The Mastermind, Episode 7: The Next Big Deal(mastermind.atavist.com) |
The Mastermind, Episode 7: The Next Big Deal(mastermind.atavist.com) |
To me the picture that is being painted is that Truecrypt was a project funded by criminals and maintained by people associated with organised crime.
Yet we still don't know what happened in 2014 that ended the project and the circumstances in how they 'gassed' their canary. Was it something to do with Le Roux's informing? Was it connected to the Snowden revelations?
It should've been mentioned in the beginning with his E4M work and then later in the follow-up question. That's it unless the author has more evidence with a solid or highly-probable tie-in to Truecrypt.
"I asked him what he meant, and Hafner told me that in the middle of the development work for DriveCrypt, he discovered that Le Roux was still working on E4M and had incorporated some of his work for SecurStar into his personal project. (...) In 2004, a group of anonymous developers did exactly what Hafner had feared: They released a new and powerful, free file-encryption program, called TrueCrypt, built on the code for E4M. “TrueCrypt is based on (and might be considered a sequel to)” E4M, a release announcement stated."
In: https://mastermind.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side
Also, the sting operation on Hunter's crew is a classic example of entrapment. Lured by big money, and egged on by LeRoux, it looks like Hunter's crew was lead into this, and they went along with whatever LeRoux told them to do. It would be relatively easy to say these guys would not have ever done any of what their accused of without LeRoux's involvement.
Again, this seems completely backwards to me.
Keep in mind, a lot of the crimes we've read about in this story are himself, a non-US citizen not in the US, doing things with/to non-US citizens not in the US. I imagine the prosecutors are fare less concerned about a South African living in The Philippines having a Filipino killed than they are with the fact that the killers were brought in from the US.
He's better off just leaving it off except the E4M-Truecrypt beginning and the question in court. It wasn't relevant to anything else unless I'm overlooking something. THe rest of the article is about pharmacies, call centers, hitmen, and so on. Nothing to do with TrueCrypt.
I don't feel the author is milking any of it to make the article more interesting.
https://mastermind.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side
The Hacker News comments and title showed many were already thinking a grand reveal was forthcoming of how Le Roux was financing Truecrypt all this time. It keeps getting mentioned even though it has nothing to do with Le Roux's life or story post E4M. Here's an alternative that's more accurate for the significance of Truecrypt to the story:
The original paragraphs on E4M and Truecrypt spinoff stay. After sentence "...message boards for good," the author stops talking about Truecrypt entirely. He should mention PhoneCrypt offer in isolation as it was significant. Later on, might mention for the trial question the context that some people suspected Le Roux might have funded or worked on Truecrypt all this time. Then show he was asked, said yes for E4M, and no for Truecrypt. Then move on.
I mean, there's not much reason to talk so much about Truecrypt, Snowden's view of it, and so on if there's nothing tying Le Roux to Truecrypt. That someone built on his work and it turned into a solid tool would be enough to say. The only good thing I could think of is that the author is trying to encourage people to use Truecrypt and such strong, OSS encrypt by embedding it into his piece. That would be annoying but justifiable in a greater good sense. Still not relevant to Paul Le Roux, though, past fork of E4M without evidence he was behind Truecrypt.
Truecrypt is very well known amongst tech literate people and Snowden at least is well known amongst the rest. By repeatedly driving home the fact that Le Roux was responsible for the foundation of this software, it makes him seem more impressive in the readers mind.
So, saying he made E4M that others' turned into Truecrypt... then dropping Truecrypt... is more honest if we're talking his accomplishments. Not Truecrypt developers' accomplishments.