CIA deputy director says Bitcoin is a tool for intelligence collection

Bitcoin was sold to many early adopters as digital cash that nobody could trace. The CIA’s second-in-command would like a word. CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said in a May 1, 2025 podcast interview that Bitcoin is not truly anonymous, and that US intelligence uses it to collect information on adversaries. For anyone still treating the network as a privacy cloak, that is an awkward thing to hear from a spy agency. What Ellis actually said Ellis described Bitcoin as “pseudonymous” rather than anonymous. The difference matters more than it sounds. On Bitcoin, activity is tied to addresses rather than legal names. Ellis’s point is that the gap between an address and a real person can be closed, and authorities are working to close it. According to Ellis, that gap is what lets US authorities follow illicit activity connected to adversaries. He named drug cartels and terrorist organizations as examples of the groups whose crypto use can be tracked. “We can disrupt our adversaries’ use of it and we can use these technologies to collect more intelligence.” That one sentence covers two separate jobs. One is defensive: interfering with how hostile groups move money. The other is offensiv...