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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!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
It's beneficial that I exercise Grammarly. Straight away those concerned with distinguishing me, will undergo unhingement.
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.
So who was Shakespeare?
Say, we could find that out, couldn't we!
All we have to do is digitize the bulk emails and texts collected from the NSA's mass surveillance of everybody in 16th century England, and compare them to Shakespere's works! Easy.
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.
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.
I wonder how long it will take the NSA to unmask Slashdot's Anonymous Coward.