Again: why do you use such belittling words like "conspiracy theory"? We know that the services interfere. We know that they interfered with vendors of cryptography products. And we know that National Security Letters exist, as do other – legal – means to pressure such vendors. There is no conspiracy needed for them to try to pressure someone by, say, threatening them with denial of a entry visa. Or they could have simply tried to buy them off which they might not have liked. It's not a crazy idea by any stretch.

> It wasn't even a speed bump for the Ulbricht investigators.

Are you talking about the situation where they had to very carefully snatch a running laptop from a suspect so that they can't lock it? Seems to me like FDE would have been at least a significant speedbump had they not circumvented it. Why else would they go to such trouble? And what would they have done if the suspect hadn't used his laptop in a public place?

AIUI it was a speedbump for Ulbricht; didn't they need to ambush him in a library in order to ensure they had access to his laptop's contents?

(I mean, sure, it didn't protect him in the end. But it was a speedbump.)

He's not linked beyond reasonable doubt to TrueCrypt, but IIRC

- there is clear evidence linking him to some earlier cryptographic software

-and someone (the journalist who wrote the story?) tried to say that it was a precursor to TrueCrypt.

It's unlikely to be him given his style of immediate profit-seeking and immense risk taking in the years that surround the creation of Bitcoin.

It’s quite obvious that he is not.