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GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

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Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#71

Post by krageon »

sschueller wrote: post #8
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

This probably protects those users. Contributing to the project at this point opens one up to the international reach of U.S. law enforcement.

You are going to open a huge can of worms if you are going to start prosecuting people for software pull requests. Are we going to prosecute people who manufacture phosphor bombs for the US military as well now?

No, because the US will invade and then perform war crimes on you if you imply that one of their soldiers has maybe performed war crimes and deserves to be tried for it.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#72

Post by gilrain »

prvit wrote: post #34
moron4hire wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit like saying there is nothing inherently wrong with cleaning up a dead body, you don't want to just leave dead bodies to sit around and rot, so therefore "tampering with a crime scene" is a "fake crime".

It’s a bit absurd to prosecute a murderer for trying to conceal their crime, no?

No…

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#73

Post by meltyness »

bhaak wrote: post #31
wesleywt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is code speech? To me it is the equivalent to nuts and bolts of a machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States > After four years and one regulatory change, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.

Hopefully the next time something like this gets trounced it is congress turning the IRS into like, 20k LOC, instead of ... a bureau.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#74

Post by ncmncm »

prvit wrote: post #34
moron4hire wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit like saying there is nothing inherently wrong with cleaning up a dead body, you don't want to just leave dead bodies to sit around and rot, so therefore "tampering with a crime scene" is a "fake crime".

It’s a bit absurd to prosecute a murderer for trying to conceal their crime, no?

Yet, it is done. Just not always. Obstruction of Justice is a crime. As is failing to report income from a crime, on your taxes.

But the woman who ordered the videotapes of US torture sessions erased was appointed head of CIA, instead of being prosecuted. Meanwhile, the whistleblower Jeffrey Skilling was charged with mishandling information that was only classified after he last touched it.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#75

Post by plq »

bad416f1f5a2 wrote: post #56
nurettin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no sympathy for crypto whatever and I really don't care about who sanctioned whom and for what reason, but... Sanctioned project's contributors must be deleted from the server - where is that written in the list of things Microsoft has to do since you went out of your way calling everyone on the reply train ignorant?

Because others are answering you in much more detail, I’ll give them more generalized answer – This is quite simply not how a sanctions regime works. The US government does not make a list of all the sanctioned persons’ assets, then start going after those in court. Instead, it goes the other way: any company with a US nexus watches those sanction lists carefully. When someone is listed they look at their internal re…

Be that as it may, isn't this still an unacceptable collateral damage?

So when you contribute code to an open source project, you generally do so under an open source license. All of them generally contain something akin to the following:

    IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE
    LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
    SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(this particular excerpt is from the BSD license)

I can understand taking action against the people who run the code. I can even understand taking action against people who were hired to contribute. But why kick some random open source contributor in the guts? What did they do wrong?

Are there open source licenses that protect the contributors from such unforeseeable damage? Or are we to watch our step from now on as open source contributors?

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#76

Post by viraptor »

subjectsigma wrote: post #40
junon wrote: post #7

People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned . > These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. This is, unambiguously, di…

The amount of people replying "Code is free speech! You can't do this!" shows you about how much Twitter understands laws.

You can understand the law and still disagree with it for the same reason. Laws are not set in stone.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#77

Post by whatisweb3 »

GitHub has the right to do whatever it wants, and it makes sense they would take this action to avoid getting into legal concerns.

But it is deeply concerning. Whether or not you like crypto, you should not be supporting this if you are a researcher, academic, technologist, cryptographer, or privacy advocate. The code for Tornado Cash is a series of cryptographic and mathematical functions that can be repurposed for a variety of applications unrelated to privatizing user wallets.

Having it open source and accessible is a net benefit for the entire world.

EDIT: A comparison would be that US decides to sanction the open Matrix protocol and any developer that has contributed to it, as it can facilitate end-to-end encrypted terrorist communication.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#78

Post by neilalexander »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #60
blueflow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is decentralized per default.

not really, it’s very inconvenient to use git without a centralized server

You can pull and push to pretty much anywhere, including directly to another person or workstation, over SSH. It's admittedly harder to have a single source of truth by doing so but it is still very possible to use in a decentralised fashion if you needed to.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#79

Post by oliwary »

paulgb wrote: post #11
junon wrote: post #7

People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned . > These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. This is, unambiguously, di…

Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? (It’s not clear from the thread whether the people blocked contributed after, or only before, the sanction.) For what it’s worth, I don’t see much evidence of people being upset at GitHub in the thread. There’s talk about decentralized alternatives, but not much actual pinning the blame on them.

This is the crux of the issue in my opinion. It seems ridiculous that the sanctions should apply retroactively to anyone who has dealt with a sanctioned entity at any time in the past - if the people contributed before the sanctions, they were not contributing to a “blocked person”, as the project was not blocked at the time.

Imagine if, say, A foreign electronics company is sanctioned by the government - does this mean that anyone who has previously worked with them or bought their electronics has done so illegally? If so, that sounds like a significant impediment to commerce, since nobody can predict who will be sanctioned in the future.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#80

Post by RobertoG »

junon wrote: post #7

People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned . > These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. This is, unambiguously, di…

>>People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant.

I don't know but there are some comments asking for an distribute alternative to GitHub. That was pretty funny.

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