NSA Has Been Actively Tracking Bitcoin Users Since 2013 - Snowden Documents
I saw this on The Intercept today and didn't really understand what I was reading until I got through the whole thing. The title didn't really grab me, need a lesson from Russian trolls:
INTERNET PARANOIACS DRAWN to bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.
It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something.
The documents reveal that the NSA use programs normally used for drug money laundering operations to track transactions. Because they have access to the content as it moves through fiber optics, the idea of a "privacy coin" becomes non-existent:
Emin Gun Sirer, associate professor and co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts at Cornell University, told The Intercept that financial privacy “is something that matters incredibly” to the bitcoin community, and expects that “people who are privacy conscious will switch to privacy-oriented coins” after learning of the NSA’s work here. Despite bitcoin’s reputation for privacy, Sirer added, “when the adversary model involves the NSA, the pseudonymity disappears. … You should really lower your expectations of privacy on this network.”
[Matthew] Green, who co-founded and currently advises a privacy-focused bitcoin competitor named Zcash, echoed those sentiments, saying that the NSA’s techniques make privacy features in any digital currencies like Ethereum or Ripple “totally worthless” for those targeted.
I'm not technical enough to agree or provide a rebuttal to this article, but the quotes and actual actions are something to consider. No one should be surprised the government was focused on Bitcoin, but how will this effect the market and that mainstream money from re-entering the space?
You raise a very important question. I hope that it does not put people off investing into btc and crypto. Thanks for raising the issue and keep up the good work.
Great work @chieppa1! Thanks for posting this. I really love the added touch of your intro video showing the t-shirts.
Just added this post it to the 2nd part in my series on the Shadow Gov't & Deep State as exposed by ex-CIA agent Keving Shipp: Limitless Secrecy & Destruction of the Shadow Government and CIA (Part 2 of ex-CIA Agent Exposes entire Shadow Gov't & Deep State Apparatus)
Carry on my friend.