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This is so sad, how does locking him up for 5 years really helps anyone? or keep anyone safer? He did something stupid maybe, but his work was exploring how dig

This is so sad, how does locking him up for 5 years really helps anyone? or keep anyone safer? He did something stupid maybe, but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK, so who doesn't agree with that? None of the information he presented was secret, it was all publicly available. For comparison here is a company that actually facilitated NK building Nuclear Weapons, 145 violations of the law , they got fined $15k more than Virgil and had no jail time. https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/td-bank-fined-105k-for-north-korea-sanctions-violations/31208.article#:~:text=TD%20Bank%2C%20N.A.%20agreed%20to,of%20North%20Korean%20sanctions%20regulations https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/td-ban... What a stupid and harmful legal system.

orangepurple 5y ago
It is obvious that the US penal system is designed for retribution not rehabilitation. Furthermore, you are not allowed to do anything important unless you are affiliated with the Party.
beebmam 5y ago
North Korea actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemies. There should be no sympathy for this regime or anyone who collaborates with it.
- ricochet11 5y ago
  How do we go about improving relations? How do we improve the lives of the people living under that awful regime? How do we give people ways to exit and escape, and have access to the freedoms we have?
  - mdanger007 5y ago
    Sanctions are one of the few tools the world has against nuclear armed despots. If you're really interested in the questions you ask, I would start here: https://nymag.com/strategist/2018/03/the-10-best-books-about-north-korea.html https://nymag.com/strategist/2018/03/the-10-best-books-about...
  - light_hue_1 5y ago
    The same way that the West won the cold war and liberated Eastern Europe: information. My parents and grandparents would sit and listen to Radio Free Europe at night, at low volume, so the neighbors couldn't hear and turn them in (years later we found out which neighbors told on them, it was.. interesting). That's how people in communist countries heard the truth and why they eventually overthrew their governments. If you listen to defectors what made a huge difference for them is just seeing normal life in smuggled tv shows and soap operas. Seeing hard evidence for the fact that other people live far better than they do. The government of North Korea tells people they live a great life and everywhere else is miserable. The problem is that today, the West has a huge disinformation problem. News networks like Fox routinely lie, politicians like Trump convince their people of things that are obviously false, etc. The truth simply doesn't play as much of a role. Russia learned this lesson too. There are fervent pro-Putin supporters out there now. This wasn't the case under communism. People generally understood that the system was garbage.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Agreed. And once we finish with North Korea we should turn our eyes to the United States, the country that developed and currently only user of nuclear weapons in combat. No sympathy for users of nuclear weapons or any country who threatens its use!
  - egberts1 5y ago
    … only user …? Clearly, you are qualified to comment on world affair. /sarcasm
    - happytoexplain 5y ago
      Assuming you didn't miss the "in combat" part, this may be an English issue: To be a "user" of nukes here means "has used nukes in combat", not "has nukes for use in combat".
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      What other countries have used nuclear weapons in combat?
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      That statement is entirely correct; the US is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in combat. Everyone else has only ever tested them, or used them as threats/deterrence.
    - garbagetime 5y ago
      Did a whole nuclear war go by without my noticing?
      - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
        Not an entire nuclear war, but you may remember the end of the second world war.
        egberts1 5y ago
- etherael 5y ago
  Giving North Korean citizens access to an economy outside their locked down one where they can engage in trade may well be the exact opposite of collaborating with the North Korean regime. This could easily be the most practical and realistic way to destroy North Korean control over its economy. If those citizens are no longer beholden to the regime for their economic livelihood and that encourages internal organisation as well as more people seeing they have other options, sooner or later that's going to have a corrosive effect on state control of the economic affairs of North Korean citizens. Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    How many times do we have to try this "stronger economic ties will encourage freedom/peace/democracy" theory before we accept that it only serves to enrich those who are already wealthy and doesn't do a thing to preserve peace. It perhaps even does the opposite: becomes a tool of coercion the bad actor can use to manipulate the free economies with which they trade. The free markets get hooked on the cheap $thing provided by the authoritarian government and then we're stuck. Our consumers are fat and happy with the cheap $thing so our politicians look the other way as the evil regime does more and more overtly evil things. Trade makes us more tolerant of the authoritarians' bad behavior. It doesn't encourage the authoritarians to behave better. See, e.g., Russia's sale of natural gas to Europe, China's sale of labor/consumer products to the West, KSA's sale of petrol to the States. Time and again we do business with evil regimes and pretend it might result in some good. It doesn't. It won't. Let's not keep repeating the same failed experiment.
    - etherael 5y ago
      I didn't claim anything about stronger economic ties between the organisational units of the States in question. I was making the exact opposite claim, that you weaken a closed state proportional to the degree of its closure by using countereconomics to erode the control it can directly exert upon its citizenry. I absolutely agree with you that trade with dystopian hellholes that provide economic resources the rulers of those dystopian hellholes can use to continue with their strategies is counter-productive and that all trade of that kind should to the maximum degree possible, be stopped. The kind of trade however that is enabled by peer to peer participants all over the world being directly able to trade with each other for goods and services to the extent the rulers of those dystopian hellholes cannot profit from is another thing entirely, and that is the kind of trade that blockchains can enable. That black market trade sets up competitive and progressively independent organisational units not beholden to the dystopian rulers they would otherwise be and directly compromises their economic power. Ask a soldier in the Venezuelan army what he thinks of the regime, and then ask a Venezuelan software engineer with the skills and experience in demand that would enable him to work remotely for dozens of well paid jobs transacting in crypto all over the world the same question. I guarantee the responses you get will illustrate my point very clearly.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  Why do you think it is that the DPRK places such a priority on emphasizing its nuclear capabilities?
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    Because the civilized world would bring down the Kim regime, as we certainly should, if we could. Because they have nukes, we can't. This is getting to be a real problem as 21st-century history continues to unfold.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      This sounds like a catch-22/ circular logic. We would invade and topple the government if they didn't have those pesky nukes. The government needs to be toppled because they are developing nukes and we don't want them to.
    - SamReidHughes 5y ago
      The "civilized" world had plenty of time to do that before NK got nukes, and it didn't. War in Korea would be far worse than peace.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        War in Korea would be far worse than peace. The Korean War saw about 1.5 million civlian deaths, according to [1]. It's impossible to say how many died in the 1994-1998 famine alone, but [2] puts it at "240,000 to 3.5 million" and [3] cites figures of "up to 3 million." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine [3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim-jong-il-starved-north-korea/250244/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim... So, no. There are worse things than war. For allowing this situation to fester for multiple generations, history will judge us the way we talk about the "good Germans" who didn't lay a hand on anyone but who also did nothing to stop Hitler. You're correct, though, in that the North Korean nuclear program is now an ideal excuse for continuing to do what we did before, which was nothing.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  "actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemie" Citation needed. NK nuclear policy is No Preemption understood to be borderline No First Use. Until last month when Japan and South Korea were threatening base strike capabilities in which case NK turned into only retaliation strikes against military targets if attacked first.
Barrin92 5y ago
>but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK, so who doesn't agree with that? Anyone who understands that trying to transfer technology to North Korea that aids in avoiding sanctions is not going to contribute to peace. That a bank got away with doing something similar is of course equally stupid and hypocritical, but doesn't really change the point.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
Well it wasn’t like he did this by accident: > "The most important feature of blockchains is that they are open. And the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] can't be kept out no matter what the USA or the UN says," He intentionally violated the law. Sure, one may consider the law stupid but one should expect to be punished if one blatantly violates it. That’s how laws work, he’s not imprisoned by the whim of a king. It would be more stupid to violate the law and expect no negative repercussions. There are more constructive ways to reform laws than openly violating them.
light_hue_1 5y ago
> but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK Except that North Korea uses that money to build nuclear weapons. Sanctions are the only reason North Korea doesn't have a nuclear arsenal with ICBMs that it can used to threaten the entire world. Giving North Korea access to more money is not good. It does not promote peace. Locking him up does plenty of good. It means that someone who would help a ruthless dictator build up weapons that could end the world, is not out there doing it. > For comparison here is a company that actually facilitated NK building Nuclear Weapons, 145 violations of the law , they got fined $15k more than Virgil and had no jail time. Let's read the article. TD processed $300k. That's.. nothing. I'm sure Kim spends that much on wine every month. This person was trying to give North Korea a roadmap by which it could evade sanctions with as much money as it wanted. That's far worse.
sofixa 5y ago
> but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world Surely nobody is that naive? Wars and sanctions aren't a technical problem that can be "solved" with a "digital system".
- weego 5y ago
  As a neurodivergent person in tech, mentoring and MH support, I've met a number of similarly ND people who are indeed convinced that human scale problems are just issues we've not solved with technology yet.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    That is so obviously true that denying it is like denying evolution. If we had one of the those shields from Star Trek, we wouldn't have to worry about NK.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      You should look into MAD, and why the USSR and USA signed a treaty restricting anti-missile defenses. If any country was close to getting ironclad missile shields, it's adversaries would probably act preemptively.
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        Also look into Jason P Lowery, and Mutually Assured Preservation concept. PoW Cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, will end all war. Modern war can only be perpetual with loose monetary policy. Fix the money, fix the world. Post MAD, the strategic battle was over post 70s. The tactical, hash warfare battle is the next phase we will have to live through. Eventually we realize we are all on the same Planet Earth team and explore the stars. But for now, this is humanities best hope for peace.
        yffras 4y ago
        Bitcoin will not eliminate the need to own physical property - like cars, real estate, companies, etc. Bitcoin will actually expand war. Today you have a military to fight to protect your physical property. The strongest currency typically has the strongest military. Bitcoin (and crypto) will expand property into the digital realm. So now you will need a larger military to protect with force physical property AND digital property.
GauntletWizard 5y ago
All the solutions to your math homework are publically available, you can find plenty of examples all over. Nonetheless, you're not allowed to go to your friend's desk and do it for him. North Korea is a country under sanction from the international community for... Cartoon-level villainy, but in the real world. Some of the regimes' crimes are unbelievable because they seem too cruel. They remain actively at war with t This man did not give a talk about how North Korea could evade sanctions, he traveled to Pyongyang to teach them. This is pretty close to being the definition of "Treason".
tofuahdude 5y ago
He expressly stated he knew he was helping to evade financial sanctions and you think it's "sad" to punish him for violating the laws of our country? How does it help anyone? It sets the tone that people who break the rule of law will be punished. It establish that there is real "stick" so that other people do not perpetrate similar crimes with other rogue states.

orangepurple 5y ago

It is obvious that the US penal system is designed for retribution not rehabilitation. Furthermore, you are not allowed to do anything important unless you are affiliated with the Party.

beebmam 5y ago

North Korea actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemies. There should be no sympathy for this regime or anyone who collaborates with it.

ricochet11 5y ago
How do we go about improving relations? How do we improve the lives of the people living under that awful regime? How do we give people ways to exit and escape, and have access to the freedoms we have?
- mdanger007 5y ago
  Sanctions are one of the few tools the world has against nuclear armed despots. If you're really interested in the questions you ask, I would start here: https://nymag.com/strategist/2018/03/the-10-best-books-about-north-korea.html https://nymag.com/strategist/2018/03/the-10-best-books-about...
- light_hue_1 5y ago
  The same way that the West won the cold war and liberated Eastern Europe: information. My parents and grandparents would sit and listen to Radio Free Europe at night, at low volume, so the neighbors couldn't hear and turn them in (years later we found out which neighbors told on them, it was.. interesting). That's how people in communist countries heard the truth and why they eventually overthrew their governments. If you listen to defectors what made a huge difference for them is just seeing normal life in smuggled tv shows and soap operas. Seeing hard evidence for the fact that other people live far better than they do. The government of North Korea tells people they live a great life and everywhere else is miserable. The problem is that today, the West has a huge disinformation problem. News networks like Fox routinely lie, politicians like Trump convince their people of things that are obviously false, etc. The truth simply doesn't play as much of a role. Russia learned this lesson too. There are fervent pro-Putin supporters out there now. This wasn't the case under communism. People generally understood that the system was garbage.
endisneigh 5y ago
Agreed. And once we finish with North Korea we should turn our eyes to the United States, the country that developed and currently only user of nuclear weapons in combat. No sympathy for users of nuclear weapons or any country who threatens its use!
- egberts1 5y ago
  … only user …? Clearly, you are qualified to comment on world affair. /sarcasm
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    Assuming you didn't miss the "in combat" part, this may be an English issue: To be a "user" of nukes here means "has used nukes in combat", not "has nukes for use in combat".
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    What other countries have used nuclear weapons in combat?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    That statement is entirely correct; the US is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in combat. Everyone else has only ever tested them, or used them as threats/deterrence.
  - garbagetime 5y ago
    Did a whole nuclear war go by without my noticing?
    - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      Not an entire nuclear war, but you may remember the end of the second world war.
      - egberts1 5y ago
etherael 5y ago
Giving North Korean citizens access to an economy outside their locked down one where they can engage in trade may well be the exact opposite of collaborating with the North Korean regime. This could easily be the most practical and realistic way to destroy North Korean control over its economy. If those citizens are no longer beholden to the regime for their economic livelihood and that encourages internal organisation as well as more people seeing they have other options, sooner or later that's going to have a corrosive effect on state control of the economic affairs of North Korean citizens. Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  How many times do we have to try this "stronger economic ties will encourage freedom/peace/democracy" theory before we accept that it only serves to enrich those who are already wealthy and doesn't do a thing to preserve peace. It perhaps even does the opposite: becomes a tool of coercion the bad actor can use to manipulate the free economies with which they trade. The free markets get hooked on the cheap $thing provided by the authoritarian government and then we're stuck. Our consumers are fat and happy with the cheap $thing so our politicians look the other way as the evil regime does more and more overtly evil things. Trade makes us more tolerant of the authoritarians' bad behavior. It doesn't encourage the authoritarians to behave better. See, e.g., Russia's sale of natural gas to Europe, China's sale of labor/consumer products to the West, KSA's sale of petrol to the States. Time and again we do business with evil regimes and pretend it might result in some good. It doesn't. It won't. Let's not keep repeating the same failed experiment.
  - etherael 5y ago
    I didn't claim anything about stronger economic ties between the organisational units of the States in question. I was making the exact opposite claim, that you weaken a closed state proportional to the degree of its closure by using countereconomics to erode the control it can directly exert upon its citizenry. I absolutely agree with you that trade with dystopian hellholes that provide economic resources the rulers of those dystopian hellholes can use to continue with their strategies is counter-productive and that all trade of that kind should to the maximum degree possible, be stopped. The kind of trade however that is enabled by peer to peer participants all over the world being directly able to trade with each other for goods and services to the extent the rulers of those dystopian hellholes cannot profit from is another thing entirely, and that is the kind of trade that blockchains can enable. That black market trade sets up competitive and progressively independent organisational units not beholden to the dystopian rulers they would otherwise be and directly compromises their economic power. Ask a soldier in the Venezuelan army what he thinks of the regime, and then ask a Venezuelan software engineer with the skills and experience in demand that would enable him to work remotely for dozens of well paid jobs transacting in crypto all over the world the same question. I guarantee the responses you get will illustrate my point very clearly.
garbagetime 5y ago
Why do you think it is that the DPRK places such a priority on emphasizing its nuclear capabilities?
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Because the civilized world would bring down the Kim regime, as we certainly should, if we could. Because they have nukes, we can't. This is getting to be a real problem as 21st-century history continues to unfold.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    This sounds like a catch-22/ circular logic. We would invade and topple the government if they didn't have those pesky nukes. The government needs to be toppled because they are developing nukes and we don't want them to.
  - SamReidHughes 5y ago
    The "civilized" world had plenty of time to do that before NK got nukes, and it didn't. War in Korea would be far worse than peace.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      War in Korea would be far worse than peace. The Korean War saw about 1.5 million civlian deaths, according to [1]. It's impossible to say how many died in the 1994-1998 famine alone, but [2] puts it at "240,000 to 3.5 million" and [3] cites figures of "up to 3 million." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine [3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim-jong-il-starved-north-korea/250244/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim... So, no. There are worse things than war. For allowing this situation to fester for multiple generations, history will judge us the way we talk about the "good Germans" who didn't lay a hand on anyone but who also did nothing to stop Hitler. You're correct, though, in that the North Korean nuclear program is now an ideal excuse for continuing to do what we did before, which was nothing.
dirtyid 5y ago
"actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemie" Citation needed. NK nuclear policy is No Preemption understood to be borderline No First Use. Until last month when Japan and South Korea were threatening base strike capabilities in which case NK turned into only retaliation strikes against military targets if attacked first.

Barrin92 5y ago

>but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK, so who doesn't agree with that? Anyone who understands that trying to transfer technology to North Korea that aids in avoiding sanctions is not going to contribute to peace. That a bank got away with doing something similar is of course equally stupid and hypocritical, but doesn't really change the point.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

Well it wasn’t like he did this by accident: > "The most important feature of blockchains is that they are open. And the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] can't be kept out no matter what the USA or the UN says," He intentionally violated the law. Sure, one may consider the law stupid but one should expect to be punished if one blatantly violates it. That’s how laws work, he’s not imprisoned by the whim of a king. It would be more stupid to violate the law and expect no negative repercussions. There are more constructive ways to reform laws than openly violating them.

light_hue_1 5y ago

> but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK Except that North Korea uses that money to build nuclear weapons. Sanctions are the only reason North Korea doesn't have a nuclear arsenal with ICBMs that it can used to threaten the entire world. Giving North Korea access to more money is not good. It does not promote peace. Locking him up does plenty of good. It means that someone who would help a ruthless dictator build up weapons that could end the world, is not out there doing it. > For comparison here is a company that actually facilitated NK building Nuclear Weapons, 145 violations of the law , they got fined $15k more than Virgil and had no jail time. Let's read the article. TD processed $300k. That's.. nothing. I'm sure Kim spends that much on wine every month. This person was trying to give North Korea a roadmap by which it could evade sanctions with as much money as it wanted. That's far worse.

sofixa 5y ago

> but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world Surely nobody is that naive? Wars and sanctions aren't a technical problem that can be "solved" with a "digital system".

weego 5y ago
As a neurodivergent person in tech, mentoring and MH support, I've met a number of similarly ND people who are indeed convinced that human scale problems are just issues we've not solved with technology yet.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  That is so obviously true that denying it is like denying evolution. If we had one of the those shields from Star Trek, we wouldn't have to worry about NK.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    You should look into MAD, and why the USSR and USA signed a treaty restricting anti-missile defenses. If any country was close to getting ironclad missile shields, it's adversaries would probably act preemptively.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Also look into Jason P Lowery, and Mutually Assured Preservation concept. PoW Cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, will end all war. Modern war can only be perpetual with loose monetary policy. Fix the money, fix the world. Post MAD, the strategic battle was over post 70s. The tactical, hash warfare battle is the next phase we will have to live through. Eventually we realize we are all on the same Planet Earth team and explore the stars. But for now, this is humanities best hope for peace.
      - yffras 4y ago
        Bitcoin will not eliminate the need to own physical property - like cars, real estate, companies, etc. Bitcoin will actually expand war. Today you have a military to fight to protect your physical property. The strongest currency typically has the strongest military. Bitcoin (and crypto) will expand property into the digital realm. So now you will need a larger military to protect with force physical property AND digital property.

GauntletWizard 5y ago

All the solutions to your math homework are publically available, you can find plenty of examples all over. Nonetheless, you're not allowed to go to your friend's desk and do it for him. North Korea is a country under sanction from the international community for... Cartoon-level villainy, but in the real world. Some of the regimes' crimes are unbelievable because they seem too cruel. They remain actively at war with t This man did not give a talk about how North Korea could evade sanctions, he traveled to Pyongyang to teach them. This is pretty close to being the definition of "Treason".

tofuahdude 5y ago

He expressly stated he knew he was helping to evade financial sanctions and you think it's "sad" to punish him for violating the laws of our country? How does it help anyone? It sets the tone that people who break the rule of law will be punished. It establish that there is real "stick" so that other people do not perpetrate similar crimes with other rogue states.