Right. Which means the laws are only enforced against people that Obama doesn't like. That's the main vulnerability -- you cannot assume the regulators are honest.
Dishonest regulators like staying out of prison. It's child's play for the next guy to figure out that an ETF with no significant moving parts is a fraud. A dishonest regulator would pick something like Madoff's fund, not a commodity ETF. Huge amounts of institutional (pension funds, mutual funds, foundations, hedge funds) money goes into GLD. They can't all be stupid, unlike Madoff's investors, most of whom were non-professionals like Kevin Bacon and so on.