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posted by martyb on Saturday September 02 2017, @01:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the truthiness dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @11:45AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @11:45AM (#562907)
    The original Skype was too independent and too inconvenient. Too P2P for the US Gov's liking. With the old-style Skype if you send a message and the recipient wasn't online, the message would be stored on YOUR machine and only sent the next time both of you are online.

    So the US Gov convinced Microsoft to buy Skype for them. And not long after that when you send a message it gets sent somewhere even if your recipient isn't online. Go figure...
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday September 02 2017, @06:56PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday September 02 2017, @06:56PM (#562982) Journal

    Further, send that recipient a link (to a web server you control), and watch how many times that link gets visited.
    This is also a worth while test on any other platform you are considering using.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.