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I tried that exercise after reading the affidavit, and determined they were using Monero (XMR) which makes this task much more difficult if not impossible.


It was funny how they redacted "Foreign Government-1" everywhere, but left "SVR Russian's External Security Service" in the footnotes.


You can find some pretty interesting improperly redacted documents all over PACER. Usually it's defense attorneys who don't realize that blacking out text in Adobe doesn't remove it rather than the government though.

Here's one https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.42... for the sentencing submission for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux which reveals some pretty personal and operational information.

There's one about a Colombian paramilitary leader/drug trafficker turned informant which improperly redacted all the people he informed on: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.184.... This is from like a decade ago but goes to show how this kind of thing can literally put people's lives at risk.


The book about Le Roux is pretty good. Quite riviting reading.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41181600-the-mastermind


I read this a few months ago and it was such an interesting read. Can recommend!


That's not a redaction (these kind of pseudonyms in court filings are different from redactions and are often more about avoiding formal direct statements associating an entity than about secrecy, and are often easily penetrated—e.g., "Individual-1" in the Michael Cohen case), and while one might infer from the interaction of the subject with an SVR TOR server that Foreign Country-1 is likely to be Russia, there is nothing in the affidavit that asserts that the TOR server in question was operated by Foreign Country-1.


Yeah, it was fairly apparent earlier in the complaint what country they're talking about, but that was funny to find. I'm sure it's not the first time footnotes accidently leak info that is supposed to be redacted!


I too read the affidavit looking for opsec tips to commit my own mastermind crime.


Good to see they know what they're doing.


And not just crypto -- turns out they're quite skilled at robbing banks as well: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve...


The affidavit indicates that the target selected the cryptocurrency - presumably, he thought he knew what he was doing, but the amounts and times were still cross-correlated after the fact.




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