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Bitcoin Government United States

The CIA Is Deep Into Cryptocurrency, Director Reveals (vice.com) 39

Posted by BeauHD from the hardly-surprising dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: There's a long-running conspiracy theory among a small number of cryptocurrency enthusiasts that Bitcoin's anonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, was actually the CIA or another three-lettered agency. That fringe theory is having a fresh day in the sun after CIA Director William Burns said on Monday that the intelligence agency has "a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency" on the go. Burns made his comments at the tail end of a talk at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Summit. After discussing everything from the possible Russian invasion of Ukraine to the challenges of space, someone in the audience asked if the agency is on top of cryptocurrencies, which are currently at the center of the ransomware epidemic that U.S. officials are attempting to get a handle on and stamp out.

Here's what Burns said: "'This is something I inherited. My predecessor had started this, but had set in motion a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency and trying to look at second- and third-order consequences as well and helping with our colleagues in other parts of the U.S. government to provide solid intelligence on what we're seeing as well.'" Cryptocurrencies "could have enormous impact on everything from ransomware attacks, as you mentioned, because one of the ways of getting at ransomware attacks and deterring them is to be able to get at the financial networks that so many of those criminal networks use and that gets right at the issue of digital currencies as well," Burns said.
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The CIA Is Deep Into Cryptocurrency, Director Reveals More

The CIA Is Deep Into Cryptocurrency, Director Reveals

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  • The whole thing is a CIA op, isn't it (Score:4, Funny)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:36PM (#62056551)

    The whole thing is a CIA op, isn't it? All the goat NFTs are just a way to fill their slush fund and then use that to fund mind control rays and whatever else they're doing nowadays.

    • It would be one way to keep track of dirty money if dictators and drug lords used it.

      • This would only be true if it were necessarily possible to trace a BTC address to a human, which obviously it is not. If it were, the dictators/drug lords/ransomware ops would not be using it.

        If the CIA created practically untraceable internet funny money as a way of moving dirty money around for their dirty deeds, that would be incredibly stupid considering 1: the entirely foreseeable collateral damage it's caused (allowing Kim Jong Un to apparently get his hands on at least hundreds of millions of dollars

        • That would not necessarily mean the CIA doesnt use it. Save the honeypot idea for DEA and ATF. If the CIA is willing to market heroin smuggled from afghan to us citizens to market black ops; why wouldnt they market in BTC if they got it early and/or behind some of the theft.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Potor ( 658520 )

          This would only be true if it were necessarily possible to trace a BTC address to a human, which obviously it is not. If it were, the dictators/drug lords/ransomware ops would not be using it.

          Just like criminals would never use a phone designed by the FBI?

          • If the CIA were playing some stupendously long honeypot game spanning over a decade so far, that would still only work if they've maintained a level of cryptography knowledge completely beyond the understanding of what's available to the public for nobody to have found the vulnerability so far.

            It's the same problem as arguing that UFOs which appear to be making a mockery of the laws of physics are experimental aircraft.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Sure. The CIA is very careful to never do anything that causes collateral damage.

          • This collateral damage directly harms US interests. In fact it's not so much collateral damage as it is blowback or self-inflicted harm. This isn't turning other countries the US can safely ignore (in the short term) into authoritarian hellholes to get cheap access to oil or keep the Soviets out, this is opening floodgates of cash directly into enemy coffers.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Yes. The CIA is always very careful not to do anything that could possibly be harmful to US interests.

              • They're completely indifferent to non-American humanity and they don't seem to think far ahead, but they're smart enough to avoid the sort of shotgun-blast-to-the-foot, instant-regret scenario that inventing cryptocurrencies would represent.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                  Hm? I don't think there's any instant regret. Any real negative effects still haven't been felt, or perhaps are just beginning to be, depending on what you consider "real." I doubt the CIA thinks of ransomware as a serious problem, for example. They might even regard it as a feature.

                  And this is *years* after cryptocurrency was invented. It's not a "shotgun blast to the foot" any more than, say, training mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Dodgy exchanges, coin tumblers, exchanging a traceable cryptocurrency into an untraceable one...there are lots of options. As for dictators personally using cryptocurrency, I doubt any of them remember wallet credentials or buy anything directly with bitcoin, but I'm sure their finance people take care of all that for them. The North Korean, Iranian and Cuban regimes' activities with cryptocurrency are pretty well-established at this point.

      • The CIA was accused of creating [wikipedia.org] and trafficking crack cocaine, but the federal government investigated itself and said nothing happened.

      • Crypto is now the major way criminal organizations from mobs to terrorists to states like North Korea finance themselves. So it is, obviously, the one area that CIA should focus on to try to track money. They used to track the money through banks, now they have to also track crypto exchanges.

        Does it mean they created it, or even managed to get inside it in a significant enough way to compromise it? Not sure about that. If that was the case, it'd be tempting for them to find criminals and dismantle terroris

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      No, PickleCoin has *nothing* to do with the CIA. It is a real business, err, real coin.

      Now stop asking questions before we have to, you know . . .

  • This is the primary means of paying "opposition" where needed. You can see that the money has been received, but the origin is difficult to trace even for a nation state. Difficult, but not impossible and all of them are trying to do it.

    So if the CIA is not into research on how to trace and how to thwart tracing for its own payments it is clearly not doing its job.

  • Blatantly a good idea for CIA to do this (Score:3)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @05:17PM (#62056681) Homepage

    1) It can make them cash, off books. They love this.
    2) It lets them pay criminals. They love this.
    3) If they run enough miners, they can probably track people that think crypto is not trackable. They love this.
    4) They need to know enough to counter other's uses of crypto. They need that.

    So basically crypto is right in their bailiwick, as well as most other intelligence agencies.

  • CIA Backed rugpull (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @05:40PM (#62056753)

    Think about it... with all the talk of rug pulls and cryptos being used for money laundering, why not lure criminals into the crypto space through the promises of cleaning your money through alt-coins only to get suckered into rug pulls that's setup by the CIA. Sure, there will be collateral damage, but in a way, collateral damages have always been considered as acceptable losses in the eyes of these operatives because this is all done for the sake of the country at large.

    "People will lose their lives, savings will be wiped, and people will get hurt. At the end of the, however, I do this because I believe in my country and I am a patriot."

    Pretty sure someone have uttered those phrases before, or something very close to it...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Does the CIA care about that kind of criminal though? I thought they were only interested in high level international stuff.

      I'd have thought anyone that the CIA was interested in wouldn't be dumb enough to use alt coins. Most likely they are just harvesting data and trying to analyse it to identify Iranian government accounts and stuff like that.

      • Sure they care about that stuff. Being able to blackmail people because of their illegal activity is a huge source of leverage in the intelligence game. The CIA is not going to be busting crypto-criminals, they will want to know who the crypto-crims are dealing with, whose money is being laundered, what is being bought on the black market and so forth. They will just observe and collect dossiers for later use.

    • CIA doesnt bust criminals, in a sense they *are* criminals, like all the outward intelligence services. When you are a spy you are acting illegally in the host country.

  • When the first thing out of the guy's mouth is "This is something I inherited," to blame his predecessor, you know that office politics have ruined the CIA. Not that they were ever competent to begin with.

    • Not necessity; it can also be said to show that it goes back a long time. That information can be strategically useful.

  • Step 1: Use govt employed hackers to create Crypto
    Step 2: Convince criminals its not trackable
    Step 3: You actually can track it
    Step 4: Turn those criminals into assets.
    Step 5:
    Step 6: Profit
  • Republicans use the office of the CIA as stepping stone to higher political ambitions, to the detriment of the institution and country. It was Pompeo, a DT appointee, who bypassed the Pentagon and ordered drone strikes all over the Middle East including Afghanistan, and Africa and all that did was turned the local people against the nation building that the US spent trillions on in these countries. It was also Pompeo who bypassed the state department and went to meet Kim Jong Un and set up the ill-fated a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tekram ( 8023518 )
      The CIA as with any US institutions, is only as good as the people who are appointed there or served there as career public servents.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Meanwhile the State Department has no meaningful accomplishments going on 60 years now. Everything they touch turns to shit - even the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia if you believe anything anyone at state says is a human rights hell hole and still a threat..

      Its truly impressive incompetence when you consider they had most money and the most capable military force in the world available to them thru most of that time span.

      Yes the CIA is full of people who are clearly of very marginal integrity, but having

  • "I bought this magical math-money because I thought it was founded on concrete economics and personal integrity! Now I hear the CIA is involved!?"
  • Invent and promote TOR to hide communications.... Invent and promote BITCOIN to hide financial transactions.... Invent and promote ? to hide ?
  • Their "admission" maybe true or it be a lie designed to undermine crypto currency's impact. Either way, whether it is true or not, has nothing to do with whether or not that would make that claim.

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