
The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal - jbegley
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/the-nsa-worked-to-track-down-bitcoin-users-snowden-documents-reveal/
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criley2
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.

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sbenitoj
“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.

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portofcall
_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?

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apeace
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.

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kardos
> 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?

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fwdpropaganda
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.

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_emacsomancer_
Mullvad does that.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
Yes! That's the name. I knew if I'd see it I'd remember it :-)

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ncmncm
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.

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divbit
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).

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divbit
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.

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staplers
Pretty toxic comment section by HN standards..

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acct1771
By toxic, of course, you mean "not devoid of emotion"?

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

