The letter opens with an admission by the collective of police chiefs that they’re unable to do their jobs unless tech companies do half the work for them.
I suppose previous generations of law enforcement that were able to do their jobs before all this does not count.
To be fair: previous generations of police officers, back when most people used phones, have made extensive use of wiretapping (and current policemen still do, of course).
Forty years ago police had to have a basic level of intelligence and they investigated. Now some of them just rely on arm-twisting and plea bargain threats to find any patsy they can to stuff in a cell. They can have no crime, no complaint, no witness, no evidence, and still arrest you, and the D.A. will offer you a plea deal for something that didn't even happen. Your public pretender defense lawyer will tell you to take the deal. Don't laugh... it can happen to anyone.
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.
