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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#251

Post by seanw444 »

biglearner1day wrote: post #78
clippablematt wrote: post #60

Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right. Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important. And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers? This…

And it is always under the guise of anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism or whatever other reason they can find to excuse their inexcusable actions. Take mass government surveillance for example.

Biggest one is probably "think of the children."

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#252

Post by BTCOG »

peyton wrote: post #192
clucas wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the international law enforcement community is really trying to go after "all cryptographers" why do you think we haven't seen more arrests? Why do you think they only arrested this guy? I get that you really want to defend crypto, but I think a simpler explanation is that they have good reasons to believe that this guy was doing more than just the stuff you're trying to defend (making privacy code). It would be l…

One fact is that it’s Dutch law enforcement, not international law enforcement. A second fact is that Dutch law enforcement have stated “multiple arrests are not ruled out,” so we’re not talking about “just one guy” anymore. Finally, I’m not optimizing for credibility when stating my opinion, nor am I defending a single person. I do not think arresting developers is an effective solution for preventing money launderi…

Sorry, but this is nonsense. This was strictly done because of US pressure and sanction. Netherlands would have done nothing and likely the US did the logging and tracing of this individual.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#253

Post by salawat »

csydas wrote: post #48
tiborsaas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should knife makers be held responsible if someone stabs someone? TC was designed for privacy and bad actors _also_ took advantage of that. Prosecutors basically need to prove that privacy is bad, good luck with that.

I would be hesitant to get into the knife/gun comparisons. The charge isn't the anonymization of the money, it's specifically the concealment of money produced by criminal activity, and whether or not that's something that is allowed based on NL law is really the question, as is the motive of the developer/service providers. This next part is from a US perspective, but remember that there are multiple aspects to law…

Knife/gun is completely unrelated in the grand scheme of things.

In finance, you are required to maintain the chain of provenance in an unobfuscated form. If you can't, or won't, your license to operate is revoked. If you didn't have one in the first place, you're already in hot water. You cannot play in the sandbox anymore. That's the civil side. Just like not being willing to help with airline emergency exit doors probibits you from taking up that row of seats.

Second, if you are connected to willful facilitation of criminal activity, that's when the fangs really come out, because the criminal with the technical expertise to facilitate is a much rarer thing, and the perfect subject for being made an example of ad a warning to others.

This is why I have repeatedly told anyone who'd listen. Peer-2-Peer payment technologies without control/auditing paired with them will never be tolerated once they are widely known about. Hell, things like World of Warcraft Gold or game currencies have been used as money laundering vehicles long before blockchain, and even they got law enforcement scrutiny from time to time.

Do not publish that which you don't want to eventually run the chance of being held responsible for.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#254

Post by whatisweb3 »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #204
whatisweb3 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a criminal hiring a contractor to work on Tornado Cash. It is an open source project on GitHub that many developers and researchers contributed to, in the interest of privacy. To use an analogy, see the open Matrix protocol, a tool for privacy that can facilitate encrypted communication between criminals.

You seem to believe that if a tool is illegal, as long as it's open source and the people making it don't have a criminal background, and as long as you call it something like "privacy software," somehow it's suddenly not illegal But this is a tool whose specific purpose it is to make it difficult to track illegal transactions. Of course this is happening. Programmers get way too wrapped up in "but I called it open s…

Matrix protocol’s sole purpose is to obscure usernames and messages and enable privacy. Tornado Cash’s sole purpose is to obscure blockchain addresses and enable privacy. Privacy is not a crime. Using Matrix to hire a hit-man would be a crime, but we don’t sanction the Matrix protocol or it’s developers just because it can be used by criminals to obscure their crimes.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#255

Post by seanw444 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #216
biglearner1day wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it is always under the guise of anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism or whatever other reason they can find to excuse their inexcusable actions. Take mass government surveillance for example.

HN in its current avatar would probably cheer on if the Patriot Act was enacted today. Been on this site for a decade. Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.

Yeah when I first discovered this site in like 2017, it seemed to be a place of tech-literate counter-culture folks. Now the counter-culture seems to be non-existent, and actually looked down on.

At this point, the majority of the comments I read sound like a CNN anchor script. Ha, maybe it's their web developers.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#256

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

tokai wrote: post #138
fleddr wrote: post #104

How many people listed in the Panama papers have been arrested? Their assets seized? Fines? Zero. London's "the city" is pretty much one giant laundering operation for Saudi and Russian dirty money. Money laundering, monetary privacy, wealth obfuscation is perfectly fine. It only becomes an issue when it becomes accessible to us simple minded folks too. The urgency to stop this tech really tells the tale. Or in other…

Did you look it up or are you just spouting what ever you can dream up to fit your argument? Lots of people all over the world have been arrested based on the panama papers.

pretty sure the only people who suffered where the execs running the company, losing their yearly bonus,...and only because they embarrassed their overlords.

"In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced that it would cease operations at the end of March due to "irreversible damage" to their image as a direct result of the Panama Papers"

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#257

Post by BobbyJo »

threeseed wrote: post #76
clippablematt wrote: post #60

Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right. Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important. And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers? This…

> rather than going after the people actually committing crimes Actually they go after the people committing the crime AND those facilitating it. > Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right (a) Not a human right, (b) not enshrined in any country's law, (c) does not absolve illegal behaviour.

Privacy is very much enshrined in US law, it's the 4th amendment to our constitution.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#258

Post by seanw444 »

highwaylights wrote: post #98
epolanski wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial privacy is not a human right. Moreover the kind of financial privacy you think of is from other citizens to not know your financial movements, it doesn't apply to nation states for obvious tax reasons and money laundering purposes.

or the purposes of funding terrorism, narcotics, human trafficking, weapons, uranium, endangered wildlife and/or biohazardous material. There's a point at which if you undermine law enforcement enough there's no point in continuing to try to enforce laws, which means there's no point in having laws at all. The hype mob either doesn't see this or doesn't care, which is incredibly naive either way.

Counterpoint: bring back the wild west.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#259

Post by kube-system »

clippablematt wrote: post #60

Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right. Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important. And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers? This…

The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law. Every country recognizes warrants for this reason.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#260

Post by dcolkitt »

A lot of the apologists for this are making arguments along the lines of "being decentralized doesn't make you exempt from the rules" or "imagine if a bank laundered this much money".

The problem is it doesn't make sense to treat protocols like companies. And it definitely doesn't make sense to treat protocol devs as if they were the executives of those companies. The CEO of a bank and the lead dev of a protocol have very very different powers and responsibilities, and we can't just throw our hands up in the air and say "the law's the law, and you gotta follow it" (even when it's literally impossible given the decentralized and autonomous nature of the protocol).

Analogously when joint-stock corporations first entered the scene it required the development of whole new branches of Western law. That law had to be tailored to reflect the realities and nature of joint-stock corporations. What would have been very dumb is simply to pretend like nothing changed and say "same rules apply" and make individual shareholders liable for the action of the corporate entity the same way we're trying to make software devs liable for the action of the decentralized protocol.

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