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How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto (medium.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The 'creator' of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world's most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi's real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire's identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him -- his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the 'writer invariant' method of stylometry to compare Satoshi's 'known' writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM and then through MUSCULAR, 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.
I'd love to meet Satoshi Nakamoto. He/she/they must be brilliant. But if the NSA can positively identify them it is probable that no one is truly anonymous unless you simply don't ever post email, forum posts, or anything else online. I keep a low profile but it sounds like only cave dwellers and hermits can escape big brother!
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According to the author - ME.
Sounds truthy enough.
An anonymous reader shares a report... "according to my source at the DHS..."
Well, I am not anonymous and my source at DHS says that these claims are BS. Who is more credible?
In 2014 Newsweek was pretty damn sure they had the right Satoshi and dragged a poor soul through hell and back because of their "beliefs". Can we give this topic a rest, until we know for sure and for real? None of this anonymous reporter citing anonymous sources at DHS crap.
the NSA, I recall lawsuits after the Snowden releases were kicked out of court because they couldn't show they had standing. Apparently Satoshi Nakamoto can show he has standing because the NSA has copies of his emails.
Subject says it all.
(And yes, I read the paragraph saying there are no sources, as if this somehow represents original research.)
they used illegally-gathered data.
There aren't many people crazy enough to pay over $4,000 each for Monopoly dollars, though.
Like it or not, any item (even Bitcoin) is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Whether or not it will still be worth $4,000 a year from now it anyone's guess at this point. It could become the next Mastercard, or the various world governments might outlaw the currency and start prosecuting enough users to make it's value plummet.
Personally, the lack of certainty either way is enough to make me stay away at this point.
Doesn't this person deserve the right not to have their identity known? They have not (as far I as I know) committed a crime or being investigated for a criminal act. I'm sure the motivation behind remaining anonymous is for his own safety and well being. If someone has not released their identity on purpose, and even more so gone to lengths to keep it private why is anyone trying to find out who he is. Sure there's an interest level there. There's quite possibly a lot to learn, but at what cost? I know most of these points are completely obvious and the answers are also unfortunately obvious, but it needs to be said anyway.
Sent from my TARDIS
*Do you enjoy terrorism?*
This IS terrorism.
Now, lets hear from the liberals telling me I need to pay more taxes for crap like this. After all, I do like to use roads, police, and NSA spying on everything everyone writes ever.
I'm not sure what the word "liberals" is doing here. In general, the liberals have been rather vocal in their dislike and distrust of the NSA, CIA, and other TLAs. The support for these has been mostly been voices on the right saying "we need more tools to keep America secure!"
As for the "more taxes" quip, in general government spending goes up under Republican administrations, and is constant or even down under Democratic administrations. (It was the Bush administration, remember, that coined the phrase "deficits don't matter.")
Is Satoshi Nakamoto suspected of a crime? Is he or she a threat to national security?
The NSA has expended all this effort and violated Satoshi's and a billion other people's privacy for.... what? Shits and giggles?
violated Satoshi's and a billion other people's privacy
They violated Satoshi's privacy just for the practice. They violated a billion other's privacy to build a baseline corpus to tune their search application.
Have gnu, will travel.
YES, the NSA is reading ALL our emails, recording ALL our phone calls. Damn the Constitution full autocracy ahead.
Nothing new here folks, same method was used to nail Ted Kaczynski - of course it was much more difficult back then so a far greater accomplishment.
Actually, I think David Kaczynski simply turned in his brother after reading his manifesto and recognizing his brother's writing style...
If you want call that the same method, well, I guess you are entitled, but that probably implies that Satoshi's brother works for the NSA... If that were true, I think the NSA creating bitcoin would be a far greater accomplishment than nabbing Ted...
As a taxpayer, there be something pretty fuckin important they need to ask Satoshi personally to justify this waste of my tax money.
You really think they have to justify what they do with your money? One of my fav quotes in that good old ID4 movie: " You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?"
I imagine the IRS wants his name and a good chunk of any cash it feels entitled to.
If this is true, it begs the question: why is the NSA looking for Satoshi? Where are the warrants to do this kind of search? This is a fairly involved process, even if the software was already written, collecting the entirety of Satoshi's writing for input is time consuming work.
As a taxpayer, there be something pretty fuckin important they need to ask Satoshi personally to justify this waste of my tax money.
Maybe finding Satoshi is as important as landing a man on the moon. The task at hand may not be that important, but developing the technology in the process yields capabilities that may prove to be significant for future tasks.
It's actually just another example of how Hollywood doesn't know a damned thing about the military.
Here's just one example of how this "$20,000 hammer" story can happen. The hammer cost $10. But it is part of a large supply contract that employs hundreds of people and sells the government everything from staples to trucks. The overhead cost of the contract (all the people, the offices, the warehouses, the transportation, etc) is split evenly across each order made. Order 100 trucks? That's $10 million + $20,000 overhead. Order 1 hammer? That's $10 + $20,000 overhead.
There's also the averaged cost method, where the cost of an entire program is just averaged over the items it produces.
Then there's the "custom item" situation, where the hammer is actually made is rear materials to a custom spec that took 10 years of research to develop, plus only four of them were ever made...
In other words, Hollywood (famous for it's own magical accounting practices) is stupid, and people that quote Hollywood are even dumber.