Longer version of this story here (2016): https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind -- fascinating story and these articles captivated me. Have had them bookmarked for ages :-)
I'm reading through these. And I'm wondering, the two assassins that killed the real estate agents in the Philippines, how come they were judged in US and not in the Philippines?
It's a U.S. federal crime to conspire to kill a person in a foreign country. I guess they could have been extradited but since they were facing life (and in the federal system there's no parole), the Philippines didn't insist on trying the hitmen themselves.
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.
Thanks, I was not aware that Wikipedia mentions David Tesařík.
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.
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
Am I the only one who found this to be very poorly written? Its like the author keeps telling me how cool and mysterious this story is, why doesn't he just tell me the story and I'll decide if its mysterious or not?
"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?!
> 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
Don't forget a full page about that Filipino garbageman, that ends in him basically knowing nothing, seeing nothing and being completely irrelevant character to the whole story...
Oh man that part was ridiculous. Its like, you could spend a whole page talking about some guy taking a dog for a walk and talking about how he bagged up the dog poo and put it in a bin. Then say "little did I know this dog poo was actually related to the murder of a journalist in Australia... The dog belonged to an infamous hitman who hired a dog sitter to look after his dog while he was in Australia on a job".
The whole thing sounds like it was written by a 15 year old.
I actually enjoyed it; although usually I'd agree. It was like reading a fictional book where the author's purpose is to entertain rather than to inform. I saw it as a story following a reporter around and the allusions to the mysterious nature of everything were like how a movie would play a mysterious sounding background track while the main character followed a new lead.
Huge pet peeve of mine is when writers use analogies to describe technology or science instead of writing what actually happened.
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.
I think that’s probably a rephrasing of Einstein’s alleged quote, ”It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.” That quote as relayed by de Brolgie seems to have mutated quite a bit, changing the meaning to something more general. Of course it’s also worth pointing out that Quantum Mechanics sort of throw a superposition of wrenches into that puppy.
"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."
> Uh, I don't think so? Pretty sure they either gave up, decided it was unconstitutional, or both.
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]
Actually, a private jet full of gold would be definitely illegal to attempt to fly: it would weigh more than the allowable take-off weight.
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.
True. But I don't think it's a like for like comparison. It's more "these are the kinds of things that sound like they'd be part of an exciting spy story". I mean, if you were to add "beautiful tuxedos" or "high stakes card games" it could be the dust jacket for a James Bond novel.
Unbreakable encryption is a thing though. It's called one-time-pad and it doesn't require any sort of fancy algorithms. As long as your random key is the same length as the message, the decryption is literally unbreakable(because the contents could decode into literally any other message of the same length).
As basically a complete novice in encryption, it was interesting to learn about the unbreakable "one-time pad" method.
"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."
Haha I was sure this was going to be about PLR. Alright, story time.
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.
Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly. Most of his dealings were through employees. The pharmacy business gave him a lot of money within its first 4 years (before the FDA caught wind) so he had a lot of game fuel to play with. And his criminal dealings seemed to occupy him every waking hour, just like a game addiction. Maybe that's why he surrendered so easily, it's just another part of the game, and it interests him.
>Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly.
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.
If you read the full story, you'll see that many investigators were perplexed by his motivations and the sheer scale of his enterprises. His underlings described their duties as being like something from a James Bond movie. It was all so much larger than life, and erratic. So why did he do it? Not for money, which he didn't seem to care about. If you think about it as playing for rewards as in a video game, it makes a lot more sense. https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind
> ...this series of events ... each seemed like a kind of message from an adjacent reality that few of us experience directly.
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.
> Pure methamphetamine manufactured in North Korea. Yachts built to outrun coast guards. Police protection and judges’ favor. Crates of military-grade weapons. Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias. Explosives. Kidnapping. Torture. Murder.
What is unbreakable encryption doing in that list?
