quote from the linked article:
CAB has not disclosed the technical method behind the wallet access, standard practice during an active case. Officials credit Europol with hosting meetings in The Hague and supplying the decryption resources that made the breach possible.
Made me wonder which those resources might be???
Computing power or funds for the computing power and technical expertise, it depends on how the keys were stored. If they are stored correctly, no decryption efforts can unlock them in this lifetime not even if you throw at it all the computing power of the planet.
Does not apply in a real democracy and legally sound country though, this is a legal process not criminals beating up other criminals. Impossible with real encryption.
Anyway you can set it up in a way that you can't unlock it either under these conditions, so they may beat you to death but they will not be able to access it. Have you heard of something called multi signature or shamir's sharding?
We can debate the term 'real' democracy and 'legally sound' but I know for a fact that there was a torture house run in downtown Bucharest for at least 3 years in collusion with the USA (and the CIA). The reason for this was the torture house in Poland was closed in 2003 after only about 9 months of operation. It all came to light after the fact but these are just three 'real' Western democracies. Lithuania was also involved in this providing "overflow" space for prisoners (who were also tortured). Great Britain was a little smarter about it but MI5 and MI6 provided interrogation intelligence and targeting data for the CIA and farmed out their torture houses to foreign dictators... yeah those 'real' Western democracies used Ghaddafi for years before royally fucking him over. What are we at 5 now?
That being said, I doubt any government could procure a wrench for $5 so I'm sure it cost them millions but I'm equally sure it could easily have been a wrench - at least symbolically. FFS we're talking about Ireland here and they aren't exactly saints... aside from Patrick and I'm not 100% certain about him. Maybe they're going all stabby on some of his relatives until he "remembers" what was on those "paper wallets" he printed out and stored in a "fishing-rod case". Why would anyone assume a criminal wouldn't make up such a story? He wouldn't have trusted anyone with information about the fishing-rod case, so how could it have been corroborated? Cracking 500 coins every 50 or so days 5 years after his release seems a little "fishy" to me... this isn't bitcoin mining. I think the story was concocted between Collins and the state and made part of the public record so that once he was released, he wouldn't be hunted down by non-state bad guys with $5 wrenches or worse and as part of his plea-deal (for which he had a lot of leverage) they allowed him to release the wallets to the state 500 coins at a time once his time was served after a certain period of time elapsed. Maybe he obtained protection and immunity from future "unexplained", "fishy" wealth... who knows? Only he and a select few wards of 'real' democracy I suspect.
I'm still butt-hurt over the 'death' of Gerald
Cottan Cotten though so my thoughts may be biased. I just have a hard time believing that someone who spent years creating fake accounts, lying to users and shifting stolen funds into private accounts dies of complications of Chron's disease 48 hours after arriving in India and less than 2 weeks after signing a new will giving everything to his girlfriend and his dogs, comes back to Canada as ashes in an urn with his last name misspelled on the death certificate. One would have to completely shut off their brain to accept this story and I feel similarly about the "fishing-rod case".
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