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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

#451

Post by akiselev »

parasense wrote: post #439
dogman144 wrote: post #312

The commenters saying be reasonable, they were sanctioned, GitHub had to do this, should look into the last time code was made illegal or similar turmoil and what the developer community did in response…It was not accepting sanctions or govt failures to understand code as “well that’s that.” - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The cas…

> - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention. A legitimate example of free speech. Zimmerman published his code in the appendix of scholarly book, in addition to posting online in source & binary form. > - Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 y…

Actual prison time wasn't on the table until the federal prosecutors took over and tried to make an example of him [1]. Until then, everyone expected a slap on the wrist.

I remember those events clearly and even JSTOR, the "victim" in the case, backpedaled on the prosecution before he committed suicide. He was driven to suicide by an overzealous federal prosecutor trying to make a career for themselves.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/swartz-didnt-face-pr...

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

#452

Post by tedmiston »

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…

> Honest question: was GitHub legally obligated to delete the accounts of anyone who had contributed to the repos?

Tornado Cash is on the SDN list [1].

From [2]:

> Business transactions of any sort with SDNs are expressly prohibited and U.S. persons must block any property in their possession or under their control in which an SDN has an interest.

IANAL but it doesn't sound like much of a leap to say using GitHub falls within "business transactions of any sort".

Clarification question: Did GitHub delete the accounts of anyone who contributed to the repos? My guess would be owners and maintainers? Officially, Tornado Cash, the entity, is what's on the list, so I would think at the very least anyone who is formally tied to the entity.

[1]: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...

[2]: https://www.visualofac.com/resources/sanctions-and-embargoes...

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

#453

Post by sleepybrett »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #420
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tornado Cash in particular is (was?) a smart contract, so they could straightforwardly have built in an auditing service as an oracle.

Huh. A system of oracles that vouch for wallets. And then maybe a voting mechanism for adding and removing oracles? Does this exist?

The fact that you seem to be so brain-boggled about this is... it's just that a lot of very smart people have been warning for years that crypto-currencies are going to run into trouble. That the things they were building were simply parallel (with new names DAO etc) to the global financial system and that previous system has all kinds of controls and regulations that crypto lacked. That if crypto didn't get their shit straight there were going to be some very serious people showing up on their doorsteps.

But crypto-bros will be crypto-bros, wether they are the minnows hoping against hope that they can somehow move from greater fools to slightly less foolish or the sharks grifting all the minnows for every penny they have.. just kept living in denial or .. selling denial in the case of the sharks.. and now here we are.

It turns out that when you ask the global financial systems what they call a service that does what a mixer does, they reply 'a money laundering operation operating in plain sight'.

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

#454

Post by subjectsigma »

orangeoxidation wrote: post #93
subjectsigma wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people replying "Code is free speech! You can't do this!" shows you about how much Twitter understands laws.

Well... that's an old argument (the PGP book) and there's even support from the courts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Ok, I have to admit I learned about these cases in this thread and it threw me for a second.

After reading them carefully I think my earlier statement is correct - there is no law which considers source code as free speech, and several legal frameworks which actively oppose the idea (ITAR, IP and copyright, etc). The idea seems pretty silly to me.

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

#455

Post by subjectsigma »

peyton wrote: post #61
subjectsigma wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people replying "Code is free speech! You can't do this!" shows you about how much Twitter understands laws.

That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation.

> This is a law.

> No, it is not.

> That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation.

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

#456

Post by 3np »

jcranmer wrote: post #311
analyte123 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The difference here is that a cryptocurrency mixer serves exactly one purpose: to be used to provide a financial service. You're not going to be able to plausibly argue that you didn't know what it was going to be financial service, and you're probably not going to be able to plausibly argue that you didn't know it was going to violate applicable financial regulations. When you're working on other privacy/security te…

Even so, Tornado Cash is functionally and conceptually quite different from a mixer. It's non-custodial, for starters.

There's a plausible argument that none of the sanctioned individuals were or are involved in running any kind of financial service.

This is closer to sanctioning developers of cryptographic libraries than it is to operators of a coin mixer.

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

#457

Post by mindslight »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #450
mindslight wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try applying your argument to the electric company. If a service operator has knowledge of a specific crime being committed one can make the argument that they're obligated to report the known details. But in general knowing that nonspecific criminals may be using your service does not imply that you have to shut your service down to hinder those criminals.

Tornado Cash isn't an electric company, though. There are different rules. Financial institutions are often subject to KYC rules that require them to proactively vet their customers. You're writing as though this were uncharted legal territory, trying to reason from first principles when you can truly consider a business a criminal enterprise, but we've had laws on the books for decades for the express purpose of sto…

The traditional financial system has coasted along on having two different sets of rules - one for consumer-facing things where you can do whatever you want with anonymous cash up to a certain amount, and one for Big Serious Transactions. The distinction between those two regimes is breaking down, and I don't want to see consumer privacy get left behind. Thus it's appropriate to reason from first principles about what ought to be, and not simply what regulations law enforcement has been able to get pushed through to make their own jobs easier. Individuals should not have everything we purchase be permanently recorded in order to convince us to buy more crap or price discriminate or whatever. Financial privacy is a key part of that.

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

#458

Post by tiahura »

akiselev wrote: post #451
parasense wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention. A legitimate example of free speech. Zimmerman published his code in the appendix of scholarly book, in addition to posting online in source & binary form. > - Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 y…

Actual prison time wasn't on the table until the federal prosecutors took over and tried to make an example of him [1]. Until then, everyone expected a slap on the wrist. I remember those events clearly and even JSTOR, the "victim" in the case, backpedaled on the prosecution before he committed suicide. He was driven to suicide by an overzealous federal prosecutor trying to make a career for themselves. [1] https://w…

He made the choice. No one else.

Or, if you blame the prosecutor for driving him, do you also blame his friends and family for not being supportive enough?

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

#459

Post by orangeoxidation »

subjectsigma wrote: post #454
orangeoxidation wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... that's an old argument (the PGP book) and there's even support from the courts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Ok, I have to admit I learned about these cases in this thread and it threw me for a second. After reading them carefully I think my earlier statement is correct - there is no law which considers source code as free speech, and several legal frameworks which actively oppose the idea (ITAR, IP and copyright, etc). The idea seems pretty silly to me.

> several legal frameworks which actively oppose the idea (ITAR, IP and copyright, etc). The idea seems pretty silly to me.

IP and copyright do apply to (otherwise free) speech. That's the whole point of them. The Supreme Court famously called copyright 'an engine of free expression'.

Code is fundamentally ideas, explanations, instructions on how to calculate something, written down in rigid, formalized language. I don't see how it couldn't be a form of "speech", just like books, poems and music are.

Speech is regulated of course, e.g. bomb-building instructions are illegal to publish in the US.

Maybe you could make a case this crypto shuffling method is similar and spreading the know-how on how to do it should be forbidden, but that doesn't make it not speech.

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

#460

Post by 3np »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #420
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tornado Cash in particular is (was?) a smart contract, so they could straightforwardly have built in an auditing service as an oracle.

Huh. A system of oracles that vouch for wallets. And then maybe a voting mechanism for adding and removing oracles? Does this exist?

Yes, I've seen various variations and implementations of such schemes. It's mostly as straight-forward as it sounds (with the usual gotchas).

More interesting and recent is zkKYC (2021): https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/907

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