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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.
So who was Shakespeare?
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!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
According to the author - ME.
Sounds truthy enough.
It's beneficial that I exercise Grammarly. Straight away those concerned with distinguishing me, will undergo unhingement.
Nice warrant they used there. View EVERYONES email because everyone is a suspect.
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.
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.
no big deal, it's just meta-data, not much to be had from that; no, we don't collect data en masse; no no, that's not piss on your back, it's rain
if this were true, and the guy was a US citizen not under suspicion or any other legally obtained need, is that a crime? does the Constitution have any meaning to these people?
Subject says it all.
(And yes, I read the paragraph saying there are no sources, as if this somehow represents original research.)
I can't help but be impressed though.
Canadian money doesn't have the most powerful government and military on earth and yet we all live daily with it. Most places will also accept american dollars but won't even give you any exchange rate for it.
#DeleteFacebook
...will the real Satoshi please stand up
....ducks!......
please stand up
please stand up
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.
You can learn everything you want to know by reading the source code of the bitcoin nodes. Knowing the identity of the guy who wrote the first version doesn't really add anything.
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
Why identify Satoshi Nakamoto? Wouldn't it be of more use to identify the users of Bitcoin?
On the other hand, public knowledge (at some point) of Satoshi's identity could serve to protect him against pressure or retribution from the TLAs. If he or his associates can prove his identity, the gov't or banks can't very well engineer his disappearance.
Have gnu, will travel.
Now its being openly used for trivial shit like identifying someone who wrote software that is in no way illegal.
Illegally gather the data, use it to identify random people online that have done nothing wrong but are interesting to you.. IS EXACTLY WHY MASS SURVEILLANCE ISN'T OK
Exactly -- what is the false-positive rate of this approach?
If you throw trillions of data sets compacted into a 50-d cube, sure you will find some in the neighbourhood of your target. Probably it is not just one person, but many thousands.
Both machine learning and mass surveillance have to be gauged by the false positive rates, the false negative rates and cost (monetary and otherwise).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Dogecoin to the moon! Dogecoin will be valued at over two dollars before the end of the year.
#DeleteFacebook
Reminds me of the early days (mid 1990's) of PGP, when there was a now obviously ineffective campaign to encourage everyone to put their emails into the 'encryption envelope.'
We didn't listen. Now this is possible.
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?
There are applications that can 'Roget' written material. Google 'sinister buttocks'.
Have gnu, will travel.
A quick sanity check, suggests the story as submitted isn't true, if Satoshi Nakamoto used encryption all the time, the first port of call would be to filter for people using encryption. Then by links to others known to be involved in Bitcoin. i.e. you wouldn't use stylometry which is known to be limited.
So what is the story here?
AC submitter is trying to sell his phrenology technology, erm I mean stylometry technology? That could be it.
Or prehaps he's trying to plant the 'NSA bulk search of text using stylometry' idea in peoples head. i.e. that NSA gets all the *contents* of everyone emails and bulk searches those. Something it would have to fight a lot of companies to do. But then if it had the contents, why wouldn't it search for discussions on bitcoin algos?
So no, I don't think the story rings true.
"But why? Why go to so much trouble to identify Satoshi? My source tells me that the Obama administration was concerned that Satoshi was an agent of Russia or China—that Bitcoin might be weaponized against us in the future. "
Yeh, unlikely plot, given its open source you could just check the code.
in a 50d space, "trillions" is still going to be fairly wide spread. assuming your axes all go from 0 to 1 and that's it, and you avoid fractions, you've still got 2^50 nodes, which is on the order of a quadrillion, or 1000 nodes per text block.
Sure, there's likely to be clustering, but it's not quite as inevitable as you're assuming from just the number of data sets.
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.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
A 50-dimensional cow. Okay, now I am worried
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Interesting, there was a story recently on Fresh Air/NPR about how they caught the unabomber through linguistic work. It wasn't until his manifesto that they had enough writing to analyse. They didn't mention stylometry but the FBI interviewee discussed breaking down the writing into geographical location, writer's age, etc.
No he did not. As soon as someone tells you a wallet address you can see everything that's happening on it, you cannot troll/fake this.
And what's with that transaction done on 2017-08-22? Is it stuck or something?
#DeleteFacebook
YES, the NSA is reading ALL our emails, recording ALL our phone calls. Damn the Constitution full autocracy ahead.
That's actually a bit careless. Even I am completely aware of this. When I'm posting something anonymously, I swap cuz/cause and don't put commas before a "lol" and single space my sentences and don't use an oxford comma and use semicolons incorrectly on purpose. All you have to have is a basic awareness of how it works and you can avoid it. I blame him for not being cautious enough.
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.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
What's the point of this effort? Did he break any laws?
Or is this just more dick-waving by the NSA?
More proof that the security services are out of control?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I would also add that, Canadian money or not, I do not have to wait for more than an hour to confirm a transaction.
When two men claim they are Jesus, at least one of them must be wrong.
But when four AC's claim to be old queens, we gotta figure they are all correct.
Did they stop investigating?
Only if he supports Donald Trump.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I imagine the IRS wants his name and a good chunk of any cash it feels entitled to.
But Canadian money does have a real and considerable threat physical force behind it, unlike Bitcoin. If you don't think it does, try counterfeiting the Canadian dollar in any useful quantity and see what happens.
Yes, and nobody knows what the false positive or false negative rates are. Stylometry is not a reliable way of identifying people, and it is quite disturbing that people pretend it is.
This is just as bad as the lie detector scam. The real objective of such announcements it to create fear and doubt among the population; they want to be able to bully suspects into saying "come on, admit you're guilty, stylometry/lie detectors already prove it, but we'll give you a lighter sentence if you cooperate".
Try to send CAD or USD or any other currency from America to Asia... Probably you will have to wait longer than one hour unless you pay some crazy fees to WU or some other monopol ( which also doesnt' work in all parts of the world ).
I wonder how long it will take the NSA to unmask Slashdot's Anonymous Coward.
Aaand? Who is it?
Al Gore. Al Gore invented bit coin.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
A 50-dimensional cow. Okay, now I am worried
What if all cows have 50 dimensions but we can only perceive 3 of them?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It was Rusty Foster the whole time! Who would have thought?
Real money also doesn't use 170kW/h of electricity for every transaction.
(current power usage of the Bitcoin network is 0.08% of the worlds production)
https://digiconomist.net/bitco...
No sig today...
I can't think of too many drug dealers that accept monopoly money.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If only kW/h was an unit of energy...
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Stylometry is a useless tool that works by racial and cultural stereotypes. Anyone with a half-decent education will stymie this system almost immediately.
Take two students from the same school, whom have had the same classes, especially the language classes, right to the same teacher.
Odds are quite high that they will phrase things quite similarly.
As if this weren't evident enough in the amount of cheating that happens in middle and high school.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't need to! I earn Canadian Tire money with every purchase I make on my MasterCard!
#DeleteFacebook
Well, that's the way mice work.
If this story is not BS, then I would like to know why is the NSA spending taxpayer dollars on this fishing expedition. Is Satoshi wanted for a crime? which one(s)?
Going through an automatic translator probably works.
I don't really believe that stylometry is as effective as the article says though.
...will the real Satoshi please stand up
please stand up
please stand up ....ducks!......
Satoshi don't mess around because he loves bitcoin and this we know for sho!
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
kWh is not kW/h though. The GP said kW/h. He probably meant kWh though.
Canadian and U.S. Money, like all fiat currencies, can be instantly devalued simply by the gov't choosing to print more at any time. It IS NOT a guaranteed store of stable value.
Think about it, this is the guy who invented bitcoin. He would know better than anyone that it's a deflationary currency and the longer he holds onto his pile of coins the richer he will get. Why bother selling until you're worth more than Bill Gates? The NSA probably want to unmask him to determine if he's funding terrorists/who the hell he is. I don't think they should be conducting surveillance/this sort of analysis against this particular target because the methods being used are wrong. However I can understand the interest in him. This is someone who is using up to date encryption methods. It's basically someone the NSA would be targeting anyway to try and stay ahead in electronic warfare techniques. When your entire reason for existence is to decode intelligence communication, it's a requirement you can/try to break all encryption methods available/potentially available to your adversaries.
You DO realize that we can perceive 4 dimensions, right? Width, Height, Depth, and Time.
It is pretty trivial to do when you group the related ones. At work I visualize 20+ dimensions.
i.e. 14 Dimensions:
* X, Y
* Width, Height
* r,g,b,a
* Rot X, Y, Z
* Scale X, Y, Z
There are numerous videos on how to visualize higher dimensions
* Jos Leys - Ãtienne Ghys - Aurélien Alvarez (Dimensions - A walk through mathematics)
* Rob Bryanton (Imagining 10 Dimensions - the Movie)
If you try to anonymize your writing by running it through hained translations you had better have those translators running on yiur own hw else you are just moving part of the tracing problem to the traffic analysis space
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.
ok.
The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis.
That's purposely sounding complex to make it look more impressive than it is. Fuck that hype. Strive for quality journalism and stop bullshitting us.
The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing
ok. But really it just means there's another layer of obfuscation required. If you really want to be anonymous, now you need to pass everything you write through a SIMPLE-WORDS filter. Parish the thought of giving the NSA even a modicum of tyranny inducing panopicon. ....OH SHIT!
eh, just restrict yourself to Simplified Technical English or basic English when writing your manifesto, and be sure to randomize both sentence length and word choices.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Any time he sells a bitcoin and doesn't declare the gain on his quarterly taxes, it is called tax fraud.
Good point. People are wondering why the NSA would bother with this but it's easy to see why they might. Currently no country can tax him because they have no idea who he is. If his real life identity is connected to his wallet identity then whatever government he lives under can tax the billions he made from his pyramid scheme currency. The problem is it must be definitive and this method doesn't sound like it is. Although there probably aren't many billionaires without any obvious source of hundreds of millions of dollars or pounds or whatever who also got caught in their net. They could also rule out a lot of rich businessmen because they are rarely the type to do something like this. Although they may fund it. Of course it could be a group of people.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Sounds like a Philip Dick novel. Why is everybody arguing about whether currencies are valuable instead of discussing the inability to stay anonymous?
The parent comment seems particularly insightful and reminds me of former USA president Barack Obama's detailed description for the cameras of the operation to take out terrorist Osama Bin Laden. The idea if I get it right was to project that this country was so far ahead of others it could say openly what its intelligence services were doing. I wonder if this might ironically make it weak long term if this keeps happening and other countries don't do this.
enuf said
Come on someone, mod this funny!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Yeah, what's weird is that it doesn't seem to matter and enough people believe in it to drive up the value. Just finished "cryptonimocon", in which the premise of the story is people want to set up a digital currency backed by a hoard of WW2 gold they were hunting for. It seems quaint now because it turns out you don't even need the gold. (Although it's an awesome book)
Most? meaning more than half. I'm skeptical an average drug dealer would barter with collectibles given that I don't think I could properly identify a first edition board game even though I'm a member of my work's board game club and my Mom is an antique dealer.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Try counterfeiting bitcoin in any useful quantity and see what happens. I guarantee you far more than if you counterfeit Canadian money.
TFA explains why:
Why go to so much trouble to identify Satoshi? My source tells me that the Obama administration was concerned that Satoshi was an agent of Russia or China -- that Bitcoin might be weaponized against us in the future.
Whether you agree with what that motive or not, it's good someone was concerned about such things.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
If this is true, it begs the question: why is the NSA looking for Satoshi?
Its a research project, you have to look for someone attempting anonymity. Satoshi would be a fun target. Also an anonymous person with a larger collection of public writing would be make the research easier.
With all that power, why can't we get a copy of the medical tests confirming Alzheimers or a list of off-shore tax avoidance bank accounts of .... a certain reality TV bimbo-in-chief.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Satoshi is a serious threat to any large government since he/she/they single-handedly created the most popular and valuable de-centralized currency in the world.
Currency in any form is one that any government wants exclusive control over.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
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.
You mean like stocks. More specifically stocks that don't pay dividends
http://saveie6.com/
Eh... if you are going to look through billion people for any match you are going to get some, probably thousands, doesn't mean you found the person you were looking for. Can't say I'm surprised about intelligence agencies looking for the fella, but it's kind of late now, bitcoin is fart in the wind by now, there is no catching it anymore, getting paws on Satoshis personal bitcoin cache might be important in the long run tho. Governments can only hope it will fail on its own, if it doesn't... that wouldn't bode well for world economy. My personal opinion is that Satoshi, whoever he may be, purposefully designed the thing to be an economical doomsday device.
Depends a lot of spelling checkers set to a British dictionary will mark an word with a ize ending as wrong and want to change it to an ise ending. Stupid thing is that the ize ending is a perfectly correct British spelling, as can be determined by a quick check in the OED.
without any substantiation of the main claim
wonder how this got through the /. content selection process
They might not like him for creating a new currency -- If he's a US citizen, that is likely illegal. They can claim he is supporting terrorism by creating an untraceable currency. They can point to an increase in untraceable transactions -- money laundering -- supporting and an all crimes -- they can blame almost anything -- and then ....
If they can't prove it, they can do to him what they did to Capone and hit this "millionaire" for tax evasion.
Or do you think he paid taxes on all his bitcoins?
I don't think nearly as many people use Monopoly money for money laundering and ransomware, though.
Agreed. The vast majority of criminals use US dollars.
Perhaps someone should investigate the shady groups behind this hugely overvalued national currency? I suggest they start with the NSA, CIA, US Treasury and the US "Federal Reserve". They could then expand their enquiry to The US oil industry and the petrodollar.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
What gave this bunch the impression that they had the need or right to do this?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Nakamoto is Craig Wright, confirmed!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
All these questions of why, why, why? I say so what?
Now that they found him, what are they going to do with him? That's the real question.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Who knew the NSA was having so much trouble locating it's employees?
somewhat funny, i read this in a years old book named "bitcoin : the future of money" in that case satoshi must have been identifierd for years by now ... and also , this is not confirmed ? hmz ...
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?