Bitcoin Forum

They sure keep quite.

It's well known that law enforcement has been attending Bitcoin meetups since the beginning. Gavin has even been to the CIA to give them a talk about bitcoin.

Don't freak out about it, they've been around here since the beginning, everyone knows.

I've been questioned by police, solicited by undercovers into doing stuff, been black listed from banks with my accounts closed and they tried to recruit me once to join them.

You could have been a cool double agent ...  or are you?

proof?

Maybe we are all talking ourselves up and that in reality, no one gives a damn about us, including law enforcement.

The paranoia is strong with this one.

Any interesting stories to share? ;)

Do you think you could provide more specifics?

This should be interesting :D


*listens*

where's money that are criminals and there a few of them in this community. Money laundry is for sure a concern of them but not sure if they can find them at the meetings or even here. I assume it would be easy to buy bitcoins with illicit money and cash it elsewhere. Local buys are for sure an opportunity where the fiat leaves no paper trace and shows up as a bitcoin in some country where it can be converted back into fiat. Would not be surprised if local bitcoin sales are done by undercover cops posing as a miner

I'm pretty there are agents of various kinds attending meetups, and acting as both buyers and sellers on LocalBitcoins.

I was at a public park on Tuesday and ended up in what I thought was just a random conversation with a stranger, but after thinking about the kinds of questions he was asking I'm not sure how random it really was.

This is true. I wouldn't worry about it. Most people in the Bitcoin community are trying to build an honest, decent economy.

They are probably looking for drug dealers! :)

From a country as the US i always get the creeps. Not because i am doing something wrong, but just that they decide if you did something wrong even when the law tells us we didn't. Just look at the NSA. They count everyone as a terrorist

Yay for the police. 

I have lived in bad neighborhoods.  When the number of police officers on the beat went up enough, they quit being bad neighborhoods.  The troublemakers, thieves, scammers, dopeheads, gangbangers, and dealers all decided they would have better odds pursuing their chosen professions in other areas, leaving the law abiding citizens happy and satisfied and owning property that tripled in value as that element was finally driven away.   Seriously, three cheers for the cops!

The only thing I'm even remotely upset about is that the ladies of negotiable affection went away too.  They were harmless.  Some of them were savvy businesspeople entirely happy with their choice of profession or paying their way through college as independent operators (hey, it beats the hell out of fast food jobs), and some of them were essentially slaves and victims of coercion, not allowed to keep their earnings, and ought to have been regarded more as the victims of criminals than as criminals themselves.   But that's the way it's gonna be until the law changes. 

Still, you know how to change the law, right?  If you live in an area with democracy, you change it by participating in the process and voting!  You do not change it by making trouble for the cops, because believe me when I say that no matter where you live, they can make far more trouble for you than you can make for them, and besides making trouble for the cops gets in the way of their very valuable work keeping the nasties out of the area. 

Bitcoin can use some serious police efforts, IMO.  Keep your damn nose clean and celebrate a little victory and a better world every time they take a dangerous criminal away. 

This reminds me that at the 2013 conference in San Jose, a male and female team were making the rounds in the common area with a very high quality piece of video gear.  They got the nicest mug-shot of me imaginable.  If they were LEA or working with them, 'the feds' have a pretty good idea of every pore on my face.

For my part, I decided to go the extra mile in terms of acting within the law and hope beyond hope that if the worst happened, at least I could rely on the principle of 'ex post facto' to cover my ass.  If that is tossed out the window I believe that violent revolution would not be far behind.

Who cares. Don't break laws when using bitcoin. You should be fine.

Time to come clean. Everyone in this thread but you, OP, is a cop.

I'd like to hear more from Genjix please...

Don't mistake paranoia with rational thinking.

Of course feds are all over the forums. Haven't you read the story of Silkroad ? How they got to the guy running it ?
They found one of his veeeeeeeeeeeeeery old topics on this forum and followed the trail further.

It would be just moronic/extremely naive to think that feds are not all over the forum after Silkroad case. Obviously they are around. Maybe even in this very topic, who knows.

Especially if his comments on this forum come at the expense of mainstream media outlets.  I may have never been so embarrassed of Bitcoin as when he proposed that the solution to theft in the community was that other participants would feel sorry for the victim and make him/her whole via charity.  That was some interview on RT IIRC.  Opposite some Indian guy who had his shit together.

I lost a lot of respect for Taaki when he seemed to think it acceptable to take out a hit on someone who threatens one's business (a-la DPR.)  To me the guy is a fixture in the community in the same vein as Atlas, Bruce, Wright, etc...though he writes more code I suppose.  Thread-safe even!

Good. I hope there are many law enforcement people in every BTC meetup, so that they see there's nothing wrong about it. BTC's got to move from its drug & gambling image.

This!!! Btc is a wonderful thing so long as you use it respectfully and legally.

Increased police presence in my bad neighborhood had the opposite result. The most the officers would do was have friendly laughing chats with drug dealers & gang members and stop just short of partaking in their open alcoholic beverages and non-medical marijuana themselves. Crime went up, and so did the body count from the street racers playing Bowling for Children down busy residential streets, while the only traffic stops conducted were for dead brake lights. Our car was stolen and recovered a ridiculous amount of time later, covered in months of dust with a dead battery, not stripped, just a 24 pack of water bottles stolen out of the trunk, in a parking lot on the rich side of town, where it had spent months sitting in the same spot according to security, after apparrent joyriding and subsequent abandonment.

This isn't even 2% of all the crimes that occurred there.


"It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes." When the worst of all possible evils always wins where it counts, you realize Stalin's thesis thoroughly haunts American elections.

I have been thinking about this since reading the criminal complaints against piratea40 and DPR.   It says they are on forums since 2011.   I am starting to think that being a "hero" member actually makes me MORE wary of the person.   They are probably FBI or treasury agents.    I wonder if some are mods by now?

Hero Member is just amount of posts, not time. You can see date registered in profiles, like mine, I haven't been around since 2011.

My post was meant to be sardonic, but with the speed of your denial, I now suspect you.
and it is a time measurement.   It is the number of 14 day periods that you have made a post.

LOL

Really? Seems like that's a mod: http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Post-Count_based_membergroup

Hmmm.   Does this mean we should ask theymos to prove his W2 does not come from Uncle Sam?

You realize that Bitcoin's future has absolutely nothing to do with what law enforcement thinks about it, right?

In all seriousness, bitcoin's future is based on it becoming a stable, reliable solution that someone is convinced enough of to invest substantial amounts of money building platforms and businesses that depend on btc.
getting drugs out of the focus and into the "noise" (like they are with fiat) is a good first step.   

I was going to invite the fuzz down to my next meet up, to give their side of the story.

If you are Oakland it would probably go something like "I thought it was my taser, not my gun."

From my understanding, undercovers are limited in their ability to have direct, long term relationships with people on forums and such. So the undercover's probably spend alot more itme reading than trolling.

Also if you ask them they have to tell you they're a cop. This is how that works, yes it is.

So any law enforcement officers please post in the thread below this post. Thank you.

Lol is that before or after they snort your cocaine to validate its good stuff?

You should know the answer to that, Mr. Law Enforcement officer. Is it ok if I call you "Law"?

there is much win in this one

+1

https://www.erowid.org/freedom/police/police_info6.shtml (https://www.erowid.org/freedom/police/police_info6.shtml)

Paranoia in 5, 4, 3, 2...

Ente

We ALL work for the NSA. **Budupcha**

Oh, didn't you know ?

Everybody here is running their own version of Silkroad. Havent you heard ? That's what Bitcoin is all about !!!!!!!!1111111111oneoneoneevelen

[/NSA/FBI/CIA/ECHELON/PRISM Trolling mode OFF]

I'd assume there LE who are genuinely interested in it

Government spies are everywhere,
They're in our food and in our hair,
Lurking in their secret lair,
Counting dollars!

Thank you Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers(tm)!

Oh, Damn, I just probably went on a list somewhere, for reading subversive comics...

I'll be on the lookout. Authorities are banned from my events :)

Ever occur to you that a law enforcement officer there not in uniform might be there out of personal interest? or do you only get to use bitcoin with certain careers now?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
 - Joseph Heller

Seriously though...., don't dismiss this as a risk.   If in a couple years Bitcoin rises 50x from its current value, just like it did in that past couple years, the response by the State will likely be to round up those responsible.  And the surveillance they do now just helps them justify their case.    Did a trade on LocalBitcoins?    That might be enough to hold a person for a few weeks on suspicion of operating as a money transmitter without a license.      How would "they" prove it"?   Well, LocalBitcoins sends confirmation of each trade, in clear text, to your e-mail.   Hinted that you might like to light up?   Well, even if ten thousand people just like you in your part of town do the same thing what if you happened to be the one that got the knock on the door?    Coincidence?   Nope!

We know the the tools necessary  (Tor, GPG, mixers, shared send, etc.) but we (or most of us, myself included) don't use them.

We are doing nothing to prepare for the day they go on the offensive with regard to Bitcoin.

i wish it was that simple. unfortunately EVERYONE is a felon. the average normal neighbor joe commits 3 felonies a day. you cant just "not break the law". not even a law professor knows how to do that.

Much true, unfortunately.

Lol "in Europe". Where and when, exactly?

There may be a silver lining to the FBI reading these forums. From reading the DPR indictment, I felt that they were careful to differentiate between the illegitimacy of silk road vs. the legitimacy of bitcoin. I suspect that some of these FBI guys may secretly have bitcoin fever just like us. This could (hopefully) undermine any full scale attack by the U.S. government against bitcoin.

Are you serious? An all out attack on bitcoin would be a stupid and pointless thing for them to do.  Consider this. Bitcoin allows some privacy but not too much.  That is probably the best scenario for law enforcement purposes in the USA.

The point is that it's possible to catch people like DPR, but still private enough for most people to use most of the time.  A "hard" crypto currency that used full link encryption and message mixes as part of the basic protocol would probably replace it and that would be a full on disaster from their point of view.

Bitcoin is law friendly enough to regulate and tax and they'll only lose that quality if they press an attack.

What are the feds going to do. Find satoshi? lol

beauty about bitcoin is that there is no figure head to point fingers to. Hard to brain-wash the public.

I don't expect that 'ex post facto' principles will be tossed out the window readily.  There would be so much collateral damage that it would be a poor strategy decision in most scenerios.  Bitcoin is clearly to most not illegal now, and although there is a much higher percentage of blatantly criminal activity in the ecosystem, it is not dominant enough that a majority of those effected by a cross-the-board crack-down would be guilty.  And the userbase is growing daily.  Many people would have a friend or relative effected if some sort of totalitarian abuse happened across the board and out of the blue.

I think it is almost a certainty clear to all by now that there are individual 'dossiers' kept on every citizen of the US (and probably of the world), and that a variety of algorithms constantly sift through the every increasing collection of data.  It is very probable that individuals are tagged with all sorts of flags, and that different flags are used to select different types of analytic regimes.  I would be completely surprised if an effort to identify persons with an interest in Bitcoin are not underway and do not produce certain kinds of flags.  If there comes a point when an attempt to crack down on Bitcoin is chosen as a policy, I would not be surprised at all to see those with a history of involvement with Bitcoin be readily identified.  Whether it would result in a the old-school 'knock on the door' is less clear to me.

That would just be stupidly insane!

I don't think it's something to worry about. Especially if your not doing anything illegal. They would haven't reason to target you.

You would think the 'authorities' have better things to work on...

First of all: http://youtu.be/mjQZNkiY7ds

Second: I feel sorry for you. Something must have gone terribly wrong in your life for feeling embarrassed when someone proposes to help each other out.

Third: As far as I am concerned Amir is a fucking hero, and he is the main reason I trust bitcoin the way I do. This must be one of the most genuine guys involved in this community, yet people like you give him shit because you don't like his look, or his ideology, or his attitude. It's despicable.

(I'm not aware of any remarks concerning taking hits out on anyone though, that would be something I absolutely do not condone.)

The average person commits 3 felonies a day without actually victimizing anyone. Just a matter of time before one of the numerous laws/corrupt state makes exhaling CO2 without a gross pollution permit "illegal".

I've got nothing against doing so.  That's a completely different thing than proposing it as a solution to the problem of theft and fraud in Bitcoinland, or using it as an example of how the problem is diminished.  That is fucking idiotic on it's face both to anyone with an ounce of sense both within and without the community.  That is why I found it embarrassing.

It reminds me of the unfortunately all to common instances of people who propose that there is no need for a social safety net because churches or some such will come along and help people out who are in need.  I don't think even very many of the people who propose it actually believe it.  They just use it as an excuse to justify other political motivations.  I'd actually have more respect for such people if they were honest and just said "Fuck old sick people...let them die in the street.  I've got mine and I wanna keep it."

Exactlly and most of them are hundreds or even thousands of years old from the crazy book.
I know you wont like this, but the interpretation of the 3rd amendment is one of them.

The 3rd amendment is one of the least controversial of the Constitution and is rarely litigated. As of 2009, it had never been the primary basis of a Supreme Court decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Yes, the NRA is a powerful lobby.
It still doesnt change the fact that what was true 300 years ago does apply today.

There were law enfocement folks at our Ron Paul meetups too. Hell, Minnesota designated all Ron Paul supporters as potential terrorists.

Hopefully they learn about Bitcoin at the meetups and buy some.  ;D  It would seem a smart investment for anyone and everyone to hold a few and it would make those hard earned dollars go a bit farther. 

I would think most Bitcoin users are just highly intelligent geeky types that are law abiding citizens so maybe their time would be well spent somewhere else?

Where is phin when ya need him?

dear Us government agents,
Please read the Constitution of the United States and stop oppressing your neighbors.
your friend,
illegible poet


so is this too much to ask?

Bitcoin is a shady industry, I would hope that they are paying attention, or else they wouldn't be doing their jobs

The enemy has many spies in his service: birds, beasts, devs.

I highly doubt they are interested in a group of people meeting up to discuss and trade bitcoins.

This is an intriguing thought.
Now, if "they" only think that far in advance.. Fair trade!

Ente

Ah, that's right. I forgot we get lumped in with the Ron Paul people too... so we're all potential terrorists, then? Cool.

Hmmm.   Wait a minute.   Phin does not mine.   Does not buy and sell bitcoin.   Does not trade bitcoin stocks.  Yet he is on these boards for years and posts a lot.    Phin, are you a narc and trying to cover it up with this "pizza" business?