On April 7, 2025, attorney James A. Murphy — known publicly as “MetaLawMan” — filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit seeks DHS records related to a 2019 on-record claim by DHS Special Agent Rana Saoud that DHS investigators had traveled to California and interviewed four people believed to be behind Bitcoin’s creation.
The 2019 OffshoreAlert remark:
At the OffshoreAlert conference in April 2019, Special Agent Rana Saoud stated that DHS colleagues had traveled to California and interviewed a group of four people believed to be behind Bitcoin. According to contemporaneous coverage, the investigators reportedly questioned these individuals about both the technical and motivational aspects of their work. Saoud did not name the four individuals, and DHS has not, in the years since, published any record of the alleged interview.
FOIA request and DHS non-response:
Murphy submitted a FOIA request to DHS on February 12, 2025, seeking internal DHS emails, travel documentation, interview records, transcripts, and recordings related to Saoud’s 2019 comments. DHS did not respond publicly within the statutory window, and no documents were released.
The complaint:
When DHS produced nothing, Murphy filed suit on April 7, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He is represented by Schaerr Jaffe LLP, with Brian Field — a FOIA specialist on the firm’s team — serving as co-counsel. The case is pending before a district court judge, who will decide whether DHS must produce the requested records or may withhold them under national-security or privacy exemptions.
Position in the broader Satoshi-identification record:
The Murphy suit is structurally distinct from the journalistic and documentary identifications that dominate the post-2024 wave. The 2024 HBO documentary on Peter Todd and the 2026 New York Times Carreyrou investigation on Adam Back both rely on stylometric or circumstantial reasoning to single out one named candidate, and both candidates publicly denied the identification. The Murphy action targets a different evidence channel — a government agent’s own on-record statement about an internal interview event — and uses the federal FOIA mechanism to demand the underlying documents. If DHS records exist as Saoud’s remarks suggested, court-ordered disclosure could in principle settle specific factual questions about the 2019 interview without resorting to stylometric inference.
As of mid-2026 the case remains in early-stage litigation and no documents have been compelled. Whether the request will succeed turns on how the district court reads the FOIA statute against any national-security or privacy exemptions DHS may invoke.