Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today that ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” a/k/a “DPR,” a/k/a “Silk Road,” was found guilty yesterday on all seven counts in connection with his operation and ownership of Silk Road, a hidden website designed to enable its users to buy and sell  illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement, following a four-week trial before U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest.......

1. Summarize the U.S. government’s case against Ross Ulbricht.

2. Summarize the reasons Judge Forrest sentenced Ross Ulbricht to life in prison without parole the appropriate punishment for Ross Ulbricht. Do you agree? Defend your answer.

3. Was Ulbricht “a (perhaps misguided) hero and former Boy Scout acting on his libertarian convictions”?

Or, “Was he a calculating drug lord getting rich off of others’ drug addictions and ruin”? “Was the Silk Road a safer way for drug transactions to happen or a platform for dangerous, untraceable criminal activity on Tor [The Onion Router]”?

4. Would Ross Ulbricht’s letter move you to show some leniency? Move you to “throw the book at him”? Have no effect on your decision? Defend your answer.

5. In his fascinating interview with Teri Gross on “Fresh Air,” Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net, observed:

If you try too hard to undermine those systems of privacy and encryption that are being used by the bad guys because you’re only worried about them, you are also going to adversely affect all the people that use it for social benefit.

And that’s one of the reasons why in the end, we are going to have to work out a way of living with some of this bad stuff. Because the benefits of Internet freedom and of Internet privacy are so enormous—not just in this country, not just in democracies but especially in brutal dictatorships all around the world. And so if we want those people to have protection and privacy, unfortunately it means that some bad people are going to use it for ill as well. But we shouldn’t destroy the whole system simply as a result of the behavior of the bad guys. Do you agree? Defend your answer.