 Hello my friends and welcome to the 68th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Today's episode is as interesting and important as it is infuriating. Most of you have probably heard of the Silk Road case. It's been in the media pretty frequently for the past few years. A man named Ross Albrecht created a dark web marketplace online. He was eventually arrested by the feds and his court case has been a series of remarkable events. If you've just been getting your information from the mainstream media, you won't have heard about the rampant corruption, injustice, and I would say downright illegality of the government's case against Ross Albrecht. But don't take my word for it. My guest this week is Lynn Albrecht, who is the mother of Ross and she's been fighting this case full time for years. She shared some facts in this interview that you probably won't hear anywhere else because many of the facts are new. I must say I have a very dim perspective of government but every time I hear more facts about this case my jaw drops and I just can't believe how deep the injustice goes. If you're interested in helping out or you want more information about this particular case go to freeross.org and you can learn more about it. But before we start let me tell you about the very appropriate sponsor of this episode because if you're like me you might find your blood pressure rising. As I mentioned before since talking with Buddhist monks in both Japan and Thailand I decided that I wanted to start picking up meditation. So my wife and I tried a few apps. The first one we did was Headspace, which I liked and many people recommended, but it wasn't quite as serious an investigation into meditation that I was looking for. So then I found the app that we both use almost every day. It's called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. The host of the app takes a very rational and socratic approach into meditation. He literally goes around and interviews professionals about the subject matter, which naturally I'm partial to that approach because that's exactly what I'm doing on this show. So if you want to investigate then go to stevedashpatterson.com slash meditate. And as a listener of this show you can sign up for a free month's trial. So check it out for yourself. Okay so I hope you guys enjoy and learn from this conversation that I had with Lynn Ulbricht. So first of all Lynn I want to thank you for sitting down and talking with me about this case. I know you have been going for years non-stop. It's an emotional drain. It's a crazy story and every time I hear you speak about it I learn some more details that just make my stomach turn. So I want to use this as an opportunity as a platform for anybody that has maybe heard about the case in the media but doesn't know some of the mischief that's been going on. I want to use this to try to get some truth out there. So thank you for talking with me about this. Oh well thank you for having me. So where I want to start is just the very basics of the case. So for people that haven't heard of it we'll just talk about that for a minute and then we'll go into some facts that has been really kept from a lot of people on the court. Facts kept from the jury on the court and facts kept from the media either intentionally or otherwise that people might be surprised to hear. So in a nutshell what is the Silk Road case? What is this all about? Well the case involves my son Ross Ulbricht who has been sentenced to double life without parole plus 40 years for launching and operating a website where people bought and sold things anonymously including illegal drugs and he is being held responsible for everything that occurred on the site. Okay now in this particular case there's a huge legal precedent that maybe we can get into about what the government can access regarding digital data. So if they get your laptop for example how much information could they legally extract from that laptop. So this isn't just a one-off interesting case this is a case that has potentially huge legal implications. So there have been a few headlines that have said oh there's been some corruption maybe in the Silk Road case. There were some a pair of agents that were busted. So first of all let's let's start with that fact. What is this what happened with the two corrupt agents? Yeah there were two corrupt agents at the core of the investigation. One was Karl Markforce he was a DEA agent. The other one is Sean Bridges he was a secret service agent who was also working for the NSA at the time. And they were assigned to the Silk Road case and to investigate it and they used their expertise to infiltrate the site and steal over a million dollars. But they had the ability to really had the run of the site. They could they acted as different aliases. They had the ability to act as Dread Pirate Roberts which was the everyone used a pseudonym. So that was a pseudonym that the court said Ross used. The person who was running the site used it person or people. And they had the ability to also use it. They could change passwords, pin numbers. They had access to keys, bank accounts. They could delete, add, edit chats on the marketplace or the forum. Which was evidence later. They basically had what one journalist called the keys to the kingdom. We don't know what they did because it's impossible to prove forensically and I've been told this by experts. It's impossible to prove if digital evidence has been tampered with. There are no fingerprints. There's nothing to be shown when it's tampered with. It's just that version unless you find an original version, which actually we did find. But I'll talk about that later. So there were there were a pair of agents at the FBI. They're working at the FBI. One was DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency. One was Secret Service and NSA. And they had access. They had admin access, essentially. Tile level admin access to the site for many, many, many months. Have they been charged with any crimes? They were charged with stealing over a million dollars from various, I don't know all the details actually of their charges exactly, but stealing over a million dollars and they're in prison now. They're currently in prison. Now what, how did this come up in court? Wasn't permitted to be mentioned in court. So even though, and actually the defense didn't even know about the Secret Service agent until after the trial, they weren't even informed of his, his activity, that they did know about the DEA agent, Carl Force, and wanted to cast reasonable doubt at, during the trial, which is a due process right. And the judge, Catherine Forrest, denied that and said that that would be precluded from trial because the prosecutor argued that that would jeopardize their investigation. We found out later that they already knew they were being investigated, they've been interviewed by law enforcement, so it wouldn't have jeopardized anything. And also the defense said, okay, we'll just postpone the trial to finish your investigation and then we can have all the information known to the jury. And Catherine Forrest denied that. So that was nothing to do with those corrupt agents was permitted to be mentioned at trial in any way. Okay, now in the trial and in the media, there was a great hullabaloo about some, some diaries that were found. And the claim is, or was, that Ross or DPR, the Dread Pirate Roberts, hired Hitman essentially to, to kill one or two people that. I think originally it was six. Oh, it was six. Then it was down to one by the time they got, yeah, I need to go ahead. So that's what made it in the media. Right, well the media loved that, yeah. Yeah, they cast Ross and when you first read about it, you read the service level media coverage, you go, oh geez, but this is crazy. So tell me, how did this come up in court? Because clearly this is a very big deal. Yeah, this is a huge allegation. Huge. Very serious, but it didn't come up in court. It came up in court only as something to talk about without being charged. The prosecution was permitted to discuss it with the jury and just say, but just realize he's not being charged with this, there were no murders, but he did it. Take our word for it. So of course the defense, he couldn't defend against it because it wasn't a charge. And this allegation has been used to deny Ross for bail, of bail, and then they dropped five out of six of them after the bail hearing when he didn't get bail, even though he has no priors and no history of violence whatsoever, it was used to deprive him of the witness list before trial, which normally the defense gets weeks before trial so they can do their research. They didn't get that. It was used at sentencing to justify a double life sentence saying he was violent. And now it's been used in the appeal, the appellate court's ruling saying that it justified the original life sentence. And none of it, none of it has been even brought to trial, and one journalist, Brian Doherty, recently said, well, why do we even have trials? Well, I mean, what's the point? And that is a question. It's like if you can put someone, or use it to put someone away for life in prison to really have a death sentence, a slow death sentence, without a trial, what is the precedent here? It's very disturbing, no proof required. Who made these allegations? Because you hear this, okay, it came up in court, it had not just legal implications for how they ruled about how big the sentence should be, which we can talk about also. But personal implications, this is your son we're talking about. Yeah, very much his reputation and cast him as a horrible, violent thug. So who is it that made these accusations and how could this possibly have come up in court talking to the jury about allegations that those same people aren't even charging him with? I did not, this is the prosecution saying this based on digital evidence, which I've been told by many experts is vulnerable to tampering, deleting, planting, all kinds of things. One of the chats that they based it on, that is with the corrupt agent, I believe, who's now in prison, but he was under an alias, I believe so, but anyway it's a chat with an agent with DPR quote unquote. And I said to one expert, I said, how do we know that that person didn't write the whole thing, both sides of this chat? And he said, you don't, you have no way to know. And actually that chat is very, it just doesn't sound like a regular conversation. It sounds like someone sat down and wrote it like a crime novel or something. It's really like a crop show or something. It's really ridiculous. But anyway, so the prosecution just had digital evidence, which is a whole other issue. And there's a precedent after precedent, but the fact that the government can use digital evidence that's so easily manufactured and most all the evidence, it's not like they had witnesses, DNA, fingerprints, nothing. They basically had digital evidence that can be manufactured out of thin air in no time. And so we're all vulnerable now to having accusations based on digital evidence thrown on a screen in front of a jury. And the judge said, oh yeah, you can rely on this. Well, any expert will tell you you can't. So the judge literally said you can rely on this? He said it's accurate. She said, this is all what's up on the screen. I don't know if those are exact words, but basically, yes, she said that. But at the same breath, there's not a charge. Well, she said about all the digital evidence. But yeah, there's no charge at trial. I mean, there is an indictment that's part of the indictment in Maryland. They've never prosecuted it. They've never brought it to trial again. It's just sitting there for three and a half years now doing nothing with it. So when you say these things could have been tampered with, evidence could have been tampered. Is there any evidence whatsoever that actually digital evidence was tampered with in any way? Well, after trial, originally the government dumped six terabytes of material on the defense as you go through this and you can figure out your defense. This is what we have. Six terabytes is billions of pages of single space type pages, I believe. It's pretty impossible to be able to read it very quickly. And so, but after trial, and so it's easy to miss things. After trial, the defense team continued to sift through it and found an obscure folder that contained a complete version of a chat between the same dread pirate Roberts and a character named Not Wonderful who said they were law enforcement and they wanted to sell DPR information about the investigation. There was a whole bunch of chats about it. None of this was in the evidence shown to the jury because it was deleted by someone who went in and had high level admin access and could delete evidence. And there was no way to, if that folder had not been found to show the complete version, there'd be no way to know that it was tampered with. So there's no way, it begs the question, how much more is there that's been tampered with you? It's proving a negative, it's very difficult. And in addition, that same discovery, not that discovery, but at the same time, it showed that someone using the dread pirate Roberts account signed in to the Silk Road Forum seven weeks after Ross was in prison, which is pretty definitive that there's more than one dread pirate Roberts and to say that Ross is the dread pirate Roberts and should take the fall for this entire situation is, well, it's obviously not true. So is it true to say that there is literal proof that evidence was tampered with by somebody with admin access and that there is proof that the same DPR account was accessed after Ross was in prison? Yes, it's in the government's discovery, it's in their own evidence in an obscure file. And luckily that file was found and I guess the person wiping the information didn't know, overlooked it. Now this was not in trial because they didn't know about it. And it can't be in the appeal because it wasn't in the trial. The appeal is only about what's in the trial. The only way this can really be used is if we have another trial. Okay, so another question for you. I had heard that a government prosecutor at some point was not, I don't know if he was convinced or had believed that he had identified who the dread pirates Roberts was and it was a gentleman named Mark Carpalas. Mark Carpalas was the owner of Mt. Gox, which notoriously went bankrupt and I don't forget how many millions of dollars were essentially stolen. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Who was this person and was that information also in the trial or not? Well, that was coming out in cross-examination of a DHS agent named Jared Dragan who was investigating Silk Road as well out of Chicago. So there were different agencies investigating and he had been undercover on Silk Road for two years, thousands of hours as Cirrus and he had decided, first of all, he testified in trial that he thought there were many DPRs. He said that, I heard him with my own ears. He also had decided it was Mark Carpalas who also had developed websites who knew about all that technology and by the way Ross was not a programmer as much as the media says he was a programmer. He studied physics and material science. He doesn't know programming languages and that kind of thing. He's not a programmer. I mean, I'm not saying he's stupid on the computer because you guys are all really good but you know what I mean, it's like he's... Anyway, so Der Yegan was honing in on Carpalas. He even got, he signed a subpoena saying he had probable cause to believe Carpalas was DPR. He had asked for a warrant to seize his Gmail accounts and he had asked other agencies back off, don't warn him that I'm after him because I wanna, I'm closing in, I'm gonna get him. Well, Maryland, where the corrupt agents are, did warn him by seizing $2 million from Carpalas's account. I'm not sure whatever happened to that $2 million by the way. And... Okay, hang on, explain the power. What do you mean Maryland? Okay, DHS Maryland, which is where the corrupt agents were operating. So they were both in the same place. They were both at Maryland, yeah. And that's also where the indictment is, remains. But, so DHS Maryland seized $2.9 million from Carpalas's account. Carpalas's lawyer, this all came out in cross-examination of Jared Der Yegan at trial. And what came out was that DHS Maryland seized, against Jared Der Yegan's wishes, seized $2.9 million from Carpalas's account, which, of course, got his attention. And Der Yegan testified that Carpalas's lawyers met with DHS Maryland and offered them a deal. And they said, look, you back off our client Carpalas and we'll give you a name. We're gonna give you DPR's name. Then two weeks later, Ross was arrested. And Der Yegan had never even heard of Ross and Carpalas was not pursued. Now, later he was arrested for something else, like two years later, because he's a criminal. But in any case, at that point, the prosecution leaped up, stopped the cross-examination, protested, protested, this must stop, this questioning must stop. And actually the judge said, well, wait a minute, this is what defense does. They try to, you know, they're talking about an alternate perpetrator. And she goes, well, yeah, that's fair, you know? That's what happens. And he argued and argued and she finally sent the jury home early so that he could make his case, which I'm like, why? But anyway, and she said, look, this is relevant. This is total, this is out of the bag. Carpalas is out of the bag. I don't wanna hear anymore about it. This is relevant information. And we're like, yeah, and court adjourned. We'll see you on next week. And by next week, over the weekend, by the following week, she said, everything should be stricken from the record. All of this information that came out, it's out of the trial. It's stricken from the record. The jury should pretend they never heard it. You may not ask any questions about this anymore to the defense. And it's off limits. And I have a three minute video on our website just showing the day three versus day four. And from then on, the defense was tethered at what they couldn't, couldn't do. Which, I mean, there are limits, but he said this was the most strict. He was just bound. And the, basically, defense went downhill from then. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I said at the beginning of this, every time I hear you speak, I learned some other fact and my jaw just dropped. I know, it's like. So what I had heard is that there was speculation about this meeting in Maryland. So I didn't realize this came out at trial. Under oath by a government agent with their own evidence. It's not our, it's not our witness. It's the government witness take-hawking. It's in the record that Carpalas' lawyers offered a deal. Yeah, but that was stricken from the record. So I'm not sure if it's in the trial trends. I should look and see if that's in the trial transcript, but I heard it with my own ears. Is that something that I need to add it out? No. Okay. I mean, I don't know. You're okay with it though. Yeah. I mean, I heard him say it. Everybody heard him say it. And in fact, our lawyer said something about I'm not even gonna mention Guam and that's when they flipped out. And I don't know what Guam is about, except that I know from a crypto security expert, it's an NSA stronghold. I don't know anything more about that, but then the prosecution wrote this whole thing. Oh, Guam, Guam, that's not anything to do with it. Nothing about Guam. And I'm like, okay, whatever. So I don't know. Do you know which, like, so to get this timeline right, we have two corrupt DEA agents that are in there. One's DEA, one's Secret Service NSA. And they're both in Maryland. Yes. Okay. So they are in jail right now for corruption on this particular Silk Road case. Okay, so they're pursuing the gentleman who is trying to crack who is DPR. Says, in my best judgment, I've been behind the scenes for thousands of hours. I think it's this guy, Mark Carpalas, don't let him know. And then shortly after that, Carpalas loses $2.9 million. Shortly after that, his lawyers meet with the people in Maryland and then a week after that, two weeks after that, Ross gets arrested. And he offers a name. And he offers a name. And he offers a name in exchange for them backing off Carpalas. And there's millions of dollars somewhere involved here. And they don't even know where that money went. Well, I don't know about that, but there's money involved. I don't know. But you know what? We don't know what else happened to that meeting. Yeah, do you have to know? I personally think they were bribed, but I don't know. Do you think the corrupt, were the corrupt agents the ones that met with? I don't know that. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, I don't know that. Okay, so another thing I wanna ask you about. Well, let me just say one thing more about that. There's still sealed evidence, undisclosed evidence about these corrupt agents and the corruption that they will not release. They had numerous emails that were encrypted that giving them, they never asked, made them give them the key as part of their deal. And so there's all kinds of information that is undisclosed about this, that the government does not seem at all interested in revealing. So in the midst of all this, you have this information, what could be more relevant to a trial than saying, hey, by the way, one of the government prosecutors thinks it's this guy and not the one that we're prosecuting right now. So Judge adjourns it, comes back next week and says, no, now we can't talk about that anymore. That's right. Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit more about the judge circumstance. So Ross got sentenced to two life sentences without parole plus- 40 years. Plus 40 years for a not, a crime that didn't involve anybody getting hurt, that involved no violence, no harm to anybody. In fact, probably if you dive into the economics of it, probably helped quite a lot of people. Maybe we don't have to go into that. Is there anybody else involved in this case that has been sentenced? And if so, what have they been sentenced for? Is anybody getting double life sentences for operating a website or participating in it in some way? No, actually the biggest drug dealer on Silk Road got 10 years. The biggest, and they actually sold drugs. They're not saying Ross did. The biggest cocaine and heroin dealer got five years. The biggest meth dealer or a big meth dealer recently got three years. And the reason he got three instead of six was that judge, that federal judge in Oregon cut it in half because of the corrupt agents involved. He took that into consideration in sentencing. The person, I don't know what's happened to Blake Benthal who was running Silk Road 2.0. He seems to have disappeared. I have no idea where he is. But the next guy under him got eight years for running Silk Road 2.0. I guess an equivalent to senior admin, exactly the same site. And then the two agents got six and seven years. So that's when I realized this isn't about drugs. It's not about drugs. It's about a platform. It's about an idea. And I also think it got the attention of Chuck Schumer who was on the Senate Finance Committee because of Bitcoin, which was very, it was not very well known then. And Bitcoin was the only currency exchanged on Silk Road. And in addition, Pre-Pirara, who was just recently fired by President Trump, it was a long time special counsel to Schumer. He's Schumer's man. And Catherine Forrest, the judge, was nominated or recommended by Schumer for her position. So it's very much a Schumer case. And he called for, you know, this to be done. And so I think it's very political. So Schumer nominated the judge of the... He recommended her and then Obama appointed her. I see. Now... She owes her position to Schumer. I see. And he did, I remember actually, because I've been involved with Bitcoin. I remember when he came out and made this big hullabaloo about how Bitcoin and Silk Road is all this evil stuff. So he made it a political issue for him. And before trial, he came out publicly and said, congratulations, Eric Holder, you got your man. And I'm like, wait a second, we haven't even had a trial yet. And the Senator from the... Schumer's had a... Yes. And the Senator from the state where he's gonna be tried comes out and basically says he's guilty. And he's supposed to get a fair trial in that state. And the... That should have been a change of venue right there. And probably about that time too. A week prior to that, the investigator of the actual case thought that he was about to get his man and it was more carpellous. So somehow Schumer has the amazing insight to say, oh, you got your man after not even a trial being heard. So with the actual sentencing, double life plus 40 years without parole for operating a website. Essentially, yes. When the judge handed down that verdict, which seems cruel, what was the justification? Why did she say it warranted this much of a sentence? Well, her sentencing went on for three hours, which was very long and it was like a campaign speech really, where she went on and on. And basically, first she said that he started the site for philosophical reasons and she thinks it's a very dangerous philosophy. And she's not sure he's given up that philosophy. And the philosophy essentially is a libertarian, volunteerist, free market philosophy. That exchange should be free. Up to the vendor and buyer, with a limitation, there were some limitations, no victims is what the philosophy was. And she said, I can't be sure you've given it up. And so apparently it's such a threatening philosophy that he needs to never come out. And actually, the Pellet Court upheld that. And it's a First Amendment offense to bring in someone's political views into a sentencing. It's against the First Amendment as well as acts of Congress. They didn't seem concerned about that. She also justified it with the Uncharged Crime of Murder for Hire, as we discussed, never brought to trial. Actually, former federal judge Nancy Gertner joined the appeal saying this isn't right. You shouldn't run a sentence based on Uncharged Crimes. This is wrong. She's a federal judge as well, now a law professor at Harvard, but she's retired, as well as other people protested this by joining the appeal. She justified it with that and said, oh, the other thing was they called for Ross to be an example. For him to, because he'll be an example. If we give him this harshest thing, he was the first, they say, so he should get the worst sentence, which there's nothing in the law saying the first person to do anything gets the worst sentence. And in some ways, you'd think they wouldn't get the worst one because the next guy knows it's for a crime, but in any case, you're the first. And because it's such a high-profile case, it'll be a deterrent. So basically they're saying because the media chooses to write about Ross, he loses his rights as an individual and gets sentenced more harshly. And it's proven to be the exact opposite of a deterrent. Dark net markets have exploded. The biggest one is many times greater, larger, and has more things on it that we consider destructive than Silk Road ever did. It's had the opposite effect. So Catherine Forrest didn't scare anybody. And it's been researched, the British Journal of Criminology just recently did a study showing that it absolutely had the opposite effect. So, you know. So she made the decision based on her own personal philosophy. Basically, yes. That's right. She didn't like, she doesn't like libertarianism. She thinks it's dangerous. Even though. It's troubling and dangerous, yes. To those who are unaware with the specifics of the Silk Road philosophy, it was essentially drugs and black markets are too violent. What we need is an alternative to the violent system. Let's have a peaceful system for the exchange of goods, of goods that don't harm other people. So it's explicitly in the philosophy about peace and cooperation and non-violence. They don't talk about drugs specifically though. So just to be clear, it wasn't designed necessarily to be a drug site. It became that, I think, partly because of the anonymity. And that wasn't, you know, forbidden because it was considered a choice. And she thinks that is a dangerous philosophy. And in the process of sentencing another human being to time behind bars, is that I don't think you've given up your adherence to that political philosophy. She said it. And that justifies double lives. That's correct. It's in her sentencing. It was brought up at the appeal and the appellate court kind of just brushed it aside. They don't seem concerned about that at all. And in fact, they said, yes, the murder for hire is a big reason why this sentence is justified, even though it was never charged to trial proven or he couldn't defend himself against it. And they said that the fact that he is against the drug laws and thinks they could be broken and that it reduced harm and so it had some good effects shows he's a bad candidate for recidivism. And so what they're basically saying because it's a mandatory minimum of 20 years. That's a long sentence. That's a generation. It's not like we were trying for, you know, he gets out tomorrow, not that I wouldn't love that. It would be at least a 20 year sentence. They don't think that's long enough for someone to get out when they're 50 some odd years old, not having been on the internet for 20 years, they're still a danger that they're gonna go and start another silk road. That's what they're saying. Yeah. It's not about, it's obviously, it's just frightening. It's a very frightening precedent that's being said here. I think for somebody to listen to that that doesn't follow a law, like I don't follow much legal stuff. There's maybe a naive view of what happens in the courts. Oh, I had a naive view. And this has changed. Oh yeah. I would imagine. Totally changed. Do you have any, is there any recourse just even for the sentencing? Because that, to say that you're in an American legal system, you're gonna be sentenced for the political convictions of the judge not liking your peaceful philosophy. It seems like that you would have some recourse to say, hey, this is a demonstration that this is not fair. It's not fair. What is, what can you do in the system? Well, in the system, the next step is when you're turned out of appeal, you appeal the appeal. So you file a petition for a re-hearing and often that goes to the entire circuit. So it'd be 12 judges, 13 judges. The second circuit is known for not hearing, re-hearing. It's very, very rare that they do that to the point where statistically it's not gonna happen. But maybe miracles happen, whatever, we're trying. And then if that doesn't happen, then you petition the Supreme Court. That's your next recourse. It's also very difficult to be heard by the Supreme Court. They get 10,000 petitions a year and they hear about 85 of them. So it's not good odds. However, if this is, excuse me, an important case and it does affect a lot of things and one of them is sentencing, which has quintupled, life sentences alone have quintupled since the 80s and the drug war. But over sentencing is a huge problem. And so hopefully that will be appealed and they'll hear that. I also wanna ask you about this. The idea is if there's a reasonable doubt that the person being prosecuted is guilty, that that is enough to say, hey, we can't convict the person there's reasonable doubt. Already, I think we've got a thousand different reasons that there's reasonable doubt. There's another interesting fact in this that I want you to explain. When they actually arrested Ross as this dramatic thing that happened in California, I believe, where he was in a public library, I think, and they essentially snuck in on him. He was downloading the Colbert Report. He was on an open source network downloading the Colbert Report. And they arrested him and they got his laptop. He didn't close it up, so it wasn't cryptographically sealed or anything. So what happened to that laptop? Yeah, well, one of the agents who was on the laptop investigation admitted in court that they didn't follow protocol or the guidelines of how to investigate the laptop. I wish I were more retained this technical information more, but an expert sat down with me and said, all the ways that they broke protocol. And one of them, the laptop crashed in the middle of it. Yeah, the laptop crashed in the middle of their investigation. There was something about copies. I'm so sorry, I don't have, I'm so bad about retaining technical stuff, but it's all there and I can send it to you. But there were many ways, and he said to me, he goes, I think something was planted because I don't know any other reason they would break protocol so many times. Now, I don't know that, he's, that's his opinion, but they did break protocol many times. And they admitted they broke protocol. Well, they, yeah, they admitted they didn't follow the guidelines when investigating the laptop, and it did crash, they admitted that too. Okay, and what about the access to the Silk Road servers? I hear there's also drama about the Silk Road servers. What is that about? Well, that was, they seized the servers without a warrant. And they claim, the way they, Tristor Fertar, by the lead investigator who, by the way, was not brought to trial, so he couldn't be cross-examined. They, he claimed the way he found the server had to do with captures and I can't, again, my technical thing isn't good, but experts all around the world said, cried foul, they go, this doesn't even make sense. This is gibberish, this is obviously a lie. And he's just saying stuff that doesn't even make sense. There, you don't find a server that way. There's no way. And the defense called for an evidentiary hearing. They wrote an affidavit and the judge denied it all. So, the server, that issue about the server, if there's another trial, it would come up again, but it was laid to rest for this trial. So that might be, no, this is an issue of legal precedent talking about due process, where the prosecutor is supposed to access information and evidence legally following protocol, like the Fourth Amendment, you shouldn't be subject to unlawful search and seizure. They broke that protocol because they apparently got these servers without a warrant, and the claimed way that they got into the servers apparently sounds like nonsense. According to experts, and there's many, not just one expert, many. And yeah, and that was that server, and they, I guess part of the thing is it was in Iceland. So, they said, basically the government said, we don't care, even if we did hack it, it doesn't matter. That's what they said. It was a big legal brouhaha about it, so. Well, I bet, because we're talking about international law, too. Yeah, and we're talking about the Fourth Amendment rights of a citizen. Right, so, I hope to anybody listening, they have a reasonable doubt that maybe Schumer's portrayal of the circumstance that the feds got their man might be vacuous. You have experience being Ross's mother of growing up and teaching him a lot of ideas. You've got a background in entrepreneurship, and obviously he was an entrepreneur. Do you have any recollection or knowledge of him being this criminal mastermind, as many in the media have portrayed him, that this cruel, heartless kingpin, essentially, is the way that a lot of the media has framed it? If this weren't so tragic, it would be such an absurd joke because Ross is actually known for being compassionate, sweet, kind, helpful, and there are 100 letters on our website that are copies of what was sent to the judge by people who know him personally, all of them attesting to his fine character, how he's contributed to their lives. Four of them are fellow inmates who he has continued to be a blessing to them. Ross is really one of the sweetest, laid-back, fun-loving, life-loving people I know. And I think if someone is that kind of cruel, sociopathic, dangerous person, it comes out at some point in your entire life with somebody. Exactly. And even journalists have said, I've talked to one of them, the one that wrote a book about him that was based on government evidence that's full of lies. Anyway, he said, I've talked to literally 100, I spent hundreds of hours talking to people and there is not one person he can find that's like Ross. And in fact, it's the opposite that they talk about how he's so compassionate and cares for the underdog and people who other people don't care about. He's the kind of guy that if somebody, one friend, just a quick example, one friend wrote about he was kind of a awkward, unpopular kid and kind of a social liability he called himself. And Ross befriended him and encouraged him and gave him confidence. And he said he turned his, he, Ross, this is in high school, Ross turned his life around to go on. And actually that person helped us in the beginning with our website for several years because of he loves Ross so much and he wanted to help him. That's just one. There is anecdote after anecdote about Ross. And so when I read the media, it's such a disconnect. And then I of course talked to him and I'm like, oh yeah, that's my Ross. That's Ross talking to me. And I know I'm his mother and of course you'd say that, you're his mother. Well, the hundred letters, I have one letter in there. There are a lot of people, I don't even know who wrote these letters. And I don't think that cruel sociopathic people have a hundred people who write letters about them like this, you know? You think that's right? They don't. And even now, the letters Ross writes, they're just, you know, I'm sorry, but that is not the letter, those are not the letters of someone who is a danger to anyone. If nothing else, he's a encourager and a supporter of people and of life. And to think and to say that he might get out and be any kind of problem, it's just, it's patently obvious that it's not true. So the last question I want to ask you is kind of putting all this together. How has your political philosophy changed as a result of this? One of the areas that when you're talking political theory with people, if you're talking about libertarianism, I have some pretty radical libertarian ideas. And I think, for example, court systems would work better if they were privatized. I don't even like the idea of a public court system. But one of the areas that everybody says, oh, you know, this is the justice system. It's like, that is an essential function of the statement. So necessary to have a civilized society. And if you don't break a lot of laws, you don't have real world engagement with that system. So how has your beliefs changed about how the system actually works in practice? Is justice being served, do you think? Obviously it's not in Ross's case, but do you think other people are having the same kind of shenanigans being pulled by the prosecutors and the judges and all this? Yes, Ross's case is not unique. And not only do I know people at the prison whose lives are being destroyed, these are nonviolent people. These are families that are struggling to survive. And children who are being very harmed by this whole thing, most of it's nonviolent drugs. So the drug war goes hand in glove with it. But I also meet people because I speak publicly and they come up to me and tell me their stories. Unbelievable, the stories that people have. And you know, when this all started. Like they're seeming of corruption. Yes, of being framed, of being railroaded, of the unfairness, the, I mean, endless stories. And it's so sad to me because, you know, I love my country in terms of its values and its traditions of freedom. And I considered myself very patriotic. And I honestly, very sadly have to say, I believe our values have been hijacked and our country's, the values of what it was founded on. Which no, it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good in terms of, you know, freedom. And compared to, you know, historically, I feel like it's being hijacked. And I feel like we're losing our freedoms very rapidly. And I'm quite concerned about it, which is why I feel like I need to speak out, not only for Ross, but what he represents and what I've learned. Because when you see how, you know, so many times I'd say to his lawyer, but they did that and he goes, oh yeah, they do that. And I'm like, but, and he goes, yeah, they just do that. And I'm like, wait a minute, that's not right. And I said, but wait, he wasn't charged with that. No, no, they do that, they can do that. And you're like, you're dumbfounded because you're like, that doesn't even make sense, that it's so unfair. And so yeah, I absolutely believe that the justice system has become something other than what our founders intended. We're losing the trial, a fair trial by jury. We're losing that very rapidly. Very few people go to trial, you know, 97% plea to things that sometimes they haven't even done just to avoid that. It's no longer what it was meant to be. I think if our founders saw what was going on, they would be just appalled. And yeah, it's very concerning what's going on. I feel like this reminds me a little bit in an abstract way of what Thomas Sowell said about his own history. He's an economist. I know who he is. He's my favorite author. And he says he went of all places he got his PhD from the University of Chicago, I believe it was, where Milton Friedman was a very, very free market. And he graduated a Marxist. He managed to go through a PhD program in economics, a Marxist. And then he got a job in, I think it was the Department of Labor or something like that in the government. Very shortly after that, after engaging reality of how things actually work, he became a big time free market advocate. I don't care yet. Yeah, he said, okay, these people actually don't care about the people on the ground. There are bureaucrats that are pushing papers that they genuinely don't care about justice being served. Sounds like that's the same thing around here. And most people I don't think have significant experience with the justice system. And if they do, they don't have the kind of resources or publicity to do anything about it. They just kind of get squished. And then you can't really speak out. You just have to go along with the system. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm speaking for them too. To the people that I know at the prison and the children and the, because they don't have the opportunity because they don't have a high profile case. They don't have my education. They don't have the ability to articulate in the same way. But they have the same issues. Not always as severe as Ross, but others are as severe. And this drug war is a whole other thing that is feeding this machine that is, it's just astounding that our country cages more of its citizens than any country on the face of the earth. This is America. And we're just using people as a commodity. It's really, really bad. And I think most people, it's easier to forget these people. They're shut away. Exactly. You know, and you don't, but no, it needs to be, it's a bad thing. It really needs to be fixed. I'd love to know the actual data about how many people have gone into the legal system, into this whole machine, for regardless of whether it's federal or state or local or any of it, and who have similar experiences because my suspicion, and I imagine you, like you said, you talk to people who are there and their families and they have stuff like this. My suspicion is it's probably most people that engage with the system, come out with this kind of pit in their stomach that like, oh, this is not right. It's not as I envisioned it. Yeah, I think so. Justice is something, so. I think most people, at least most people I know, and me, and I meet quite a few because I go to the prison a lot. And yeah. Well, that's a sober note to end on. Yeah. But thank you very much for this conversation. Sure, well, we need to, people need to pay attention because it's not just us who are unfortunate enough to be caught up in it at the moment. It's indicative of the government's expansion and intrusion and how they're operating and how they operate is by far more dangerous than a website or an individual person. It's very concerning and people, I really hope people start waking up. I don't know, I don't know, but it's very, it's happened before in history and I believe it's happening now and I think we're at a crossroads and we need to really pay attention to which direction we're going. Now, if people want to learn more about the case, if they want to help contribute, you guys always are in need of help, both financially and otherwise, how can they learn more? Yeah, freeross.org. And we're revamping it, but it's all the information's there and yeah, freeross.org. Thanks. Help us, thank you. Yeah, thanks a lot. All right, that was my conversation with Lynn Albrick. How about that? Like I said at the beginning of the show, even if you think as poorly of government as I do and I know many of you do, listening to this case is just mind-blowing. The whole part about the judge feeling herself entitled to punish Ross because he's not abandoned his philosophy, his peaceful philosophy is just terrifying to me. The corruption in this case runs very deep and I really hope that someday, Ross gets just a fair trial. So if you want to learn more, you want to donate to the legal fund, make sure to visit freeross.org. Okay, that's all for me. I'll talk to you guys next week.