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.

Comments

This is ok

[Headw1nd]

I'm sure there will be loads of posts here denouncing the NSA for this, because it is in fact creepy and invasive. However, this kind of thing is *exactly* what they should be doing. "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a figure who created a economy-changing product, and as a result holds assets that value in the billions. Their motivations, ideology, and state ties were unknown, though they maintained they were not an American. It's completely reasonable for government to find out who this person is, and determine if they were and ally, an enemy, or neither. Now that they know they can act accordingly.

Re:Nice Warrent

[fibonacci8]

liberals = tax and spend conservatives = tax cut and spend see the difference?

Officially Pissed Off

[TiggertheMad]

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.

Re:Officially Pissed Off

[Anonymous Coward]

why is the NSA looking for Satoshi?

There has been a strong push over the last 6-12 months to bring Bitcoin into the global financial fold. Ben Bernake is due to speak in support of Bitcoin at an upcoming Blockchain conference soon. Let that sink in.

Obviously, Banks and Governments desire to get this Bitcoin thing under control. This will not be done by outright bans, or technological restriction/hacks/attacks. It will be done in the same way the post War Elite have gotten everything else under control. Social Influence. Networking, fawning praise, meetings, love-bombing, deals, conferences, NYT articles, fancy diners, meeting famous people, interviews, all making sure everyone is "part of the team" and on the same page. Indirect monetary rewards, and of course cold shoulders and consequences for the Bitcoin community members who do not capitulate to induction programme.

This will not work without Satoshi. If he calls out the co-option of Bitcoin, it's all over. The banks need him, otherwise they won't have the clout to get the bt community to alter the algorithms favorably. Best way to get him is to set the Media on him until he cracks or gives in. To do that, they have to find him: Enter the Surveillance state.

It's still possible they don't have him and the article is a bluff, to pressure him to to the dinner table. Either way they want him, they need him, otherwise Bitcoin remains outside the financial fold, and the banks and their governments can't abide that.

Re:Officially Freaked Out

[Oswald McWeany]

Develop a shifting writing style and you'll be ok.

I wonder if you could do something like deliberately write in simple sentences; run everything through Google Translate to another language and then run that translation back to English.

That should anonymise you a little.

Re:According to my source at the DHS

[squiggleslash]

Seems improbable to me too for the simple reason that the most likely Nakamoto is actually a group of people, which would explain a number of well documented oddities such as frequent switching between British and American spelling, and other unusual aspects of Nakamoto's life. That makes me doubt the entire NSA thing.

Part of me really wants to believe that one member of the group was really Craig Wright, partially because it'd upset a sizable amount of the Bitcoin community, and partially because he does fit the profile of what I'd suggest was the leadership of the group. I'm not going to make that bet though.

(Of course the perfect answer would be if it were Wright, Finney, and... Dorian Nakamoto. That'd be glorious.)

Re:Why?

[Bruce Perens]

Is Satoshi Nakamoto suspected of a crime? Is he or she a threat to national security?

One of the theories regarding Bitcoin is that it is an effort by a national actor to crash other nation's economies.