A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
wired.com
wired.com
Read the atavist piece.
Happens every time Hollywood makes a movie about any topic that would be better served by a documentary. It's never not infuriating.
As if documentaries were accurate.
I wish there was a genre of movies that take it as core principle to not abuse artistic license in service of making the plot flow.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=atavist.com%20points%3E30%20ma...
Indictment: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/file/632661/download
Relevant statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/956
Update: IMHO this research is the most comprehensive one which I saw regarding TrueCrypt authorship
In short, Le Roux was the original author (under the name E4M) was later hired by Hafner to write a commercial disc encryption system together with Hollingworth who authored ScramDisc. Later Le Roux released E4M under its new name TrueCrypt, and the commercial team (with Tesarik as its maintainer) sued him.
From what I can see in Wikipedia article, there is nothing about David Tesařík's legal dispute with Le Roux, actually it says that Le Roux had a dispute with SecurStar (a company which wanted to develop commercial disc encryption system).
Team member David Tesařík stated that Le Roux informed the team that there was a legal dispute between himself and SecurStar, and that he had received legal advice not to comment on the case. Because of this, he was unable to confirm or deny the legitimacy of TrueCrypt, keeping its development in limbo.[13][14] A new version was released in June,[15] but with a different digital signature and the developers now being referred to as "the TrueCrypt Foundation". The project received funding, the source of which is equally unclear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux
Altogether, it is still unclear how much Le Roux participated in TrueCrypt development (except E4M legacy), but it is clear that David Tesařík was one of the main developers of TrueCrypt
"Like a handful of random jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without an understanding of the larger picture."
He keeps going on about how unrelated these events are, and how mysterious it is they are happening all over the world - well if you don't know whats going on of course you will not know that two things are related?!
This made me laugh so hard. You're completely right, it's like someone setting up a joke by saying "THIS IS HILARIOUS YOU'RE GONNA LOVE IT" why don't you just get on with it then
Yah, sadly most of the stuff coming out of Wired the last couple years has been pretty low quality... this is typical. It was painful to read.
The whole thing sounds like it was written by a 15 year old.
I think I read somewhere once, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." which seems to ring true with these artful descriptions of mechanical things.
Maybe because we don't understand it enough quite yet! I'm sure gravity was hard to explain when it was first being talked about.
"Quantum mechanics pop up because the stuff we're made of isn't very small balls. It's really a manifestation of waves. How can something that's made of waves behave like particles? Let me show you:
[proceeds to pull out a length of cable, tying one end of it to some structure]
[proceeds to wave the other end, creating a wave on the cable, pointing out how the peaks move forward]
[proceeds to wave faster, creating a standing wave, pointing out the nodes]
Roughly like this. You can think of the moving peak, or the standing node, as particles - stationary or in motion. They're not really there, but you can point to them and name them. Now all the weird stuff that quantum mechanics is about - quantum tunneling, double slit experiments, etc. - appear when you stop looking at particles, and start doing the math on the underlying waves."
"Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias. Explosives. Kidnapping."
One of the things in this list is not like the other.
Furthermore, there is no way a private jet full of gold would actually fly. It would be too heavy to succeed in taking off. Gold is extremely dense, almost as dense as lead. You could put gold in a private jet, but it wouldn't be "full of" gold; there'd have to be a substantial amount of unused space for the thing to fly.
For all practical purposes, it is true.
"The one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a one-time pre-shared key the same size as, or longer than, the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key (also referred to as a one-time pad). Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition."
- Kidnapping - It's the only action.
- Explosives - It's the only thing that is illegal to make.
- African Militias - It's the only one about using people.
- Unbreakable Encryption - It's the only thing that is used by regular people on a regular basis.
- Missile Guidance Systems - It's the only thing that's not unique.
- Private jets full of gold - It's the only thing most people would trade an arm and a leg for.
doesnt the US restrict import/export of encryption over a certain keylength as well?
Either way, "make", not "export". I'm almost certain it's illegal to export missile guidance systems under ITAR.
I think it's technically still a law that's on the books and the American federal government did try to claim PGP was "munitions" at one point in the 90's, but the feds were skirted by PGP being printed in a book which is protected by the 1st amendment.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
Missile guidance systems would probably be illegal to export, though. (You'd have to declare the gold.)
I see you get one joker in your game.
Around 2007, when I was in undergrad, I started getting really interested in cryptography. At the time TrueCrypt was a very popular project in crypto circles, and I spent a lot of time hanging out on the TC forums, soaking up as much information as I could.
As a journalism major, the extreme secrecy of crypto-geeks naturally piqued my curiosity. I started digging into who ran TrueCrypt and its forums. After a bit of googling and whois, I hit a brick wall in the form of LLCs in the Cayman Islands. I therefore did what anybody in my position would do: I just asked people on the TC forums what was going on.
Within minutes, a very popular poster whose handle was `plr` reached out to me, essentially saying "yeah... that is weird! What do you know?". I told him everything, which wasn't much, but he still seemed super interested. We exchanged messages for a few weeks and followed up on a few leads. After a while, plr stopped replying to me. I figured he got bored.
Years later (= 2016, I think), this came out: https://magazine.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side
tl;dr: I was internet friends with Paul Le Roux.
Seems obvious to me. He got sick of the open-plan office environment he had to suffer with at regular jobs as a coder, but as a crime boss he got his own private office. Plus, he probably didn't have to attend any more boring meetings.
This nailed it for me. By the description this was a combination of sophistication and ad-hoc, all conducted in what is indeed a parallel world (e.g. the confusion and corruption helps them where it would get in my way).
In a movie or novel everything lines up to make the storytelling crisper. Which ultimately makes it implausible. This was quite gripping.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Acid-Alex-Al-Lovejoy/dp/1439249407
What is unbreakable encryption doing in that list?