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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

#471

Post by salawat »

ensignavenger wrote: post #417
salawat wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an act of ex-post facto lawmaking by a legislature. This is the executive doing what it has been tasked with doing under a mandate supplied by Congress in accordance with it's role as laid out by the Constitution. The Courts are not likely to be swayed by this argument. I doubt the legislature will touch anything that enables money laundering with a 12 foot pole. The novelty here is that prople are being…

I was not making an argument in front of courts, I was stating why many Americans may find this action distasteful. As far as I can tell, the executive branch was not mandated to delete anyone who contribted to/was a "member" of the github tornado dev group.

The executive was mandated to produce a list of individuals that can be consumed in oan actionable way by industry, such that it can prevent access to the U.S. financial system.

It did exactly that.

These companies got that list, their legal, risk, and compliance departments got in a huddle, and they laid out an action plan to try to get ahead of the regulatory action, while minimizing any risk of contamination or liability.

The government did not tell them to do that. Note, this is by design. The government telling them to would be unconstitutional. Rather, they acted in their own way, which to them rang as reasonable.

That is how it rolls. Is it fair? No. Is it right? Arguably not. Is it concerning? Hell yes.

It is what it is though.

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

#472

Post by meltyness »

throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #278
meltyness wrote: post #15

This is an overreach, and it is going to backfire. The target here is a software package, essentially speech so, one step down That hill. At least congress isn't deluded, corrupt, and senile enough to try this. Edit: further, it seems they're going to have to shut down Ethereum too, because Tornado Cash's contract is a person, and subgroup of Ethereum under the definition of entity which falls under the definition of…

>and it is going to backfire it isn't. the sheep have been bleating "corporations can do whatever they want" for 10 years now. the pigs will be fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32399495 it's backfiring already!

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

#473

Post by crunchatized »

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…

The phrase 'according to the treasury' and Ctrl-V are doing a lot of work there. The government says a lot of things. The other day the Secretary of State claimed Tornado Cash was a DPRK sponsored hacking group before deleting the tweet. Not everyone in authority has a real great understanding of the technology involved.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220808155413/https://twitter.c...

> We are talking about an entity that according to the treasury has laundered more than 7 Billion USD, assisted criminals and neglected complying to...(AML/CFT) obligations willingly and repeatedly.

The Tornado Cash mixer contracts have been immutable since May 2020. It's a dumb piece of software that can't be modified or upgraded. Its authors have no control over who uses it on the blockchain.

https://tornado-cash.medium.com/tornado-cash-is-finally-trus...

It's kind of a strange accusation to say that someone has 'willingly and repeatedly' neglected to comply with legal obligations by failing to do something that's technically impossible to accomplish. All the GitHub users did was write code, and simply writing code, while not executing it to do something illegal, seems like it would be pretty well protected by the First Amendment, since code is speech. Turning people's lives to shit over what a software tool they invented gets used for later, after it's completely out of their hands, is pretty wild.

You copied and pasted Brian E. Nelson's complaint:

> Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks.

But what Nelson fails to mention is that a) everyone involved has failed to impose 'effective' controls because it's physically impossible for anyone to, and b) basic measures to block sanctioned entities were actually implemented by the operators of the Tornado Cash website (which just got added to the SDN list anyway). So the complaint is that the control measure in place isn't an 'effective' control measure against entities that don't use the website.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/15/tornado-cash-adds-c...

And not that the exact number matters, but the Treasury is alleging an obviously maximally exaggerated amount of money laundering. $7 billion is the total value of deposits into Tornado Cash over all time. For that to be $7 billion laundered, 100% of all deposits, ever, put into the mixer would have to have come from illegal sources, which is obviously false. Depositing legally earned money into a privacy smart contract isn't money laundering. A sizeable portion of deposits are illicit, but far from a majority.

>Since becoming active in August 2019, Tornado Cash has received over $7.6 billion worth of Ethereum, a sizable portion of which have come from illicit or high-risk sources.

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/tornado-cash-ofac-desig...

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

#474

Post by sneak »

Bedon292 wrote: post #326
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…

I think its important to make a distinction between GitHub attempting to ensure they are in legal compliance with a sanction and approving of the sanction happening at all. You can disagree with the sanction while still being understanding of GitHub trying to cut ties with the sanctioned entity. Or be critical of them being heavy handed in their compliance but agree with the sanction in general.

> still being understanding of GitHub trying to cut ties with the sanctioned entity

What is the name of this sanctioned entity that GitHub supposedly cut ties with?

You'll note that none of the developers who had their accounts suspended were themselves sanctioned.

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

#475

Post by crunchatized »

Nursie wrote: post #283
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…

Tornado is specifically run to obscure cash flows, something which is specifically illegal. This equivocation is as saddening as it is predictable.

>to obscure cash flows, something which is specifically illegal.

It's only illegal under 18 U.S. Code § 1956 to conduct transactions to obscure the source of "the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity." There's no law against obscuring the sources of cash flows in general. And on an otherwise completely public blockchain, there was a major use case for obfuscating flows for the sake of user privacy.

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

#476

Post by andrekandre »

blagie wrote: post #449
jakelazaroff wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's between you and the maintainers of those projects. You can contribute to different projects, or they can use a different forge. Your argument is basically "GitHub shouldn't be allowed to deny me service because I want to use it," but you're not entitled to something just because you want it.

The reason we have antitrust regulations is because the world ended up in a very bad place without them. This: "GitHub shouldn't be allowed to deny me service because I want to use it" isn't a fair paraphrasing of my argument. I don't think it's likely that github would ban me specifically. My argument is Microsoft (and Google, Facebook, etc.) shouldn't be allowed to cancel/bankrupt/ostracize competitors, critics, po…

  > Antitrust hasn't kept up with technology.
im not sure its so much a technology issue as much as an ideology shift...?

(a.k.a robert bork and the "its not consumer harm if prices keep going down" school of thought with regard to anti-trust)

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

#477

Post by subjectsigma »

orangeoxidation wrote: post #459
subjectsigma wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Let's step back for a second because we are losing focus. The original Twitter thread had people claiming that Tornado could not be removed from GitHub because it is protected constitutionally. My original comment was pointing out that this is not even remotely true. I think we can agree on that?

Second, and this is just my opinion, but if I had to make two sets with the nouns 'book', 'poem', 'manual', 'hammer', 'jacket', and 'program', the partitions would be thus: book and poem would be together, with manual, hammer, jacket, and program in the other category. I'm having trouble describing it but in my mind the purpose of the first category is to communicate an idea (speech) whereas the purpose of the second is to enact a reality (tools). A program doesn't express something specifically human any more than a toroid, or the wave equation, or a chemical bond, but a poem about love certainly does.

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

#478

Post by blagie »

andrekandre wrote: post #476
blagie wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason we have antitrust regulations is because the world ended up in a very bad place without them. This: "GitHub shouldn't be allowed to deny me service because I want to use it" isn't a fair paraphrasing of my argument. I don't think it's likely that github would ban me specifically. My argument is Microsoft (and Google, Facebook, etc.) shouldn't be allowed to cancel/bankrupt/ostracize competitors, critics, po…

> Antitrust hasn't kept up with technology. im not sure its so much a technology issue as much as an ideology shift...? (a.k.a robert bork and the "its not consumer harm if prices keep going down" school of thought with regard to anti-trust)

It's very much technology.

With Standard Oil, prices didn't go down, except in the very short term. Monopoly can seek out higher profits once monopoly is obtained.

The pricing of LinkedIn, of dating web sites (almost all now owned by match.com), and of many other services is astronomically high, mostly because they can.

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

#479

Post by clucas »

rwiggum wrote: post #461
clucas wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. Here's an analogy: Is it hypocritical to say "we shouldn't punish people who sell marijuana," but also say "we should punish people who sell heroin?" Maybe you disagree with the person's preference for what should be punished, but saying "we should punish this behavior but not that behavior" doesn't make a person a hypocrite.

Free speech is free speech though. Either it's free or it's not free. You are arguing for "not free". I am not a fan of that ideology. This isn't shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre. This is restricting access to speech (code) simply because the gov doesn't approve of what the code does.

Let's say we, as a nation, through our elected representatives, decide to pass a law against trojans. Then let's say there's a site hosting a trojan repo, open to the public, and they refuse law enforcement's demands to remove access to the code. So the FBI goes through the court and gets a warrant to seize the site and prevents access to the code.

Would you stop the above chain of events at the very first link? Would you say: "We can't ban trojans because it's code, and code is speech, and speech is either free or its not?"

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

#480

Post by 8note »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #425
jakelazaroff wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the energy critique is that it's being wasted on something either useless or deleterious. You can argue with that take, but all you're doing with the "but what about dishwashers?!" response is asking them to pass a moral judgment on dishwashers, which isn't relevant to this discussion. Also, Ethereum has been "soon to be env-friendly PoS" for years now. Let's revisit that if and when it actually ha…

Cryptocurrencies are our only counter yet against the abuses of the financial system by the governments. In some countries this abuse is only potential, on others - already very real. In a country where a dictator can make you starve with a snap of the fingers, cryptocurrencies are vital to survival. So even 10x more energy 'wasted' on such an indespensable service would still be a bargain I'd take.

Protecting the wealthy from the government isn't exactly a cause many want to fight for. Using the government to reign in the wealthy is much more popular

In a country where a dictator can make you starve with the snap of the finger, what are you going to do, eat your virtual coins from your jail cell? Technology is notably not a solution to social problems

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