Sooner or later somebody's going to write a book on it on the Silk Road. Look at all the material, most of it reactionary stabs, on Wikileaks, Anonymous, even Lulzsec. I hear even 4chan and 2chan have a couple of books written on them. We talked about History, let's talk about the Future.The Silk Road is a fascinating topic in it's own right that would have a general audience of millions if written in the appropriate popular style, kmf has at least one book in him, and a few others do too. I don't have a solitary doubt a publisher would run the presses. The newspapers across the world have mostly got the memo that SR is a verboten topic, which explains the really peculiar distributions of news and information related to SR.Look at the kinds of magazines printing about the Silk Road. There isn't an English language broadsheet among them. Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Wired, Gawker etc. All are 'special interest' periodicals. The main branches of journalism are mute. Oh they know. It's their business to know such things. There are some exceptions, but I believe those are 'mistakes', calculated or otherwise (journalists are constitutionally unable to STFU, and tabloid reporters are the best/worst examples of that genre). You must have noticed that all those 'slips' all follow the exact same model of centering the piece on 'the Dark web'. SR is forbidden, but a term previously used exclusively in obscure academic journals is less so, especially since one can clump so much underneath that umbrella and beg forgiveness for any transgressions later. Their loss is a publisher's gain, publisher's don't have the same legal constraints as journalists. Once a book is published, it becomes an unavoidable topic in the mainstream media. Even if that doesn't happen, there will come a tipping point, the only question is whether it's the breaking out of SR into the mainstream media, or else the demise of SR and some instructive Aesop's fables for the kids i.e. everybody ordering illicits from illegal websites gets banged up in prison and the dogs/high-tech gadgetry will always capture such posted items so it's a fail to even try. I mean, we know it would take > 6000 years just to scan just all the American mail inside of a year if it took 1 second per item to achieve that without false positives, but that's how the authorities will spin the narrative. The supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent state. Much like the failure that was the 'Just Say No' campaign, empirical evidence will be at odds with the official story, so eventually they lose anyway. If the government is really super-smart, it will realize that there are all kinds of drug distribution systems, and some of them are much better than others if you want suppression of violence and drugs to remain illegal simultaneously. Look at what happened when the main men in Jamaica got the chop. Next stop: chaos indistinguishable from civil war. The army has learned the hard way that assassinations are an extremely limited tool to counter insurgent activity. The American Army that is. The armies of the Old World already worked that shit out several centuries ago. It's not a fucking new concept. Kill a representative of an organization that doesn't have a hierarchy, and you just turned the Hive into a Swarm which although initially baffled and inconsistent, will turn into a Hydra. Remember the network war the RAND corporation saw in the future, it is becoming more and more true everyday.Will they realize that? Yes. No, really! They actually will. But I predict they won't do anything about it. That is why the higher orders inside intelligence organizations feel such contempt for their 'betters' and their dumber younger brother, traditional LE persistently bumbling along whacking into every available obstacle. It's really almost admirable how much they and politicians manage to cock things up. That's why intelligence community isn't entirely cooperative with many parts of the government. Simply doesn't feel the others are mature to use information responsibly. So it establishes regularly scheduled meetings of some kind (a small group is smart enough to realize that controlling external perceptions in case of accusations of arrogance/non-cooperative behavior arise), the purpose of which ultimately revolves around them receiving useful information while LE receives garbage (in prose) but gets to feel important/patriotic while doing so. Intelligence community thinks in a scientific way about information as well as politically. It can do this because it is very small and centralized. If the government were one entity with a coherent plan, then they would adopt a rational approach to all of this. But they are constantly deviled by the principal agent problem. For politicians, journalists and police officers, bitching about the problems of the world and promising to right them (whether they exist or no), is their principal method of climbing the career ladder, it is much easier to do than actually preventing hypothetical problems even if it's blatantly obvious that's what comes next.Think I'm making all of this up? Can it really be that weird? Yes it can. Take fingerprinting technology. It's been around, as have fingerprint databases (in the traditional sense), for well over 100 years. Guess who has access to them all during this time? Of course. But LEO itself only established a working international fingerprint sharing program/central database a year ago. What commercial organization would be so slow off the mark?I quote a paragraph directly from a police report here:QuoteIn March and April 2011 latent fingerprintsfrom unsolved serious crimes in Canada, theUnited Kingdom and the United States ofAmerica were searched against the NationalAutomated Fingerprint Identification Systemas a pilot to establishing an internationalfingerprint exchange framework, hosted by theAFP. The pilot has occurred in conjunction withCrimTrac and resulted in one identification ofa latent fingerprint from a Canadian unsolvedserious violent crime.Jumping Jehoshaphat!