How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto (medium.com) 427
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.
Officially Freaked Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
It took them a month for the NSA to ferret out one person, and God knows how many man-hours of work in that time.
Since the NSA doesn't share much with the FBI, I'm not too worried.
Re: (Score:2)
It took them a month for the NSA to ferret out one person, and God knows how many man-hours of work in that time.
Since the NSA doesn't share much with the FBI, I'm not too worried.
Sure, but now they have the code written and tested it will be much faster for the next one.
Re: (Score:2)
You assume they didn't have the code for this already. I've heard of similar tools being available for years now. The only way to escape is to stay in the dark. But still it took them one month of effort to determine his identity so the process isn't exactly cheap.
Re:Officially Freaked Out (Score:5, Informative)
She gave a relevant introduction in 2013 stylometric analysis to track anonymous users in the underground [securityaffairs.co] and the corresponding video [youtu.be] regarding darknet user tracking through stylometry.
She commented a while ago "Please do not ask me to deanonymize Satoshi." and gave reasons.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, the major plot point was that the Unabomber's brother recognized his writing style and fingered him to the FBI. Without that, they probably never would have caught him.
Re: (Score:3)
In the process, they created a fingerprint of hundreds of thousands of other people for this search, so they now already have the database to compare new anonymous people to.
Not quite. The fingerprint was based on Nakamoto's 50 most common words. You might say they created a fingerprint for every person in "Nakamoto space", but the fingerprint can't be reused to search for a person with a different set of common words. (It could, but the range would be too low--everybody would end up looking too similar.) I think you're right about them intending to reuse this technique in the future, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Officially Pissed Off (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
Re:Officially Pissed Off (Score:4)
There are people who already collected all his writings so that wouldn't exactly be hard to find.
Why did they search for him? One possibility is they want to recruit him. Other than that it could be they simply want to track his activities given his known past record with distributed crypto. Or they want to find a way to subvert the protocol in case it comes to that.
Re: (Score:3)
Or the last option, they basically did it because they can, period.
Re:Officially Pissed Off (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Officially Pissed Off (Score:5, Informative)
I know it's out of fashion to read TFA, but you could have just scrolled right to the end:
"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. Knowing the source would help the administration understand their motives. As far as I can tell Satoshi hasn’t violated any laws and I have no idea if the NSA determined he was an agent of Russia or China or just a Japanese crypto hacker."
Oh and also, this report is literally just a self-sourced blog post.
"Sources: Many readers have asked that I provide third party citations to ‘prove’ the NSA identified Satoshi using stylometry. Unfortunately, I cannot as I haven’t read this anywhere else—hence the reason I wrote this post. I’m not trying to convince the reader of anything, instead my goal is to share the information I received and make the reader aware of the possibility that the NSA can easily determine the authorship of any email through the use of their various sources, methods, and resources."
Re: (Score:2)
But the thing is none of what he did was illegal and you actually only owe tax once you sell something. Until he gets paid for those Bitcoin in his wallet he doesn't actually own anything that's worth something. It's basically like owning stock.
Re: (Score:3)
Someone at IRS reached out to the DHS/FBI/NSA to figure out who's the owner of billions of dollars and not paying taxes on them
There's no tax due on any BTC, unless he goes to transact with them.
Re: (Score:3)
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!
For now it's too intensive a process for them to figure out everyone anonymous. 10 years from now it may only take them 5 minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
that no one is truly anonymous unless you simply don't ever post email, forum posts, or anything else online.
Write in simple English and run it through a translator. Chain a few together.
Re:Officially Freaked Out (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Officially Freaked Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Or since you're the only person whose writing in barely or totally incomprehensible gibberish, make you super easy to identify. That's a problem with most anonymization methods: unless everyone else is using those same methods, you actually make yourself stand out.
Relevant XKCD [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Or since you're the only person whose writing in barely or totally incomprehensible gibberish, make you super easy to identify. That's a problem with most anonymization methods: unless everyone else is using those same methods, you actually make yourself stand out.
Relevant XKCD [xkcd.com]
I wouldn't go through all that trouble in my daily personal e-mail. Only in the anonymous stuff.
Re: (Score:3)
Or since you're the only person whose writing in barely or totally incomprehensible gibberish, make you super easy to identify.
But also easy to confuse with POTUS.
Re: (Score:3)
There's a distinction here that you may have missed: the xkcd crooks never had anonymity, whereas the hypothetical Google Translate user does.
The crooks gave up their anonymity the moment they registered for a license plate using their real identity. Having tied their real identity to their pseudonym, they pierced the veil of anonymity, meaning that, they weren't counting on anonymity to protect their identity. Rather, they were counting on the illegibility of their pseudonym to somehow make it unrecognizab
Re: (Score:3)
person whose writing in barely or totally incomprehensible gibberish, make you super easy to identify.
Last time I gave my friend a full list of comments from here. My friend said, "it's from slashdot, isn't it?" I said, "how did you know?". My friend then said, "they are all incomprehensible gibberish that I don't understand".
Maybe it's a slashdotter thing, but I'm proud of it.
Sources for the article (Score:4, Insightful)
According to the author - ME.
Sounds truthy enough.
Grammarly (Score:5, Funny)
It's beneficial that I exercise Grammarly. Straight away those concerned with distinguishing me, will undergo unhingement.
According to my source at the DHS (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder if was created by a group of people working for the NSA. The kind of people who would be able to come up with something like bitcoin and successfully spread the idea overlap pretty heavily with the kind of people recruited by the three letter agencies. Its not hard to imagine a think tank deciding to come up with something that could be used for illegal activity in order to track that activity.
Re: (Score:3)
>Well, I am not anonymous
Do you really think using the username 'linuxguy' is that different?
Nobody knows who you are, you are as good as anonymous.
So He Could Sue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Is Satoshi Nakamoto known to be an American citizen?
Re: (Score:2)
[Citation needed] (Score:2, Insightful)
Subject says it all.
(And yes, I read the paragraph saying there are no sources, as if this somehow represents original research.)
Anonymity is Dead (Score:2)
I can't help but be impressed though.
you will hate me but it'll be in your head all day (Score:5, Funny)
please stand up
please stand up
in other words.. (Score:3, Insightful)
they used illegally-gathered data.
Why bother ? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh but see you're mistaken. What the NSA really wants is the original bitcoin(s) which are now worth millions. Other than the
theoretical wealth of his original bitcoins, you're absolutely correct. There's no reason the NSA would ever need to know the identity of the original author as he's broken no laws and done nothing wrong and everything he wrote in software is available for scrutiny. He's just fabulously rich, albeit on paper only. And furthermore bitcoin is not anonymous at all, so the moment he
Re: (Score:2)
I would expect him to throw away his private keys, to guarantee they would never fall in the wrong hands. And then maybe mine some new coins anonymously.
Re: (Score:2)
Supply/Demand Problems with your analysis.
If the supply of BitCoin in active circulation ever increased with the amount SN is supposed to have (guestimates) I would crash the market in no time flat.
Then there is the problem of "I don't remember where I put them" or "I forgot my key" or "I lost the wallet" or ... any number of excuses he might have. And until he actually uses the BitCoins, they are unrealized gains and the government can't really touch them.
The right to be private.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Do they deserve privacy? Absolutely.
Is it to be expected? No. It's not hard to see strategic value for an intelligence agency to know who created and has influence over what has become an increasing important economic exchange. They might be interested too if he HAD done anything wrong, if he were really involved in some black market transfers and that was his motivation behind creating the bitcoin. (no evidence of that so shouldn't invade his privacy... but easy to see why agencies would).
No one deser
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't this person deserve the right not to have their identity known?
Doing very public things anonymously is a funny definition of privacy.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but he left his fingerprint all over the public Internet. At some point a person needs to take responsibility for their own anonymity.
Why? (Score:2)
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.
Dogecoin! (Score:4, Funny)
Dogecoin to the moon! Dogecoin will be valued at over two dollars before the end of the year.
We were warned (Score:2)
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.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the theories regarding Bitcoin is that it is an effort by a national actor to crash other nation's economies.
Re: (Score:3)
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?
For national security obviously. You might not agree, but information is power, and our security agencies are charged with maintaining position of power. Or do you think all decisions around national security should be held by popular vote instead?
Just like the Unabomber (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:3)
This is ok (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Unabomber (Score:2)
So in other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
YES, the NSA is reading ALL our emails, recording ALL our phone calls. Damn the Constitution full autocracy ahead.
Re: (Score:2)
You based this on anonymous poster citing anonymous sources at DHS?
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Even I know this (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the main reason for all my incorrect word usage, typos, and grammar mistakes too.
Re: (Score:3)
I will never be found parently becaus3 of my brilliance disguises but also styling metering thinks I am smartphones autocarrot.
And the point of this effort? (Score:2)
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?
IRS (Score:4, Insightful)
I imagine the IRS wants his name and a good chunk of any cash it feels entitled to.
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine the IRS wants his name and a good chunk of any cash it feels entitled to.
That's a very good point. Is income earned from bitcoin mining tax collectible (I'm sure it is); and how many people report that?
Re: (Score:2)
No, it sucks for the taxpayers who are owed that money wherever he lives.
unreliable (Score:2)
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, b
ac (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how long it will take the NSA to unmask Slashdot's Anonymous Coward.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how long it will take the NSA to unmask Slashdot's Anonymous Coward.
Shouldn't be too hard. They only need to compare AC to people who are current residents of mental institutions.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We had anecdote in Soviet Union about KGB. The conversation taking place in public phone booth in the middle of the night somewhere on side road having no single person around in vicenty.
The guys is dialing number using coins a has following conversation:
- Hello ...
- Hello
- Is this KGB
- Yes
- You work poorly!
(Somebody pats on his shoulder behind)
- We work as we can
And to think (Score:2)
It was Rusty Foster the whole time! Who would have thought?
Bullshit method (Score:2)
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.
Think about it. (Score:3)
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.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Craig Shakespeare is the manager of Leicester City football club.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 th
Re: (Score:2)
I can't think of too many drug dealers that accept monopoly money.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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... [digiconomist.net]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Does the NSA follow Milton-Bradley? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't need to! I earn Canadian Tire money with every purchase I make on my MasterCard!
Re:Nice Warrent (Score:5, Insightful)
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.")
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Nice Warrent (Score:5, Insightful)
*Do you enjoy terrorism?*
This IS terrorism.
Re: (Score:2)
You can shove your whole "bcus terrorism" right up your ass. Of all the bullshit cudgels, it's the most exploited. Worst infocalypse horseman.
Go buy a tiger rock.
Re: (Score:2)
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).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
There are applications that can 'Roget' written material. Google 'sinister buttocks'.
Re: Anyone who believes this is a cow. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A 50-dimensional cow. Okay, now I am worried
What if all cows have 50 dimensions but we can only perceive 3 of them?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
No he did not [blockchain.info]. 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?
Re: (Score:2)
Did they stop investigating?
Only if he supports Donald Trump.
Re: (Score:2)
Aaand? Who is it?
Al Gore. Al Gore invented bit coin.