Actually providing the sting targets with illegal material seems a lot shadier.
Now that's a headline I can get behind
edit: second thought: I don't think it matters if something is done illegally, unless there is some penalty attached to it, no?
You can be found guilty of crime and not punished via a number of mechanisms ... that doesn't negate the existence of the crime.
The problem is that if government is not punished, then why on earth to think they will stop committing crime?
That seems like the police would have enough to arrest people and do a full investigation of their computer storage. Then should corroborating evidence be found they could charge the people; publishing details of convictions later.
It seems that by continuing to run the site that police enabled crimes which otherwise might not have been possible.
The general pattern for drug and prostitution stings is that the police will commit those secondary crimes, but intervene before allowing the primary crime to happen. In this case, they pretty much committed the primary crime at length before acting.
In a way [0], the US does preemptively ban chemicals, regardless of whether that chemical has even been synthesized or used recreationally yet.
We don't criminalize baking soda, we're just trying a Minority Report sort of approach to things that are likely to be used rather than playing catch-up with known-psychoactive analogues. Certainly the metaphor bit still applies - selling and importing these things are only banned because of their abuse potential, not because the chemical is seen as intrinsically bad.
But I stand by the point of the metaphor, which is that we criminalize distribution because of use. If you couldn't use it, it wouldn't be illegal. So even when flipping users, the intent is to run stings without letting the primary 'event' of drug use happen. That seems like the key difference between drug stings and this sting.