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 is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control. They hate the idea of bitcoin and eth not being $ or €. The large majority of money laundering happens through banks, who just pay a fine and sweep it under the rug.
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 like... if two dozen people were picketing outside of a big corporation, and the police came and arrested one dude. You would be the guy saying "they're coming for the protesters!" and I'm the guy saying "Well, if they're really after protesters why didn't they arrest all of them? And isn't that the guy they were investigating for a bank robbery?"
Defending literally every crypto guy is short-sighted if you're a true proponent of the tech. It's possible that there are bad people involved in crypto, and you'll be a lot more credible as an advocate if you acknowledge that possibility and wait for the facts.
> 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?
Because the standard playbook for "cracking down" is to first win cases against the least sympathetic, most prosecutable targets. Once that's under your belt, you gradually expand outwards to increasingly ordinary people. It's why slippery slope is such a big deal in civil liberties and constitutional law.
When drug prohibition started, they started by arresting kingpin gangstas not students with dime bags. As abortion laws restart, states won't begin by arresting anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood. But if left unchecked, some will eventually get there.
Then the community needs to be better about self-policing. If there are people in your group doing shady shit with your group's tech, then get rid of them. Otherwise, you start sounding like the police with "bad apples" but not all are bullshit. If you see someone doing wrong and don't sound the alarm, then you are part of the problem.
> As abortion laws restart, states won't begin by arresting anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood. But if left unchecked, some will eventually get there.
First thing, you can't arrest people for prior donations as postfacto laws are unconstitutional.
Second, if abortion is considered murder, why should it be legal to fund illegal abortions? We generally don't allow people to fund criminal activity for good reasons.
Do you think it should be legal to donate to criminal organizations?
TLDR: You have no rights in America other than the ones you can afford to pay a lawyer to force to be enforced.
Dude, as someone in the system, ex post facto happens all the time. In my case I can challenge it, but if I get slapped with lets say a completely 'theoretical' $5000 ex post facto "fine" it's going to cost more in lawyers to challenge, plus piss off my judge/PO for wasting time. As someone who can't get a job due to my record and can't afford a lawyer I have 'access' to the court for remedy, but I don't have access to a lawyer for remedy. The Constitution and our government are two different things.
If something gets ruled unconstitutional, that doesn't suddenly free prisoners in the USA. Each prisoner needs to then challenge their conviction in court, and get past the high procedural bar (as a Fed prisoner, do you submit to the circuit in which you are now unconstitutionally imprisoned, or the circuit that convicted you unconstitutionally? Depends on the argument you are making, either could be right or wrong. Pick the wrong one and you waste three months minimum (so much for speeding trial, that only applies to your initial trial according the the supreme court) for the court to come back and say 'they don't have jurisdiction'. Not forward to the correct court, just denied for lack of jurisdiction. For you challenging something already found unconstitutional that should just be immediate release upon Supreme Court ruling. And don't forget, you have a time limit to challenge something found unconstitutional. You took too long? To bad, you're now stuck in prison for something found unconstitutional because you didn't understand your rights and navigate the bar placed in the form of the court system in a timely), nevermind hurdles placed in prison (mailroom only open from this time to this time, mail room not certifying your mail or 'losing' it, law library copyers broken, commissary 'out' of law library typewriter ribbons for sale), etc. If the Constitution was law, those people held unconstitutionally would be released upon Supreme Court findings. The fact they aren't and can be kept in prison for 'taking to long' to challenge their Supreme Court determined unconstitutional conviction shows the Constitution is just a 'guideline' in the USA.
Caveat needed here: This does not apply if you took a plea for lesser time instead of accepting the 'trial tax' (which normally quadrupoles your sentence from say 2-7 years to 20-40) which removes your constitutional right as you agree "not to make any collateral attacks on your sentence" in the plea agreement in addition to your right to trial.
(Yes the higher courts will probably override this but most guys give up when the district rejects them. It's scary as hell challenging the prosecutor/judge on your own from prison, dealing with the harassment from the mailroom cops, one out of maybe every 4 months being able to buy new typewriter ribbons in commissary, copiers down, high copier fees. The entire process is designed to discourage you from pursuing your rights.)
The system shouldn't work like insurance claim submissions that if you fight long enough/hard enough or can pay someone to fight for you ultimately grudgingly your constitutional rights are recognized. Remember, China's constitution includes democracy and free speech too, but just like our rights they enacted 'reasonable rules that happen to be barriers to those rights as an unfortunate side effect'.
I did above. Fees/assessments that were not part of your sentence get added/imposed after the fact. The sentencing guidelines get changed AFTER what you are sentenced for occured, yet you are sentenced to the 'new' sentencing guidelines sentence, not the sentence that was called for at the time of your offense. There is a whole legal class called 'collateral consequences' that are punishments it would be inconvenient to be called punishments. They are instead 'collateral consequences' that don't fall under ex post facto and are then 'legal' to apply after the fact. Imagine that, an entire type of punishment defined as not a punishment to skirt the Constitution. The courts don't see the constitution as their guiding principle, but as bugs to try find workarounds for.
> Second, if abortion is considered murder, why should it be legal to fund illegal abortions? We generally don't allow people to fund criminal activity for good reasons.
Because it's not murder. Legislating that it is does not make it so. Full stop. That's like a government trying to legislate that the sky must always be blue, or that it's illegal to frown, or that 2+2=5. Just because it's a law does not make it just or sensible, and I would hope that in modern society we would not blindly obey unjust/unnecessary/unwelcome laws without questioning.
Murder is a legal category, it can be whatever we define it to be, so if legislation makes abortion murder then it is.
Is it intentionally ending the life of a human being? Well, what life, what is a human being?
It's intentionally terminating a pregnancy? Yes. Is that bad? Well, if the would-be-mother doesn't want it it's definitely bad, and if the would-be-mother wants it then it definitely seems cruel to not do it, but when society tries to impose whatever morals on these people the arguments start to look very silly very soon.
The main argument against abortion is a strange begging the question fallacy mixed with consequentialism: if the abortion would not happen then things would go great and a human would born (the implied assumption is that it's somehow unquestionably good).
“If legislation makes abortion murder then it is.”
I fundamentally disagree. You objectively cannot “kill” something that is not “alive”. That is just a fact of life itself. A government can legislate all they want, but it does not make an unborn fetus any more alive. And thus any law rooted in this idea is fundamentally absurd, preposterous, and so downright stupid that on the principle alone (aside from the many others) any such ban shouldn’t be followed.
To entertain the idea that government can legislate whatever it wants is to imply that a government can dictate the laws of physics. It’s just nonsensical.
I understand your argument, but (IMHO) it just causes confusion if you try to apply common sense to legal statutes and concepts. (Yes, sure politically one can argue that there's a difference between waiting for someone and running them over intentionally with a car and between abortion, but at the same time others are free to disagree. There's no objective framework for this.)
The fetus is alive. It's a bunch of cells. There's a causal interaction to remove it from the host which makes it a bunch of dead cells.
Legislatig physics is stupid, but what if some state said by law which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one? Stupid, but not much different than building codes. Or say that prions are alive and can run for office... stupid, but there used to be a lot of absurd laws. (If someone works on Saturday they shall be put to death. Sure, what's work? And then there are many many many interpretations of what's work.)
Sure, the government might make it illegal to donate to Planned Parenthood in the future but per the constitution they can't make prior donations illegal.
The sentencing guidelines (which direct the sentence a judge will give you) get changed ex post facto all the f'ing time. So yes, you can be given an ex-post facto sentence, it's just that it's been 'lawyered' to be constitutional (we didn't change the criminal law, just the sentencing guideline that dictated the sentence you were given for commiting the crime) even though the rule is 'Every law that makes criminal an act that was innocent when done, or that inflicts a greater punishment than the law annexed to the crime when committed, is an ex post facto law within the prohibition of the Constitution'.
The sentencing range wasn't changed, just the sentence the judge was required to give, but the range isn't a rule so it's ok. And if the judge sentences outside the guideline the prosecutor can challenge for 'sentence outside guideline range'. The constitution has been lawyered into oblivion.
Unless you find that abortion was never legal because the state statute on "murder" is vague. For instance, if the court re-interprets a murder statute then I believe that would apply to prior cases and then prior donations to any establishment assisting in abortion could be pursued as conspiracy.
There's a lot of room to re-interpret laws that were already on the books in ways that make prior "crimes" illegal today when they wouldn't have been interpreted that way when they happened.
There's other things that can be done as well, like searching their residence for every single code violation possible, daily police visits, civil asset forfeiture, fine-comb tax auditing, etc. It's a pretty well oiled machine for finding ways to convict people or make their life hell through the legal system if that's the goal.
That's not how our constitution works. Roe v Wade is binding for any actions a person carries out before it got overturned in Dobbs.
Even if a court ruling or legal interpretation gets overturned later, that doesn't allow you to prosecute people who were relying on that legal interpretation.
Judges aren't mindless machines and they realize the importance of avoiding postfacto prosecutions.
You have more faith in judges than I do. I've seen judges act as mindless machines.
and below still stands:
>There's other things that can be done as well, like searching their residence for every single code violation possible, daily police visits, civil asset forfeiture, fine-comb tax auditing, etc. It's a pretty well oiled machine for finding ways to convict people or make their life hell through the legal system if that's the goal.
If the powers that be want to punish those who contribute to abortion, they will find a way to do it, even ex-post-facto.
You're right, I should have said if the powers that be want to punish those who they find out contributed to abortion. I thought that was obvious, but leave it to HN for me to actually have to explain if privacy and crypto prevents a regime from finding out someone has it, then they won't be able to punish them for it (although of course they could always punish for the mere possibility, just as a totalitarian regime could execute their whole populace).
Personhood is a prerequisite to murder. No jurisdiction has granted this to the unborn, but it's an interesting thought experiment if some chose to: thinking up "unforeseen" second- and third-order effects is a fun exercise (life insurance, HOV lanes, tax deductions, censuses & electoral maps, broken websites which assume all persons have names, birthdates in the future, null birthdays on death certificates)
Various states already prohibit using public money to fund abortions, a prohibition on private funds for an act they consider extremely illegal and equivalent to murder is not a stretch.
"12 states prohibit state family planning funds from going to any entity that provides abortions."
If the state law says so, yes, you could get an out-of-state charge for providing financial aid to an abortion operation after contributing to an organization that funds them. With Roe v Wade gone, I am not sure there is a federal precedent for how to handle crimes relating to committing a murder in one state that is not considered a murder in another state.
If planned parenthood isn't performing any abortions in a state where it is illegal, how could funding them ever be made illegal? None of this makes sense.
People from illegal states already cross state lines to get abortions and then return to their home states. While it's not presently illegal, without Roe v Wade, I think that may quickly change.
> No state has yet enacted a law to ban this travel. But it has been attempted: In Missouri, a bill is pending that would enforce abortion restrictions through civil lawsuits if the abortion is administered outside the state.
> enforce abortion restrictions through civil lawsuits
I wonder how long it will be before SCOTUS kills off these attempts to use civil litigation to end-run the Constitution. The Texas law matched the court's ideology, so they let it stand, but now that Roe is overturned I expect the court to dispense with the law before places like California can use it to render the 2A moot.
If they let this continue, the court will become irrelevant in a hurry. They may have granted themselves sweeping authority a long while back, but that can be changed easily via legislation.
You can prohibit public money for any reason - and we do all the time, eg forcing the state to buy only US made cars.
You can't prohibit private money use in a situation like this - especially not for a political funding thing. That is actually a freedom of speech issue.
Usually when there’s an ongoing investigation the default is for police to not release too much information to avoid jeopardising the investigation, then release all the info when the investigation is complete. It’s frustrating and often a principle that’s applied too broadly, but I do understand the reasoning behind it.
> I agree they usually withhold details of the case. But I don't think they would flat-out lie about the charges being brought.
“With suspected ties to X“ isn't necessarily an element of the charges being brought. And the police can and do lie (or state “suspicion” on a very flimsy basis) when making public announcements related to arrests, and headlines often credulously repeat police spin rather than being grounded in facts.
While this tends to get the most attention (and still then not enough for the press to change) around police spin and media coverage related to police shootings, it is true far beyond that.
> But I don't think they would flat-out lie about the charges being brought.
I dunno, there's a pretty big trend going on right now of producing tv shows / prodcasts about how ineffective (with a strong hint of incompentence) cops can be.
“On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash”
So the suspicion is that he didn’t only develop the tool, but was involved in its illegal use, too.
> It would be like... if two dozen people were picketing outside of a big corporation, and the police came and arrested one dude. You would be the guy saying "they're coming for the protesters!" and I'm the guy saying "Well, if they're really after protesters why didn't they arrest all of them? And isn't that the guy they were investigating for a bank robbery?"
Weird take because taking one or a few persons out of a large crowd is a standard LE tactic for attacking protests and similar stuff.
OK, fine, change the example to... imagine there are a hundred restaurants in town, and the police come and arrest one restaurant owner. OP is the guy saying "they're coming for the restaurant owners!" and I'm the guy saying "Well..." etc.
My point is, there are a lot of people on HN who seem to think any arrest or prosecution of anyone who is involved in crypto is due to a shadowy push by the establishment to maintain control of the money supply and thus our lives. I'm trying to point out (1) there are simpler explanations, and (2) if you keep trying to defend everyone involved in crypto without knowing the facts, you're going to get burned and normies are going to be a lot more skeptical about crypto in the future. Just... be careful, guys.
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 laundering. It matters not to me who the “bad people” may be.
> I do not think arresting developers is an effective solution for preventing money laundering.
You're essentially reducing his role to "Just a developer" while ignoring that he might be a lot more than just a developer and might be involved with actual money laundering at many different stages of the process other than "Just writing a little bit of code".
Im not defending one side or the other, just pointing out that by ignoring everything else and calling him "Just a developer" you're not being objective.
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.
The 'compare and contrast' case is that of not a single HSBC employee or executive being arrested for helping the Sinaloa drug cartel launder over $2 billion in profits.
> "Across the world, HSBC likes to sell itself as ‘the world’s local bank,’ the friendly face of corporate and personal finance. And yet, a decade ago, the same bank was hit with a record U.S. fine of $1.9 billion for facilitating money laundering for ‘drug kingpins and rogue nations.’"
> 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
This isn't a simpler explanation than the even simpler one that goverments have decided that cracking down on crypto is a good idea for a wide variety of reasons, and are executing on this decision. The way governments do this kind of thing is by starting to prosecute people who they think they have the best chance of willing a case against. This doesn't mean the case, ultimately, has merit, just that they've decided it's the most likely success.
Because he was working on something specialized, where he was in effect a supplier to a single customer. Thus, he's turned into a ready scapegoat.
You can't easily scapegoat someone if their pieces of code (or ideas) are also used, say, in every browser for securing connections, or whatever.
If you're closer than arm's length from some people who are engaging in criminal activity, an in particular doing exclusive work for them, you are prosecutable.
It could be the first of many. Up until yesterday we lived in a world (by which I mean the Western World) where no one had ever been arrested just for writing open source code. It appears that this is no longer the case. This is how the Overton window gets moved, one step at a time, not in huge leaps. And clearly there are powerful forces interested in moving it in a direction that would likely be detrimental to many of us here.
How do you know that this guy was arrested "just for writing open source code?"
The whole point of my comment was that he was probably arrested for more than that... Or at least, we should wait to see what the evidence against the guy is.
If you go around saying "the sky is falling! they're coming for the developers!" then it turns out the guy was actually doing bad stuff to help launder money, you're going to make it that much harder to get people's attention when there is an actual abuse of police power.
> How do you know that this guy was arrested "just for writing open source code?"
I don't know that, but that currently appears to be the case and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
EDIT: The title of the page is "Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash". So they are certainly making it appear that they consider having developed Tornado Cash to itself be worthy of arrest.
The article doesn't actually say he was arrested for being the developer of Tornado Cash. It might be trying to imply that (or offer an explanation of what the connection is between the arrest and the investigation into Tornado Cash). All the article asserts is that he is suspected to be the developer of Tornado Cash, and that he was arrested "[under suspicion] of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering" via Tornado Cash. That could (and likely does) mean that he was involved in far more than just development.
I work in AML/BSA, they want it under their control. Higher ups talk about how banks shouldn't necessarily cut off (derisk) customers they think are breaking the law because then they can't keep tabs on them.
Banks and financial institutions are happily privatizing Big Brother.
> Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering
I have questions: did money laundering happen on the platform? Did the developer financially benefit from the money laundering? If the answer to both is "yes", then it sounds like the developer could be in a world of trouble, which is not related to crypto.
If I build a picture-sharing board with no moderation, and I profit from illegal pictures being shared, I would be in trouble for facilitating crime, that doesn't go away because I implement the picture-sharing on a blockchain. Using crypto to implement any system doesn't make it kosher: as far as the law is concerned,a system is what it does, not how it does it.
Exactly. I understand the sentiment that people are sharing around, "They're just being arrested for writing code!", but intent matters. And it seems like, in this case, there may have actually been intent to develop this to assist with illegal activities.
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.
So we're all suppose to become techno-anarchists? HN has a great balance of both, it's just mostly the crypto-obsessed that decry government encroachment because they're still struggling to find a useful purpose for the technology before they get regulated.
It's one thing to be a techno-anarchist and it's another thing to be reasonably skeptical about government and what it considers "justice" and the ramifications of that "justice".
The way the government has been approaching cryptography and privacy in general is very much "throw the baby out with the bath water, we don't need it". What is happening in the financial privacy space (i.e. developments in crypto) should be alarming to anyone who believes in democracy, in my opinion.
Financial privacy has little to do with democracy and at the extreme would be its antithesis. Absolute financial privacy would mean that moneyed interests could quietly buy any legislation they want and the public would be none the wiser because the funding/bribe would be untraceable and unknowable. See Citizens United[1] for an example of how extending human rights to money has negative consequences for democratic society.
Edit: I don't get why financial privacy is consistenly presented as a win for the "little guy" against "the man". The "little guy" spends most of his money on necessities and pays moderate to low taxes relative to other parts of society. The parties standing to win the most in a world where any transactions can easily be kept private are those that wield a lot of money, a lot of power, or both. Consider Nancy Pelosi's insider trading and how hard it would be to discover/prove if those transactions could be kept private.
Escaping government encroachment is literally the purpose of the technology. It needs no other purpose.
The thing is, most people here don’t think that escaping government encroachment is a worthwhile endeavor. Which is pretty much the antithesis of the word “hacker”
> Escaping government encroachment is literally the purpose of the technology.
You are assuming that the government is tech-illiterate/tech avoidant. As it stands, several US government agencies are way ahead of civilians on tech, and not for the purposes of escaping the government. Technology is just a tool, it can be used to further any end the wielder chooses
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.
The greater the threat which a community represents to the vested control hierarchy, the more intensely it becomes infiltrated and coopted. This is an Iron Law.
One thing to recognize is that HN has had an influx of new users that are pretty right wing, at times using veiled far right speech. Years ago, it was filled with people who had stock very left wing (at times ridiculous) views that I wouldn't call "counter-culture" either. I only know this because I've had to report many of them.
My hypothesis is that each of these groups come here after being kicked out or pushed out of wherever they usually hang out. The ones that remain on HN after a period of time are the ones that dang doesn't wear out via moderation or haven't been outright banned. They eventually learn to be good HN members and then stay.
> HN in its current avatar would probably cheer on if the Patriot Act was enacted today.
No.
> Been on this site for a decade. Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.
Probably because you disagree with tech/gov right now. It's really a case of "the leopard ate my face." HN has a long history of supporting "Big Tech." The issue is, you don't like how big tech is using it's power now, but were fine with it using that power years ago.
> Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.
It's always been that way. You just refused to see it because it aligned with your views.
The UN disagrees.
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks". [0]
You can argue what the right to privacy means and the limitations of that freedom in respect of non-arbitrary interference are acceptable, but to claim privacy is not a human right is simply incorrect.
> Although not legally binding, the contents of the UDHR have been elaborated and incorporated into subsequent international treaties, regional human rights instruments, and national constitutions and legal codes.
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1948, Article 12: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 1966, Article 1: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honor or reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Ageism here is unwarranted. I'd assume there are now more 40something years olds keeping the traditional hacker values (before "hacker" became to mean "dude stealing money from gullible strangers over the internet") than there are 20something years olds. Because they actually might have been the part of that old hacker culture (not sure if it even exists now?). Now even in the best tech schools they'd probably teach you the most important thing on the internet (after the adtech of course) is to make AIs to ban "hate speech" and "misinformation". And if the independent hacker culture still exists, it's certainly not easy to find among the noise.
I think you may mistake the individuals for the whole. HN as a social center can be corrupted and coopted without any of the original individuals changing their behaviors, simply by adding more individuals with different behaviors. If by "they" you mean the individuals, your statement would then be incorrect, while if you mean the community gestalt, it would be correct.
Strange how the NSA can just skate through this. Then again, the US Constitution also says "All men are created equal" and that was a bunch of horseshit for centuries.
> Actually they go after the people committing the crime AND those facilitating it.
But only if it is in their interest. We don't see other services and platforms sanctioned for facilitating illegal activity. Furthermore, the Data Protection Directive does give users the (human!) right to privacy, considering that crypto isn't a currency, it's merely your private data which is also protected by GDPR.
You are cherry picking part of my comment and reducing it to absurdity. Obviously any implementation needs to be more nuanced than a single sentence generalization. I mentioned warrants for a reason!
No, that's not what they said. They said if you are using it to break laws, then you can't not expect to be arrested.
A money laundering operation can hardly been seen as fundamentally a way to provide privacy but as a way to change dirty money into clean. It's like claiming that an illegal brothel provides employment services as well as anything dodgy that people might use it for!
It absolutely protects your privacy in a system where the movement of money is public. Donations to politically sensitive organizations can be used against you, this technology limits that possibility, just as the traditional banking system does not make your transactions public. Many places in the world people do not enjoy your privilege of immunity from state violence due to support for activism.
Nobody said it didn't protect privacy. Obviously, that is the technology's function.
Above, we were talking about whether one has a right to that privacy. That right is observed differently by location, but it is commonly accepted to have at least some exceptions.
Nobody has said it is not a privacy tool. It is a privacy tool that has documented use in money laundering. Building tools is generally legal, using them to commit crimes is something different. The developer here is not accused of building privacy tools, they are accused of knowingly being in on the money laundering and profiting from it.
It's not clear from their vague, weasely language whether they're accusing him of any involvement beyond building the privacy tool. If they had any evidence of that, presumably they would have said so.
> suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering
Of course; what I'm suggesting is that they would have simply used less ambiguous language like "working with" or "providing support to". Their weasely language suggests that they need plausible deniability because their insinuations may turn out to be baseless.
The local mob-owned laundromat is also a privacy tool. Both are meant to hide the provenance of money from others. What's the difference besides the implementation details?
The difference is that one provides privacy exclusively to money launderers, while the other is a generic tool which anyone can use to obtain financial privacy.
> The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law.
Sufficiently good use of sufficiently good privacy technology would make this judgement impossible. What happens then? Good luck not becoming a police state.
You might be able to encrypt some information associated with a crime, but you can't encrypt the real world manifestation of crime. https://xkcd.com/538/
The comic proves the parent's point. Drugging and hitting people with a wrench (i.e. torturing) to extract information is exactly what police states do.
The comic has a non-literal meaning as well. (i.e. see the alt-text) The wrench can be a warrant, a confidential informant, or it can be a security camera, etc. Obviously, the world consists of more sources of information than encrypted data on your laptop and the information inside of your head.
Crimes happen in the real world, not behind a cipher. Some element of any crime is unencrypted and unencryptable.
I have to disagree with the alt-text. (For me it says, "In actual reality, nobody cares about his secrets.") It's flippant and out of touch. Because somebody does care about his secrets, otherwise mass surveillance wouldn't have reached totalitarian levels along with privacy becoming increasingly criminalized. So the more resource-intensive using the "wrench" is, the more privacy is protected.
Except the Seychelles. There is a reason why dirty money and shell companies make the Seychelles their home as well as the wealthy elites mentioned in the Pandora Papers.
Technically correct, I was just supporting my argument with evidence. The UDHR also doesn't recognize a right to absolute privacy. They only recognize a right to be free from arbitrary interference with privacy. The idea that privacy is absolute and has no exceptions is very extremist, and not really supported by anyone other than absolutist internet commenters.
You've obviously never heard of the Fifth Amendment. It's actually quite the opposite, the Constitution enhances your right to privacy (by refusing to talk about something) when doing so could be used to prosecute you for a crime.
The 5th doesn't give you privacy to anything outside of your thoughts inside your head, which isn't related to anything being discussed here. Everything else in the US is covered by the 4th.
Wrong. For example courts have consistently ruled that you can’t be compelled to unlock your phone or decrypt your hard disk if you’re invoking the 5th
That is a perfect example of how my statement is 100% correct. (many/most) Courts in the US have ruled that you can't be compelled to provide a decryption key only when it is, as I said:
> inside your head
If it is written down, biometric, etc it does not get protection under the 5th. Those realms are not inside your head, and so they are protected by the 4th, and subject to warrant.
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.
Financial privacy is definitely a right. The question is whether that right is respected by any given institution. Since it is against the interests of existing institutions to do so, they will not unless compelled by a greater force. Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights .
(Tornado cash, like most mixers, leaves too many loopholes in its contract to be proof against a concerted attack in typical practical applications - they usually leak too much partial information.)
Unless you prove it is, it's not. It's not encoded in the UN's human rights charter, nor in pretty much any legal system out there.
Governments should protect you from other individuals accessing your financials except the government itself, but that's it.
> Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights.
I am absolutely against the use of "cryptography" (which by the way any transaction system uses) and cryptocurrencies as there is one and only one purpose for such a thing: tax evasion and money laundering. There's literally no other purpose except far fetched arguments.
I've honestly given up believing in anything like rights. Everybody seems to have different opinions on what they are, and they never seem to match up with what governments actually do. I'm not sure it's actually a useful word.
Authors who have given robust analytical treatments of rights include Rawls, Habermas, and Kant.
I think the concept is at least useful if you want to protect a right. Without it, in practice, it would be much more difficult to defend against the controlling capacity of raw force.
This is a baseless, so I think you're making a bad assumption. Finance is opaque at a low level because of arbitrage and physical trade, but it's the belief that the physical world dictates social rights (which are moral at the core, so let me know if you want to jump to morality?) is simply incorrect.
What's more, I think that the default position that finance should be private actively hurts society in innumerable ways. Unfortunately, without it, capitalism immediately breaks down into monopolies. So we live in the happy middle, as with many things, suffering the inevitable (corruption, blackmail, etc).
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.
In my capacity of unofficial spokesperson for the hype mob, I would say that if a tool can be created that has legitimate and nonlegitimate purposes, criminalizing its creation or possession is the worst possible action to take, because it ensures that all talented people who are interested in developing it for legitimate purposes become disaffected at worst or aligned with your enemies at best. Setting aside the moral argument, the NSA's treatment of Snowden, Manning, et al. makes it much more difficult for the NSA to attract the best talent in its field.
> criminalizing its creation or possession is the worst possible action to take
Sure. That’s not what’s happening.
Tornado was used illegally. Its leadership kept developing it, kept getting paid, and made no apparent course corrections. This wasn’t simply a GitHub repo; it was a remunerated enterprise.
When I’ve brought up the legal issues around mixers, a common response involves the impossibility of governments to enforce their Will on blockchains. If these guys messaged similarly they’re justifiably boned.
Justifiable by what, exactly? International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on. Is the argument that every government should have an unchecked ability to enforce its will on the medium of exchange?
> International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on
Do we have such a money supply? If not, do we have international trade? Is the world not multipolar?
This claim fails on face value. Most of history was multipolar, international trading and reliant on money states de facto controlled. (You’re not moving tonnes of gold without the state’s permission and not being chased by them.)
An argument could be made that the US stopped being the arbiter of last resort wrt the medium of trade since the Ukraine war, but before that point, it was certainly not multipolar. There was one political entity that, along with its allies, controlled the value of money, and they were disincentivised from cheating too hard by the fact that they could dictate terms to the rest of the world if it was important enough to them.
But I grant you, heavily-guarded ships full of physical gold would still work today. If that's a future you're on board with you may want an answer for how the piracy problem will evolve if trends around the cost of kinetic weaponry continue.
I'm rejecting the premise that we need a neutral money supply. (I reject the notion such a thing can exist. Money--monetary value, even--are social constructs.)
International trade in a multipolar world with sovereign currencies and commodities works. It has since at least the Bronze Age. So yes, if someone wants to cart around gold or use crypto, that's fine. But it doesn't magically exempt them from the law. A Dutchman committed crimes under Dutch law. They were arrested in the Netherlands. This isn't some Kim Dotcom bullshit. It's the law being applied plainly.
Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money.
Since 1971? Yes. That is a very brief experiment in monetary history, and quite Lindy. It can be validly estimated to have 51 years of life left in it (albeit with vast error bars, difficult to calculate).
> Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money
"Neutral money" has no meaning in an era when information travels at the same speed as trade. (It arguably lacks any meaning today.)
Bronze Age civilizations didn't have the surplus labor to haul around gold. (Nor to test it.) Though they didn't have coins, they used token money--from engraved clay and stone markers to shells and beads. Commodity money was traded in representative form locally and physically over long distances. Commodities, not bullion, were used because they preserved value over distance--a Hittite trader couldn't know what a gold bullion would exchange for in Hispania or Egypt when they got there.
> stories based on implausible premises -”didnt have surplus labor" lol- are conspicuously unpersuasive
Versus stories about neutral money?
Insufficient labor is a hypothesis. The archaeological evidence is engraved clay and stone markers. Long-distance trades settled with commodities. Bullion being traded between kings and kingdoms, seldom by merchants, and abandoned stores of value holding jewelry, precious stones and spices.
International trade in multipolar worlds does fine without a "neutral" money.
...and the USD is used for far more illicit transactions than any other exchange medium. This will predictably change as privacy technologies become more widely adopted. For example, transactions on the Monero network have been growing at an exponential rate for several years.
> will predictably change as privacy technologies become more widely adopted. For example, transactions on the Monero network have been growing at an exponential rate for several years
The posts keep shifting for what governments cannot enforce. I suppose this is a natural endgame; crypto enthusiasts setting precedents for, and giving popular cause to, state expansion.
AML has never been even close to perfect. But it's enforced. Hopefully, the Monero community learns from Tornado. Instead of thumbing its nose at the law, it could try to not encourage illicit transfers in the name of some convoluted (if entirely unoriginal) interpretation of financial privacy. Then it could survive and become something novel, like Bitcoin.
IANAL but if your website has indicated that the software is useful for circumventing the law (I don’t know if they did this) then I imagine it could be possible to make the argument that you’ve induced a lot of people to commit felonies while profiting from it directly.
This isn't open source privacy code. Whether or not someone else does something bad with it isn't relevant.
Until you can face what it really is, you aren't going to come to terms with what's happening.
This is like making unlicensed guns that don't follow safety or tracking regulations, then complaining "but I'm not the burglar, I didn't kill anyone" when you get shut down.
This is and always has been the obvious explicit purpose of this code. This has nothing to do with "privacy" and you don't actually legally have the right to hide your financial transactions besides.
There are people operating on blockchains in which transaction parameters are a matter of public record who:
1. May not want individual amounts and recipients to be publicly inspectable.
2. And are not criminals.
It may not be a right, but Tornado Cash is absolutely a tool to increase privacy. It is not solely for criminals to liquidate blockchain assets.
Even if there is people who want that, that doesn't justify it. Privacy has limits, and there is some really bad people using crypto to transfer assets. Banks are required to report suspicious transactions, so working around banking laws by using crypto is clearly breaking the spirit of those regulations. If an individual wants privacy, there is a more standing if they do it themselves, but when a third party gets involved, they must follow the same laws all businesses must follow. You can't code yourself out of legal responsibility.
Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.
And taxes are kind of proof that the government has a right to see ones personal transactions. You can't have income taxes without verifiable income requirements and reporting.
When I traded crypto I just self-reported on my taxes. It's not that hard. It's already illegal to "evade" taxes, so we don't need to make it "double illegaler" by banning crypto used to evade taxes.
>Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.
The issue is due to FATCA as a US citizen I have no exit valve to simply leave and seek residence elsewhere because leaving the country still makes me a US person reportable to IRS by worldwide banks (and in fact also by legal self reporting requirements) and the US charges a oft prohibitive multi-thousand dollar exit tax renounce. If we're going to put these kind of imposition on people we should at least streamline renouncing and make the payment to leave the gang something almost as cheap as the walk to Mexico.
You are assuming that people using Tornado Cash are only seeking privacy from governments.
You could want to use Tornado Cash for other forms of privacy, while still respecting your obligations to governments.
For example, suppose you are a company that pays salaries in tokens on the Ethereum blockchain but you want to do this without disclosing each employee's salary to the rest of their peers. You could fund a bunch of fresh accounts through Tornado Cash and distribute private keys to your employees off chain so they could access their funds.
Everyone involved could be completely respectful of taxes, etc. but they would still benefit from the privacy offered by Tornado Cash.
You don't have the ethical right to force people to disclose their financial transactions, either. Nor use threats of violence against people for designing tools that allow people to keep their transactions private. Doing so is the action of tyrants. Many people in the world do not have the luxury of immunity from state violence for supporting activism, and this technology is meant to shield them from such.
Cash is unwieldy in large amounts, which is why most authorities don't care about cash transactions. When cash is used at scale for anonymous transactions (e.g., when the US airlifted cargo planes full of cash to Iraq in 2004 to pay government workers without an Iraqi paper trail), it is international news.
If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD), I guarantee that no one in authority would give a shit.
> If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD)
A 200 euro banknote's dimensions are about 153x77x0.113 mm, if we consider double that thickness (because unless they're brand new, banknotes tend to crumple) we get that 2,253,400 euros will have a volume of 30 liters, which should fit in a backpack. If you wanted to use the more common 50 euro banknote you could fit 615,650 € in 30 liters.
That amount of cash is heavy and difficult to obtain. It's possible, but it's certainly not ergonomic, and in the US, withdrawing $10K+ in cash from a bank will create a paper trail.
The 500 euro note, which would allow you to carry an even larger sum in the same 30 liters, was discontinued because European authorities were concerned about how much the note was being used to facilitate illegal activity: https://www.bis.org/review/r160211e.htm . In the US, all bills with a face value greater than $100 were recalled in 1969 for similar reasons.
You can transport a greater dollar value in the same volume using diamonds or gold, but again, the amount one person can carry is not unlimited.
Both cash and crypto have their downsides when it comes to money laundering. A non-tech savy person might not trust their crypto transactions to remain anonymous or their funds to be safe, because at the end of the day the only way you can be sure of that is if you read and understood the code. For that kind of person the weight of cash is the lesser issue. I've been told that decades ago my dad's uncle would go on trips to Switzerland with bags full of cash.
If you're exchanging cash, you still theoretically have the legal obligation to declare it. Businesses accepting cash have the obligation of issuing a receipt, and you may have some obligations of keeping that receipt.
Now, it's true that these things are hard to enforce, or even impossible for small enough sums. But people systematically flaunting the rules for large sums of money will get arrested, even with cash.
> If you're exchanging cash, you still theoretically have the legal obligation to declare it. Businesses accepting cash have the obligation of issuing a receipt, and you may have some obligations of keeping that receipt.
I'm pretty sure that's legally required even when buying with crypto
I'm in favor of privacy, but if you're profiting off designing and operating a system that you know is being used to facilitate large amounts of criminal money laundering (some going to known foreign government agents), you're more or less asking to be arrested.
You can pose an argument that your service has some positive impact in certain cases, but you can't flat deny any negative impact or responsibility for consequences of your service. This is true of any and all services, whether they relate to privacy or not.
In my jurisdiction, if I operate a pawn shop, I am required by law to record transactions, collect ID, and make good faith attempts to prevent people from laundering stolen goods through my shop.
Does "privacy is a human right" trump the law in my jurisdiction? Can we say it is improper for the government to require me to collect ID from people selling me goods? Can we say it is improper of the government to require me to keep records of who sold me what?
I take the proceeds from my pawn shop to the bank. They are required by law to collect my ID. If I deposit large amounts of cash, they have additional reporting requirements. Does "privacy is a human right" trump these laws that exist to prevent the laundering of criminal proceeds through banks?
I also have discomfort over how much data the government collects in the name of preventing the laundering of stolen goods and criminal proceeds.
But in the large, I accept that freedom is not an absolute, it is a set of careful tradeoffs between:
1. The freedom for citizens to do as they please without society limiting what we're allowed to do, versus;
2. The freedom for criminal cartels to do as they please, preying upon citizens.
The latter is important, because when criminals prey upon citizens, they reduce our freedom as well. I want the freedom to own nice things. The easier it is for criminals to steal and fence my things, the less freedom I actually have to enjoy them
I also want the freedom to run a business. When criminals can prey upon businesses with ransomware and launder the proceeds through TornadoCash, the less freedom I actually have.
A "Libertarian Paradise" where criminals are free to do as they please because we don't want to impinge upon any citizen's freedom whatsoever, is free in name only. We may not like all of the current set of tradeoffs, but we must accept that if we don't make some tradeoffs, we will not be free in any real sense.
That has no bearing on the basic argument which consists of:
1. Claim: "Privacy is a human right, the government should not be allowed to know anything about financial transactions," and;
2. Counter-claim: "Privacy of financial transactions is not a thing now, and absolute ideological freedom is not actual freedom, it is the law of the jungle where the strong are free to prey upon the weak, and the weak have no freedom from the predatory strong."
Tornado Cash is an anonymizer. Same as every cash drawer in every business. All kinds of money goes in - legitimate as well as illegitimate - and is mixed up together.
Does shuffling a bunch of currency notes together - some of which might be from a drug dealer - make you a criminal?
Being a money mule makes you complicit in fraud or financial crimes. Running cryptocurrency code and using your own cryptocurrency wallet to help launder stolen money is a crime. People are expected to know better than to lend their wallet for "temporary storage" of money for a reward, especially if they don't know who the source or destination of the transaction may be.
No company will advertise themselves as a criminal operation, even the dumbest thieves aren't that stupid.
Google "bitcoin financial oppression", and you'll find that cryptocurrencies are being advertised left and right as a tool to escape "financial oppression", or as someone less cynical would say, to evade financial regulations.
(From Wikipedia) The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ensures that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
(Also) Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
It’s generally understood that without privacy people are effectively disenfranchised politically, because any expression of an contentious opinion or association with subversive or dissident thinkers becomes potentially so harmful that wise people would avoid both and keep almost entirely to themselves or family.
Of-course, but then there are no absolute rights that I can think off - property can be taxed, movement restricted by imprisonment / laws against trespass, labour can be forced by military draft or prison work, speech restricted by laws against defamation / abusive conduct, life can be taken in self-defence or during military service, etc.
>No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
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 is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control. They hate the idea of bitcoin and eth not being $ or €. The large majority of money laundering happens through banks, who just pay a fine and sweep it under the rug.