Bitcoin FBI Report April 2012

[Matthew N. Wright]

Your skepticism is a little too strident however.

+1 He sounds very afraid, I wonder why?

Because he wanted a signed affidavit from the leaker to make himself feel important because he would protect him under the freedom of the press laws for unpublished magazines on the UK...

Or he's just mad because being a magazine(?) editor he should be the one to score the scoops, yet he has none to show on his magazine(?) even after 5 months of publishing delay

Breaking news! Guy on forum claims unmarked PDF comes from FBI with no proof whatsoever!

I'll leave that kind of garbage to the tabloids.

[1714156719]

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[etotheipi]

One thing that sucks is that it is an image scrape.   Anyone really good with OCR?  I would be willing to put some coins towards a bounty to convert the doc into machine readable format (txt or otherwise).    It would be a tricky conversion (the low res blurred image doesn't help) so it may not be possible but maybe we got some OCR wizards.

I was already working on this when I saw you post this, because I started to try to read it and my eyeballs started bleeding.

Unfortunately, I think any OCR program is going to struggle hard with this blurry low-res text.  Here's the best my meager offering could come up with.  Is this any better?     Here's a sample of the first page:

You might try doing a round or two of deblurring/deconvolution on the image, first.  Richardson-Lucy is a great algorithm if you can give a reasonable estimate of the blur function (which may not be too bad just assuming very simple blurring).  Do 2-4 passes of Richardson-Lucy, it might sharpen it just the right amount.  (I speak as if you would be manually processing the image with custom algorithms... I'm sure photoshop/gimp has some canned algorithms for this).

Well, there's also "sharpening", but I've never been very impressed with the sharpening algorithms out there...

[matonis]

Although, I think this comment has lots of merit too:

Maybe it was an act of civil disobediance by a FBI analyst who also sees the value in Bitcoin?  Also don't count out a counter-insurgency type move.  The leak could be intentional by the FBI.  A way to point out to potential investors and businesses that Bitcoin is on the FBI radar to keep it marginalized.

They know that we know that they know that we know....

Yes.........but do they know what they don't know?

FYI, here's an actual FBI leaked document on 'Legal Aspects of Online Gaming Financial Transactions' (20 June 2011) that also cites the 'Cyber Criminals Exploitation of Real-Money Trading' (8 June 2011) mentioned in page 3 of OP's Scribd document.
http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/10/10400_FBI%20Cleveland%20.pdf

[Raoul Duke]

Hey Matthew, maybe you should learn with Matonis ^^ how the real press works...

I'll help him a bit and start with:
1st lesson: Don't just talk out of your ass, investigate.

[Steve]

FYI, here's an actual FBI leaked document on 'Legal Aspects of Online Gaming Financial Transactions' (20 June 2011) that also cites the 'Cyber Criminals Exploitation of Real-Money Trading' (8 June 2011) mentioned in page 3 of OP's Scribd document.
http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/10/10400_FBI%20Cleveland%20.pdf

What, if anything, does this say about the legitimacy of this Bitcoin document?  It's hard to imagine someone would go to such great effort to produce a fake that doesn't even have anything terribly controversial in it.  We certainly know the government agencies are well aware of Bitcoin and it's hard for me to imagine the FBI hasn't produced reports such as this.

[Matthew N. Wright]

Hey Matthew, maybe you should learn with Matonis ^^ how the real press works...

I'll help him a bit and start with:
1st lesson: Don't just talk out of your ass, investigate.

Firstly, that's not my role at the magazine. That'd be like telling you to make the beds where you work.

Secondly, Matonis is the bomb. If he wants to investigate into the true source of this PDF file, I encourage him to.

Thirdly, has anyone caught that full moon? It's been full and huge for over 3 days now.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

What a waste of 3 pages of forum threads.

We should be dissecting this report and going over it, not debating its legitimacy.

In fact, its extreme accuracy speaks for itself, I think its real.

I'll do that in the Legal subforum. 

[Matthew N. Wright]

What a waste of 3 pages of forum threads.

We should be dissecting this report and going over it, not debating its legitimacy.

In fact, its extreme accuracy speaks for itself, I think its real.

I'll do that in the Legal subforum.  

That begs to ask the question-- why would one dissect it if it's not legitimate?

[rjk]

What a waste of 3 pages of forum threads.

We should be dissecting this report and going over it, not debating its legitimacy.

In fact, its extreme accuracy speaks for itself, I think its real.

I'll do that in the Legal subforum.  

That begs to ask the question-- why would one dissect it if it's not legitimate?

Because it is?

Or are you about to admit that you created it, in a spergy fit of madness due to the full moon?

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

What a waste of 3 pages of forum threads.

We should be dissecting this report and going over it, not debating its legitimacy.

In fact, its extreme accuracy speaks for itself, I think its real.

I'll do that in the Legal subforum.  

That begs to ask the question-- why would one dissect it if it's not legitimate?

Honestly Matt, have you really read through it?

The report does not introduce any new laws, just clarifies old ones in more detail.

In fact, it is 100% on par with the clarifications I spent thousands of dollars on from lawyers.

Wether or not its legit or not, the material is accurate.

[finway]

Not very exciting, nothing new.

[jgarzik]

What a waste of 3 pages of forum threads.

We should be dissecting this report and going over it, not debating its legitimacy.

In fact, its extreme accuracy speaks for itself, I think its real.

I'll do that in the Legal subforum.  

That begs to ask the question-- why would one dissect it if it's not legitimate?

Honestly Matt, have you really read through it?

The report does not introduce any new laws, just clarifies old ones in more detail.

In fact, it is 100% on par with the clarifications I spent thousands of dollars on from lawyers.

Wether or not its legit or not, the material is accurate.

The material also matches my own legal research in large part.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

What a waste of 3 pages of forum threads.

We should be dissecting this report and going over it, not debating its legitimacy.

In fact, its extreme accuracy speaks for itself, I think its real.

I'll do that in the Legal subforum.  

That begs to ask the question-- why would one dissect it if it's not legitimate?

Honestly Matt, have you really read through it?

The report does not introduce any new laws, just clarifies old ones in more detail.

In fact, it is 100% on par with the clarifications I spent thousands of dollars on from lawyers.

Wether or not its legit or not, the material is accurate.

The material also matches my own legal research in large part.

+ 1

[kokojie]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/92797476/FBI-Bitcoin-Report-April-2012

Holy smokes!  Very interesting, what do you guys think?

rofl. It's on the internet so it must be true.

This is one of the ugliest/laziest trolls I've seen in a long time.

Really? a well written 20 page document is the laziest troll?

[kokojie]

You guys crack me up. You're already referencing it as "the FBI report". What a fail community. Excuse me while I go make another FBI report.

"Oops! it leaked! What do you guys think? Ignore the links to Bitcoin Magazine on the poster's status. I don't know how that got there"

Where's your "another FBI report"? I'd like to take a look.

[ArticMine]

The PDF of the report is available from this thread on another forum -- a straight download (click the link: Download in pdf format).
 - http://www.bitcointrading.com/forum/index.php?topic=525.0

+1 We need to be linking to a readable .pdf that does not require to "log in with Facebook". To qoute the report I would say with "High Confidence" that this report is a genuine leak not a fake.

[SgtSpike]

One thing that sucks is that it is an image scrape.   Anyone really good with OCR?  I would be willing to put some coins towards a bounty to convert the doc into machine readable format (txt or otherwise).    It would be a tricky conversion (the low res blurred image doesn't help) so it may not be possible but maybe we got some OCR wizards.

I'll retype it.... how much would the bounty be for?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Where's your "another FBI report"? I'd like to take a look.

It will be available in 5-6 months but only if 1000 people pre-order it now.  It's gonna be awesome.  20,000 pages, full color, so glossy it will fall right out of your hands, and in 1080P 3D.  Contact Matt is you want to purchase some ad space.

[JusticeForYou]

I personally don't think it is real, but it might be. I'll tell you why?

The very first page graphic, but that might have been added later by OP.

The information contained in the report would only be an awareness of Bitcoin to cc: parties and not provide any really useful information that anyone that uses a computer doesn't know. But then again, they are usually behind the 8-Ball.

And if real, they have missed swathing sections on how really hard it is to track. They also point out a bottle neck when converting to fiat currencies which is true if using an exchange but if not it would be really hard to tell even IF a conversion to fiat currency took place.

They didn't even mention that beyond a network P2P, that there could be exchange of Wallet.dat files that the network wouldn't even see.

But in the end, this is a 40 Million Dollar economy. Yes it is large but no where near what the 'BigBoys' would move.

Of course, the 'BigBoys' don't worry about the FBI because they have the power to sway government agencies or at least control senior executives in them. We're talking Billions not 40 Million. I've seen how big companies work and how the 'government' ignores it. I am for capitalism but for FAIR capitalism.

BTW: Any time the FBI using the term Money Laundering they should be saying: "We are to stupid to catch the people doing the crimes, so we will try to follow the money AFTER they have committed the crimes."  Basically they are Lazy and a foot on the ground is more expensive than a computer in a bank.


End Of Rant.

[Raoul Duke]

Where's your "another FBI report"? I'd like to take a look.

It will be available in 5-6 months but only if 1000 people pre-order it now.  It's gonna be awesome.  20,000 pages, full color, so glossy it will fall right out of your hands, and in 1080P 3D.  Contact Matt is you want to purchase some ad space.

Witnessed!

The very first page graphic, but that might have been added later by OP.

That's unlikely... I very much doubt that if it was the OPs work, as you suggest, he would've put the

(U) - Bitcoin logo from https://en.bitcoin.it

in there. Also the fact that the link shows in blue suggests that it was original linked text on the pdf