Because most people believe that punishment should be fitting of the crime committed. Particularly, what if someone in your family decides to steal something one day? Will you want them to be executed for doing so? Of course not. Peoples own selfish desires will be enough that they will want penalties for crimes to reflect the crimes. Of course some people are insane and think that possession of marijuana warrants severe penalties, but I am not arguing that everyone will be in favor of realistic punishments for crimes, only that enough will be that defense agencies will be forced into constraints. If an agency is killing people for relatively small crimes, people will find it in their best interests to put a stop to this. I agree that without the US government the DEA would be in a tough position. However, they do make a substantial income from robbing drug dealers and selling drug users into slavery, and I imagine that they will continue to do this even if the US government collapses. They make enough money just stealing drug money that they could largely support themselves even without external financial support, although it will still be bad for them financially if they cannot use the force of the entire US government in order to extort money from non-drug dealers/users as well. I agree that we have a lot to worry about more than the DEA, we have a full tyrannical government to be concerned about! It seems like over 30% of people on SR think we should battle them . I do believe that an assassination market of DEA agents and other government officials is possible. Jim Bell partially implemented an assassination market, although he was promptly arrested for tax evasion and various other charges as well. Two of his friends also attempted to implement one but I don't know what ever came of that, they were possibly arrested as well for some unrelated things. One of the reasons an assassination market might be difficult, although not impossible, to pull off is because of the fact that the NSA and similar intelligence agencies might not be to fond of it. Something like SR, they are extremely unlikely to involve themselves, but an assassination market against government officials is likely to be something they would concern themselves with. The anonymity of Tor is not enough to prevent such an agency from locating clients / servers, and thus they would be able to quickly find such a market if hosted on a hidden service. Additionally, they can hack into most any server, and would perhaps be able to steal the bitcoin pools and cause general havoc. Additionally they would be able to trace the operator and arrest him/her, as well as determine everyone who placed a bet. This problem can be countered though, if the market is not hosted on a hidden service but rather over a high latency network consisting of highly secured mixes. NSA is not an easy agency to take security measures against, but I do not think it is impossible to be secure and anonymous from them, although perhaps with the technologies of today it would be quite difficult. Another issue is that if such a site is set up, potential assassins will not be certain that they will receive a payout from carrying out the action. After all, the site could be run by scammers. So they will be taking a very large risk with no certainty of receiving payment. Additionally, a lot of people may be too afraid to place bets or they might dismiss the entire market from the get go. That said, I do think that such a market could exist but it would need to be exponentially more secure and anonymous than any of the other illegal networks are, because if it actually worked and gathered any significant participation, it would quickly become a high priority target for many police and much more importantly intelligence agencies. Hm, I read a paper about an anonymous AND undetectable covert channel system the other day. An interesting feature of the discussed system is that unlike mix networks and low latency onion type networks, it does NOT need its own dedicated infrastructure, rather it piggy backs off of servers on the internet in general. It allows Alice and Bob to communicate without either revealing their identity to the other, and it is covert in that there is an extremely low probability of third parties determining that Alice and Bob are communicating with each other OR that Alice or Bob are communicating covertly at all. I imagine software to create a group communication channel using a system similar to this would be required for the assassination market site, strong crypto would be required for validation of bet placement, and payment would need to be with bitcoin which would additionally need to be heavily mixed and preferably cashed out as anonymously as possible as well. Although I would not want my rape images spread around, I would also recognize that I do not have a right to prevent other people from accessing information on the internet. No I referred to child porn as a crime scene photograph, which is one of the many politically correct terms for CP. I believe the currently used word is Child Abuse Materials, or CAM. People in the government and organizations against child porn do not like it to be called pornography because they say that this implies it is similar to consensual adult pornography, when in reality it is a photograph of a crime scene (hence Crime(scene) Photograph, as comsec called it), or a photograph of child abuse, hence Child Abuse Material. My point was mostly to Comsec, and to reiterate my point is that CP is the only case in which it is illegal to view a photograph of a crime scene, and this is not consistent. It does not make sense to argue that child porn possession or distribution should be illegal because CP is photographic evidence of a crime, if you do not hold the belief that ALL photographic evidence of crimes should be illegal to distribution or possess. Nobody believes this to be the case really, I have never heard for a ban on images of the holocaust, and certainly the holocaust was a massive crime against humanity. Thus the people who argue against CP possession legalization on this ground are unprincipled in their argument, because if they were principled then they would argue for all crime scene images to be made illegal to distribute or possess. I was merely pointed out that the people who argue against CP possession/distribution legalization, on the grounds that CP = crime scene photographs, are unprincipled people who hold inconsistent beliefs. To argue against what you just said, I would ask why you think that the information stealing crime of possessing CP without consent of the victim should be treated differently than other information stealing crimes, which are generally civil matters for possessors (although criminal for distributors). To the extent that a person is victimized by the continued spread of the CP they are in, I would place the blame entirely on the person who originally produced the photograph. Additionally, depending on your definition of revictimization, you may very well simply be insane to think that viewing a CP image revictimizes the child. Certainly the definition of revictimization that I most frequently run into (causing the child to experience the abuse all over again) is complete and utter bullshit with no mapping to reality. I can see that some privacy violation does occur, which I would blame on the original person who published the images. Okay so you think that CP possession is an information stealing crime. Why should it not be a civil rather than criminal matter then? I can only imagine that you did not think this reply out all the way. This is circular logic. if you believe: 1. It should be illegal for CP to be viewed or possessed because it is a privacy violation and: 2. Spy camera footage of naked adults is a violation of the adults privacy but also believe that 3. Spy camera footage of naked adults not being illegal on privacy violation grounds and child pornography being illegal on privacy violation grounds is not inconsistent and your supporting reasoning for the third point is 4. Because child pornography is illegal and adult pornography isn't then you essentially are saying "Child pornography should be illegal because child pornography is illegal" seems like a pretty dumb argument to me, I think you are more intelligent than to use such piss poor circular logic too. Maybe you are tired or something ?? It is just worth pointing out that if the reason for making child pornography possession illegal is because the victim fears their photo being seen, then it is an entirely pointless effort as even if the photograph IS entirely removed from circulation the victim will have no way of actually knowing that and thus will continue to fear. People who view CP are frequently enslaved, they are captured by FBI or ICE for a bounty (salary) and then sold to the prison industrial complex.