Entrapment requires that the police induce a suspect to commit a crime which they would otherwise be unlikely to commit. You have to show that the cop induced the victim to do something he wouldn't normally do himself without the cop's specific involvement. (e.g. If you go to a line up of hookers and just pick the one that happens to be a cop, that's not entrapment.)

In the Maryland indictment, an uncover cop posed as a supplier and arranged a deal with DPR to move cocaine in bulk since shipments to small time users wasn't profitable for him. A couple of weeks after they finished that deal, DPR contacted the same undercover cop about one of the site's admins who had been caught by the police and who had stolen money from other Silk Road users. He asked if he could arrange for the man to be roughed up and forced to return the money before later asking to have him killed. The indictment implies that DPR was the one to tell the cop about the guy being caught, though it's hard to tell how it went from there. He paid $40k up front and after and gave the go ahead after being told assassins were waiting to get him alone away from his wife and kid. This took place over two months with multiple chances to pull out.

This first also comes up later in a second hit request against someone trying to blackmail him.

The federal indictment describes an incident in which someone by the nickname "FriendlyChemist" claimed to have hacked into another Silk Road vendor's machine and downloaded the real names of vendors and customers. He attempted to blackmail DPR to the tune of half a million that he said he needed to pay off his suppliers. DPR then asked for his supplier so that they could work things out. Behind FriendlyChemist's back, he asked for the supplier to have him killed as a liability and to sell his wares directly instead. The supplier quoted a price of $150k-$300k, which DPR haggled down to the lower end of the range saying that he'd paid for $80k in the past for a hit. He was later mailed a picture of the guy dead and thanked him for his swift action.

Probably because (a) he thought he wouldn't get caught for it, and (b) there aren't really any other places where one can enjoy the same standard of living that won't harshly punish or turn over a trafficker in illicit goods and services. I mean, where exactly should someone who runs a black market website live?

Mostly in snagging your password if you, like most users, reuse passwords. Also, if you wish to use a pseudonym that you don't want tracked back to you, it's impossible without SSL covering what pages you view and what you post.

For now. But people could have said that same thing about fire ants, crazy ants, Africanized bees, and most definitely the Asian tiger mosquito which is pretty much everywhere now. There's no reason to believe if there's a breeding pair that they won't flourish as well here.

Strange... For someone paranoid about the government, you only care about using anonymous transactions when making the most innocuous purchase on the list (food close to where you live).

Oh, I know you know, and I know you know I know, but do everyone else out there know we know or even just know, you know?

You will probably not be able to get your coins back. They have been seized via civil forfeiture. To get your coins back, you will need to establish proof that you are the owner of the coins and that you qualify for an "innocent owner" defense under 18 USC 983(d). Specifically, you will need to show that you "(i) did not know of the conduct giving rise to forfeiture; or (ii) upon learning of the conduct giving rise to the forfeiture, did all that reasonably could be expected under the circumstances to terminate such use of the property."

So, can you show that you did not know that drugs and other illicit materials were being traded on Silk Road? If not, can you show that you tried to get your coins out as soon as you learned this was the case? If not, then goodbye money. You shouldn't have knowingly comingled funds with criminals.

Beyond the unlikelihood of successful recovery, I would point out that attempting to claim your coins may put you at risk of criminal charges for your own actions. I note that you specifically mention that you "have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens" (emphasis added). If you have used your coins to participate in a crime elsewhere or have participated in activity that is legal elsewhere but criminal in the US (e.g. trade in controlled substances), you may run afoul of money laundering charges (18 USC 1956-1957) and RICO (18 USC 1961-1968).

I highly recommend you consult a real attorney first. (I am not one!) Be honest with them; you have attorney-client privilege in the US and in many other countries, and they cannot give good legal advice without all the facts. Don't be reckless, though. Since you're a foreign national, any calls to the US will most likely be monitored according to recent news, and the DEA is accused of using information they can't legally obtain to fake up a "clean" evidence trail that can't be constitutionally impeached. If possible, you may wish to seek an attorney local to your country who works with US law internationally.

Final note: I am not a lawyer. This should not be construed as legal advice, and I may be quite wrong on several aspects of the above. If you are in serious trouble, consult a real attorney and not Slashdot.

It's "intents and purposes!"

I don't even want to know what an intensive purpose is, but I bet you'd probably want to keep that kind of thing on Tor and out of public sight.

Welllll, maybe...

Do you remember the recent stories about the DEA and "parallel construction," where the DEA was getting phone records from the NSA and then using them to identify suspects from which they could reverse engineer a false "lead" to let the police just happen to find other incriminating evidence to build a case on?

I'm not saying that's clearly what happened here, but as others have pointed out, it's a distinct possibility given that drugs are involved.

I think we're more picking over definitions here than an actual perception of where the parties sit, so since you've laid out where you're coming from, I'll do the same, and we can part as some of the few people in this article to have had a back-and-forth without convincing ourselves the other is an idiot. :-)

If Sollard meant to say that there's no middle in American politics anymore, I would agree to that, but characterizing the Democrats as the "far left" is disingenuous, since it portrays them as just as far from a reasonable, centrist stance as the Republicans.

I think people today have completely forgotten what the "far left" used to look like in American politics and have no conception of what it's *really* like when you go to countries where Communist parties actually get votes. It's a disservice to history, and it plays into the false equivalency that both sides are just as bad as each other. This is clearly not the case to anyone looking outside the narrow blinders of the current status quo to the greater global and historical perspective. Context matters more than just the horse race to me.

Anyway, that's what got my hackles up.

I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.

Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to, and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.

12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.

This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere. Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.

Thank you, /., for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time), but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website.

Good luck in your future endeavors.

Signing off, Tackhead (#54550)
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.

(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)

So what's the plan going forward? I've had a couple of hours to cool down and formulate my objections more objectively.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to, and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.

12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.

This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere. Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.

Thank you for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time), but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website. Good luck in your future endeavors, but if there's no D1/D2 preservation, I'm afraid I won't be riding this train to wherever it's going.

Signing off,
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.

(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)

Yeah, how's that theory working out, post 9/11?