The trial of Ross Ulbricht — a.k.a. ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ — reveals a battle between libertarian techies trying to build and maintain a decentralized, encrypted and unregulated Internet and government operatives trying to stop them. [ Deep Web credits: Dir: Alex Winter/ 90 min/ Documentary/ Legalize Drugs, Search & Seizure]
External Reviews
“Alex Winter’s Deep Web…tells a tale that’s both tragic and alarming. Tragic, because its protagonist, Ross Ulbricht, the “Dread Pirate Roberts” of the now-quashed Silk Road online drug market, destroyed his life in the practice of apparently sincerely held anarcho-libertarian ideals. And alarming, because the way in which the federal government finally nailed him raises serious Fourth Amendment issues that have not yet begun to be resolved.”
–Reason
“The film’s position, and that of many civil-liberties organizations, is that this case illustrates privacy issues we should all be worried about, violations of Constitutional protections that are hard to enforce in the digital age. Though it might not be clear in news stories that focus on an ‘eBay for heroin,’ this case (like that of Aaron Swartz, subject of last year’s The Internet’s Own Boy) has the potential to affect the lives of law-abiding Americans in ways they won’t understand until it’s too late.”
–The Hollywood Reporter
“[Director] Winter makes a strong case that Ulbricht was railroaded by a judge who blocked introduction of mitigating evidence, and victimized by FBI agents who supposedly ignored constitutional safeguards, and even ‘hacked a foreign server.'”
–Variety
“What happened in that courtroom at the beginning of 2015 is the genesis of precedence that will potentially allow our government to wield unlimited power over the changing social climate of our lives.”
–The Film Stage
“Deep Web also traces the roots of digital libertarianism to the naughties Cypherpunks—a Bay Area group of math geeks, programmers and crypto-anarchists dedicated to individual liberty, anonymity and personal privacy (think Eric Hughes, Tim May, Anonymous, etc.) and poses the question of whether or not we are ushering in the digital dystopia that rabble-rousers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have warned against.”
–The Wild Magazine
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Wikipedia: Silk Road
“Ross W. Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a notorious online marketplace for the sale of heroin, cocaine, LSD and other illegal drugs, was sentenced to life in prison on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.”
–New York Times
“Lawyers for the mastermind behind the world’s largest online drug emporium — who was sentenced to life in prison without parole last week — say their appeal will rely at least in part on alleged government corruption deemed immaterial during the trial.”
–Business Insider