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Comment by cowmoo728 | Hacker News Reader

"Richard Downing, who oversees the computer crime section of the Justice Department, said he and his colleagues have focused on techniques that create distrust on the sites by encouraging users to believe that sellers and site administrators have already been compromised and are feeding information to law enforcement."

This looks like a good way to spark real-life violence in what is otherwise a remarkably safe way to exchange drugs. In addition, reputation and trust are everything in dark net markets, and reputation is the only thing preventing vendors from selling fake or adulterated drugs.

I can't see any way that the police intentionally spreading misinformation is a good thing, on a practical or philosophical level.

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The police don't know what they are doing. Trying to break the trust of darkweb users is a fool's errand. The system is built on mistrust. The big selling point of these markets is that you don't have to know anything about your dealer, and they need to know almost nothing about you. So there is no trust system to break.

The other big selling point is that these websites defeat all the violence. There are no turf wars online, at least not physical wars. No dealer can force users to buy from them exclusively. No low-level dealer in a neighborhood must pay homage to a local mob boss. All of that disappears. Any cop that thinks oldschool tactics like spreading distrust within the supply chain to instigate internal mole hunts has watched too many movies. Within Tor it is assumed that everyone is a mole. Each individual protects themselves with the tools available. Every dealer assumes at least some buyers are cops. Every buyer assumes the cops are running sting operations. The market functions nevertheless.

So long as 'trust' is part of the factor for purchase, then by 'Supply and Demand' - the tactic will work.

Consider that there's an incredible number of 'regular people' who might visit these sites, not super knowledgable. They might have regular jobs, regular lives.

The thought that they could be caught up in something legal, lose their jobs etc. etc. is a very material risk.

Without getting into other aspects of this issue ... the tactic they're using is actually reasonable.

Also, I'll bet their not spending a huge amount of energy on it, it probably boils down to 'keeping an eye on it'.

As far as your comments bout 'no violence' etc. - really, it'll just move elsewhere.

Anything that starts making money will be exploited very quickly by nefarious entities for nefarious means.

It's also safer than buying it off the streets (aside from dealing with gang members), there is no telling what you are buying (they probably don't know either).

While it's true that everyone mistrusts each other. Sellers are also competing with each other to offer the best products with the best prices, putting a huge amount of effort to build the best feedback ratings. A world away from gangs using extreme violence to increase turnover (you would think that factors into the priorities). I'd feel safer buying from DreamMarket than I would Ebay.

> The big selling point of these markets is that you don't have to know anything about your dealer, and they need to know almost nothing about you.

Huh? Sellers need a physical address. Sure, one can use the address of some senile neighbor, or that of someone on vacation, or an empty house, etc. But I bet that over 90% of buyers use their actual address. I mean, DPR did, when he bought fake ID from SR.

My thoughts exactly. People still have to provide some address to receive it, and if they are buying from a cop then when the package shows up the cops will be watching and when you grab it, you're busted.

Seems like you still need some level of trust, but please correct me if I've got it wrong.

Consider that if I know your address, I can order drugs delivered to you. Then you take the sting. I would think that this factor and the desire to catch the sellers more than the buyers motivates law enforcement to focus on disrupting the chain and tracking down sellers more than pursuing all but the highest volume buyers.

Also there is plausible deniability. "I don't know why drugs showed up to my house. Look! That's not even my name...clearly a mistake."

Sure. But they would use your name.

What if they just record you taking the package, follow you home, get a warrant based on probable cause, and search your house and find the package?

That's certainly a risk.

If you're using a market that's not compromised, you trust sellers' ratings. Sellers who were police honeypots would arguably not have high ratings. Unless, of course, police had created user bot armies.

From what I've read, you place a test order, shipped to your third-party address. Relying on tracking information, you anonymously hire someone to "steal" the package, with the contents as part of the payment. To get the rest of the payment, they need to message you anonymously, and you pay well-mixed Bitcoin. You never actually meet them again.

If that works out, you place a real order, shipped to the same address. And hire someone else anonymously to "steal" the package, and drop it somewhere for you. And then pay them anonymously, with well-mixed Bitcoin. But it's gotta be a decent payment, comparable to what they could get by selling the contents.

Too iffy for me.

define 'well-mixed Bitcoin' please?

Is there a threshold that you'd use? How do you judge whether a BTC tx is well-mixed?

Between my meatspace identity and Mirimir, which is my least ~anonymous persona, well-mixed means mixing successively by three different services: A, B and C. I mix via Tor, using Whonix VM instances, and Electrum wallets. So three Whonix/Electrum instances: X, Y and Z.

    source to X via A
    A to Y via B
    B to Z via C

Bitcoin in Whonix/Electrum instance Z is available to spend, or transfer to another VM.

For transfers among ~anonymous personas, I just mix once or twice, depending on the desired compartmentalization level.

Damn, I was brain-dead when I wrote that. Make it:

    source to X via A
    X to Y via B
    Y to Z via C

> What if they just record you taking the package, follow you home, get a warrant based on probable cause, and search your house and find the package?

What if you never opened the package before the warrant was executed? If you never opened it you can't possibly know what's in it. And if anything receiving a package from a sketchy sender and _not_ immediately opening it sounds totally reasonable.

Until they shoot your dogs and put you in cuffs...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_may...

> Prince George's County Police later arrested two men in a drug trafficking plan involving the shipment of large parcels of marijuana to addresses of uninvolved residents. After each parcel was delivered outside the addressee's home, another individual would retrieve the drugs. Police seized six packages containing 417 pounds (189 kg) of marijuana.[9]

Yep, SOP. And the police totally blew it. If they had just contacted the mayor, they could have setup an ambush for the pickup operative.

The book "Drug Interdiction: Partnerships, Legal Principles, and Investigative Methodologies for Law Enforcement" was written by law enforcement, for law enforcement. Here is an excerpt from the section about controlled deliveries:

>The undercover agent will attempt to solicit any statements in which the suspect may admit knowledge of the parcel delivery. The key to any parcel investigation is for law enforcement to prove that the subject had knowledge of the parcel’s contents. This is critical to the prosecution of the suspect in a parcel investigation. It is virtually impossible to litigate a criminal case without proving knowledge of contents.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Stay safe out there.

> What if they just record you taking the package, follow you home, get a warrant based on probable cause, and search your house and find the package?

If someone sends a package to my house, my taking it into my apartment is evidence of about nothing. Why you would send it somewhere without plausible deniability—say, a PO box you only use for drugs—is beyond me.

Furthermore, they also need to demonstrate you had knowledge of the contents before opening. That's damn hard.

FYI fake names is bad OpSec; it's a great way to get a 'care package', i.e. a controlled delivery.

You have just as much plausible deniability with or without a fake name.

Yeah, the postal system is watching. So you gotta have name and address match. Some post offices won't even deliver to unknown names. And some tiny post offices know every resident, by name. I know, because I've received mail addressed to my name and the five-digit postal code. It was a very small town.

That's interesting. I've always used a fake name when conducting P2P transactions online. For instance on RedditGifts, I've always used a fake name. This backfired once when a housemate sent a very expensive chess set sent from Singapore back and the sender never got it. Other than that I've had a good experience.

That's true, somewhat. If you read the history of the SR1 takedown, you see that the FBI interviewed buyers whose packages had been intercepted by Customs. And from what I've seen, there's no indication that any of them were prosecuted.

But on the other hand, someone did have heroin sent to Brian Krebs, and planned to trigger a SWAT upon delivery.[0] It was just luck that he found out about it in advance, and filed a police report. For less clueful victims, it's still arguably a substantial risk.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/hacker-who-sent-me-heroi...

> If you read the history of the SR1 takedown, you see that the FBI interviewed buyers whose packages had been intercepted by Customs. And from what I've seen, there's no indication that any of them were prosecuted.

At least 65 SR1 buyers are known to have been arrested: https://www.gwern.net/DNM-arrests

Wow. Great work! Thanks.

I really doubt that in a country where Swatting resulting cops killing the innocent and unarmed video game players in their house.

And, due to the anonymity of the new market, there's no benefit to busting the chain if you bust a buyer. You can't get the buyer to snitch on who their supplier is.

> My thoughts exactly. People still have to provide some address to receive it, and if they are buying from a cop then when the package shows up the cops will be watching and when you grab it, you're busted.

> Seems like you still need some level of trust, but please correct me if I've got it wrong.

Is it illegal to receive drugs if you don't know it's drugs? Is merely bringing a package into your home, without inspecting its contents, illegal?

Probably not but most people who order drugs online will probably use them at some point, it's not like the drugs will remain in a sealed box forever.

If they bust you with an unopened package, they will try to get you to admit that you ordered it. And here's where it gets tricky.

If you ordered from a police honeypot seller, they have some reason to think that you did order. So if you at first deny ordering, and later admit that you did, you've just admitted to lying to them. Penalties for that can be worse than ordering illegal drugs ;)

Denial of guilt is not considered lying. Otherwise, every contested guilty verdict would have a perjury charge attached. Just say no. Or say nothing. Or one word: lawyer.

Say nothing. I think you can stay quiet but if you talk and lie to FBI, you will be Martha Stewart. Totally unrelated to the original case and they can prove this very easily, 2 FBI agents with detailed notes vs you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_may...

> Sellers need a physical address.

Still only circumstantial evidence, you can order drugs to any address you want.

Besides, I highly doubt most buyers have enough activity to justify pursuing legal action.

The seller can also perform a dead drop instead of mailing the package. Although, it seems difficult to do a dead drop in a place like NYC without getting caught on camera.

That, and presumably a seller would be nervous about using a buyer-chosen dead drop, or reusing a dead drop location buyers knew about.

This is foolish.

Vendor ratings and exchange reputations absolutely matter. It is in no way a trust-less system. Vendors forego significant profit to establish these ratings.

It is a system where you must constantly guard against malicious actors - cops, exit scams, etc. - but the nash equilibrium achieved depends deeply on trust metrics. Increasing the number of malicious agents is much like increasing parasitism in ecosystems, and has dramatic effects on how the ecosystem performs.

But how could you trust the ratings at all? Amazon, with all their resources and ML prowess, is having a very difficult time with fake reviews. These sites don’t stand a chance.

An Amazon verified purchase is a cheap thing, if I'm buying that widget anyway I could imagine accepting some kickback to let the bots review it in my stead. Why not?

But a darknet market purchase? That's different. One goes through all kinds of ridiculous gyrations to prevent third parties from being included, and with good reason. Unless you think you can compromise legit user accounts, your bots would have to spend a whole lot of money on real drugs before anybody would give credence to their fake reviews.

How do these systems do “verified reviews,” and if they can, wouldn’t it be bitcoin just going back the same person?

The system is largely the same--I'm prompted to leave a review after a transaction is completed.

In the Amazon case, it's not a big deal if both me and the shady seller communicate out of band. We can use email or whatever to orchestrate the payback for a positive review, and the penalities for our scheme being compromised are low: maybe we get banned from Amazon and frowned at by our friends, who cares.

In a darknet market scenario, we rely on the market to handle our identities, and try to stay completely anonymous otherwise. So we have to use some other identity mechanism to orchestrate the kickback, which fails in two ways:

- Either it's too disconnected from the original transaction, and there's no way for me to hold the seller accountable for the Bitcoin I was promised in exchange for a positive review (aside from buying from the shady seller a second time just for the opportunity to leave a negative review).

- Or it's too connected to the original transaction. In this case, if our side scheme is uncovered it could be used as evidence against us in court. Which is a significantly scarier outcome than being banned. Although being banned also carries more weight because some sellers won't sell to accounts without positive history, so if you need to reboot your identity you might have to risk getting ripped off a few times before the larger community of sellers trusts you again.

Also, I'd stay the hell away from any seller that approached me with such an offer, they want me to participant in a scam, which tells me something about them. Why should I trust their drugs?

Rather puts me in mind of the deliberate poisoning of alcohol by the government during Prohibition. The attitude was that if someone died from drinking poisoned hooch, well it was their fault for drinking it. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/government-poison-10000-am...

The government did not poison supplies of alcohol meant for human consumption, nor did it intentionally aim to kill those who drank the tainted products.

That's a big difference from a deliberate poisoning.

And that still happens today - you can buy "denatured alcohol" that is unfit for human consumption.

Quoting the referenced article, in turn quoting a Slate article:

> To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to “renature” the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.

They didn't put poison specifically in alcohol for human consumption, but they did put poison into chemicals that they knew would be consumed by humans. At the end of the day, I don't see the difference.

Fair point. But that still happens today. They add things like benzene, toluene or diesel to alcohol so it can’t be consumed.

It’s similar to over the counter codeine in Canada. The dose is small and combined with a dose of acetaminophen.

Seems kind of cruel for addicts to destroy their liver if they take too much.

I didn't say that it doesn't still happen today. All I'm saying, is that it doesn't make much difference if the government directly poisons alcohol, or, if it poisons chemicals that it knows people are going to drink. At the end of the day, the people that die as a result don't care about the distinction.

We'll agree to disagree then. I see that as a major distinction.

What is the difference between directly killing someone and taking an action that you know will result in someone's death? The end result is exactly the same.

Laws call one murder and one manslaughter.

Really isn't that cruel when you look at the solubility of acetaminophen at freezing temperatures.

Please explain. Is this a serious comment or a joke about Canada being cold?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_water_extraction

See also a similar, disturbingly common attitude about acetaminophen/opiate combinations.

I've heard an RN say the problem is that it doesn't ruin junkies' livers fast enough.

If however, you have vested interests in the private prison industry and benefit from keeping the drug-trade illegal and on the streets it is a very good thing..

Less than 10% of prisoners are in private prisons - getting rid of private prisons would have little impact on support for the drug war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison

Which isn't to say that public sector unions and companies that supply material to prisons, or built prisons don't all support polices that incarcerate more and more people. (For example, the CA prison worker union spends more on political lobbying than all other labor unions in CA.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...

Said it yourself in the second part.

>>"The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations." https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-economics-of-the-america...

Alternatively you could have completely open interests in public correctional officers unions. Over 90% of prisons in the US are public and their employees are at least as highly motivated as any investor to lobby for more punitive laws and they can vote.

It's an awful idea. Same thing happens when police departments run ads claiming that there is a bad batch of crystal meth in town and to please bring yours in and the police will dispose of it and then they arrest people that show up.

Makes it super difficult for legitimate harm reduction organizations to get out actual information about possibly adulterated substances.

Do they seriously do that? Seems so obviously counterproductive.

This looks like a good way to spark real-life violence in what is otherwise a remarkably safe way to exchange drugs.

How? The whole point of the dark web is that you don't know who you're dealing with so who are you going to seek revenge against if you think you've been wronged? If you mean the second-order effect of people giving up on the dark net and buying drugs of questionable quality from a dealer on a street corner (with all the implicit violence of illegal street crime) that's likely true; but policing is an instrumentality and wishing they weren't is to say that the police should shape policy, which creates a whole new set of problems.

Without endorsing the drug war, this is going to happen any time you have asymmetric conflict with incomplete information. So while I think all drugs should be legal and we should concentrate on education and harm reduction, the same techniques will be deployed against other things that everyone does agree are crimes, from the manufacture and distribution of child porn to disrupting violent organized crime networks. Wherever there is a demarcation of liability actors on both the supply and demand sides will operate independently to penetrate it and establish a bidirectional channel.

So while I'd like to see the drug war ended right now and a full pardon for everyone who hasn't committed murder or extreme violence, the philosophical aspect of this is never going to go away because it's a fundamental strategy, arguably rooted in biology if not deeper.

Devil's advocate- just because the violence is not visible doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's just pushed out of sight. The increased ease of acquiring drugs is probably pretty strongly correlated to stronger cartels elsewhere.

I think the real solution is legalization of most drugs but until then I see no issue with these tactics.

Why most and not all?

Also, given how many existing drugs are already legal, couldn't one say that most already are legal and that hasn't been enough to fix the problem?

> This looks like a good way to spark real-life violence in what is otherwise a remarkably safe way to exchange drugs.

The drug war is the antithetical to harm reduction and safety in production and use. The only solution to the drug war is decriminalization, legalization and improved health systems for harm reduction.

Most of the issue with the drug war and overdoses is in direct relation to drug illegality. Users get badly produced products, mixed with harsher drugs like fentanyl that are cheaper or people can't get them help due to the criminality of the policy. Drugs can be dangerous, the drug war and illegality makes them more dangerous and obliterates harm reduction. The hard line approach leads to more dangerous synthetics that only exist due to the illegality of the substances they are analogs to. Anyone taking drugs that is addicted and needs help, should get help, not felonies and put in a building with violent criminals, adding to problems problems doesn't solve anything.

Not only that, the drug war has diverted funds to mafias/cartels that have built them to the size of nation states, making the whole thing extra violent when it is mostly just a non-violent end result. We learned nothing from alcohol prohibition.

The drug war also makes respecting law and order a joke when drugs like marijuana, LSD, psilocybin and more are treated harshly, these are safe drugs with very low toxicity [1], lower than caffeine, aspirin and nicotine, and keep people from harsher substances.

Ultimately the drug war is a war on people and plants, that is part of a drug dark age we are in, that will look quite silly in retrospect from the future, same way alcohol prohibition looks today.

Alcohol is a drug, it is dangerous, but also fun, as long as there is harm reduction and information about it and it is produced safely. When alcohol was illegal, all of that, including production which led to explosions and production of deadly batches, was more dangerous being illegal than legal. It is also safer with the legal market running it rather than the mafia, the reverse is true in other illegal drugs.

Harm reduction, decriminalization, legalization and bringing a regulated market in will make all substances safer, markets around them efficiently work safety into the system when is has enough market value as there is liability that pushes producers to make safe products and information about harm reduction.

It is time to throw in the towel on the war on people and the human condition, then turn to a human/health/market focused solution rather than authoritarian enforcement solution. End the drug prohibition dark age. We need a Right to Body amendment that ends this prohibition and future attempts.

[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/Bkl9QeN

I agree with what you're saying but that chart isn't accurate at all. GHB isnt toxic except at massive doses, it metabolizes into water and carbon dioxide and is a first-line prescription treatment for narcolepsy.

Really? Wikipedia lists:

> single doses over 7000 mg often causing life-threatening respiratory depression, and higher doses still inducing bradycardia and cardiac arrest.

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric_acid

As far as I know the danger with depressants is not necessarily poisoning but also cardiac and respiratory arrest. Do you know what the LD50 of GHB is meant to be? I can’t find it.

The typical nightly dose for adults is 6-9g and it doesn't cause respiratory depression. Wikipedia isn't a good source on its own.

https://www.xyremhcp.com/xyrem-dosing-and-titrating-adults

Replying to the other commentor: The very first listing on the box warning for Xyrem is respiratory depression.

The warning has to do with bad combinations. Sedatives/alcohol/etc mixed with GHB can cause respiratory depression and death. On its own 'GHB slows and deepens respiration (causing no net effect on blood gasses) and it slows heart rate'.

https://life-enhancement.com/pages/the-truth-about-ghb-steve...

That is just completely inaccurate. The black box warning does not apply to only combinations.

Don't take medical advice from "life-enhancement.com". There is an extensive body of peer reviewed literature. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400846/

> "The primary effect of GHB on respiration was a dose-dependent decrease in respiratory rate, accompanied by an increase in tidal volume, resulting in little change in minute volume."

Eventually tidal volume cannot be increased to compensate for decrease in RR. GHB is dangerous because this change occurs at the margins of recreational dosages. This is especially pronounced when combined with other respiratory depressants. I am a medical professional, not making this up. Please do not spread harmful misinformation.

The guy's personal views aren't sufficient to make what he's saying untrue. Everything will kill you at some dose, GHB having a lethal dosage doesn't make it especially dangerous.

'Morse et al. [7] have demonstrated the effects of GHB on breathing. A decrease in respiratory rate occurs, accompanied by a compensatory increase in tidal volume, allowing minute volume to be maintained until doses approach lethality. The concomitant ingestion of ethanol typically alters the concentration-effect relationship, leading to respiratory depression when the compensatory increase in tidal volume is avoided as seen in cases where GHB is administered alone. This deleterious effect from combining GHB and ethanol could be avoided through the administration of GABA-B receptor antagonists. These receptors seem to be involved in its development.'

http://dual-diagnosis.imedpub.com/sodium-oxybate-and-respira...

You realize that I referenced the same article? I already addressed this. I also have never seen that journal you referenced; it does not appear to be indexed in PubMed and it's strange.

You cannot indefinitely increase tidal volume. This study was done in mice. There are established LD50s for GHB which are not far from recreational dosages. GHB causes respiratory depression. It is worse when combined with other agents like ethanol, which it often is. I already wrote that.

What it metabolizes into isn't very important. GHB is quite dangerous when used alongside other respiratory depressants, most commonly alcohol. They have a synergistic effect on respiratory depression.

It's also pretty habit-forming.

What a drug is metabolised into is sometimes how it treats a patient. Grapefruit can slow down some of the P450 enzymes so drugs like heart condition drugs can kill, and Viagra in combination with grapefruit will give you a priaprism that lasts for hours. 2 Litres of grapefruit juice + 50mg of Viagra to be exact is all you need, and to go down, you need a visit to the A&E dept who will inject both sides of your penis with andrenaline, or getting a couple of epipens from the darkweb could also save you a trip to the A&E dept if you want to do it yourself. Tobacco speeds up the metabolise of some drugs again altering some of the P450 enzymes, like caffeine so instead of it lasting in the body for about 8hrs, its cleared in 4hrs, yet some other prescription drugs including some female contraceptives can make caffeine last in the body for over a day, which explains why some people are sensitive to it. Viagra and poppers is also a big no no as it can cause a fatal drop in blood pressure, but so can ingesting large quantities of potassium. Paracetamol also slows down some P450 enzymes so when combined with alcohol, the alcohol can reach toxic levels in the body and kill. Its an easy suicide method if you know the right amounts to take. To bypass the liver which is like a safety net for the body, inhale drugs like cocaine, hold them under your tongue as the skin is thin there or stick them up your bum which also has thin skin and thus easily absorbed. Pretty much anything is dangerous at the wrong dose, the wrong delivery method and those Lethal Doses can be affected by other foods and drugs which many people may not think anything of, so just be careful.

I'm familiar with all of that, which does not apply to GHB.

Holy cow, I could not agree with you more. As someone who has lost loved ones to drugs (they got something other than what they thought they were buying) and also to suicides over having their legal opioids taken away from them due to the "opioid epidemic," I think you are spot on.

For the skeptic out there: ask yourself if your loved one wanted to overdose or if it was an accident. I bet the majority of cases were unintentional. Had the drugs been clearly labeled with doses and checked for purity, your brother/sister/father/mother/friend might still be here. Mine would for sure.

Couldn't have said it better myself. To add to the list of very good and reasonable arguments there's also the social, recreational and medicinal benefits.

Most people I know are hypocrites when it comes to drugs, on one hand they happily drink alcohol or smoke almost every day as well as consuming huge amounts of caffeine but as soon as illegal drugs of any kind comes up many people get on the fences they really really don't see the similarities, I guess it's just sheepism and brainwashing from early childhood.

It would be funny if some of these illegal drugs end up curing some of the major problems we have today like depression, social anxiety and loneliness.

It's just becoming ever more hard to argue rationally and scientificly for prohibition. Many people who are against drugs all have some "exceptional" personal reason like having lost someone close etc. Where in most of these stories, the illegal drug blaimed was a tiny bit of the problem or was laced or impure as a direct consequence of illegality. I'm not denying addiction at all, but iirc all evidence points to addiction levels being steady or falling when you legalize. There'll always be the troubled people who'll struggle more than others and some of them will abuse whatever's available.

it makes sense when the goal is not to protect people but to enforce the law for the law's sake

Really? What law is being enforced by these actions? This is just a domestic PsyOps operation; I see no adherence to the rule of law here.

Broadly speaking, the law in question is Title 21 Chapter 13 of the US Code. Buying and selling controlled substances without appropriate authorization is illegal. Disruption of illegal activities by law enforcement is generally legal, provided no other laws are broken in the process.

Now, whether buying and selling these substances should be illegal is another question. But it's definitely not obvious that law enforcement is outside its typical role here.

I didn't mean to suggest that law enforcement is outside its typical role, just that it is outside its legitimate role if it were behaving in a way, as dewaine suggests, of blindly enforcing a law for that law's sake.

This action doesn't appear to actually enforce any law, only to create acrimony and violence in communities where some people choose to violate it.

> blindly enforcing a law for that law's sake.

I think this take is really uncharitable. I believe many/most people in the US believe that the laws controlling illegal drugs have at least some good purposes. Sure, most people want weed to be legal (not everyone, but most people). But heroin and fentanyl? I'm guessing support for legalizing those is well below the 50% mark. I bet in an unbiased poll, most people would support efforts to disrupt marketplaces that sell these goods.

I agree that if law enforcement believed what, say, many HNers believe about the effectiveness of prohibition laws, this type of enforcement would represent a slavish devotion to the law over justice. But I'm guessing they generally believe the law is a good law and that the country is better off with it enforced.

> This action doesn't appear to actually enforce any law

I already referenced the law that it enforces. I'm not sure what you mean by reasserting that it doesn't enforce any law, while in the previous paragraph you conceded that "[law enforcement were] enforcing a law for that law's sake." Are they or aren't they enforcing a law?

They are certainly enforcing the laws against selling and purchasing drugs. It is uncharitable but if the state actually cared about people it would treat drug addiction as a health issue. It can be treated, current policy obviously has done nothing to solve the problem in the US. The police are enforcing the supremacy of the state, these people are flaunting the law and must be punished otherwise the government looks weak. Nobody wants to admit defeat because it is admitting they are much less powerful than they want people to believe they are.

All of this is conjecture and would of course be unconscious motivation. People want to think they're the good guy, people justify what they're doing so they can sleep at night.

> They are certainly enforcing the laws...

> The police are enforcing the supremacy of the state...

It strikes me that these two concepts are mutually exclusive; that was the reason for my objection in the first place.

> while in the previous paragraph you conceded that "[law enforcement were] enforcing a law for that law's sake." Are they or aren't they enforcing a law?

It seems that you've gotten mixed up about who is saying what in this convo. I am actually contesting the notion that anybody was "enforcing a law for that law's sake" - it was dewaine who said that, and has repeated that assertion in a sibling comment to this one.

The primary thrust of my point is that these sorts of actions don't reflect a devotion to the letter of the law, but rather a nebulous "whatever it takes" approach, even unto naked PsyOps, to achieve a misguided end.

This might also have the inverse effect. Some websites already do what they can to ensure that the web admins don't have access to communications between the seller and the buyer. Increased paranoia results in more safety guides and increased attention to detail by those who do not want to be prosecuted.

The law enforcement are vastly overselling their capabilities and impact here.

These dark-net markets are already rife with FUD from scammers, and the LE accounts spreading it are painfully obvious to the communities that they exist in.

>This looks like a good way to spark real-life violence in what is otherwise a remarkably safe way to exchange drugs.

If you believe what they are doing is bad and must be stopped, then it makes such a choice seem like the relevant thing to do. When the violence does come, it provides more support for the laws in the first place. From the view point of someone who disagrees with those laws in general, I find it evil. But seemingly well thought out evil. Given their existing ideology, it makes sense.

This is beyond the mere position on whether drugs should be legal. The question raised by op is: at what cost? OP says: this action directly causes violence. Therefore anyone defending the action must defend either one of the following positions:

- that is wrong, it does not cause violence, or

- it does cause violence but drugs are so bad that this violence is worth it.

These are different positions from “drugs are bad and must be stopped.”

Talking about this is valuable, because everyone has a limit on how far they’re willing to see countermeasures go. E.g. we think DUI is bad and must be stopped, but clearly not at the cost of making alcohol locks mandatory on every car in circulation. But DUI is evil! Well, yes, but apparently not that evil.

The question then is: ok, you think drugs are evil.. how evil? This evil?

It’s more than just ideology.

I would argue the violence has nothing to do with the drugs and everything to do with the legality -- you, as an upstanding citizen, can't seek legal protection for your chosen trade so have to provide your own protection outside the legal frameworks.

>it does cause violence but drugs are so bad that this violence is worth it.

Generally once you want to make something illegal and use the threat of execution to force people into cages for engaging in it, then you have to accept that it is worth the violence to stop it.

I do see a lot of people who want to make things illegal but don't consider what that actually means for the perspective of someone having the law enforced against them. For example, people who want to make abortion illegal, but when you ask them about what penalty it would be enforced with, they don't want one. Personally, I consider these people to be in a state of still deciding their views on the given issue.

Once an individual has decided that someone in possession of the wrong plant should be locked in a cage for years and using physical, potentially lethal, violence used if they resist, then it seems quite reasonable they will feel the same about other uses of violence for the same reason.

> E.g. we think DUI is bad and must be stopped, but clearly not at the cost of making alcohol locks mandatory on every car in circulation.

Based on the numbers of deaths from alcohol and compared to other movements to restrict rights based on deaths caused (restriction of privacy in the case of terrorism or gun rights in the case of mass shootings), I find it quite surprising there isn't an effort comparable to what you suggest. It makes me begin to question the honesty and sincerity of any held political position.

Your last paragraph is completely on point. I wonder the same thing as your last sentence.

Well I mean they gotta tell the brass they are doing something, right? So you create an atmosphere by where it looks like you are doing stuff, but really you know the things you are doing are ineffective and even counter productive to your goals. But you need a job, doesn't everyone? So the cycle of a bumbling war on drugs goes on.

> I can't see any way that the police intentionally spreading misinformation is a good thing, on a practical or philosophical level.

Being undercover is spreading misinformation. It's the nature of the job.

By that logic, the "birther" movement resulted merely from the "nature of politics", yeah?

At some point, we have to concede that misinformation campaigns can be quite dangerous - like with yelling fire in a crowded theatre.

Seems like a good use of taxpayer money.

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