LE agents acting illegally is nothing new; but this story illustrates the problem of the power LE investigating agents have when equipped with the full panoply of mass surveillance and targeted attack tools during investigations: http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...igating-silk-road-admits-800000-bitcoin-theft I've always felt that financial insider trading & fraud was a huge unacknowledged iatrogenic when it comes to assessing the costs of current weaponisation of the internet & misuse by (very human) authorised operators.
Nice read. Funny, I don't hear these types of stories being widely circulated on my national news networks! Their emphasis is full power and steam ahead at all costs. If anyone gets in the way just mow them down and keep moving. No need for checks and balances just get it done! my .02
I think what they really don't want to talk about is widespread industrial espionage and "official" insider dealing - as well as the freelance versions of fraud and insider dealing as reported here. The data collected as part of mass surveillance (and known to have been done for large companies like Petrobras), would be very easily unofficially purposed into a little spread-bet flutter to great profit and little risk. For instance, it would be obvious when a merger and acquisition would be likely by simple metadata analysis between the board and executives of the companies. Economic espionage has always been a major component of spying, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if a nice little feed goes into the Federal Reserve and beyond. Back to the old saw, "follow the money". GCHQ certainly seems to be being run as a cost center, and there seems to be the mentality that the more "customers" they have, the more they justify the mass surveillance, and the harder it is to unravel.
