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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

#191

Post by bluGill »

yosito wrote: post #55

Honest question: was GitHub legally obligated to delete the accounts of anyone who had contributed to the repos? I get that contributing to the repos would be a violation of the sanctions, but it's not clear to me when the project was sanctioned and whether all the contributors were aware that they were contributing to a sanctioned project. Would it have been enough for GitHub just to remove the projects? I ask as so…

Probably not, but it is in their best interest. By blocking all these accounts, if it is later discovered they missed something else related to this they can bring all those blocked accounts up as evidence they were trying to obey the law and this was an honest mistake. The courts understand mistakes happen, but you need to prove it was a mistake and not an attempt to evade the law by ignoring something. The more you do to ensure mistakes don't happen, the more likely the courts are to decide you weren't trying to evade the law, but just made a mistake.

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

#192

Post by egorfine »

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.

I know right! Just like the browser you are using to post this comment.

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

#193

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction

The people who built Tornado Cash are already in trouble. The crime--facilitating money laundering--has already been committed. OFAC is an enforcement office. Its lists are more like wanted posters than rules.

GitHub is cutting ties with people likely to be charged with federal crimes. If some of them are going to continue contributing to the project, GitHub doesn't want to be the conduit through which it is done. This is all standard sanctions compliance.

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

#194

Post by sschueller »

blooalien wrote: post #154
sschueller wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the US does not prosecute its own. Instead they go after the messenger e.g. Julian Assange. They also usually find the lowest scapegoat they can get instead of having the responsibility be at the command level. Edit: Spelling of scapegoat

I'll likely get downvoted straight to Hell for this, but grammatical errors going uncorrected become common errors as they spread to others… This particular one is already extremely common. https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/sc...

Thanks, I don't know why I wrote "escape goat" when I know it's "scapegoat".

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

#195

Post by mananaysiempre »

PeterisP wrote: post #115
plq wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? The argument probably is that they assisted a sanctioned entity by providing a contribution i.e. service to it. Quoting US Treasury "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." However, th…

> The key issue is that any collateral damage is considered acceptable, but any false negatives are absolutely not.

Even though “better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer”. Not that this was ever uncontroversial, but how did it ever go so wrong, that the very problems of government that modern laws sought to correct are gleefully recreated using private companies as enforcement proxies?

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

#197

Post by jaywalk »

yrro wrote: post #155
oliwary wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless, of course, GitHub considers every single contributor to Tornado to be part of the sanctioned entity due to the decentralized nature of git? Seems like a very dangerous interpretation for open source in that case…

If you really want to lose some sleep look up partnership law. Everyone who has ever contributed to an open source project _could_ be (in the absence of the project setting up proper legal structures) considered a membership of a general partnership, and thereby become jointly and severally subject to unlimited liability for the actions of the partnership. (IANAL this is just what I've read online)

IANAL either, but I have taken business law courses. And what you said is simply not true. At all.

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

#198

Post by whitepaint »

kube-system wrote: post #186
whitepaint wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

```Record or rewind any change to your code to keep you and your team in sync. Host it all for free with unlimited public and private repositories.``` - https://github.com/ Once again, just because they were legally obliged to do it it doesn't mean the action is not immoral. Oh god, will I do it... Okay, I think I must, because my point is not going through I see. Think of Nazi Germany. It was illegal to try to save…

Godwin’s Law strikes again. Free git repository hosting is not comparable to the holocaust. If you want some quotes from their website, here’s another: > GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. > This Agr…

> Free git repository hosting is not comparable to the holocaust.

Where did I compare it to the holocaust?! I was trying to pinpoint that your previous statement: "They do have a moral obligation to follow the laws of the country they operate in, though." is clearly invalid.

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

#200

Post by hnthrow1010 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #177
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there are no other real applications for these mixers. The only reason you even need to do that on a public blockchain is because the design of them is so bad that there's no other practical way to have privacy without enabling large amounts of criminal activity. If you really care about privacy, and you don't like criminals, then just don't use any blockchains or cryptocurrency.

This is not the level of comment quality I would expect on HN. You can do better.

Sorry but I try to avoid dumping huge amounts of information on people in every comment, that often doesn't go down well either if you can imagine. If you want more I'll elaborate. There is no possible way you can deploy this service anywhere while effectively complying with AML laws. It isn't going to work. But it's also the only real effective way you can obscure the source of transactions on a blockchain that's forced to be public. There's no reason transactions need to be forced public in the first place, other than how blockchain designers insisted it was a fundamental design parameter, when you probably agree that it isn't and that some transactions should be private by default. The simple solution is to avoid all blockchains and cryptocurrency altogether. Yes, they are that bad. I wish it wasn't true and I could say something good about them, but I just can't after watching 13 years of bad things happen.

And no, things like monero and zcash aren't a working solution to this problem either, that's a whole different discussion though.

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