The Federal Silk Road Trial Has Begun ... First Objection Concerned Emoji In E-mails

[Selene]

Fascinating trial. I may go and sit in on it. Free live theater...cheap date. In the '60's my girl friend and I would go to night court and then to a nice restaurant/club in Manhattan.

How emoji, similar to the ones shown here, in chats and others messages should be presented in court has become a subplot in the trial of Ross W. Ulbricht.

The eBay-like enterprise was run on a hidden part of the Internet called the Tor network, where online activity can be anonymous. Deals were made in Bitcoins, an electronic currency that is as anonymous as cash, and Mr. Ulbricht used a pseudonym, Dread Pirate Roberts, in chats with his employees and other communications, the government has

But how chats and other messages and their symbols should be presented in court — and the larger question of how jurors should be educated about unfamiliar terms in a case steeped in web culture — has become a running subplot in the case.

Interesting issues about electronic communications and evidence.

Mr. Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty to narcotics trafficking conspiracy and other charges, and his lawyer, Joshua L. Dratel, has denied that he is Dread Pirate Roberts, the name of a character from “The Princess Bride.”

Before trial, Mr. Dratel asked that all chats, forum posts, emails and other Internet communications be shown to the jury, and not read aloud.

“Chats are designed to be absorbed through reading, not through hearing,” he said in court

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/nyregion/trial-silk-road-online-black-market-debating-emojis.html?smid=li-share

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[Selene]

In the article, there is the 309 page dissertation, of which 261 pages is work, for a PhD thesis entitled:

EMOTIONS ARE RELATIONAL:POSITIONING AND THE USE OF AFFECTIVE LINGUISTIC RESOURCE

And the sub tittle is:

POSITIONING AND THE USE OF AFFECTIVE LINGUISTIC RESOURCES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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[BaalChatzaf]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/nyregion/trial-silk-road-online-black-market-debating-emojis.html?smid=li-share

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Dread Pirate Roberts is found guilty. He will serve 20 years to life.

Nobody defies the TSOG and gets a away with it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

TSOG = Tsarist Occupational Government. Read "The Thing that Ate the Constitution" by Robert Anton Wilson.

[Selene]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/nyregion/trial-silk-road-online-black-market-debating-emojis.html?smid=li-share

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Dread Pirate Roberts is found guilty. He will serve 20 years to life.

Nobody defies the TSOG and gets a away with it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

TSOG = Tsarist Occupational Government. Read "The Thing that Ate the Constitution" by Robert Anton Wilson.

Good call Bob:

It took the jury less than four hours to convict him on all counts in the Manhattan case, including narcotics distribution and criminal enterprise charges that carry a potential life prison term. Ulbricht faces a mandatory minimum prison term of 20 years when he is sentenced in May, reports USA Today.

His parents said after the verdict that Ulbricht likely will appeal his conviction and contended that he had been incorrectly barred from presenting evidence that would have supported his defense.

“When it’s not an even playing field, it’s not a fair trial,” said his mother, Lyn Ulbricht. “If we don’t have fair trials in this country, then we’re all in trouble.”

Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua Dratel, described the jury verdict as “very disappointing” but said he expects his client to prevail on appeal due to the court’s restrictions on evidence and witnesses Ulbricht was allowed to present, reports the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.).

Well that was a quick trial.

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[Selene]

TSOG = Tsarist Occupational Government. Read "The Thing that Ate the Constitution" by Robert Anton Wilson.

Some peculiar theories are launched by Wilson.

Gen. Gehlen and Gen. Vlassov formed what became the Gehlenapparat, the CIA's main source of info on Soviet affairs; Gehlen became the fulcrum of the CIA's "Soviet penetration" sector, working under James Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence, breeder of prize orchids, lover of the arts, and a devout Catholic.

Since the U.S. government based its foreign policies on CIA reports, and the CIA based its Soviet reports on Gehlen and some other former Nazis, plus a crew of Mystical Tsarists, as filtered and interpreted by a Papist intellectual, the U.S. government's ideas and actions became increasingly "weird, " bizarre and frightening, in the view of the rest of the world. The results are very sad and very funny. In a nutshell, most of the world thinks we've gone batshit crazy. "Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!"

Although James Jesus Angleton was Gehlen's alleged supervisor, data indicates that the Gehlenapparat engaged in many activities, including kidnapping, extortion, murder etc. about which Angleton either did not know or devoutly did not want to know.

But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton's fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and "interpretations." These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde's "The Reality of Masks" and Yeats's hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.

http://www.rawilson.com/tsog.html

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