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Over at Medium, a blogger claims to have an inside source at NSA that claimed that the NSA put in effort to determine the person(s) behind Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.
According to the blog, the NSA created a "fingerprint" of Nakamoto's writing style(s) and used this fingerprint as follows:
The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM (a court-approved front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts) and then through MUSCULAR (where the NSA copies the data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information among the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook) the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.
The blog goes on to discuss that it may be a Chinese or Russian individual or group, possibly a state actor. Of course, that's quite a claim so that would require quite a proof.
The blogger has updated the post to decline to substantiate these rumours.
What do you guys think: does the NSA have the capability to perform such an investigation? And is it cheap enough for them to waste it on this? If so, what's next? the NSA identifying the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday September 02 2017, @01:48AM (1 child)
I don't know anything about the blog or it's claims about Nakamoto. But there is no doubt that the NSA has the capacity, knowledge and ability to create a "fingerprint" of someones writing and then try and match to other pieces or written text in an attempt to try and see if they are written by the same person, or an anonymous text being compared to a known text to identify the author. Within some % degree. You don't even have to be the NSA to do that. But for them it should be even easier then for many others since they should have so much more material to learn from and to compare to.
Is it cheap? That is irrelevant. But it shouldn't be very expensive, after all they already gather all the data so it's not like they are actually paying more for this. This is probably not more then a side project and the data-gathering is already paid for.
Is it a waste of time? No. You have someone that has created a new currency that seem to be taking off or at least fuel parts of an underground economy. That would be something the NSA, and other parts of the US (or any) government, should be interested in.
If they have not found Hoffa by now they probably never will. That said I don't know what a written "fingerprint" has to do with finding Hoffa unless some old mob hitman wrote extensively about it and they can after they identify him water-board him until he tells them where the body is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @02:49AM
But can they attach a finger print like that to a group? If several people edited the document, it must be much more difficult.