The United States Army has expressed interest in kitting out its principal investigative division with cryptocurrency tracing tools.
In a Statement of Work (SOW) published July 10, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command's Major Cybercrime Unit (MCU) began the process of welcoming bids from contractors.
Instead of software or hardware offerings, the Army is inviting vendors of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions to come forward and provide information for planning purposes. Contractors have until July 20 to accept the Army's invitation to express interest.
According to the document, the US Army Contracting Command-New Jersey (CC-NJ) located at Fort Dix, NJ, is "surveying the market for potential contractors capable of providing one license for one user of a cloud, web-based application capable of assisting law enforcement to identify and stop actors who are using cryptocurrencies for illicit activity such as fraud, extortion, and money laundering."
The Army isn't interested in developing an app from scratch, but instead wants to garner information about pre-existing web-based applications.
Applications submitted must enable users to conduct an in-depth investigation into the source of cryptocurrency transactions and provide multi-currency analysis "from Bitcoin to other top cryptocurrencies."
The SaaS solution must provide real-time Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transaction tracing, to include service attribution and identification, and must be able to spot transaction patterns and interaction with other entities.
Furthermore, it must have the capability to set up unlimited individual user accounts with unlimited queries available.
To facilitate the analysis of data, the app must have some type of visualization and/or link analysis tool and has to be capable of exporting graphs and generating reports as a csv, pdf, or image file.
This latest publication comes almost a year after the Army shared a pre-solicitation notice that revealed users of the app will be located throughout the US and overseas where there is a CCIU (Computer Crimes Investigation Unit) presence.
Previously, the Pentagon looked into the use of cryptocurrency in a war game designed around domestic civil unrest. Documents obtained by The Intercept detailed a scenario in which a "rebellion" was launched by a Gen Z that included the use of crypto to redistribute stolen funds.