Ross Ulbricht arresting officer wishes him best with second chance.
As part of their discussion at the Threatlocker Zero Trust World conference in Orlando, former FBI agent Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent who arrested Hector Monsegur and Ross Ulbricht, talked about seeing the human side of cyber-criminals.
As Tarbell said Monsegur’s behaviour after the arrest had ‘humanised his actions’, saying “he went from Sabu and then day one to Hector Monsegur,” he also commented on Ulbricht being pardoned.
Admitting that he “didn’t want to get political” about the situation, but he said after Ulbricht was recently pardoned by President Trump from his two life sentences, he said that the “old me would have been pissed about that, new me says I hope Ross does something good with the second chance.”
Ross Ulbricht, also known as "Dread Pirate Roberts," operated the anonymous digital marketplace known as Silk Road between 2011 and 2013, when law enforcement shut the site down and arrested him at a California public library.
Ulbricht was arrested and charged in 2013, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2015. Ulbricht was found guilty on seven counts, from selling narcotics and money laundering to maintaining an “ongoing criminal enterprise.”
Tarbell said: “Hector has humanised what a criminal was to me and it's changed me, I think, for better, as a person and I think people sometimes forget that.”
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Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
