It is a pretty widely held belief in security circles that Russia paid the RBN to DDoS Georgia and several other countries (yes they knocked several countries off the internet). Certainly RBN has connections to Russian intelligence agencies, they openly flaunt international law and tell Interpol to suck their dicks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Business_Network Or if you mean do I really believe the US will not use Botnets. I believe that Russia is more likely to use Botnets for DDoSing targets than the US is. I suppose the US has used Botnets in a sense though, in the case of Stuxnet it traveled through thousands and thousands of systems before reaching its target. However, Stuxnet erased itself off machines that were not the target, their goal was to reach the targeted systems rather than to make an enormous Botnet of arbitrary infected machines. I guess I am not as certain that USA will not use Botnets as I made it sound like at first though, but it is certainly illegal for them to do so (although practically they wont care about this, Stuxnet was illegal as well) whereas Russia has a government that is much less theoretically bound by law. I guess though that I do not think USA will use an illegal Botnet to DDoS Silk Road. Also Russia did not officially use a Botnet either, they got the RBN to do it. If the USA uses a botnet it will likely be similar to how Russia did, indirectly through the proxy of a criminal network. Nah I am a non-exclusive ephebephile if anything. It is common knowledge that Freenet is loaded down with CP, and Lolita City is also pretty common knowledge to those who use Tor (I mean several other people in this thread suggested DDoSing it so clearly they are against it but know about it). Although I do indeed have quite a lot of knowledge about child porn, mostly stemming from reading about the technology those into it use to protect themselves, although that did lead me into reading quite a lot about those who consume it as well. I don't really feel a need to justify my 'perversions' per-se, I am pretty comfortable with who I am and definitely don't feel like I cause anybody harm. Wow it didn't take you long to change the subject from possession to production. This is a pretty common tactic in people who argue for child pornography censorship, because they have no good reasons for it and rather try to pretend the debate is about production. The thing is there are already legal forums for pedophiles that simply don't allow posting of pictures. Do you think that those forums should be censored as well? Nothing stops a pedophile from saying they have molested children on such a forum, and getting karma etc. Also I think it is a bit insane to think that anybody actually molests children to get + karma on a forum, although I guess there are all kinds of weird fucks out there. You seem to think it should be illegal to tell someone who has broken the law that you support them having broken the law. Should we make it illegal to say 'nice!' when someone tells us they have sampled a rare drug? Also just for your information, the overwhelming majority of child pornography is traded on P2P networks like Limewire, without any social aspect at all. Only the most dedicated CP collectors join forum communities. So it seems you are actually for the complete censorship of all things related to casting pedophilia in a good light? No more forums for pedophiles that don't allow posting CP, etc. I am glad that you come out and say this because it clarifies that your position is one against free speech that you find disturbing. Sure the fact that there is a correlation between legalized child porn possession and decreased child sex abuse rates in every single country that it has been studied in does not necessarily imply causation. CP producers "[receiving] karma points, positive reputation, compliments, pornographic material, and even bitcoins[citation needed] for snapping photos of themselves fucking their daughters" on forums and them molesting children is also a correlation, why is it that you argue causation in this case? We can learn that Hidden Services are not invulnerable to hacking and that a hacking attack can easily turn into a deanonymizing attack. We can learn not to send sensitive identifying information over hidden services in plaintext, because hacking attacks can allow the attacker to gain access to that information. We can learn not to post pictures without taking extremely great care, because LE are truly fucking experts at finding the location where a picture was taken. A few things. First they were not doing everything to fly under the radar. Their hidden services were all using vulnerable php scripts and that is how LE was able to compromise their servers. They were communicating sensitive information in plaintext. The biggest thing that fucked them is they were posting pictures of themselves molesting children. That is the primary flaw that was exploited to deanonymize them, not attacking Tor. At least half a dozen people were arrested due to technical attacks, the remaining 50 or so people who were arrested appear to have been arrested primarily due to photographic forensics narrowing in on them. However, nobody knows exactly how many of the arrests were directly related to technical attacks. Second, yes most if not all of the people arrested in this case were fucked up individuals (likely sadistic psychopaths) who were molesting children. However, a great many pedophiles (who are not sadistic psychopaths) do not think what they do is disgusting or wrong, and a great many of them think that they are actually fighting for freedom in the same way as homosexuals have fought for freedom. Of course we disagree with them, but society also disagrees with us. Don't fall victim to mirror imaging, thinking that everybody thinks the same way as you do. To ourselves, we think that we are struggling against state oppression of drug users. Society thinks we are poisoning their children. To child molesters, they think that they are struggling against sexual oppression, society thinks that they are molesting their children. There are a great many similarities between both of our groups (child porn traders and drug scene people). We use the same technologies, we both think we are fighting for freedom, we both can show a great deal of untrue propaganda about us from the government, we both have opponents who make billions of dollars a year unsuccessfully trying to combat us, we are both demonized by society and the media, etc. From an objective point of view, society views us as quite similar indeed. The Republicans think we are both evil criminals who must rot in prisons, the Democrats think we are both sick and must be rehabilitated (and for both of us, the objective medical community falls somewhere between agreeing with the government and agreeing with us: the government claims all drug use is drug abuse but the objective medical community is against the notion that using drugs rarely and responsibly is a medical disease, the government claims that any attraction to those under the age of consent is the mental disorder pedophilia, but the objective medical community does not classify attraction to those 13+ as a disorder). We both trade in illegal contraband, objectively both sorts of trade are causing a great deal of harm to innocent people (in the case of CP obviously the children who are abused for the images, in the case of drugs the innocents who are killed by the cartel and gang wars etc). The only difference I see is that harm to innocents is inherent to the production of child pornography whereas there is not inherent harm to innocents stemming from the production of drugs. This is why I am in favor of legalizing the production of drugs, but not in favor of legalizing the production of child pornography. Short of the production level though, I see virtually no difference between us and child porn traders.