{"id":32609,"date":"2018-03-21T06:26:26","date_gmt":"2018-03-21T11:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32609"},"modified":"2018-03-21T06:26:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-21T11:26:37","slug":"the-nsa-worked-to-track-down-bitcoin-users-snowden-documents-reveal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32609","title":{"rendered":"The NSA Worked to ‘Track Down’ Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Illustration: Tyler Comrie for The Intercept<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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THE NSA WORKED TO \u201cTRACK DOWN\u201d BITCOIN USERS, SNOWDEN DOCUMENTS REVEAL<\/a><\/h3>\n
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INTERNET PARANOIACS DRAWN<\/u> to bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency.\u00a0Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable \u2014\u00a0while also offering discretion.\u00a0Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin\u2019s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.<\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world \u2014 and\u00a0wielded at least one mysterious source of information to \u201chelp track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins<\/a>,\u201d according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA\u2019s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed\u00a0software program\u00a0that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the agency was interested in surveilling some competing cryptocurrencies, \u201cBitcoin is #1 priority,\u201d a March 15, 2013<\/a> internal NSA report stated.
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The documents indicate that \u201ctracking down\u201d bitcoin users went well beyond closely examining bitcoin\u2019s public transaction ledger, known as the Blockchain, where users are typically referred to through anonymous identifiers; the tracking may also have involved gathering intimate details of these users\u2019 computers. The NSA collected some bitcoin users\u2019 password information, internet activity, and a type of unique device identification number known as a MAC address, a March 29, 2013 NSA memo<\/a> suggested. In the same document, analysts also discussed tracking internet users\u2019 internet addresses, network ports, and timestamps to identify \u201cBITCOIN Targets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Illustration: Tyler Comrie for The Intercept THE NSA WORKED TO \u201cTRACK DOWN\u201d BITCOIN USERS, SNOWDEN DOCUMENTS REVEAL INTERNET PARANOIACS DRAWN to bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency.\u00a0Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable \u2014\u00a0while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4174,15611,249,551,577,652,15125,765,5567,1197],"class_list":["post-32609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-bitcoin","tag-cryptocurrency","tag-edward-snowden","tag-national-security-agency","tag-nsa","tag-privacy","tag-sam-biddle","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept","tag-tracking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32610,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32609\/revisions\/32610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}