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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.
If it becomes beta only, I'll become soylentnews.org only.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.