Thing is I honestly don't know or give a whole lot of a shit if they are police, I like the SR community and have been here for a good while now, don't use the marketplace of SR and have no plans to use the marketplace of any other site. I am just commenting on it from what I can gather, and although I agree it is entirely possible they are LE , I just don't see the red herring that you seem to see that makes it so they *obviously* are LE, and my honest opinion is simply that you have nothing but a gut feeling to go off of. That said, LE did run a drug forum once, and it was apparently their knee jerk reaction upon discovering the existing drug forums, so it seems like not much of a stretch that they would do the same in the case of public drug dealing websites. However, this new market is a hidden service (the FBI forum blocked access via Tor and said only scammers use it), they allow messages to be encrypted with GPG (even adding a potentially worthless automatic encryption feature, hopefully nobody relies on it, but I am sure almost everybody will, which sucks, as it is quite possibly completely worthless, but better than nothing I suppose) and they allow anybody to be a vendor. None of those things pop out and say police to me, although having all of those things also doesn't pop out and say not police to me, only potentially not police. Just my two cents .