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.
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.
Are you really so innocent as to believe that the NSA was _only_ targeting foreign Bitcoin holders, or that they made effort at least to avoid capturing info on Americans?
That's the law, no reason to think otherwise without evidence. I assume the story would be very different if there was any indication this was used on US citizens.
Actually no. I read all 300+ documents leaked by Snowden independent of the news coverage in order to determine if the media narrative was true, as that would be absolutely enraging to me and I needed to decide if I would need to be calling and mailing my representatives/senators daily about this.
I was not able to find evidence in the leaks to substantiate any claims of improper use on everyday citizens. I like to operate on facts, so if there was a leaked document I somehow missed, you can provide a link and I would be happy to review it.
I concur. The purpose of Snowden’s leaks was to educate the masses that mass surveillance is a thing, and privacy should be taken seriously. He did not suggest the government was breaking the law, just that the law permitted surveillance on a scale that the average person probably wasn’t aware of.
As a result, we gained things like GDPR, which will revolutionize privacy worldwide because of its extra-jurisdictional effects. And think about how much more SSL is happening now. Http:// is mostly gone. We have letsencrypt. Google is encrypting all traffic between datacenters. Etc...
But no, Snowden did not reveal anything suggesting widespread illegal surveillance of Americans.
Why would they be afraid of going to jail? None of them have gone to jail so far. You only face consequences for reporting misbehavior, not for engaging in it.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
I was trying to explain how small bitcoin is compared to the sum of all black market activity by using an example of one the most profitable bitcoin dark market to date
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.
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.
I agree with your thesis on the importance of the invention.
More abstract (and international) money and blockchain rules will be huge advances, fully agreed. Less corruption, more stability, these things I believe will finally allow us to set systems up to provide resources with efficiency we haven't been able to before and this is huge.
Where I get off is is thinking it's some kind of libertarian revolution wresting control from the hands of government. I don't predict that. The way I see it, governments will be in the thick of it. But they (hopefully) will finally have to play by the rules.
They’re definitely already in the thick of it, no doubt about it. But ultimately capital goes where it is treated best, and governments treat capital worse than thieves, they’ll never play by the rules. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to be a really rocky road, but eventually worldwide governments will not be in control over money anymore. Now that people don’t have to use fiat that is debased on purpose by governments to fund their operations, they will not. It’s not about a libertarian revolution (although I do believe sound money will result in a more libertarian world), it’s about sound money being an order of magnitude more superior to fiat. People in Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic didn’t stop using debased currency because they were libertarians, they stopped because it was clear their money was becoming worthless and there were superior alternatives.
Those are extreme examples where it can happen overnight, it will take longer for less aggressive regimes, but it’s only a matter of time before the same happens to all other fiat.
Fiat currencies seem to be doing a decent job of it, and they don't require the terawatts of power a crypto currency would need if it were adopted as a primary currency of a major country.
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.
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.
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.
Openvpn is unlikely to be malicious, and is opensource so you could theoretically audit it. And if you're _really_ paranoid, it's an open protocol, so you could write your own implementation. Although, then it's likely vulnerable -- there's a principle, I forget who from, which states that for any piece of software of sufficient complexity, if you wrote it yourself then you probably made a mistake and it's vulnerable; and if you didn't write it, then even if you read the entire source code very carefully, it's still possible, likely even, that they snuck in an exploit that you didn't notice.
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.
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).
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.
> Yup, just what we might expect -- hordes of downvotes, zero discussion.
You were likely downvoted and flagged mainly because of the accusation that Snowden is a "Putin asset". If you want discussion, then making accusations like that is not helpful, particularly given that these documents being published by The Intercept are documents handed over before Snowden ever set foot in Russia.
EDIT: For context, the comment I'm referring to above, is the deleted/flagged grandparent of this comment which you need showdead on to see.
It is not an accusation, it is the fact of the matter.
He's a defector, he had help before and during his defection, and he is staying in Russia at the pleasure of the FSB (successor to the KGB), who, as we have seen has no problem terminating people for whom they have no use.
There are many more, if anyone cares to read them, but this audience remains far too enamored of the 'state surveillance is always evil' mentality (and I formerly had the same attitude, not that it cannot be very evil, but certainly not always so).
Snowdon and Putin's efforts to spin the 'hero/whistleblower' yarn, partly through outlest such as Sputnik, RU, Intercept, do not change the facts, and these outlets should be read with extreme skepticism.
All of this is speculation without a shred of evidence behind it, but even if we postulate that all of this is true, it is irrelevant with respect to the contents of the article.
If you wanted to raise a point about the article, do so, and you'll see that others have also made the point that there's nothing particularly shocking about the NSA "tracking down" Bitcoin users without being downvoted, because they managed to make the point without making emotion-driven unproven accusations.
If you want to get your points across here without ending up getting comments flagged on a regular basis you might want to consider sticking to the point, and not making accusations like in your flagged comment and this one without actually presenting evidence (and your links do not present evidence).
Actually, there is quite a bit of evidence, some linked in the articles in the previous post. And there are many other sources if you search. Did you read the linked articles? they aren't just opinion ...
BTW, what is the deal with being flagged? First, other than your highlighting it, I see nothing in the UI (displayed on Win/FFox) indicating to me that I've been flagged. How could I tell, and what is it flagged for (If I'm somehow violating some rule or norm, it's kind of hard to change behavior with no info)? What am I missing?
I agree with most of the posters here about the article that it was unremarkable that the NSA searches the identities of BTC users and it's in their job remit.
The point, which I probably could have made more clear at the outset, is to look at the reason behind the article's existence -- it's published to promote the RUS narrative that the western intelligence services are untrustworthy, and by extension the western governments and alliances are untrustworthy. This is a primary theme in the Russian Active Measures directed at the West.
> BTW, what is the deal with being flagged? First, other than your highlighting it, I see nothing in the UI (displayed on Win/FFox) indicating to me that I've been flagged. How could I tell, and what is it flagged for (If I'm somehow violating some rule or norm, it's kind of hard to change behavior with no info)? What am I missing?
HN moderation can be quite opaque. You get the opportunity to downvote first when your karma has reached a certain level. Beyond downvoting comments can be flagged. Once they're flagged enough they get marked "dead". Once they're dead, they'll still look live to the person who posted them, but not to others (you can verify by opening the site logged out/in an incognito window). This is intentional because while in some cases people are just not aware they've stepped over the line, a lot of the flagged comments are spam or abusive. There's an option (I'm not sure if that's available to everyone or if it needs a certain level of karma) on the settings page called "showdead" which will let you see flagged/dead comments. I keep it on because the volume is small enough and occasionally interesting comments gets caught up in it. The "headline" of your comment shows up like this for me:
> toss1 17 hours ago | parent | flag | vouch | favorite [flagged] [dead] | on: The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snow...
It's worth noting that the presence of politicized topics on HN at all is a thorny subject, and politicized articles are far more likely to be flagged (the whole article) or taken down by moderators if they're perceived to attract too much controversy, or see comments flagged repeatedly. HN tolerates a quite large range of political viewpoints, but rarely tolerates direct attacks on named individuals unless the evidence is very clear (I'm sure there are exceptions).
Get flagged too much, and you can get shadowbanned - basically everything gets marked dead but it still looks like normal to you. This is rare, and when a user seems to have been shadowbanned for no good reason the moderators do tend to be good about undoing it. You're not subject to that - it's only individual flagging.
> The point, which I probably could have made more clear at the outset, is to look at the reason behind the article's existence -- it's published to promote the RUS narrative that the western intelligence services are untrustworthy, and by extension the western governments and alliances are untrustworthy. This is a primary theme in the Russian Active Measures directed at the West.
I see this is additional unsupported conjecture, but it'd likely have stood up better to downvotes than a direct accusation against Snowden.
I personally agree that the guy was naive and had no idea what he was doing, seeing as most of the news coverage is not actually substantiated by the source documents when you look through it all. That would be a valid criticism.
However, unsubstantiated claims of being an asset is pointless to use as an argument, there is no evidence and it does not help the discussion even if you really do believe it.
The very title of the 2nd article I linked specifies that Russians have admitted that he is an asset, and there were FSB people cooperating with him.
From the article:
"In a remarkable interview this week, Franz Klintsevich, a senior Russian security official, explained the case matter-of-factly: “Let’s be frank. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do. If there’s a possibility to get information, they will get it.”
With this, Klintsevich simply said what all intelligence professionals already knew – that Snowden is a collaborator with the FSB. That he really had no choice in the matter once he set foot in Russia does not change the facts."
Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. And, again, I used to think Snowdon was great, but I've since read a lot more data which has changed my mind.
I changed my mind as well after reading through the source material itself. I am not defending the leak.
Once again, there is no evidence he is an “asset” or collaborator. Maybe there will be actual public evidence in the future, but at the moment it is not useful as an argument as nobody will believe it without hard evidence. Vague quotes from officials do not meet that standard.
As I'm using it, it could be a wide range of intentions, including:
* a willing ideological traitor,
* a paid agent,
* a double agent,
* a person cooperating semi-willingly to get out of a jam,
* a compromised person unwillingly cooperating,
* a dupe or 'useful idiot".
The only thing in common is that they have people on the other side successfully working to make some of their actions work for that side and not ours.
I do not believe that we'll ever have specific detailed classified evidence revealed to us, at least withing the next 75 years. However, we can take a clue from the people inside the intelligence agencies who have seen the evidence, and they unanimously classify Snowdon as a full-on traitor.
I;m not sure I go that far, but he's at least a step above useful idiot. This can be judged just by Snowdon's own a public activity since his taking up residence in Russia (Manning, and Reality Winner, OTOH, are probably mere dupes).
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.