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