193
European Law Enforcement Officials Declare Encryption Must Be Broken To Ensure Public Safety
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
193 points (98.5% liked)
Privacy
32051 readers
1877 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tor is funded by the CIA, which means assets use it to get info or send info.
It's going nowhere.
Same thing with Bitcoin. It's not going anywhere. In fact thats the reason why the CIA can trace every Bitcoin transaction and identify the owners, which was thought no one could do, but what do you know, when you wire up 3000 ps4s into a giant supercomputer for 1/50th the cost apparently the budget opens up some and now they must have a dedicated supercomputer just for this. Those chucklefucks who blackmailed the pipeline in the SE, that energy company paid up in Bitcoin, within 24 hours the NSA/CIA had the Bitcoin back and perps arrested.
Make your trades in favors, that's all I'm saying.
You've got a bit of misunderstanding of how bitcoin works, and they definitely aren't using the juryrigged supercomputer for unmasking. Most likely human analysts and investigators with some minor algorithmic help for analyzing tumbled transactions on the chain.
Bitcoin is inherently traceable. The entire concept of the blockchain originally was to have a distributed ledger of all transactions available and verifiable by anyone, so the banks couldn't go "no that transaction never happened".
The anonimity of being able to instantly and freely create wallets with little to no identifying info attached was a side purpose, but not a true purpose. Your wallet is effectively just a username they'd have to find a way to connect to your real identity.
All bitcoin transactions are auditable by anyone.
So most criminals use tumblers, scattering a transaction into irregular pieces that move across a shit ton of wallets before slowly making their way to the actual destination wallet.
But even those are traceable, just difficult. Over time and through seizing black market servers, intelligence agencies can build maps of what wallets match up to what. Sellers leaving donate links in forum signatures, finding the tumbler accounts from a seized market, etc. Then by using external info like knowledge of the payout amount and how many wallets its going to end up in, they can analyze the block chain ledger and connect the dots.
TL;DR- Bitcoin has always been psuedonymous, not actually anonymous, and is more easily traceable than other options by fucking design. You are only as anonymous as the distance between your real identity and your wallet address. Practice proper OpSec for shady business.