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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

Jamesbeam wrote: post #175
oliwary wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your perspective on this is distorted. We are talking about an entity that according to the treasury has laundered more than 7 Billion USD, assisted criminals and neglected complying to Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations willingly and repeatedly. Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber…

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by throwaway290 »

This should be a wake-up call for all Russian Github users. If Github suspects you're Russian (e.g. like me you sponsored using a card with Russian billing address), today you are frozen out from all paid features, tomorrow your acc may be gone.

And since creating more than one acc is against Github ToS, the best move is to stop using it ASAP except if required for work.

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

#283

Post by Nursie »

analyte123 wrote: post #251
Jamesbeam wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perspective on this is distorted. We are talking about an entity that according to the treasury has laundered more than 7 Billion USD, assisted criminals and neglected complying to Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations willingly and repeatedly. Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber…

Anyone who has ever contributed to privacy or security technology should “have their life turned to shit” too under this logic. All the evil terorrist money launderers probably used VPNs or Tor too. Maybe they posted on HN, making you part of an internet terrorist club. Maybe they asked a question on StackOverflow that you answered. You’re waving around some acronym that the government made up 20 years ago to describ…

Tornado is specifically run to obscure cash flows, something which is specifically illegal.

This equivocation is as saddening as it is predictable.

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

#285

Post by devmor »

Replies to the tweet saying "we need a decentralized git" strike me as bafflingly dense. Do these people think that the website, Github is the only way to interact with a repository?

Are they entirely unaware of git's default decentralized nature, or even that there are other central repository sites?

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

#286

Post by pca006132 »

Beltalowda wrote: post #111
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…

GitHub didn't remove the account of everyone who ever contributed to the repository; if you go to the Web Archive many of the people listed under "contributors" still have accounts. Presumably, they just removed the people who were a member of the organisation.

This should be the top comment and the title should be changed. The title and other comments made me wonder if GitHub deleted the account of all contributors to that repo, which is more serious than deleting the account of members in an organization.

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

#287

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> seems ridiculous that the sanctions should apply retroactively

Anyone contributing to Tornado after it became public knowledge that it was used to launder money put themselves at risk. The sanctions are the enforcement action. A wanted poster. The crime, laundering money, was committed a while ago.

> does this mean that anyone who has previously worked with them or bought their electronics has done so illegally?

If you knew they were doing sanctionable things, yes. If you didn’t, no.

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

#288

Post by toolz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #262
toolz wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> what money laundering even is Hiding illegal gains. > crime happened before the laundering and that's what we should be preventing Covering up a murder is a crime because we don’t want people helping murderers cover up. > like this where innocent people are going to get screwed over because they utilized a tool that criminals utilized People who used Tornado Cash aren’t getting screwed. Even the developers aren’t.…

> People who used Tornado Cash aren’t getting screwed.

Incorrect, as per sanctions putting the onus on private entities to get things right, circle has blacklisted any USDC address that has been owned by the tornado cash protocol, which means anyone using tornado cash for legit purposes will lose every dollar they had in USDC. I'm really not sure how you came to the conclusion innocent people weren't getting screwed here, but it's irrefutable that they are, unless of course your definition of guilty is someone that used tornado cash, which would be a silly definition. I've used mixers plenty for completely legit reasons. I don't want people knowing how much crypto I have and I don't want to manage tons of addresses so when I transact in open ledgers I have at times had people pay me via mixers to hide the addresses I own and thus hide how much crypto I own from people doing business with me. All completely white market business dealing with buying/selling electronics too, for that matter.

> People laundering money through banks get sanctioned and jailed. When banks make a habit of laundering money, they too get sanctioned. There is ample historical record of all of this.

Incorrect, they pay fines that rarely even cover the profits they made to begin with.

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

#289

Post by root_axis »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #65
root_axis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all speech is legal. If I write a virus and unleash it on the internet it's not unconstitutional to arrest me.

It could be argued the sole intent of unleashing a virus on the internet is malicious. The sole intent of publishing a privacy protocol on GitHub is not. Look at Tor for comparison. GitHub has a section on this[1]. There should be no problem with allowing this software online for research and educational purposes. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...

What if it's a virus that targets politicians?

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

#290

Post by tromp »

skywhopper wrote: post #268
jacooper wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes Then american banks should be sanctioned, they are also involved in money laundering too.

When they fail to take steps to prevent it, they are often punished. Here’s a few big ones from 2021 alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/03/24/le... Why aren’t these banks put on the sanction list where it’s a crime to do business with them? Because the vast majority of what they do is not money laundering and when they are discovered money laundering, they generally stop. And when they don’t,…

> and nothing was done to stop it.

What could be done to stop it? It's just a contract run on the blockchain. I suppose they could limit throughput, but not much else?! Similarly, what could the Monero or ZCash developers do to stop money laundering on their blockchains? Here, not even throughput can be limited since amounts of transactions are completely hidden.

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