A trove of documents handed over to an investigative news agency by whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed that keeping track of bitcoin transactions and users was “#1 priority” for the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The documents are of the same bunch which Snowden exposed long back that led Edward Snowden to attain worldwide popularity. As per the, heavily redacted documents published by The Intercept, the NSA used a special software to target bitcoin users.
A per a memo, in order to track bitcoin users the NSA not just followed the public ledger (called blockchain) which stores all the information about the transaction except the real identities, it also collected some bitcoin users’ password information, internet activity, and a type of unique device identification number known as a MAC address.
The documents talk about a data source which provides the agency with ‘MAC addresses, password hash history, provider users and user sessions’. The agency sought more information and user validation from its source.
With the kind of information which the NSA accessed and catalogued like “billing information and Internet Protocol addresses”, it would have been a child’s play to identify a user of bitcoin. Thus, failing the premise which makes bitcoin attractive — anonymity.
The NSA program which catered to the tracking of the Bitcoin network was codenamed OAKSTAR a collection of covert corporate partnerships enabling the agency to monitor communications. They enabled the agency to siphon off internet traffic from the optic fibre cable network.
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