's hardly unique along real ideologies.
The reporting I've seen is that they were making efforts to get rid of anyone at FBI who would be upset at this. They are also reported to have an employment screening question that requires applicants to say the 2020 election was stolen.
You are talking about Kash Patel's FBI. The guy who has a hit song and book called "The Plot Against The King" pretending the 2020 election has been rigged and who maintains it to this day.
The FBI does what Trump tells them to do, that's it.
And why aren’t the people who “stole” the election being prosecuted by Trumps DOJ and FBI? He had proof remember? I wish liberal media would hammer this point and expose the lie for what it is.
They got me—a copyright infringement lord—too. The FBI profile assigned to me even wrote in a case study that the FBI thought I was making millions, amongst other misses.
Would love to hear more about this if you're inclined to share or have written about it somewhere. Legal contacts betweent he fedreal government and individuals are often surreal.
I read this, and found it to be a disappointing read. It had few details, and instead was more of a social sciences paper, covering basic ideas in academic language.
Roughly it seemed to be suggesting that:
* It's easier to deceive someone if they first solicit for help on a forum
* You can trick someone into revealing sensitive info like which infrastructure provider is used by nerdsniping them: "My mate thinks you should just enable health checking on AWS ELB", and then they reply "Well actually I use Hetzner". Except I'm guessing it was more elaborate than that.
I guess I wasn't the target audience of the article though.
joshmn, what did you think of the article?
Do you find it difficult to trust random commenters online now?
I see you mentioned you can't discuss technical details, but if/whenever that expires (?), that'd be great to hear.
I also found it underwhelming, though I'd like to think I’m the most scrutinizing of the subject matter. There's some nuance between my take on my behavior and the profiler's, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt—they only had my Reddit posts to go on and had to package that for investigators.
I still tend to trust by default and make witty comments or jabs that sometimes land flat, so the article was accurate in that sense.
As for talking to the undercover, I made a point of keeping no secrets about my site's technical implementation. Between me and some "competitors," I was usually the first to respond to upstream provider changes—I'd even share my findings without expecting anything in return. Anyone could’ve asked about my issues, and I would've told them.
Trust is the most valued currency in the piracy world, and I worked hard to earn it with both peers and customers. Acting otherwise would've gone against that—and against my own morals. My being neurodivergent may also be worth noting in my willingness (or unwillingness from a free-will perspective) to trust others.
Technically speaking, the site worked by reverse-engineering the league's official streaming services—a few curl requests, careful observation of responses, and adapting them to my needs. There's more to it, of course, but my 2016 MVP was barely 50 lines of Ruby and a plain HTML file. TorrentFreak got some of the details right.
The US gov doesn’t even care about copyright infringement, just in the cases where big companies are inconvenienced by it and it’s done by an individual / small company instead of a mega AI corp swallowing up all copyrighted content to vomit out their own spin on it through algorithms.
Federal investigations tend to only go after big fish yes.
The root problem is the IP laws that congress passed. There will always be large pressure on law enforcement from the industry if you give them that leash.
Look, when Jeffrey Bezos and Larry the Lawnmower ask Trump for an FBI investigation and send him over another solid gold turd or whatever bribe is fitting for such a request, they expect results.
Both are true. For a long time the Libertarian party was seen as drawing away small numbers of protest votes from the GOP, being populated by (mostly) guys who rejected Democratic over-regulation and nanny-statism but also rejected the GOP's anti-abortion politics, criminalization of drugs etc.
A few years ago there was an organized effort to capture key roles in the Libertarian party and focus the organization more on property rights and capitalism, with less emphasis on personal freedoms and constitutional limitations on government. This effectively split the Libertarian party, neutering it as electoral factor.
Now, the Libertarian party never mustered a large share of the vote, but many electoral contests are won at the margins. They managed to get ~3% of the vote in 2016, but lost >80% of that over the following 2 elections.
This seems more likely - how many libertarians are there in the US? Surely there are much larger groups you can appeal to if votes is what you're after
> Libertarians are like independents except noone wants to try to win us over
Because they are not like independents. Democrats have moved so far left that it's not even a question of who libertarians will vote for. The candidate just needs to show them a little attention so they remember to register and vote.
The Libertarian party got ~4.5 million votes in 2016. Getting some of those votes, or dissuading them from voting, is enough to make a difference in a tight race. See my other answer upthread for more context.
I don't think the crypto crowd was ever at hazard at not voting for Trump, so I'm not sure what the advantage would have been with respect to them. However, the libertarian crowd was.
As a libertarian voter, the pardon for Ross was the only thing Trump did that actually brought me pause. To the point, I felt immensely guilty for not voting for him when I voted (L) because I knew[thought] I was damning Ross to a jail cell. It weighed on my conscious for a long time after the vote, an it wasn't until Trump won I felt somewhat absolved of the guilt.
My personal opinion regarding the Ross pardon is that the Libertarian Party sold its soul for a donut. They could have gotten way more out of Trump than pardoning one particular Internet drug dealer.
Oh please. Ross was no saint by any stretch and it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a mountain of details and nuance around that case, including a whole host of law enforcement abuses that many people would find distasteful if not sickening if they actually got the whole story.
Entrapment. The FBI posed as a user and convinced Ross that some people needed to be taken out, offered to do it, arrested him, dropped the murder-for-hire charges because they didn't want to play that game in court, knowing it would backfire, while still using those (unconvicted) charges to publicly smear him and influence the judge's decisions, and finally stole his Bitcoin.
Two agents went to prison over this. Those same agents have a history of fraud and abuse.
So -- I can't imagine how one could expect to run a massive drugs-and-arms bazaar and not go to jail forever for something or other. But. I think the surrounding circumstances gp's alluding to might have involved [0] and [1] (with a fairly colorful slant). I'm inclined to give a little weight to the colorful account since the agents in question actually went to jail for the massive theft; for a more neutral treatment, Justice [2] and Vice [3] cover the situation.
The basic claim being that the salacious murder-for-hire bit was 1) never tried or proven, and 2) was allegedly instigated in part by federal agents (operating out of unrelated offices) and a "mentor" of Ulbricht's. In reaction to one of the federal agents himself stealing $800,000 from the criminal enterprise for himself in the course of his investigation. Or something like that.
I'm not clear how that squares with Ulbricht going on to order five more imaginary executions, but the whole thing seems awfully sordid from every angle.
I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cut...