Trump pardons Ross Ulbricht, founder of dark web marketplace Silk Road
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Trump has issued a full and unconditional pardon to Ross Ulbricht, who founded the dark web marketplace, Silk Road. The site sold illegal drugs, stolen passports and hacking equipment using Bitcoin. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison a decade ago. Newshour gets reaction from former federal judge John E. Jones III.
Also in the programme: Iraq's new child marriage law; and are footballers more intelligent than we think?
(Picture: Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Trump attends the Libertarian Party's national convention, in Washington. Credit: Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez. |
| 0:10.4 | And we're going to begin today in the United States and what might be described as an avalanche of presidential pardons in the past few days. |
| 0:17.9 | From the outgoing President Joe Biden and, of of course the new occupant of the White House |
| 0:22.4 | Donald Trump. Mr Trump had barely got his feet under the Oval Office desk before issuing a near |
| 0:27.4 | blanket pardon for more than 1,500 of his supporters who stormed Congress on January the 6th, 4 years |
| 0:33.6 | ago. He described their sentences as ridiculous and excessive. At a news conference in |
| 0:39.1 | Washington, he was asked whether rioters who attacked police officers should be held to account. |
| 0:44.1 | He replied saying they should, but added that their sentences could be shortened. |
| 0:49.3 | They've served years in jail and murderers don't even go to jail on this country. And we had 1,500. We have 16 under review, as you know, we commuted about 16 of them because it looks like they could have done things that were not acceptable for a full pardon. No, we pardoned people that were treated unbelievably well, poorly. In the history of |
| 1:14.6 | our country, there's never been anything take place like this. There's one conviction which has been |
| 1:20.2 | overturned, which is raising a lot of eyebrows. And it's the unconditional pardon given to Ross Ulbrick, |
| 1:25.7 | the founder of the Dark Web Marketplace Silk Road. |
| 1:29.7 | Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison back in 2015 for running the site where criminals could |
| 1:35.7 | trade drugs using Bitcoin. Let's talk to the BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy, who's with me |
| 1:40.9 | in the studio. Perhaps just remind us what the dark web is and what exactly |
| 1:45.2 | happened on Silk Road. Yes, so Silk Road was the first of these dark web marketplaces. The dark |
| 1:50.5 | web is a part of the internet that's only accessible through specific software. You need to |
| 1:55.0 | download something called the Tor browser, which stands for the onion router. And then it works |
| 2:00.0 | similar to like a Google or |
| 2:01.9 | a Chrome or whatever. Once you know the address you want to go to, you can type it in. It will take |
| 2:06.2 | you there. But it's not indexed like the normal websites and like the normal internet. So it's |
| 2:10.9 | much harder to use. And it's also crucially very privacy conscious because your internet traffic is bounced around the world, |
... |
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