I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cut...
The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.
It convinces others that you're willing to pardon them too in exchange for money and convincing other people is the definition of politics.
> Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
I don't know how much more obvious I can make this for you. Bribery is political.
Bribery is political. But it's not taken to be a usual part of politics in the West. (Similar to how the Roman word for ambush was the same as their word for treason. Treason isn't taken to be a usual part of politics. Ambush, for them, not a usual part of warfare.)
Basically, you're both right because what is and isn't political is itself a political question.
The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’
First at rec.humor.funny on October 11, 1992
Who has Trump pardoned that wasn't a supporter of his?
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-donald-trump-pardons-seco...
The specific political agenda was to get support from libertarians, who lean conservative, but don't like Trump much - because he rejects libertarianism.
That's as political as you can possibly get. It wasn't a behind the scenes thing. It was literally announced at a political convention.
more like large bribe reasons.
Op means to say this type of pardon is not to meant to win votes or satisfy the demands of constituents, Like with convicted cops or people with weed related crimes etc or pardoning draft dodgers after Vietnam or civil war and so on .
While money is involved deeply in politics and financial corruption is there , occasionally idealogical (political) actions without direct financial benefits also happen.
It is hard to say whether this pardon of Silk Road founder was motivated by libertarian, or crypto community pressure or by financial donations to the party etc both are possible even at the same time but they are different considerations
“Government exists for the personal benefit of the leader” (or simply “for my personal benefit as the leader”, with even less generalization beyond that) is an ideology, actually.
It’s not one that is popular to embrace publicly, but, that's hardly unique along real ideologies.
This is an unverified blanket statement. We don't know what percentage of the FBI and law enforcement agree or disagree on anything.
The FBI does what Trump tells them to do, that's it.
Well if they don't like it I'm sure he would be happy to start a bidding war.
1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/stealing-bitcoin...
Their priorities are highly political.
Roughly it seemed to be suggesting that:
* It's easier to deceive someone if they first solicit for help on a forum
* You can trick someone into revealing sensitive info like which infrastructure provider is used by nerdsniping them: "My mate thinks you should just enable health checking on AWS ELB", and then they reply "Well actually I use Hetzner". Except I'm guessing it was more elaborate than that.
I guess I wasn't the target audience of the article though.
joshmn, what did you think of the article?
Do you find it difficult to trust random commenters online now?
I see you mentioned you can't discuss technical details, but if/whenever that expires (?), that'd be great to hear.
I also found it underwhelming, though I'd like to think I’m the most scrutinizing of the subject matter. There's some nuance between my take on my behavior and the profiler's, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt—they only had my Reddit posts to go on and had to package that for investigators.
I still tend to trust by default and make witty comments or jabs that sometimes land flat, so the article was accurate in that sense.
As for talking to the undercover, I made a point of keeping no secrets about my site's technical implementation. Between me and some "competitors," I was usually the first to respond to upstream provider changes—I'd even share my findings without expecting anything in return. Anyone could’ve asked about my issues, and I would've told them.
Trust is the most valued currency in the piracy world, and I worked hard to earn it with both peers and customers. Acting otherwise would've gone against that—and against my own morals. My being neurodivergent may also be worth noting in my willingness (or unwillingness from a free-will perspective) to trust others.
Technically speaking, the site worked by reverse-engineering the league's official streaming services—a few curl requests, careful observation of responses, and adapting them to my needs. There's more to it, of course, but my 2016 MVP was barely 50 lines of Ruby and a plain HTML file. TorrentFreak got some of the details right.
The root problem is the IP laws that congress passed. There will always be large pressure on law enforcement from the industry if you give them that leash.
Like that ever stopped USA before...
not if their top priority is to erase memory
Not for any ideological reason.
A few years ago there was an organized effort to capture key roles in the Libertarian party and focus the organization more on property rights and capitalism, with less emphasis on personal freedoms and constitutional limitations on government. This effectively split the Libertarian party, neutering it as electoral factor.
Now, the Libertarian party never mustered a large share of the vote, but many electoral contests are won at the margins. They managed to get ~3% of the vote in 2016, but lost >80% of that over the following 2 elections.
https://www.the-pechko-perspective.com/political-commentary/...
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/libertarian-pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Libertar...
Because they are not like independents. Democrats have moved so far left that it's not even a question of who libertarians will vote for. The candidate just needs to show them a little attention so they remember to register and vote.
As a libertarian voter, the pardon for Ross was the only thing Trump did that actually brought me pause. To the point, I felt immensely guilty for not voting for him when I voted (L) because I knew[thought] I was damning Ross to a jail cell. It weighed on my conscious for a long time after the vote, an it wasn't until Trump won I felt somewhat absolved of the guilt.
Oh please. Ross was no saint by any stretch and it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a mountain of details and nuance around that case, including a whole host of law enforcement abuses that many people would find distasteful if not sickening if they actually got the whole story.
very vague. care to expound?
Two agents went to prison over this. Those same agents have a history of fraud and abuse.
The basic claim being that the salacious murder-for-hire bit was 1) never tried or proven, and 2) was allegedly instigated in part by federal agents (operating out of unrelated offices) and a "mentor" of Ulbricht's. In reaction to one of the federal agents himself stealing $800,000 from the criminal enterprise for himself in the course of his investigation. Or something like that.
I'm not clear how that squares with Ulbricht going on to order five more imaginary executions, but the whole thing seems awfully sordid from every angle.
[0] (Sarah Jeong for Forbes' contributor network thing) https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the...
[1] (Andy Greenberg for Wired Magazine) https://archive.is/BvuQr
[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-federal-agent... and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sen...
[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-evidence-of-government-c...