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US Government Lurked On Silk Road For Over a Year

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-am-one-of-you dept.

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.

12 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Go get em... by wbr1 · · Score: 4, Funny
    Good job boys. Stop those dopers! They would be raping your grandma and selling acid to your 5 year old if we didn't do this! Look how violently they fight over the black market we created!

    Now, kindly pay your taxes, drink a case of beast and watch the football game. Thank you!

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  2. Who dat on Silk Road by dotslashdot · · Score: 5, Funny

    Turns out, the government was just buying and selling to itself the whole time and no one else is actually on Silk Road!

  3. Slashdot messing up their UI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Has someone been tweaking the Slashdot CSS? Because you've gone and fucked things up.

    The Newer/Older buttons on the front page shrank, so the background style doesn't cover all of the text. Also, the search bar in the header (site-wide) shrunk in height and is too small to display the text typed into it. In the screenshot I have "search term here" entered into the input. Screenshot 1

    There's a huge empty white block on the left side of each article page now. Screenshot 2

    The post/reply comment page now has a semi-visible "Archived Discussion" button, on every article, even brand new ones. Screenshot 3

    All in Firefox 34, Windows 7.

    1. Re:Slashdot messing up their UI? by pitchpipe · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
      Look where all this talking got us, baby.
    2. Re:Slashdot messing up their UI? by The+Fifth+Man · · Score: 4, Informative

      They'll follow this course of action now -- subtle stuff.

      Back in 2006 they ran a CSS redesign contest. Slashdot users overwhelmingly preferred Peter Lada's redesign:
      http://web.archive.org/web/201...

      They picked a mobile-ready, stripped down design that left a lot to be desired. Then the beta fiasco with the Dice purchase ("fuck you, get ready to have this shoved down your throat for the sake of pointless redesign" ).

      To avoid a hue and cry, they'll be making unannounced changes like this. Why? Because fuck the slashdot community, that's why.

  4. Your Tax Dollars At Work by hyades1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So how many millions of dollars did this "team of U.S. law enforcement agencies" spend in a whole year of fattening themselves up at the taxpayer's expense?

    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. Now it's up and running again, making scads of money for the operators, and thumbing its nose at the U.S.

    Oh, well, at least long-suffering taxpayers can happily contemplate about all the boats, cottages and retirement homes they've bought for Norbert the Nark and his Homeland Security buddies.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
    1. Re:Your Tax Dollars At Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. Re:its a drug bust by pitchpipe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:its a drug bust by ArsonSmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. And that's just one agency! by ron_ivi · · Score: 4, Funny
    Assuming most countries have many law enforcement agences; and there are many countries --- it makes me wonder if most of the traffic on Silk Road was just a bunch of undercover operations trolling each other.

    For example, in the US, I could imagine there were buyers from DEA, FBI, some DHS agencies, some DoD agencies, maybe even NYPD (heck, NYPD even has a branch in London, Israel, and Hamburg ) -- and that's just one country. Multiply by a couple hundred countries, and that really might have been a significant fraction of the market.

  8. Free Keen and Jury Nullification by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been following the trial with some interest.

    The Free Keene group went down (from NH to NYC) to protest the trial and hand out Jury Nullification pamphlets, for which they were threatened by the judge.

    The government is using threats to prevent jury nullification information from getting to potential jurors. Doesn't seem fair to me, but then the constitution is probably written in some strange dialect of English where the meaning is something different to a lawyer.

    It occurs to me that this is one way we can have an effect on government in addition to the vote. By informing people about jury nullification, we can encourage juries to ignore unfair laws.

  9. Re:Bitcoins - Good Enough for Government Work! by jrumney · · Score: 4, Informative

    The US government holds that Bitcoin is property not legal tender.

    Legal tender has a very specific and limited meaning relating to payment of debts - if you owe a debt, then an offer of legal tender to settle it cannot be refused. Not being legal tender is not a barrier to something being used in commerce, even by the government. If both parties agree, they can use whatever payment system they want (as long as the IRS is kept happy by declaring a US$ equivalent where required).