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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

#161

Post by oliwary »

PeterisP wrote: post #123
nuclearnice1 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, Github blocking an account is not considered "punishment" according to criminal law or constitution, only standard contract law would apply and I believe Github has the right to terminate such contracts if they wish. This consideration would apply if and only if the government would actually pursue criminal charges against someone who contributed to TornadoCash - which they possibly would if someone would do st…

I agree - GitHub can block whoever they want. But doing so despite not being required to by law is a valid reason to criticize them.

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

#162

Post by eropple »

dingleberry420 wrote: post #143
PeterisP wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no matter what other applications for Tornado Cash may exist, since yesterday it is illegal to interact with Tornado Cash or assist them in any way for anyone within reach of USA jurisdiction. That's it. Privacy as such is not illegal, but that does not mean that government may not prohibit certain specific ways of achieving privacy.

Turns out privacy now is illegal in the US of A.

This is breathless but misleading. With recent conservative judicial decisions the notion of general privacy is on the ropes, but KYC has always precluded financial privacy at any scale other than unstructured cash transactions, and you're still supposed to report those in your taxes. This is in line with the treatment of other entities that fail to maintain KYC compliance.

The state has the power to levy taxes and prevent transactions with entities that it considers harmful (OFAC is effectively this); this is the state taking steps to do so, while GitHub is deciding that people who are attempting to evade those laws are outside the risk profile of "who we want to provide services to".

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

#163

Post by SnowHill9902 »

dom96 wrote: post #142
jdpedrie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always sign your commits! gpg is a pain but once you set it up you never have to think about it again.

or don't sign your commits and then you have plausible deniability about commits in your name

Yeah and leave your wifi open so that you have plausible deniability for downloading CP.

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

#164

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> Replace the code with Tornado.Cash source. Everyone's account is banned by Microsoft.

Code is speech, that's settled law. It's the entity and wallets that are sanctioned. If someone is a member of the Tornado Cash group on GitHub, it’s safe to say they’re in at least legal jeopardy. GitHub puts itself at risk by knowingly continuing to facilitate their work.

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

#165

Post by Karunamon »

zaphar wrote: post #129
whatisweb3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tornado Cash is a protocol. It targets EVM, and has been deployed on Ethereum, Optimism, Avalanche, Polygon and other networks. It happens to be open source, the code was mirrored on GitHub for research and contributions. They are setting a precedent that any forks or similar implementations of this protocol will also be sanctioned. A comparison would be sanctioning the Matrix protocol because it facilitates end-to-e…

If the matrix project was run by terrorists then your comparison would be accurate. It is not however. Tornado Cash however is run by a group with the express purpose of money laundering which is a crime. This difference is important and is why they are now sanctioned and Matrix is not.

If we want to talk about important differences, then you need to understand the difference between money-laundering and privacy.

In short, if you are not concealing the source of your funds to conceal a crime being committed, you are not guilty of money-laundering. It's that simple. KYC laws apply to banks and corporations, not individuals and not protocols and not code.

Privacy is not against the law, and neither is deploying a privacy tool that happens to be used by criminals. The comparison to matrix is surprisingly apt here. I have no doubt that criminal activity is facilitated by matrix, but the idea that they are responsible for that is ridiculous.

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

#167

Post by Hermel »

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…

If taken literally, this would mean that the founders could not even do their groceries any more, right?

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

#168

Post by eropple »

tromp wrote: post #144
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…

> GitHub had to do this. They only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction. It's not clear that they limited themselves to those. It would in fact seem to be hard to contribute in the limited time range between establishing the sanction and removing the project. There is also the collateral damage of removing unrelated projects that happened to be owned by these people. Couldn't github…

Any chance the blocked accounts had forks of the repository? That'd be an unsurprising heuristic.

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

#169

Post by Spivak »

salawat wrote: post #150
dingleberry420 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So making a PR to some project the US government might decide to sanction means github is going to delete my account?

Yes, pretty much. This is why I'm surprised more people aren't way more terrified about OFAC than there are. It's probably one of the nastiest diplomatic tools the U.S. has in its arsenal.

I think this thread has a lot of today's 10,000 finding out what it's like to interact with the US gov't as non-citizens by way of this tiny tiny little taste.
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