And how do you lessen the cash flow of something like that? I literally laughed out loud at the naive "Defund the NSA" initiatives proposed earlier this year.

Remember this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking

So how about this one: Maybe Silk Road was just an NSA operation from the beginning, designed to gain a significant percentage of the total Bitcoin economy? A year ago I would have been laughed out of the room saying such a thing, but today? Disturbingly obvious, isn't it?

But whether or not that is true, the point is: cutting tax dollar funding from the NSA isn't going to do anything. If they're clever enough to do the things Jacob is pointing out in that video, they're certainly clever enough to have (long ago) diversified their income strategies.

-wendell

hivewallet.com | twitter.com/hivewallet | pgp: B7179FA88C498718

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:23 AM, Bruce Chastain wrote:

> Things can be done, technically, to improve privacy, to generally make their work more difficult, however in the end the fact is they have massive cash flow and until that is lessened they're just going to keep doing what they do. So I see only way to solve these problems is to work in every channel, by that I mean, political, civil disobedience, technical solutions, education, etc.
>
> All these things are done to us because people are afraid to stand up, in most cases not even willing to take the smallest risk. Frankly based on what I'm seeing in the general public, I'm now pessimistic about the situation, it seems that largely people just don't give a damn.