Professor Chander Comments for Media on Trial of Alleged Silk Road Founder
Professor Anupam Chander commented for media including The Takeaway, VICE News, and Al Jazeera on the trial of Ross Ulbricht, who is accused of running Silk Road, an encrypted online marketplace that allegedly facilitated billions of dollars' worth of sales in narcotics and other illegal goods.
In a live interview on The Takeaway, a news program produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting and broadcast in syndication on National Public Radio stations nationwide, Professor Chander was asked whether Ulbricht could be held responsible for the actions of users on his website. "If the allegations are as the justice department is bringing them, Mr. Ulbricht knew exactly what was happening on his site," said Chander. "If you run a thieves market, and you know that it's a market for thieves, and you facilitate its illegal transactions intentionally, then clearly you're complicit in the criminal activity there."
During the trail, Ulbricht's defense attorney attempted to cast doubt upon whether Ulbricht had run Silk Road, suggesting that it could have been Mark Karpeles, a French national who once ran the largest bitcoin exchange on the internet. "I find that [argument] so fanciful," said Chander in an interview with VICE News. "He's making millions of dollars with this operation that's already at the edges of the law. Is he really going to get involved in something that is so clearly illegal, and destroy the reputation he wants for bitcoin as a legitimate currency?"
Professor Chander said that, regardless of the outcome of the Ulbricht trial, it is likely that illegal markets on the internet will be a continuing problem for law enforcement. "Illicit markets will continue just as they have existed forever," Chander said in an interview with Al Jazeera. "New thieves will always come up, new people will be trying to take advantage of the money to be made."
Professor Chander, a leading scholar of international economic law and cyberlaw, is the author of The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World in Commerce, published in 2013 by Yale University Press.