US President Donald Trump has pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a lifelong prison sentence for running the notorious dark web drug marketplace. Trump had pledged during his campaign to free Ross, who was arrested in 2013 and later sentenced in 2015 in a landmark US prosecution.
The pardon is “full and unconditional,” as President Trump claimed, adding that he called Ulbricht’s mother to break the news on Tuesday. Ulbricht is serving his sentence at a federal prison in Arizona, but his attorney said he’s hopeful that Ulbricht will be released shortly.
The pardon is just one of the many moves the Republican president has made since coming to power. Trump had already announced plans to pardon Ulbricht in May, and the Libertarian Party, an advocate for drug legalisation, had long pushed for his release as well, labelling his prosecution a case of government overreach.
If Trump’s social media posts are anything to go by, he agrees. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me,” claimed the newly elected US president on his social media platform Truth.
The Silk Road was a dark web marketplace for drugs and other illegal services and one of the most popular of its time. The website relied on the Tor network and accepted payments in Bitcoin to help preserve user anonymity. Ulbricht’s prosecutors claimed that between 2011 and 2013, the website was used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell $214 million worth of illegal drugs and other services, adding that some people died due to drugs purchased on the marketplace.
Ulbricht himself is said to have taken extreme measures to protect the site’s operations, including soliciting the murders of several people who posed a threat. However, no evidence exists showing any murders happened.
In the News: Truecaller rolls out AI voice detection and real-time caller ID for iOS
