A contract agreement obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, shows that the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is providing geo-tracking data to US government agencies without any restrictions placed on it.
According to contract documents provided to The Intercept, Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is providing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a set of features used to track and identify bitcoin users.
For $29,000, Coinbase sold a single analytics license to ICE in August 2021. The following month, the government may have spent $1.36 million on software, although it was not clear what capabilities would be provided to the controversial Homeland Security Investigations division of the agency. ICE now has access to a number of forensic features offered through Coinbase Tracer, the company's intelligence-gathering tool, according to a new contract agreement (pdf below) obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the w...