US Government Lurked On Silk Road For Over a Year

angry tapir writes "In order to build a case against the notorious Silk Road underground marketplace, a team of U.S. law enforcement agencies spent well over a year casing the site: buying drugs, exchanging Bitcoins, visiting forums and even posing as a vendor, although they did stop short of selling any illicit goods. From March 2012 until September 2013, Federal agents closely tracked the site, making over 50 drug purchases, according to Jared DerYeghiayan, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security who was part of a special investigation unit looking into the site.

Comments

its a drug bust

[Anonymous Coward]

For everyone who is about to object: what do you think a drug bust looks like? They posed as drugs consumers/dealers and busted the parties buying/selling. This seems like what my taxpayer dollars should go towards: stomping out illegal activity where it is prevalent.

Re:its a drug bust

[pitchpipe]

For everyone who is about to object: what do you think a drug bust looks like? They posed as drugs consumers/dealers and busted the parties buying/selling. This seems like what my taxpayer dollars should go towards: stomping out illegal activity where it is prevalent.

Not only is it a complete waste of time and ruins people's lives, it is a fucking waste of my tax dollars. Oh, but they sure are about to win this stupid fucking drug war.

Next you think they'll try to outlaw stupidity, thereby breaking logic once and for all.

Re:its a drug bust

[ArsonSmith]

I know some people probably can't handle it, but the only lives I know that have been ruined have been due to the police action against them and nothing to do with the pot smoking they did.

Re:Your Tax Dollars At Work

[vux984]

And what did they accomplish? They knocked Silk Road off the net for a few months, and in so doing helped it improve its security for next time.

What is your point?

Are you suggesting we just ignore the black market?

That we should simply pretend it doesn't exist, until its so mainstream that even the local coffeeshop will let you pay for your espresso and avoid paying taxes?

You do have a supportable case that drugs shouldn't be a black market product in the first place. But that's hardly a justification to make the argument that the police shouldn't be tasked with shutting down black markets.

What about murder for hire? Money laundering? Child porn? Slave trafficking? ...

Re:Slashdot messing up their UI?

[pitchpipe]

They're probably trying to fuck up the classic site so they have an excuse to roll out beta to fix it. It's definitely not displaying properly on my phone anymore.

If it becomes beta only, I'll become soylentnews.org only.

Re:Your Tax Dollars At Work

[Anonymous Coward]

What about murder for hire? Money laundering? Child porn? Slave trafficking? ...

Unlike recreational drug use, those things cannot be done responsibily and they always have victims. That's why they should remain illegal, because they do demonstrable material harm to real people, not merely because they're frowned upon by busybodies, nanny states, private prison industries, and other control freaks whose fevered egos require them to try (and fail) to dictate how other people will live.

I seriously and rightly question the intellectual honesty of anyone who would deliberately conflate such things. A willful effort to misrepresent one issue by grouping it with much worse issues can be the only motive there. This is, in fact, a good example characterizing the pro-drug-prohibition rhetoric that has expanded the police state and caused over 60% of all prisoners to be there because of nonviolent drug offenses at tremendous monetary and social cost to us all.

Re:Over 50 drug purchases.

[jklovanc]

Last I've heard, they can arrest and charge with a single transaction without any problem, so why so bloody many for this?

Police do that to establish a pattern of ongoing criminal activity and counter the "it was a one time thing" defense.
Good segway to unsupported police bashing.