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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

#311

Post by jcranmer »

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…

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 technologies, they have substantial enough other uses that you are plausibly able to argue that you were ignorant of its use in illegal steps.

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

#312

Post by dogman144 »

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 case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention.

- Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically

- Clifford Stole spent several years being ignored by every govt agency under the Sun, except for CIA, for finding, attributing and then exposing a widespread KGB hack of govt systems in the 80s

- L0pht testified in front of congress to expose significant internet security risks that were otherwise ignored.

I’m not saying Tornado Cash and related devs were doing a purely moral action. But the automatic siding with the heavy hand of govt sanctions on code the govt doesn’t really understand is pretty shameful for a nuanced technical audience.

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

#313

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked?

It looks like it was just the three creators. If they’re smart, this is a prelude to announcing a legal defence fund.

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

#314

Post by toolz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #301
toolz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 Wasn’t aware of that. Fair enough. Innocent people will get harmed. That said, innocent users whose USDC was frozen haven’t lost their money. They’ll have to show they weren’t laundering money. When they do, they should be able get…

> They’ll have to show they weren’t laundering money. When they do, they should be able get it unfrozen.

I hope you're right, but the process to make this happen will be painful and slow and the damages will not be compensated I suspect.

> If you don’t want to run the risk of your stablecoin getting stuck, don’t use mixers. Particularly after they’ve been publicly identified for laundering money.

Following this logic, should people stop using HSBC or any of the top international mega-banks? We're talking about banks that didn't "accidentally" let money laundering happen. They actively facilitated it. HSBC specifically laundered money for one of the most violent cartels in the world and not a soul went to jail.

Bit of a rant, but my point is that exactly where should people keep their money that is safe from being caught up in laundering? Such a place doesn't exist as far as I'm aware.

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

#315

Post by hamburglar »

vel0city wrote: post #276
blagie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An organization doesn't become a monopoly just because they are large. Otherwise you might as well claim McDonalds has a monopoly on food and Nike has a monopoly on shoes. There are tons of competitors to GitHub out there.

And tons of people who don’t use GitHub, despite claims that you have no choice but to use it. It’s been years since I touched it.

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

#316

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tomjen3 wrote: post #269
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> going to open a huge can of worms if you are going to start prosecuting people for software pull requests Tornado is sanctioned, not the underlying code. Contributing to the project is legally tantamount to coding for a North Korean entity. This isn’t a start to anything, it’s established law and practice. Simply pulling shouldn't be a problem. But I can see law enforcement getting a subpoena for a list of accounts…

What would be the legal consequences of forking the project and create a new project with the code? And speaking of code - North Korea has their own os which is essentially a reskinned version of Linux. Does that mean that the US government could go after people who contributed to the Linux project?

> Does that mean that the US government could go after people who contributed to the Linux project?

No. You’re comparing money laundering, which has stricter controls, to exporting software, which doesn’t. (If you knowingly provide support to Pyongyang, probably.)

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

#317

Post by bilekas »

syzygyhack wrote: post #296
bilekas wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You simply can't argue that money laundering isn't rampant on cypto currencies. Actually, I can quite easily argue that. Neither of your sources give evidence or numbers that justify your assertion. In fact, less than 1% of transactions are shown to be illicit activity, and the majority of that is scams, not money laundering. Here's a report from your 2018 source, CipherTrace, only using more recent data: https://c…

I'm not going to be argumentative here, but the last article you referenced. Clearly coinbase would have a bias to promote userbase.

That said :

> Of that small portion, scams make up the overwhelming majority of cryptocurrency related crime.

How do you think those scams will cash out ? Next step - Places like Tornado.

> From 2017 to 2020, criminal economic activity was overwhelmingly conducted through traditional financial institutions.

This is apples and oranges. But a good number to put on paper when promoting a cryptocurrency exchange for sure.

There is just an incomparable amount of traditional fiat currency compared to crypto currency so how someone would even make that argument says a lot.

> Myth #2: More illegal activity takes place using cryptocurrency than with cash.

I have no idea what sincere person would say that myth was true unless it was said as a joke. So no argument there but again, not adding any value. See above comment.

> Myth #3: Cryptocurrency makes it harder for law enforcement to investigate malfeasance.

And the 'Facts' given ignore services like Tornado.cash. Conveniently wouldn't you agree ?

My personal opinion of the CoinBase article is "Shill out of Ten".

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

#318

Post by gunapologist99 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #280
mafuy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagreed. They are de-facto mandatory to use. A former university I was at, for instance, published some required information on facebook. Saying "well, they should not do that" is as correct as it is useless and futile in practice. I believe the information was visible to either all logged-in users or just all visitors, but that still requires facebook to serve the page to me.

You can say this about anything, though. "My university requires us to use Blackboard, therefore it's a de facto monopoly." "My work email account is through Gmail, therefore it's a de facto monopoly." They're still not. If another party requires you to use a service for some reason, that's between you and the other party.

Common carrier is a more useful limit function.

   Common Carrier

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

#319

Post by shkkmo »

whitepaint wrote: post #198
kube-system wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godwin’s Law strikes again. Free git repository hosting is not comparable to the holocaust. If you want some quotes from their website, here’s another: > GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. > This Agr…

> Free git repository hosting is not comparable to the holocaust. Where did I compare it to the holocaust?! I was trying to pinpoint that your previous statement: "They do have a moral obligation to follow the laws of the country they operate in, though." is clearly invalid.

It is possible to have two competing and contradictory moral obligations, that does not mean that either moral obligation ceases to exist. I think "save lives if possible" out weighs "follow the law", but that doesn't mean that the moral obligation to abide by the law goes away. I do think it is often moral to break the law, but it has to be in service to a greater morality.

Your are equating the morality of opposing the Holocaust with the morality of opposing sanctions in that you assert that they both out weigh the moral obligation to follow the law.

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

#320

Post by px43 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #287
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…

> 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…

What if we said "Anyone contributing to *HTTPS* after it became public knowledge that it was used to launder money put themselves at risk." ?

Tornado is a super basic privacy layer that has been used as such for many years for countless legitimate purposes. Transaction privacy is obviously something that is in high demand by the general public, and they have it. Of course criminals might use it too, but doesn't the general public deserve the ability to make transactions without the world watching? The idea of making privacy tech illegal is absolutely outrageous, and it blows my mind that any reasonable person would take any other stance.

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