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CIA Confirms It Is Working On Cryptocurrency Projects: Report

The CIA confirms it is working on cryptocurrency projects, putting an end to the rumors as Director William Burns noted so let’s find out more in today’s crypto news. CIA Director William Burns was asked about the CIA’s involvement in trying to fight against ransomware attacks. He said that his predecessor started a few different […]

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CIA Confirms It Is Working On Cryptocurrency Projects: Report

The CIA confirms it is working on cryptocurrency projects, putting an end to the rumors as Director William Burns noted so let’s find out more in today’s crypto news.
CIA Director William Burns was asked about the CIA’s involvement in trying to fight against ransomware attacks. He said that his predecessor started a few different projects that are based on crypto. Of course, on social media hundreds of conspiracy theories emerged with some claiming that Tom Hanks is a pedophilia kingpin, the CIA inventing Bitcoin, and much more. It turns out however that the CIA is involved in crypto after all but it did not invent bitcoin.
William Burns, CIA Director
During the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit, CIA Director William Burns admitted that the agency has a few projects up its sleeve to keep track of crypto. Responding to a question about whether the agency is able to constrain ransomware attacks from abroad, Burns said that his predecessor set in motion plenty of projects focused on crypto and trying to look at second and third-order consequences while helping the colleagues in other parts of the US government to provide intelligence on what they are seeing.
Ransomware is a type of malicious software designed to shut down the computers or the networks until the payment is received, often in Monero as a privacy coin or Bitcoin. Attacks this year shut down the major oil pipeline Colonial Pipeline, mat processing giant JBS and IT business infrastructure. The Biden administration labeled ransomware a “priority” and said it will use crypto tracking to address it. Burns didn’t say much about who was the predecessor he was referring to, but the assumptions bet on David Cohen. Cohen was picked as an acting director from January to March by President Biden as he previously worked at the Treasury Department who oversaw the Office of Foreign Asses Control and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Will Joe Biden bring more clarity to the crypto world?
Michael Morell served as an acting director of the agency on two separate occasions under President Obama and acknowledged the value of BTC to the intelligence community and called Blockchain technology a “boon for surveillance” in a report. The report also defended the crypto against claims that its best use case is for criminal enterprise but the public nature of tranactions makes it an underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity.
Burns was vague about what the CIA is actually doing but did say it seems that the CIA confirms to be working on cryptocurrency projects:
“One of the ways of getting at ransomware attacks and deterring them is to be able to get at the financial networks that so many of those criminal networks use and that gets right at the issue of digital currencies as well.”

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