Here’s a chance for the people to use their collective voice to speak out against offenders of human rights when they try to get involved in our cryptocurrency industry. We need to see a groundswell of Coinbase account-holders all delete their accounts in protest. It can’t be tolerated that they hire Italian Security company Neutrino, who are actually the same members as Hacking Team who sold their surveillance ware to dictators and tyrants to oppress their citizens, like Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
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Twitter has been approaching viral with its calls for the #DeleteCoinbase campaign. Coinbase may be one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in America and probably the world, but they have crossed a moral line by association in their recent hiring of Nutrino - the company that develops online spy tech for law enforcement and financial institutions enabling them to monitor transactions on the blockchain. The open ledger setup of blockchain generally allows anyone with the tech to observe all and any movement of crypto from wallet to wallet.
Even Monero is apparently vulnerable to their tools. These are some of the world’s best hackers, and they have aided and abetted several tyrannical countries and so can be seen as mercenaries for hire, with no affiliation to any moral code. You don’t have to wave a national flag on the blockchain, but some degree of human rights standards should exist.
By hiring Nutrino, the international crypto exchange Coinbase has shown their willingness to employ mercenaries because their tech is good. The problem is that we may not be aware of Coinbase’s true intentions. With a powerful team like this they could start making clients very nervous as to their own privacy.
Who's to say Nutrino won’t set up a spy channel on the millions of Coinbase accounts operating?
And to deal with mercenaries is just wrong. Bitcoin is all for anarchy and sovereignty but there is still a fine line between a freedom-fighter and a pirate.
Hacking Team have achieved some notoriety already when they found out how the North Korean WannaCry ransomeware hackers got away. It turns out they changed their bitcoin at Shapeshift into Monero. And Coinbase is admittedly aware of their new team’s history. It’s just that Blockchain forensic analysis is a much sought after industry presently.
Marco Valleri, (aka NaGa), and Alberto Ornaghi, (aka ALoR) are Neutrino’s chief research officer and chief technology officer. They are developers of the world’s best spyware for intercepting traffic, capturing passwords and eavesdropping. Can you imagine that kind of tech monitoring all the millions of Coinbase accounts? That’s TMI for one company. Any kind of rogue behaviour is possible behind the scenes. This is asking the wolves to tend the sheep. Maybe it’s a case of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Being bedfellows with pro-government mercenary hackers is a bit too close you might say.
“Increasingly, third-party blockchain analysis companies are requesting customer data from cryptocurrency companies that they serve. It was important for Coinbase to bring this function in-house to fully control and protect our customers' data and Neutrino’s technology was the best we encountered in the space to achieve this goal,”
- Coinbase spokesperson via email.
Hacking Team were dealers in spyware originally, which is not illegal but they sell to governments who use it illegally to thwart human rights. Morocco, for example, used their software to spy on citizen journalists, like you and me. Eventually the website had to shut down because reporters were scared of being targets of government surveilance. Such spyware can spy on computers and cell phones. Freedom of speech and whistleblowing could be stifled as a result, and free speech may be forgotten as a fundamentall human right.
They were also hired by the Milan police to develop a Windows driver that could monitor Skype calls and today their spyware is apparently used on six continents, according to their website. And Saudi Arabia recently murdered and dismembered a prominent outspoken journalist critical of their monarchy. These are the countries Nutrino has worked for.
As a result people are callinig for a mass boycott of Coinbase via a mass account closure. Some account holders were struggling to close their’s due to the dusting of small coins in their wallets, which need to be empty when you close your account. However, the dust was too small to send to an external wallet. To counter this members have formed a #DeleteCoinbaseTrustChain, much like the #LnTrustChain.
They are each sending their dust to another member of Coinbase who is adding their own dust and sending it on yet again, and so on.
“I hope that this message makes Coinbase understand that a press release won't fix this. They need to disassociate themselves from Hacking Team if they have any hope of earning people's trust again. I don't know if this can happen, so the alternative is that people at least know about it and get to decide for themselves.”
– independent developer Udi Wertheimer – founder of the #DeleteCoinbaseTrustChain
Has a line been crossed?
Would you shut down your Coinbase account along with the other protesters?
Will it even help?
Where do you stand on the issue of hiring mercenary hackers?
Leave your comments below.