Either (a) the dragnet surveillance isn't doing what it's supposed to or (b) there's another reason for the spying.

And yes, I could be accused of whipping on the NSA no matter what, that in my view, they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. So what? Even if I don't have "standing", and the NSA is doing "legal" things, and the 3 Prong Test for Violations of Privacy hasn't been met, the NSA is still doing things that until recently were considered grossly unamerican, a violation of the principles that made the USA different than commie Russia.

Spying on political activists and leaders, foreign as well as US citizens.

Spying on diplomats and trade negotiators.

Spying on international commerce.

Doing industry espionage, for the benefit of US companies.

Protecting embarrassing information from being leaked, including covering up crimes.

Targeting political important targets, even those with no significant threat to national security. Megaupload might be an example.

Lastly, the cold war showed NSA the importance of good spy network, and might be maintained for the purpose of maintaining one.

It possible that this wasn't such a cut and dry case of police work, and instead the police were handed leads that came from the NSA work.

An other equally plausible would be that the silk road was a false flag operation, run by a undercover unit. Nothing points in that direction either, but hey, it "could be" right?

From Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...):

> The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. [...]

> After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."

> The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

> A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

> "It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Given how they talk about parallel construction, it certainly sounds like it's not an uncommon technique, so do you think it's so implausible? I'm not going to say they did or didn't use it, because the simple fact is that I don't know, but given that "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day" that is "decades old, a bedrock concept," it doesn't seem too implausible that they would use it in such a high profile and important case.

But in the mean time, one should not jump to it directly when more simpler explanations are available. Using undercover cops to entrap drug sellers is even older, and even more common method than parallel construction. It also extremely simple and effective.

I would also suspect, that entrapping a first time offender, an 47 year old administrator who sells drugs anonymously on-line from his home, to not be very hard. Especially if the undercover cop could impersonate flawlessly established "trusted" drug sellers by taking over their accounts, as it seems to be in this case.

All points toward parallel construction as an something that might had been, but in this case, is less likely to actually have happened.

One could argue that the entire NSA program was such a conspiracy theory until Snowden.

What's interesting is that the article itself noted the difficulty that the LE investigators perceived when running this case.

Normally they get a specific suspect or possible set of suspects in mind and then get specific warrants to find the evidence needed.

In this case the "proof" was right in front of them on the Silk Road front page but they had no suspects (or alternately, an infinite set). So even in this case "simple basic police methods" are insufficient to be mechanically applied; it was a probabilistic investigation, at best, in this case.

With a few less slip-ups by Silk Road users we may very well not be discussing these arrests at all, except perhaps for the Silk Road admin who accepted delivery. But that alone needn't have fingered DPR, he helped tighten the noose himself with his later actions.

Beyond that, so what? The publicly stated goal of the dragnet surveillance is preventing the crime of terrorism. If "back to the basics" police work found out Dread Pirate Roberts, then why the "anti-terrorism" justification for dragnet surveillance? Dread Pirate Roberts and the Silk Road Web Site actually worked at hiding themselves in a technical, engineering, fact-based manner. From what we read, terrorists do not. At least some of them use "Islamic cyphers" and do other superstitious things in an attempt to conceal themselves.

Why not concentrate on basic police work rather than massive surveillance?

But ultimately, the real reason of intelligence? Look at it this way: the US is sitting at a poker table with Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and so on. Some of the other players might be our friends--Britain and the US have a deal that we'll share each other's winnings and cover each other's losses. But nonetheless, everyone at the table is playing to win. And everyone at the table is trying to sneak a peek at everyone else's cards. This is why the distinction between spying on Americans and spying on foreigners is such a big deal--if you spy on a Japanese industrialist, you get to see some of Japan's cards, and that helps in the game. But there's no reason to spy on your own country because you already can see your own cards. If you're spying on your own people, maybe your intentions are not what you purport them to be.

>If you're spying on your own people, maybe your intentions are not what you purport them to be.

Considering that a non insignificant portion of SIGINT is contracted to companies owned by a handful of private equity firms, I would say that the poker table has more participants who are not nation states who are all vying for their own interests as you say.

Spoken like a true gentleman. Thank you for acknowledging the rhetorical fig leaf that covers the immodesty of dragnet surveillance.

And some of the other arrests, like the vendor "NOD" included some rather fortuitous circumstances. Like random inspections over a day or two just happening to pick up multiple packages with the same handwriting.

If Tor was compromised, you can bet they'd take ever measure possible to prevent leaking that information. That'd include making sure they have very solid, plausible, cover stories. But yes, it does look reassuring that all the arrests seem to based off of basic police work and simple mistakes.

Probably for one of the same reasons that anybody buys cocaine. Either because they like cocaine, or (judging by the amount), because they want to make lots of money selling cocaine. Making money on transaction fees doesn't mean you don't want more money.

A year ago I would have said that DEA using "parallel construction" to hide the origin of intelligence was just a paranoid conspiracy. Today I'm not sure I'm being paranoid enough.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...