New Snowden documents reveal that the NSA has been tracking Bitcoin users since 2013. The documents show that that the NSA used methods to directly siphon internet traffic using a program code-named OAKSTAR, as well as a sham internet anonymizing service called MONKEYROCKET. ZeroHedge has a good summary of the happenings. The original story, along with the classified documents was published at The Intercept.
There is so much information here that I can't begin to wrap my head around all of it. However it certainly sounds like blockchain may not be anywhere near as secure as originally thought.
Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target Bitcoin users around the world - and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to "help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins," according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.
There is so much information here that I can't begin to wrap my head around all of it. However it certainly sounds like blockchain may not be anywhere near as secure as originally thought.
Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target Bitcoin users around the world - and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to "help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins," according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.