Crime in Bitcoin is big money. $28.5 million more worth if Bitcoins have been taken from the Silk Road racket. Other things are big money in Bitcoin too, such as those on Reddit who are paying young women to take their clothes off and put the video on the Internet, a great personal risk to themselves.
It’s no wonder Bitcoin people are trying to run offshore to countries like China hostile to liberty and the rule of law, even as they try to hide their tracks accessing US markets with conspiracies like Tor.
It’s also no wonder the anarchists have seized upon recent events to try to demonize the NSA.
That said, careful tweaks of NSA and FISA are reasonable things to consider, which I suppose is why we see Jim Sensenbrenner coming out with the USA FREEDOM Act. I’m skeptical of a big, multi-pronged bill, but I’m open to this being reasonable. It seems specifically to be adding accountability to the FISA Court, add transparency to that court, and to add safeguards to prevent NSA from collecting too much information in bulk. Given that the NSA has come out and said some of their own internal safeguards may have failed in some cases, this is reasonable.
Anyway, I love it when the bad guys whine. Freeloaders are crying about spying on their operations, as well as crying that the site that made millions on them, ISO Hunt, is cooperating with MPAA as part of its $110 million dollar settlement deal (How many millions did they yet profit?), and crying about being trolled by a copyright holder who uploaded a fake copy of his own movie to fool them… only the bulk of a movie is a shot of his nude body.
I’m so glad to see Republicans holding FTC accountable on its power grabs. We don’t need FCC, FTC, and DoJ all policing the same companies three different ways.
The patent trolls are angry that the Congress may cut the branch out from under them, but Bob Goodlatte is standing his ground. Again though, I still say the real way to fight patent trolls long-term is to stop issuing bad and trivial patents.