Thread by @Dry_Observer

Hmm. *How* easy is it to track #cryptocurrencies?

By definition, a permanent, online, irremovable record of each exchange.

Aka, the #blockchain.

@Bambenek literally set up an automatic tracker of neo-Nazi #bitcoin transactions. @NeonaziWallets.
twitter.com/NeonaziWallets

I go into this rather extensively. In part because of just how *much* has surfaced recently on how vulnerable it is.

For criminals at least.

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If your wallet public/private key is out there, people can literally Google it.

But notice just how *many* huge cryptocurrency law-enforcement takedowns have been in the news recently.

Backpage gets taken down for child trafficking & money laundering $1/2 billion... in bitcoin?

All those tens of thousands of accounts the IRS seized from Coinbase? The BTC-e shutdown?

But what's so deadly is this is all happening in the context of the world's largest #FinCEN/counterintelligence/law-enforcement investigation in history.

One starting with huge reputed money launderers.

And with everyone from criminals to Russian intel running bribes & money laundering through #cryptocurrency.

If #FinCEN investigates financial crimes, you cooperate with them or cease to be a bank.

Because no bank in the world can function if US banks won't countersign them.

Cryptocurrencies, like a number of other would-be weapons - #botnets, evolutionary algorithms used in psychological operations, etc - creates a vast web of admissible information which, combined w/#FinCEN's resources, forms a global map of subversion & crime.

& while there are exponentially more powerful options for tracking & analyzing this data, one thing I wrote when telling the @FBI about the #cryptocurrency flaw in mid-September, 2017, was how to radically augment their supercomputing power to this end w/conventional means.

But to close: Look at each major criminal nexus shut down in the last several months.

Cambridge Analytica, Cohen's records, even things like Backpage or the anonymity of large accounts running through operations like Coinbase.

What do they have in common?
cc: @ericgarland

If you wanted overwhelming, devastating, admissible evidence on one or more elements of the larger conspiracy or simply global organized crime, these are the places you would go to.

The "taint team" has cleared over a *million* documents for prosecutors' use from Cohen alone.

When you superimpose each new dataset of evidence on the global map, you can see even more each time.

Some of these things are terrifying.

Targeting 50 to 200 to 300-million+ Americans w/psychological operations?

The most *benign* interpretation is they were knowingly targeting millions of people who could be hurt far more than others.

People suffering from dementia, brain injury, PTSD, paranoia, phobias, suicidal, etc.

The less benign & more probable interpretation?

The likelihood they knew who many of these people were, whether from direct access to seized medical records or by induction in their "psychographic profiles."

The likelihood they knowingly used that information to "enhance" their impact.

Evolutionary algorithms are easy to apply, even if you're inept.

Try a bunch of different configurations, see what works best.

Keep those, toss the rest.

Except when you're targeting people's darkest fears & hatreds, the game gets very dark indeed.

But on one end, say, Cambridge Analytica, you have the data & practically the whole *crime,* frozen in amber.

Everywhere else on the Internet you have data trails & keywords/phrases endlessly repeated in sequences it becomes trivially easy to unravel.

The logfiles alone are there for a year. But the nature of these interventions means you leave vast data trails *everywhere.*

And if a mere civilian saw this, imagine what the .@FBI, .@NSAGov, .@DHSgov, .@GCHQ have seen.

Imagine what they know.