If this is true, someone broke into a PricewaterhouseCoopers office in Tennessee and stole records of Mitt Romney’s tax returns. And they are asking for a million bitcoins to either release the records or to destroy them. Apparently, they have already sent flash drives containing encrypted copies of the returns to both the local party offices. If Romney doesn’t come up with a million bucks before September 28th, they’ll tell people how to de-encrypt the flash drives. If someone other than Romney pays a million bucks to them, they will release the records earlier than September 28th.
I do not know if this is a hoax or not.
Oh fabulous. Just what we needed.
Actually, just what ROMNEY needed. Now the SOB will be transgressed upon poor sap. Sympathy will be pouring out of the asses of the Right and the KneeJerk Left.
I hope to hell its fake.
What DerFarm said. I hope this is a phony as the Whitey Tape.
Well, it’s a criminal act. My hope would be that the people are caught and prosecuted. On the other hand, I would not be shocked to see Romney’s tax returns leaked or hacked and then leaked. If you could ascertain who prepared and e-filed his taxes, it’s fairly uncomplicated for a good hacker to go get that. Probably a lot harder to get it from the IRS directly.
I think it’s bullshit because the hackers claim to have his “1040 tax returns.” A guy like Romney files a lot more than a 1040. The PDF of the one year we have includes a huge number of forms and schedules, and runs to 203 pages. Why would his accountants keep his 1040s in one place and his other forms and schedules elsewhere? And why would they be “copied”? I’m skeptical that his accountants woulds still retain paper copies in their main offices — that’s crazy. Wouldn’t they send the paper to an offsite storage facility, or just digitize it and shred it?
I’m not a tax expert, but don’t the 1040’s have the bottom line?
I went and reread their letter and it doesn’t really say whether the files were in paper form. All it says is that the files were copied onto a flash drive. That means that they either hacked the computer system or they took photos and uploaded them.
But Romney wouldn’t file his taxes in Tennessee, so if this has any credibility, they used the office to access the computer system.
That was my first thought. My second was to wonder if this is a dirty trick by either GOP operatives or sympathizers, because that’s the fairly predictable public response to this story. And not only is politics at this level a very dirty business, but the GOP track record over the past 12 years in particular suggests at least some of the folks in the fold are fully capable of engineering a stunt like this.
I’m not normally a paranoid conspiracist – quite the opposite – but this is a little too neat, and the people being “victimized” are professionals at both dirty tricks and finding ways to cast themselves as victims.
Ditto.
The fake TANG memo was probably pawned off by conservatives to kill the Bush National Guard story.
Same thing.
Sounds like a scam if they are begging bitcoins.
Why? I’m assuming bitcoins are harder to trace, which is why they want them in bitcoins. Further, this community uses bitcoin…
Might also be Breitbart-y.
Why would a PWC office in TN have them? Also, you do realize that there is a good chance that some Democratic Senators have already seen them, legally, right?
I didn’t realize that. How?
Here is how(sorry for the HuffPo link .. but it’s the best I can do quickly):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/harry-reid-romney-taxes_n_1821491.html
This explains why Mitt is on a boat far away from shore. Again he will be unable to answer any reporter questions.
This really sounds hoaxy and I hope it is. Publicly announcing that you broke into a company’s computer system and stole confidential personal data and are demanding money to not release the information?
Stating that you are going to go ahead and put this stolen information (encrypted or not) into who knows how many hands before you even have the money seems impressively stupid.
If this story is true, this would be how many really serious criminal charges, possibly even international of some sort? This person or persons would have to be absolutely certain that no one would or could ever figure out the source of the files. For what they are risking, $1,000,000 ransom seems paltry.
And if they do get the money, just how exactly do they get the files back from all these news outlets? “The keys to unlock the data will be purged and what ever is inside the documents will remain a secret forever.” Oh, really?
This whole story really sounds like a hoax.
Could definitely be a hoax, however it seems to me like they’ve thought it through. The flash drives were delivered but can’t be read by anybody, save possibly the NSA. They don’t need to be retrieved because they’re useless unless people get the de-encryption code.
And the money may not be traceable, although I don’t fully understand how that works.
Now, I don’t know who prepares Romney’s taxes, but they probably file them electronically, which leaves a record on their servers and machines that a hacker can exploit. This is much easier than hacking into the IRS computers.
If PwC really did do his taxes, they could have accessed them from any office in the country, provided they could defeat password protections.
It doesn’t seem that implausible to me.
Is the money enough to justify the risk?
If there is a flaw in the plan it’s that no one would trust them to do what they’ve promised to do once they get the money.
Wonder about the encryption allegedly used. Most encryption is perfectly fine for most uses, but if the data has high value then very expensive supercomputers can break commercial encryption schemes fairly quickly. This means that even in the not-going-to-happen scenario where Romney paid up anyone holding the encrypted flash drive could, given enough resources, decrypt it.
All-in-all this does not seem a well-thought-out scheme, and thus I suspect it is a hoax.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-would-it-take-a-large-computer-to-crack-a-p
rivate-key
I don`t know for sure if thats correct but a good encryption key seems secure for the forseeable future.
For what they are risking, $1,000,000 ransom seems paltry.
It does bring to mind a certain Dr. Evil.
Sounds like a republican October surprise a month early.
IF true, then there is no reason for Romney to pay anything. Paying a million dollars to suppress them is just as damning as release potentially is. Even more so, since Romney keeps clinging to “I don’t legally have to.” But no one. not even a millionaire would pay a million, and have everyone wonder what was there worth a million, just to prove a point.
How would anyone know if Romney did pay a million for them?
“They were bluffing, we ignored them, now they’re pretending that they got their money. Why would anyone take this anonymous person seriously?”
Maybe he would pay with campaign money. It’s stupid but we’re talking Romney.
Of course, the Koch Brothers might buy the key. Then they would have the sword to hold over his head and keep him in line.
Should turn that flash drive over to the authorities and make sure the media sees them doing it. Say we want no part of this illegal act and will do nothing to support it.
Agreed. It sounds like a whitey tape to me but you’re right that this is what the Dems should do.
Oh please let this trace back to Rove. This may be a hoax but there’s going to be serious consequences. Thinking now the FBI, at the least, would be asking for access to those servers and no firm would like to have that exposure.
Of course Romney can always go ahead and release the returns himself, thus cancelling the impact of the hackers and saving himself or the FBI $1 million in bitcoins.
BitCoin was hacked and lost money:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/bitcoin-exchange-market-hacked-us-250-000-loss-195136054
.html
Some one hacked the system of a trader, they lost bitcoins which are worth money. Bitcoin didnt lose money, its not an entity.
It can lose its perceived value when security issues like these arise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bitcoin_exchange.png
I’ll take your word for it, I’ve never heard of bitcoins until this article.
First thing I think of is that this is a Romney stunt. These “stolen” tax returns will get released showing nothing Romney-negative and Romney gets to be the Palin-esque victim.
It will show damning information if it’s real, but like the Bush (lack of a) military record, the way it was exposed will bring about more outrage than the record itself.
B-b-bu-but Dan Rather said that George W. Bush went AWOL.
I made that connection, too.
Another legitimate story that was harming a Republican presidential candidate, and then disappeared because of a fraudulent document passed off by a mysterious source.
Exactly.
Karl Rove has pulled reverse-tricks like this twice in his career, both in the service of GWB, both successfully. We can beat Mitt without this.
Every once in a while some people here accuse me of tinfoil hat-style paranoia.
This thread takes the cake.
Please.
Who gives a rat’s ass what the bottom line is on this stunt? It is transparently a scam of some sort, even if it’s “real.” I have seen better syntax and grammar on Nigerian get rich quick emails.
Ignore this kind of shit and go on about the real business.
Please.
What would happen if someone threw a scam and nobody bit?
Please.
WTFU.
AG
Here’s hoping you are right, AG. Unfortunately, most of us (myself included, but probably not you) can be fairly described as Yellow Dog Democrats. Most of us would also decry the label as being wrong, we just vote for the least objectionable … who is ALWAYS a Democrat.
The one thing all YDD are capable of is fear that something will happen that will turn a pretty sure win into a great loss … re: October ’72, ’80, ’04.
It’s a Republican!
I think people are kind of dancing around what I think is the real point of this. Whether or not this is a hoax (and it probably is), it illustrates that if Romney has something in his tax returns that would sink him politically, if he were to gain the Presidency he could be compromised by a foreign entity that gained access to his returns. While I’m sure every President has done something from time to time that could prematurely end his tenure, those are state secrets, and we have a whole infrastructure in place to guard those (guffaw all you will about its effectiveness). Tax returns are not quite so secure, especially ones like Mitt’s that require an army of accountants to craft.
The brilliance of the hoax, if such it is, is this: if the encryption key is never released, it is never proved whether it was a hoax. Romney will deny making the payoff, but he obviously would deny it whether he did or not, and would not make it in a traceable way, if he did make it. So having nothing looks pretty indistinguishable from getting paid off. At that point, Romney has to rely on the administration to insist very strongly that there was no tax return theft, but that can’t necessarily be proved either. The only hitch would be if someone called the bluff by offering to pay for release: but doing that would make one an accessory to a felony, so it’s probably not going to happen, at least not publicly, which is how it would have to happen to expose the hoax.
Well, he really does have his taxes done by PwC, and the flash drives were really delivered to both parties’ local headquarters.
Sure, but if the drives are never decrypted, there is not telling what was one them. Could be someone’s tunes collection, the phone book, anything.