Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

Interesting, Trump administration pardoned Ross William Ulbricht who run drug dealing business specifically because it was done behind Tor using cryptocurrency. So this was a one off?

This sounds awful lot like Middle Eastern mafia stuff, where it's technically illegal to do some things but you can do a lot of things if you are aligned with the people in power.

I have no idea what this person was up to but this selective treatment(if true) smells very bad. IIRC behind the release of Ross there was some libertarian NGO or something, maybe contact them?

> Interesting, Trump administration pardoned Ross William Ulbricht who run drug dealing business specifically because it was done behind Tor using cryptocurrency. So this was a one off?

Didn't Ulbricht get pardoned for being a hero of the cryptocurrency-bros, as kind of a deal to get support from the Libertarians in the election? I think he was a one-off, or at least part of a small category that doesn't extend to cryptography and privacy idealists.

Right, I was hoping that this will set some kind of precedent for legitimizing Tor.

>there was some libertarian NGO

That was the National Libertarian Party and the party chair was forced to resign in disgrace shortly after, due to accusations of kickbacks and embezzlement.

https://thirdpartywatch.com/2025/01/25/mcardle-resigns/

> This sounds awful lot like Middle Eastern mafia stuff, where it's technically illegal to do some things but you can do a lot of things if you are aligned with the people in power.

This didn't work out for SBF, but you can clearly see this process being set up for other people.

The pardon was specifically a campaign promise to libertarians, and likely little more than that.

Even if this Administration is friendly to Tor (which I doubt), the FBI is a very large organization and installing a new head doesn't magically make current caseload at the agent level go away. There are still Biden-era and even Trump v1 era investigations likely still open and active there.

He still did a decade in the slammer. I think his sentence was excessive, since he never directly harmed anyone.