The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/the-nsa-worked-to-track-down-bitcoin-users-snowden-documents-reveal/

by jbegley • 8 years ago

169 44 8 years ago

criley2• 8 years ago

Bitcoin is aggressively used in dark net, drug dealing, zero day exploit selling, and is used by nationstates to hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's and governments.

There was a period when people erroneously thought that bitcoin was anonymous and secure.

If the NSA was not working to track down the premiere currency of the dark web and of the nation state actors they work counterintelligence against, this would be dereliction of their duty.

This is like suggesting the FBI tracks down "USD" users. No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use. Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.

sbenitoj3• 8 years ago

“Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.”

Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto.

Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

portofcall• 8 years ago

Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto.

Number 1 by volume (duh) or number 1 by percentage of transactions for illegal goods and services?

Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

You hear that atomic energy, antibiotics and computers?

jandrese3• 8 years ago

Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

Dude, lay off of the Kool-Aid.

wongarsu• 8 years ago

No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use

I mostly agree with you, but I find this statement odd. There's obviously some regulation that is helpful to law enforcement and counterintelligence (money laundering regulation comes to mind, which you can't even really get around by using BTC). But crime and intelligence operations have a long history of working around those regulations, and both law enforcements and counterintelligence seem to cope just fine.

stagbeetle• 8 years ago

Thank Satoshi we have Monero et al. Although we might run into the same problem as regular drug dealers: only the idiots get caught, i.e only the ones using BTC/non-cryptonote get caught.

buildbuildbuild• 8 years ago

The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue.

Using wide scale warrant-less data collection with an unspecified secret sauce, however, is questionable in its legality. Is this what voters intend their government to be able to do?

Any time one agency wields immense undocumented powers of surveillance and another agency has a big question mark on a case, humans will be tempted to go the route of parallel construction. That under-table information sharing, to me, is a debate the American people need to be considering.

ttul3• 8 years ago

We aren’t talking about domestic surveillance here. The supposed privacy tool was foreign-targeted. This is NSA’s legit mission.

secfirstmd• 8 years ago

>>>hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's

Woah, can you give some sources on Bitcoin being used to pay for attacking NGOs? Do you mean DDoS or do you have specific links on that?

ojr2• 8 years ago

bitcoin is a horrible currency to do drug deals, the most infamous dark net site, Silk Road was doing $15 million annually at its peak, compare that to the 400 billion illegal drug industry that is mostly transacted with cash. Currently the primary use for bitcoin is speculation. Nation states will hire and pay with cash without the blockchain trail... There was a period of people speculating on a currency whose money supply is controlled by open source software and maintainers and it is still happening.

root_axis• 8 years ago

Why would you even bother making the comparison between the sum of all black market drug activity on the planet and a single niche website hidden behind tor?

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

dark net, drug dealing

These are law enforcement things. The NSA should not be deployed against drug dealers.

zero day exploit selling

This is squarely within the NSA's purview. Also North Korea [1].

More broadly, Bitcoin takes cash-like transactions and posts them in a unified computer-friendly database. Of course it will be mined for insights. Even collating U.S. dollar transactions involves querying multiple financial institutions, each who hold their data in various formats.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/north-kor...

solotronics• 8 years ago

if the government is collecting data that another department can use you bet they are sharing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

thathappened• 8 years ago

After learning about the war on drugs being a ploy to build up the gun and law enforcement markets.

I wondered if Bitcoin was created by the us to launder and fund projects while still maintaining control over the majority of it and possibly use to collapse other currencies and governments.

They already print cash so we know the anonymous currency isn't frowned upon and the only banned Venezuela crypto none of the other seeming shady coins.

staplers2• 8 years ago

Pretty toxic comment section by HN standards..

acct1771• 8 years ago

By toxic, of course, you mean "not devoid of emotion"?

staplers2• 8 years ago

No I mean, devoid of fact. 100% emotional opinion.

oska• 8 years ago

HN is trenchantly hostile to bitcoin. Pretty much standard with any bitcoin story on here for the last 8+ years.

apeace• 8 years ago

This is the most important and disturbing part in my view:

At the same time, MONKEYROCKET is also described in the documents as a “non-Western Internet anonymization service” with a “significant user base” in Iran and China, with the program brought online in summer 2012. It is unclear what exactly this product was, but it would appear that it was promoted on the internet under false pretenses...
The scope of the targeting would then expand beyond terrorists. Whatever this piece of software was, it functioned a privacy bait and switch, tricking Bitcoin users into using a tool they thought would provide anonymity online but was actually funneling data directly to the NSA.

One has to wonder what this tool was. Later in the article they speculate that it could be a VPN.

My advice if you want your traffic to be anonymous and private: use a VPN over Tor (not the other way around!). That way the VPN can't see who you are, and Tor exit nodes can't spy on your traffic either.

DennisP• 8 years ago

It may also have been a Bitcoin mixing service.

kardos• 8 years ago

That way the VPN can't see who you are

So how do you get around the part where you pay for the VPN service and provide login credentials to use it?

AgentME• 8 years ago

With a privacy-based cryptocurrency like Monero or Zcash, or Bitcoin anonymously purchased using a privacy-based cryptocurrency.

fwdpropaganda2• 8 years ago

I remember there was a VPN (can't remember the name right now but I'm sure if you're interested you can find it easily) that accepted logins without e-mail, or any kind of ID, and accepted payments in cash in an envelope.

willstrafach4• 8 years ago

Probably not the best idea if your VPN uses any sort of client software, seeing as it would be able to collect your "true" IP address if it were malicious.

earenndil2• 8 years ago

You shouldn't use any vpn-provider-provided client software anyway, you should use openvpn.

divbit2• 8 years ago

Although bitcoin could be used for some bad things, but also there are some (501c) charities that accept bitcoin too,

- give directly

- redcross (used to at least)

- water project

- ..

(there are at least two others but I forget)

So hypothetically (assuming it would pass like sec / whatever regulations) at the right point in time you could make like a coinbase type thing that - buys $30 of bitcoin - automatically watches some exchange API until it appreciates to 'desired amount in US / GBP / Whatever currency you use' - makes the donation automatically at say 10x the value - gets 'the actual registered charity' to send you a non-deductible receipt for that amount, (non-deductible since you no longer 'have control of the coin once it's in the app', which would is essentially the price you pay for getting the increased amount of 'social-benefit', since it's 'going to hurt' to see the potential missed profit, even though the alternative would be to lose the $30 at the earlier time in just a 'tethered' amount)

There is a 'large benefit' to automating / appifying this process to people in that, putting such a system together in one place could lessen the dangers in a manual process of doing this like: lost receipts, hacked exchanges, constantly watching prices, actually dealing with crypto.

In any case, my point is that, given that there is probably 'some good potential to bitcoin (although it might require a team of some creative / dedicated thinking at the right time)' it seems that there might be some benefit from viewing it less as an entrapment / tracking device, and more as a tool for social benefit, and thus making a strong push in the warnings / regulations area to get people on the social benefit track of it's potential use rather than the negative aspects of it. To restate: you have the choice of either guiding bitcoin use towards being a law enforcement tool, or towards being a social benefit / solve world problems tool. I think the recent SEC exchange warnings thing is probably a step towards pushing it in the right direction... (potentially there are some deep sci-fi strategic reasons for viewing crypto-coins in a certain way in terms of desired world progress in a certain direction, which would be interesting to think about).

divbit2• 8 years ago

By the way, I don't have the depth of experience or team to build something like this in a way that I would feel happy with, so feel free to please use this idea if you think it is good.

ncmncm• 8 years ago

Always and forever, surveillance is a precursor to and enabler of extortion.

The extortion we usually hear about is people forced to testify, often to lie, about others still under investigation, or to recruit other informants and exfiltrate secrets. We hear about it because it is useful for us to have heard about it. In the other instances there is no reason to tell us, so the only way to find out about them is to be extorted.

The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

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