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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

#121

Post by rurban »

hikingsimulator wrote: post #45
chrischattin wrote: post #17

Any constitutional law experts care to comment? If the US government put pressure on Github to remove the code and delete their accounts, it seems like a clear violation of the developer's first amendment rights – "code is speech" being precedent.

IANAL; even in the USA not all speech is protected under the law. See libel laws. Here it is less about the code as speech, but code as an illegal business and product. It's not an either//or situation. Code is more than just one thing.

Code is never an illegal business. You have to run the code to do an illegal business. In this case running the mixer is apparently illegal (wonder if at all or with just some specific cases), but maintaining and improving the code to run such a mixer certainly not.

crypto wars 2.0

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

#122

Post by whitepaint »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #77

GitHub has the right to do whatever it wants, and it makes sense they would take this action to avoid getting into legal concerns. But it is deeply concerning. Whether or not you like crypto, you should not be supporting this if you are a researcher, academic, technologist, cryptographer, or privacy advocate. The code for Tornado Cash is a series of cryptographic and mathematical functions that can be repurposed for…

Absolutely. Just because it is legal doesn't mean that it is not absolutely morally deplorable. Which in this case - it obviously is.

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

#123

Post by PeterisP »

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #109
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…

I agree with your analysis. Ex post facto criminal laws are barred by the constitution for good reason. Retroactive punishment leaves people guessing what actions might or might not be punished.

Well, Github blocking an account is not considered "punishment" according to criminal law or constitution, only standard contract law would apply and I believe Github has the right to terminate such contracts if they wish.

This consideration would apply if and only if the government would actually pursue criminal charges against someone who contributed to TornadoCash - which they possibly would if someone would do stuff after these sanctions e.g. try to circumvent this GitHub block, make and advertise a replacement service, etc; do not do this if US laws apply to you.

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

#124

Post by jdpedrie »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #69
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…

>2. Motivate people contribute to it, see DigitalOcean hacktoberfest. Can skip this step. Just make fake commits ( https://github.com/asizikov/gang/graphs/contributors ).

Always sign your commits! gpg is a pain but once you set it up you never have to think about it again.

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

#125

Post by nojito »

treesprite82 wrote: post #89
nojito wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's pretty cut and dry.

Cut and dry if the open-source contributors are "blocked persons", but are they? They'd no longer be allowed to contribute to the project, but does someone having contributed in the past mean the sanction on the project extends to their person? Github themselves provided hosting to the project.

Yes it almost certainly does.

Sanctions work because they are virulent.

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

#126

Post by kube-system »

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…

I’m not sure that there’s been a ton of cases exactly like this that have made it to court. If someone asked you to pick between [maybe going to prison] or [definitely not going to prison], which button would you press?

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

#127

Post by PeterisP »

paulgb wrote: post #11
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…

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.

I'm assuming that the problem for Github is that they can't reliably know which of the contributors are "currently part of" TornadoCash and which ones are unrelated people who just contributed code some time ago, and since they absolutely must block the former, in the case of uncertainty the only safe option was to block everyone who seems related.

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

#128

Post by bad416f1f5a2 »

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…

It’s a gray area. These sanctions went against Tornado Cash, the entity. Does that extend to core devs? Anyone who did a PR? That’s the question GH’s counsel has to interpret.

> deletion of accounts seems more like a CYA move than a strict obligation.

Microsoft is prohibited from giving any good or service to a blocked entity. It’s very possible their lawyers will say “the easiest way to meet this obligation is to delete accounts related to the blocked entity.”

The legal system is CYA, after all.

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

#129

Post by zaphar »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #100
zaphar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they aren't. They are sanctioning a software project and service that runs on Blockchains not a protocol.

Tornado Cash is a protocol. It targets EVM, and has been deployed on Ethereum, Optimism, Avalanche, Polygon and other networks. It happens to be open source, the code was mirrored on GitHub for research and contributions. They are setting a precedent that any forks or similar implementations of this protocol will also be sanctioned. A comparison would be sanctioning the Matrix protocol because it facilitates end-to-e…

If the matrix project was run by terrorists then your comparison would be accurate. It is not however. Tornado Cash however is run by a group with the express purpose of money laundering which is a crime. This difference is important and is why they are now sanctioned and Matrix is not.
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