He Always Had a Dark Side

Really the only "big" information presented is that Paul Le Roux, a man arrested recently by the DEA, is very very likely the same person who was the early leader of TrueCrypt. It discuses his background a lot - he was an extremely intelligent child and teenager, who started shady business practices as early as 16 when he was arrested for selling porn. He was rather poor and led a shaky life in his early twenties, and had a fairly strong anti-authoritarian belief, which is what led to his interest and development of TrueCrypt (and its predecessor projects that laid the foundation for TC).

He eventually started his pharmaceutical business and made hundreds of millions of dollars. According to sources, he became gradually "darker" as he got more money, including allegations he had people killed. And then recently he was arrested by the DEA.

The article got most of its information by a supposed relative - the reporter is convinced it's legitimate because of how much they know about Paul and their access to documents a non-family member is unlikely to have.

The other interesting new information is that his biological mother (edit: grandmother) is the wife of a US senator, but there's nothing to really collaborate that other than the word of the anonymous soruce.

There is no new information about the discontinuation of TC in this article. The article says that Paul disappeared from the crypto community (at least, under his own name) at about the time he started his pharma company (2004), but implied that he had worked on TC for the decade leading up to 2004. The anonymous source also said he "switched" to the pill selling, perhaps suggesting he left the TC project around that time in 2004.

If I had to guess, whoever was funding the TC developers stopped funding them. And the developers decided to move on with their lives, having worked on it for 15+ years, and possibly largely only doing so because they got paid. The "TrueCrypt is not secure" message was probably to imply that a lack of updates wasn't because they were confident they weren't needed, but rather because it was no longer maintained.

Teenager in the US at the same time.

Yep, this is exactly what we did with our 8-bit machines and modems at the time.

We were global even then.

EDIT- LOL. I guess the HN downvoters have proof this isn't what we were doing back then???

Looking at the article again I realize the headline here may be incorrect. It is not proven that Le Roux wrote TrueCrypt, but he definitely built the foundation for it.

> Hafner and his SecurStar colleagues suspected that Le Roux was part of the TrueCrypt collective but couldn’t prove it. Indeed, even today the question of who launched the software remains unanswered. “The origin of TrueCrypt has always been very mysterious,” says Matthew Green, a computer-science professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute and an expert on TrueCrypt who led a security audit of the software in 2014. “It was written by anonymous folks; it could have been Paul Le Roux writing under an assumed name, or it could have been someone completely different.”

Interesting read, regardless.

What a fantastic piece of journalism, I'm totally hooked. Love these long-form pieces when they have something really and truly meaty to work with. Very grateful for the chance to read it, thank you for posting it over here.