A new Special Counsel, the obscene energy reality of Bitcoin, and the hazy future of Twitter

The annual energy cost of Bitcoin is greater than the annual electricity expenditures of *all* of West Africa.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Welcome to the first, accelerated episode of the UNSUB Files. I’d been planning to launch this in the new year, but with increasing questions about the future of Twitter, it makes sense to get this up and running while that ship is still afloat. Please forgive the rough edges and inevitable hiccups as my familiarity with Substack evolves.

If you find this interesting, please subscribe. All the main content is and will remain free. For extras, and/or if you want to support my work, consider a paid subscription. You can find details on what you get (particularly including my reading a podcast of each written post with extra commentary) at the end of this post.

Why the UNSUB Files?

The UNSUB files derives its name from the FBI term Unknown Subject, a term given to an investigation where an event or allegation is known, but the person or entity who conducted it is not. As I wrote in my book,

To understand the challenges of an UNSUB case, consider the following three hypothetical scenarios. In one, a Russian source tells his American handler that, while out drinking at an SVR reunion, he learned that a colleague had just been promoted after a breakthrough recruitment of an American intelligence officer in Bangkok. We don’t know the identity of the recruited American — he or she is an UNSUB. A second scenario: a man and a woman out for a morning run in Washington see a figure toss a package over the fence of the Russian embassy and speed off in a four-door maroon sedan. An UNSUB.

Or consider this third scenario: a young foreign policy adviser to an American presidential campaign boasts to one of our allies that the Russians have offered to help his candidate by releasing damaging information about that candidate’s chief political rival. Who actually received the offer of assistance from the Russians? An UNSUB.

The typical approach to investigating UNSUB cases is to open a case into the broad allegation, an umbrella investigation that encompasses everything the FBI knows. The key to UNSUB investigations is to first build a reliable matrix of every element known about the allegation and then identify the universe of individuals who could fit that matrix. That may sound cut-and-dried, but make no mistake: while the methodology is straight forward, it’s rarely easy to identify the UNSUB.

Take the imaginary recruitment in Bangkok. Does “American intelligence officer” mean what we think it means? Could it be a defense attaché? Or maybe they were wrong about its being an intelligence officer and it was actually a State Department official? Someone passing through on a temporary duty assignment? Any one of them could be the UNSUB.

And what do we actually know about the source in Moscow — the Russian whose tip caused us to open the hypothetical Bangkok UNSUB case in the first place? Sources are problematic, sometimes imprecise, usually complicated. They embellish. They forget things. They make things up. They believe their memory is more reliable than it is. They have drinking problems. Marital problems. Gambling problems. They want to be liked, admired, paid, to have purpose. Everybody’s looking for something, as the Eurythmics said.

Investigators try to identify and understand these factors. Most of all, they ask questions with analytic rigor. Does the source have a record of reporting reliable information? Was he groomed and recruited, or was he a walk-in who volunteered to us, which raises the risk that he’s part of a Russian operation to feed false information? Do we know what various components of the U.S. intelligence community know about the source? What if a different source conveys a similar story from the same time frame, except that that source heard the recruitment was in Kuala Lumpur? Is that the same allegation or a different one? What if the Russians recruited two people? Most everyone had been drinking at the reunion, so how much of this is solid information to begin with?

Some of the most confounding real-life—and still unsolved—cases involve multiple sources, where a more reliable source might have vague information while less vetted sources provide conflicting but very specific information about the same allegation. The variables can be limitless, and involve constant reassessment and balancing of source information. Intelligence work, and counterintelligence in particular, is sometimes called a wilderness of mirrors. It’s hard enough to figure out the truth, but when your opponent is actively trying to muddy your view of reality, it can be diabolically complex (and as addictive as the best puzzle you’ll ever encounter).

I loved counterintelligence work because of the interplay of complexity, curiosity, and the pursuit of finding and understanding the truth. My goal is to use this space to unpack and explore interesting topics in a much greater level of detail than a series of 280 character tweets or one minute answer on cable news allows. While I anticipate most posts will apply the lens of 20+ years of counterintelligence and national security work, you’ll probably get an occasional photo or two as well.

Special Counsel Jack Smith

As I discussed with Lawfare’s Ben Wittes and Quinta Jurecic here - Another Special Counsel Investigation of Donald Trump - I think the broad impact of AG Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as a Special Counsel is a net positive, and regardless, a necessary step given existing DOJ guidelines.

Having led the FBI’s efforts in setting up Special Counsel Mueller’s office, here are some thoughts about that process and how it applies to the task in front of SC Smith:

• Smith’s appointment order is very broad - “whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021” as well as the investigation of documents marked classified recovered from Mar-a-Lago. That’s a lot more than Trump, extending to people both in his immediate orbit (potentially including Mark Meadows, Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and others) as well as possible members of Congress. Remember, Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry had his phone seized by the FBI, and Representatives Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Jody Hice, and others met with Trump in mid-December, 2020, reportedly to discuss how to overturn the 2020 election results. At least some of them appear headed to Committee leadership positions in the next Congress, including, in the case of Jordan, leading the House Judiciary Committee, which holds oversight responsibility for DOJ and the FBI.

• In many ways, Smith steps into an even more developed investigative environment than Mueller did. At the time Mueller was appointed, the investigations were far from “starting from scratch” - they had been ongoing for 10 months, and had already obtained hundreds of communications and financial records, conducted scores of interviews, consensually monitored conversations, and executed search warrants.

• With Mueller, many of the agents and analysts working the cases transferred over to his office; the process of identifying and assembling the core team of prosecutors to work with those investigators took 3-4 weeks. In Smith’s case, prosecutors have long been assigned and are already working with the various investigative teams.

• Mueller’s appointment caused no discernible impact on the pace of the investigations. He was appointed May 17th and was at FBIHQ with his core team receiving briefings two days later. While I don’t know Smith, his reputation is one of an aggressive, no-nonsense prosecutor. I fully expect a similar sense of urgency from him and his leadership team.

Bottom line, I don’t expect Smith’s appointment to slow anything down. But that doesn’t mean things will occur as rapidly as many people would like.

On the Mar-a-Lago documents front - seemingly a much more mature investigation than the January 6 cases, oral arguments before the 11th Circuit are scheduled for tomorrow. And that’s just argument. It’s hard to predict the speed at which the Court might issue an opinion, but the process for even an expedited decision comes against Thanksgiving and the end of year holiday season. There’s every reason to believe the party on the adverse side of the ruling will appeal to the Supreme Court, likely pushing a final decision into the new year. I can’t envision a scenario where SC Smith makes a charging decision without the benefit of the documents at issue in this appeal - meaning we’re unlikely to see charges, if any, before early next year.

A final thought on Special Counsels and our criminal justice system in general. Criminal investigations necessarily follow well established law and take time. That’s a good thing: however urgent our desire for justice, many rules which slow also serve as checks against abuse. Justice comes in many forms, of which criminal prosecution is merely one. A demand that “DOJ must move faster” may be looking to the wrong source of justice. Sometimes moral justice is better found in the political arena and elections, or in the reporting and writing of history.

The Obscene Energy Reality of Bitcoin

Henry Mance of the Financial Times published a engaging interview of software engineer Stephen Diehl discussing the crypto industry, a “giant scam” that Diehl describes as a “commoditisation of populist anger, gambling and crime.” Well worth your time.

One area the article does not address is the obscene amount of energy consumed by the crypto currency market, with Bitcoin one of the worst offenders. According to data from the New York Times in September, 2021, Bitcoin consumes approximately 91 terawatt-hours of electricity each year. By comparison, that’s more than the annual electricity consumption of the entire nations of Finland or Belgium.

Close to half of one percent of the entire world’s electricity consumption.

But it’s even worse than it sounds. Consider, according to 2018/2019 Wikipedia data, it’s more than the electricity used by the entirety of West Africa each year (ECOWAS + Mauritania, figures in terawatt hours/year):

1. Nigeria 29

2. Ghana 8.8

3. Côte D'Ivoire 6.7

4. Senegal 3.8

5. Mali 3.0

6. Guinea 2.0

7. Burkina Faso 1.8

8. Niger 1.6

9. Togo 1.3

10. Benin 1.2

11. Mauritania 0.9

12. Cape Verde 0.5

13. Gambia 0.3

14. Liberia 0.3

15. Sierra Leone 0.2

16. Guinea-Bissau .04

All, according to Diehl, for “a solution in search of a problem. It’s not building a new financial system. It’s not building a new internet. It’s not an asset uncorrelated with the market. It’s not a hedge against inflation. It is a vehicle for pure, naked speculation detached from anything in the economy. It’s a casino that’s wrapped in all of these lies. When you tear back those lies, what’s left looks like a net negative for the world.”

The United States, by the way? 3,990 terawatts/year.

Why Subscribe

The UNSUB Files will be a labor of love and will remain free for the most part because I consider this sort of work essential. If you can afford a subscription, however, I hope that you will support this effort in order to keep it going. Paid subscribers will get an audio recording of this newsletter with some conversational elements delivered to their inbox, as well as the opportunity to post comments and engage with me in AMAs and other threads. Founding members add multiple (at least two, possibly up to quarterly) Zoom conversations throughout the year for an opportunity for personal conversations beyond the written page. And paid subscribers will have the goodwill of Max and Cloudy, for helping fund their treats.