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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

No, this information is just hearsay. This is a PR campaign by the Obama administration to justify cracking down on Bitcoin and Tor.

Until DPR has tried and convicted we should assume that all reporting on this criminal investigation is lies and slander. I'm not trying to defend DPR, torture, or any of that, but we need to hold ourselves to higher standards.

This kind of news caters directly to us -- the affluent tech crowd -- and we should be especially careful. The submitters of these news articles will need to be closely scrutinized as well.

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The Obama administration is so concerned about Bitcoin that they created a fake murder for hire scheme instrumented by a fake undercover cop documented in a federal indictment that supersedes another federal indictment that explicitly says Bitcoin has lawful uses, and is so concerned about Tor that... what, they stopped funding it?

I'm not saying that DPR is innocent, on the contrary. I'm saying that the government will be using this as an opportunity to shout from the highest mountaintops that decentralized systems of currency/information transfer is dangerous.

Of course, those doing the shouting will be the mainstream media -- mouthpieces of the government.

Criminal investigations are one thing, but guiding and manipulating the general populace is something else entirely. Tomorrow we will definitely be seeing lots of news about DPR, Bitcoin, Tor, and drugs -- this situation will be spun to high hell, both for supporting decriminalization and undermining it.

Did you miss the part about how the indictment said the opposite about Bitcoin?

If the media reports that -- despite DPR's unsavoury activities -- BTC has its uses then I will quickly and happily eat crow. I'm expecting the worst tomorrow, especially considering all elements in the situation have very poor reputations (Silk Road, BTC, Tor, Tor hidden services).

So far all I'm seeing is the government saying that they think a guy who ran an underground drug network tried to have people killed. I seriously doubt they care that much about Bitcoin in this instance.

With all the recent events concerning the government in the past couple years, that doesn't seem TOO far fetched.

Sad, really.

It is absolutely too far fetched.

> This is a PR campaign by the Obama administration to justify cracking down on Bitcoin and Tor.

If the US government wanted to "crack down on Tor", they could just stop funding it; the US government created Tor, and has always been the main funder of Tor development.

> Until DPR has tried and convicted we should assume that all reporting on this criminal investigation is lies and slander.

There's healthy skepticism, and there is credulous conspiracy theory. You seem to have opted for the second.

In contrast to mbetter, I agree with your assesment.

Take out the second sentence and you're good. Otherwise you're guilty of a little hearsay yourself.

Did they really crack down on Tor or did they just compromise the hell out of it?

Oh, get fucked.

What a way to have a debate. Your comment totally proves GP wrong!

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