Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg

she and the other researchers on the team had explicitly suggested in their paper that a law enforcement agency with subpoena authorities could easily identify criminal activity on the blockchain. But she was turned off by the aggressive tone of the agents in the room: They began describing the anonymity software Tor simplistically, as a haven of crime and abuse that prevented them from catching bad actors. Meiklejohn saw Tor as an essential privacy tool. She knew, for instance, that it was used by millions of people around the world, often living under repressive regimes, to attain a modicum of free and unsurveilled access to the internet. She was personally friendly with Tor’s creators and developers, whom she’d met at cryptography conferences, and she’d found them to be likable, principled people. She left the meeting deeply disillusioned with any notion of cooperating with federal law enforcement.