This Tuesday, September 27, 2016, college’s around the country will be showing a premiere of the film “Deep Web,” a documentary by Alex Winter. This film depicts the events surrounding the creation, existence, and ending of the online black marketplace called “Silk Road.” It also highlights key political issues of the deep web, including the formation of Bitcoin, a virtual currency system that is cash for the internet. Bitcoin is independent of central banking, thus, eliminates the middleman in transactions.

Most importantly, this film shows crucial information surrounding the unfair trial of Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old genius who was charged with the creation of the Silk Road. Ross went to trial on seven different charges including conspiracy to traffic narcotics, procuring murder, money laundering, computer hacking, and more. However, as this film will show, the trial was a complete “miscarriage of justice,” before, during, and after the court proceedings. This was mainly due to most of the crucial evidence in Ross’s favor not allowed to be presented in court such as the fact that federal agents tampered with key evidence in the investigation leading up to trial. However, this evidence was left out of the courtroom, leaving an uninformed group of jurors to decide Ross’s fate based on a slim amount of biased information.

At the end of the trial, Ross was convicted on all seven accounts, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. This punishment in itself is absolutely preposterous. Ross essentially ran a website similar to Craigslist; it was an online marketplace where people could go on and order drugs and other products without having to deal with sketchy in person encounters. He didn’t harm anyone’s life, liberty, or property, and certainly did not procure any violence. He simply hosted a website where people could buy and sell goods.

How is it that owning a website can lead to lifetime in prison, but violently raping a woman will only land you three months in jail? This is not right or just. Sure, there were illegal drugs bought and sold on the Silk Road, which is one of the main charges Ross faced. The issue is, there is no evidence that Ross ever bought or sold those drugs himself. He simply provided a domain that let other individuals do so. If this is such a prominent issue, then the individuals who should have been charged were those who were selling and buying the illegal products, not Ross.

If the federal government were to follow this dangerous precedent created in this case, of holding web owners accountable for illegal exchanges that happened on their web platforms, then Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg would surely be thrown in prison, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin would be in prison, Craig Newmark of Craigslist would be thrown in prison, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang would be in prison, and so many many more. These individuals are clearly still living their lives happily and soundly, as they should be, so why is it that Ross, a website owner, was held responsible for the actions of other people? As Lyn Ulbricht put it, he was “the first website host ever, to be convicted for the actions of the users of the site.” This sets a harmful precedent of holding individuals accountable for other people’s actions, which is wrong and dangerous.

As Reason’s Nick Gillespie put it, “if you care about due process, Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches, the limits of government surveillance, and Internet freedom, you should pay attention.” Go see Deep Web this Tuesday, or stream the movie online for a small fee. For more information about Ross Ulbricht and his trial visit https://freeross.org/.