On this day exactly 7 years ago in Canada, police killed developer Sam Maloney in the presence of his common-law wife and children in his own home.
Sam was the creator and core developer of MORPHiS, a system for distributed file storage and encrypted messaging. He is also the inventor of DPUSH (DMAIL), a decentralized spam resistant unsolicited messaging protocol based on Proof-of-Work. He believe his inventions would also help scale and develop Bitcoin, and he had been working on decentralized Bitcoin microtransations networks before the publication of Lightening, which he thought MORPHiS was the missing piece to.
"MORPHiS worked flawlessly as a distributed datastore (meaning you could store files in MORPHiS' database and other users would be able to retrieve the files at their end, provided they knew the file's 'address') and you could send encrypted messages to other users of MORPHiS," Klaus Seistrup, a 56-year-old nurse living in Denmark who contributed to the code, wrote in an email.
Less than a month after Maloney's murder, the popular Vice magazine published an article titled "
Why Did Police Kill an Alleged Small-Time Hacker?" that justified the government raid on his home on the basis of the police having a warrant to seize Maloney's computer:
The police suspected Maloney of hacking a local cinema's website. The person responsible posted a manifesto called "The Declaration of the Independence of Atlantis" that reportedly railed against race mixing. Days before the hack, Maloney posted a rambling screed with a similar title to his Facebook page. According to Millar, the cinema was a client of Maloney's at the time.
At some point, Maloney allegedly fired a crossbow bolt at the officers, injuring one. Then, with police still there, he got on the phone with his lawyer. Nick Cake instructed Maloney to put up his hands and cooperate, which Maloney acknowledged. The scene sounded chaotic, according to Cake, but Maloney sounded calm. And then, according to Cake, who remained on the phone, four shots rang out.
Maloney's wife and two children, ages two and six months, were present when he was killed, according to Millar. When he was shot, he was on the phone with his lawyer, Nick Cake.
Despite these claims, Maloney's published "The Declaration of the Independence of Atlantis", allegedly the reason for the police raid, did not rail against race mixing:
People are free to mix, as that is one way that good traits can be shared across races in evolution; too high a rate of mixing however destroys the separate species, thus destroying the genetic diversity that drives evolution's creativity. Likely, some mixed groups will get together and form their own mixed nations – some even where all mixes are welcome. Other mixes will want to diverge off into their own unique combination. The Amish have a right to diverge if they want; they play correctly, letting their children leave with the Rumspringa tradition of their culture. If two races want to mix, that is up to them. But if individuals from those races don’t want to hybridize, they want to see their species continue in their descendents, then it is their right to stay distinct, and to raise their children with an education and culture that strongly teaches them to do the same. That is how evolution and culture work. That is the right of cultures and races. It is their genome, their destiny, their decision.
Also shortly after these events, Maloney's common-law wife, Melissa Facciolo, claimed he was not a racist:
"Morphis is something totally different. It was actually meant to fix the problems of the world and unite people.
He had some extreme ideas I guess about some things. But he wasn't racist. He was paranoid because he thought that Morphis would make governments and government surveillance impossible and that governments would be obsolete."
Shortly after this interview, police charged her with weapons and drug charges after searching their home.
Lawyer Phil Millar said the new drug and weapons charges slapped against 35-year-old Melissa Facciolo smack of police retribution, after she spoke out about the pre-Christmas raid that brought 21 police officers swooping down on the Old South bungalow where she and Samuel Maloney lived.
Maloney’s father has also publicly questioned why so many officers descended on the house with young children inside, including a baby, during the pre-dawn dramatics Dec. 23, suggesting it was “overkill.”
“The timing is suspect. It comes after she gave a public statement,” Millar said of the latest charges against Facciolo, noting they came after she granted a two-part television interview in which she described the raid on the Duchess Avenue house and the shooting of her husband.
Less than a year later, police dropped the drug-related charges against her:
Facciolo was facing four federal drug possession charges, but the Crown has withdrawn those because they no longer believe there's a reasonable possibility of conviction.
The drug charges were withdrawn Nov. 3.
Facciolo still faces obstruction and weapons charges.
Two years after these tragic events, Melissa Facciolo filed a lawsuit against the city's police, from which it was learned that the police dropped 7 of the 8 charges against her, and that the original warrant that allowed the provincial anti-terrorism squad to break into their home was flawed and did not authorize the police to arrest Maloney.
The lawsuit alleges police should have known that the pre-dawn raid by 11 emergency response officers on Maloney’s Duchess Avenue home, where his wife and children were inside, could have resulted in serious injury or death, according to the recently filed statement of claim.
“There were no exigent circumstances and no reasonable grounds that such force and surprise were necessary and justified,” the lawsuit says.
The provincial anti-terrorist squad and the Integrated National Security Enforcement Unit confirmed Maloney wasn’t part of any extremist group or cause, but police decided to get a warrant for Maloney’s computers with the idea to charge him with mischief to data and unauthorized use of a computer once they found offending material on his devices, the SIU report said.
The officer assigned to prepare the search warrant application had never written one before, the lawsuit alleges, noting the application was “deficient” and didn’t include vital information that justified the involvement of the emergency response unit. Excluded was any mention of Maloney’s background or history of violence, the possibility of a crossbow in the house and that his children could be inside.
These allegations echo criticisms of the warrant that SIU director Tony Loparco made in his mandatory report on Maloney’s death last year.
Loparco called it “extremely concerning” that police submitted the deficient warrant that didn’t authorize them to arrest Maloney.
Facciolo was charged with eight weapons and drug offences in the wake of the shooting. She pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited weapon in May and was given 12 months’ probation and a lifetime weapons ban. The other charges were withdrawn.
After Sam Maloney was killed by police, his MORPHiS project stopped developing, and the website and repository soon ceased to function. The open source code of the project itself was preserved in a fork on github:
https://github.com/bitcoinembassy/morphis.
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