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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

#241

Post by jakelazaroff »

blagie wrote: post #209
oliwary wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I disagree. Github should not be able to block anyone they want. We went through this about a century ago with railways, antitrust, and Standard Oil. I won't step through the details, but can provide more background if anyone cares. We landed with the concept of a "common carrier." Railways, as well as telecommunications companies, ISPs, public airlines, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, cruise ships…

> As an individual or a small business, ones does not have an alternative to

- Microsoft Word — Google Docs? Apple Pages? Zoho Docs? OpenOffice?

- GitHub — GitLab? sourcehut? Bitbucket? Gitea?

- Facebook — Twitter? Instagram? TikTok? SnapChat?

The thing about Git is that it's free software. Anyone can run their own server for very little money. If you get banned from the railroad, you can't just get your own train.

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

#242

Post by plq »

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…

As an example, it seems plausible to me that a person who wants to enter the cryptocurrency sector could send a pull request and actually work with them to get merged to put it in their resume.

This person can be totally oblivious to the illegal stuff that's happening behind the scenes. After all they were just trying to prove that they actually have experience with cryptocurrency code to potential future employers.

It also can be some random security researcher who is preventing open source developers from shipping vulnerable code. I know for a fact that Github themselves employ such people that send security-related patches from time to time to open-source projects.

You can work up more examples -- my point is that people who definitely have nothing to do with any illegal activity whatsoever could exist in the list of contributors of these repositories.

It's nice that they didn't just nuke the whole contributors list, but it's still a bit unsettling.

> it's your responsibility to know and check who you are dealing with.

What can I say, duly noted.

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

#243

Post by JumpCrisscross »

toolz wrote: post #204
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who literally did nothing wrong? What on earth did people think a tumbler like Tornado Cash was going to be used for and by?

You ask this as if there are only non-legitimate uses. Do you think businesses often give away their revenue data to their competitors for free? Of course not, so if you want to do business on an open ledger then you have to have a way to obscure transactions so that your competition doesn't get to know exactly what your revenue stream looks like. There's nothing sinister about privacy. It would be a logical fallacy…

> nothing sinister about privacy

Totally agree. One damning aspect of Tornado is we know it was used to launder money. Criminals used it. This was publicly reported and certainly known to the Tornado team.

If you know your product is being used by criminals to do crime and you respond by shrugging your shoulders, I’m not sure what the expected outcome is supposed to be other than getting dinged.

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

#244

Post by bilekas »

syzygyhack wrote: post #185
bilekas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have particular vitriol against Tornado itself, they do offer compliance tool and seem to have just been an eventual outcome in crypto. I do however have an issue with the incredibly high rate of money laundering etc that flows through crypto. Particularly so with Tornado cash. It's the 'go-to' for easy money laundering. And no that's not a 'general ignorance' it's just a bi-product of having decentralized sy…

> I do however have an issue with the incredibly high rate of money laundering etc that flows through crypto. Incredibly high relative to what exactly? The total exchange volume of the cryptocurrency industry? Can you show some figures to back that assertion? OR are you talking relative to the global economy? In that case, it's not even a drop in the bucket. Clearly the Tornado Cash team should have simply started a…

Incredibly high rate of money laundering in relation to the entire flow of cyrpto.

You should know comparing traditional fiat against crypto doesn't make sense.. But I guess I'm the one who's ignorant.

There is a good paper overviewing a lot here : https://www.unive.it/pag/fileadmin/user_upload/dipartimenti/...

It's more of an essay but all all stats are referenced.

Also another good read : https://ciphertrace.com/q3-2018-cryptocurrency-anti-money-la...

You simply can't argue that money laundering isn't rampant on cypto currencies.

Also just another clarification from your earlier comment :

> Your vitriol against Tornado is misplaced, though not surprising given the general ignorance regarding the blockchain industry on HN.

Blockchain != Crypto

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

#245

Post by bad416f1f5a2 »

dingleberry420 wrote: post #212
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thoughtcrime is a thing now in modern America? Nothing wrong with writing code. Code is speech, that's settled law. But the Tornado Cash team wasn't just publishing. They were building a tool. Semenov styled himself as a co-founder and the group advertised open positions on its website.

Okay, how does that relate to open source contributors? Can you retroactively read their minds and determine their intent? Why does their intent even matter? What they were doing was not illegal at the time, and now they are being punished by the US.

> now they are being punished by the US.

The US didn't mandate deletion of their Github account. The US isn't punishing them – you can tell because they didn't put them explicitly on the SDN list.

Microsoft made the choice to remove their accounts. Their compliance team likely looked and said "$ we make from these devs decide if we should keep them on our platform."

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

#246

Post by chii »

blagie wrote: post #209
oliwary wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I disagree. Github should not be able to block anyone they want. We went through this about a century ago with railways, antitrust, and Standard Oil. I won't step through the details, but can provide more background if anyone cares. We landed with the concept of a "common carrier." Railways, as well as telecommunications companies, ISPs, public airlines, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, cruise ships…

> As an individual or a small business, ones does not have an alternative to Microsoft Word, github, or Facebook.

Google Docs, gitlab or bitbucket, and as for social network there's plenty out there.

None of those are real monopolies. They _might_ be best in class, but there's no rule that says you must be allowed to use the best in class service.

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

#247

Post by tomjen3 »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #200
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Why is Monero not a solution either? As far as I know, it is not public which seems to be what you complain about, right?

Surely you accept that illegal trade happens through cash and even through banks, so you will agree that there is some level at which you cannot ban an entire system.

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

#248

Post by toolz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #243
toolz wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask this as if there are only non-legitimate uses. Do you think businesses often give away their revenue data to their competitors for free? Of course not, so if you want to do business on an open ledger then you have to have a way to obscure transactions so that your competition doesn't get to know exactly what your revenue stream looks like. There's nothing sinister about privacy. It would be a logical fallacy…

> nothing sinister about privacy Totally agree. One damning aspect of Tornado is we know it was used to launder money. Criminals used it. This was publicly reported and certainly known to the Tornado team. If you know your product is being used by criminals to do crime and you respond by shrugging your shoulders, I’m not sure what the expected outcome is supposed to be other than getting dinged.

I like to ask myself what money laundering even is and whether it makes sense and ideally it wouldn't even be illegal. Money laundering isn't the crime - it's just a convenient tool to dissuade crime. Ideally there would be no crime without violence and there is nothing but consenting individuals involved in money laundering. The crime happened before the laundering and that's what we should be preventing.

Otherwise you end up in situations like this where innocent people are going to get screwed over because they utilized a tool that criminals utilized. This isn't fair or just by any standard and I personally don't accept the collateral damage as worthy.

This doesn't even begin to touch on the vast majority of laundering that happens in fiat across international banks . That would take a while just to list all the infractions that are constantly happening, yet those entities are still not only operating in the free market, but they have federal insurance and backing.

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

#249

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dingleberry420 wrote: post #212
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thoughtcrime is a thing now in modern America? Nothing wrong with writing code. Code is speech, that's settled law. But the Tornado Cash team wasn't just publishing. They were building a tool. Semenov styled himself as a co-founder and the group advertised open positions on its website.

Okay, how does that relate to open source contributors? Can you retroactively read their minds and determine their intent? Why does their intent even matter? What they were doing was not illegal at the time, and now they are being punished by the US.

> Why does their intent even matter?

It doesn’t. Tornado was used to launder money. That’s all that matters.

My guess is the only people in real legal jeopardy are those who kept working on it after its involvement in laundering was exposed. (I’m assuming they weren’t in on the laundering.) For GitHub, figuring out who those people are is impossible. So they’re being cautious and cutting ties more broadly.

There is a creep problem to sanctions. Some companies in Russia are banned. Suddenly everyone from Cyprus is under extra scrutiny, since you don’t want to be the dupe they used to launder their money. Tornado and its developers were those dupes. But it has been illegal to help North Koreans launder money since before Tornado was founded. It remained illegal when it became known North Korea used Tornado to launder money. Anyone going into money services knows, or is negligent in not knowing, that these laws apply to them. It’s tough to have sympathy for anyone who kept ties. Particularly when the punishment, so far, is simply ostracism.

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

#250

Post by prmoustache »

krono wrote: post #120
ezfe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not decentralized in any practical manner when everyone's local clone is pointing to the same, now no longer available, origin. This could have been mitigated by having a pre-determined fallback origin (which could very well be something they had in place - I'm not familiar with this project).

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