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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

#101

Post by break_the_bank »

darkcha0s wrote: post #88
egorfine wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not after the creators. The contributors. People who were submitting code changes to an absolutely legal piece of software.

...that enabled nefarious people to go about their deeds unpunished.

The nefarious people were probably on a unix system or a windows system. Should we go about and delete their contributors accounts as well?

I’m not at all pro crypto but this enforcement does seem extreme. I do understand that Microsoft is just following the sanctions.

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

#102

Post by baobob »

plq wrote: post #75
bad416f1f5a2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

> What did they do wrong?

They wilfully contributed to the upkeep of a money laundering service. They should be thankful losing their GitHub account is the extent of the fallout, take it as a lesson that code can cause real harm, and act more judiciously in future when it comes to contributing labour to suspect projects.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #57
personjerry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's written in the definition of the sanction given by the Department of the Treasury [0], i.e. at the level of US federal law, of which Microsoft must follow as a US company. > Sanctions Implications > 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, o…

Is this the first time the US has sanctioned a cryptographic protocol? The quote you pulled specifically refers to "blocked person" but in this case they are not sanctioning a person - they are sanctioning a mathematical protocol that happens to have a popular open source implementation.

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by ezfe »

krono wrote: post #92
seydor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't git decentralized already?

Git is not GitHub

A Github repository is decentralized among everyone who has cloned it, nothing about Github changes that.

The other parts, like issue tracking, obviously are not.

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

#106

Post by SXX »

trinovantes wrote: post #67
SXX wrote: post #24

This is a good time time for EFF to step in. This is open huge so many terrible ways for abuse. 1. Make some random crypto project. 2. Motivate people contribute to it, see DigitalOcean hacktoberfest. 3. Replace the code with Tornado.Cash source. Everyone's account is banned by Microsoft. Also I wonder what happen if you didnt sent PR yourself, but someone crafted git commit with your email and added it to such repos…

Unless they enabled PGP signed commits, can't you just forge their commits?

Yeah you can and I mentioned I curios who exactly Github has banned. It's possible they only banned people who created PRs under their own account.

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

#107

Post by outsidetheparty »

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.

You'd think after 16 years I'd be used to it, but it still kinda blows my mind that the social network designed for context- and detail-free hot takes is the one people use for political discussion.

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

#108

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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?

> going to open a huge can of worms if you are going to start prosecuting people for software pull requests

Tornado is sanctioned, not the underlying code. Contributing to the project is legally tantamount to coding for a North Korean entity. This isn’t a start to anything, it’s established law and practice.

Simply pulling shouldn't be a problem. But I can see law enforcement getting a subpoena for a list of accounts that pulled that repo to find and stop copycats.

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

#109

Post by nuclearnice1 »

oliwary wrote: post #79
paulgb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I agree with your analysis. Ex post facto criminal laws are barred by the constitution for good reason. Retroactive punishment leaves people guessing what actions might or might not be punished.

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

#110

Post by withinboredom »

krageon wrote: post #71
sschueller wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience in Afghanistan, it was other countries that performed more "war crimes" than the US (as in violating Geneva Conventions). Why do you think they make it such a big deal when the USA does it? Is it only because the US just prosecutes their own and doesn't recognize the international court? The international court does a much better job of keeping their decisions and the soldiers being punished, private. The US makes quite an example of theirs.
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