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People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned. > These prohibit

by junon 4y ago

People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned. > These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. This is, unambiguously, directed toward entities such as GitHub providing them service. I'm not a fan of GH these days but they did the only thing they could do in this situation. You can be upset about it, but you can't be upset at GitHub about it.

deleted 4y ago
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paulgb 4y ago
Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? (It’s not clear from the thread whether the people blocked contributed after, or only before, the sanction.) For what it’s worth, I don’t see much evidence of people being upset at GitHub in the thread. There’s talk about decentralized alternatives, but not much actual pinning the blame on them.
- oliwary 4y ago
  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 mean that anyone who has previously worked with them or bought their electronics has done so illegally? If so, that sounds like a significant impediment to commerce, since nobody can predict who will be sanctioned in the future.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    A government can pretty much do whatever it wants in the realm of foreign relations, things it can't usually do to it's citizens (such as retroactively applying sanctions). If you have a problem with it, take it up with the government.
  - nuclearnice1 4y ago
    I agree with your analysis. Ex post facto criminal laws are barred by the constitution for good reason. Retroactive punishment leaves people guessing what actions might or might not be punished.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      Well, Github blocking an account is not considered "punishment" according to criminal law or constitution, only standard contract law would apply and I believe Github has the right to terminate such contracts if they wish. This consideration would apply if and only if the government would actually pursue criminal charges against someone who contributed to TornadoCash - which they possibly would if someone would do stuff after these sanctions e.g. try to circumvent this GitHub block, make and advertise a replacement service, etc; do not do this if US laws apply to you.
      - mananaysiempre 4y ago
        > Github blocking an account is not considered "punishment" according to criminal law or constitution I understand this to be the case. I don’t understand how anyone considers this to be even remotely sane.
        junon 4y ago
        Sanctions are orders to cease providing service, aid, goods or funding. Which part is unclear?
      - oliwary 4y ago
        I agree - GitHub can block whoever they want. But doing so despite not being required to by law is a valid reason to criticize them.
- seydor 4y ago
  isn't git decentralized already?
  - rurban 4y ago
    Issues not, unless you use git-bug
  - krono 4y ago
    Git is not GitHub
    - ezfe 4y ago
      A Github repository is decentralized among everyone who has cloned it, nothing about Github changes that. The other parts, like issue tracking, obviously are not.
      - krono 4y ago
        It's not decentralized in any practical manner when everyone's local clone is pointing to the same, now no longer available, origin. This could have been mitigated by having a pre-determined fallback origin (which could very well be something they had in place - I'm not familiar with this project).
        catlifeonmars 4y ago
        > It's not decentralized in any practical manner when everyone's local clone is pointing to the same, now no longer available, origin. On the contrary, removing the common, centralized origin makes the project decentralized by definition.
        krono 4y ago
        Some form of distributed authority could have been implemented as a more practical alternative to the scattered remnants that they might be left with now. You're right, of course. My previous post was written up a bit too hasty :)
- PeterisP 4y ago
  I'm assuming that the problem for Github is that they can't reliably know which of the contributors are "currently part of" TornadoCash and which ones are unrelated people who just contributed code some time ago, and since they absolutely must block the former, in the case of uncertainty the only safe option was to block everyone who seems related.
  - px43 4y ago
    None of the Tornado developers are anonymous. They are all well known and respected members of the security/privacy community, and I have personally hung out with them multiple times in the US at public events, where they often speak etc. This isn't some shadowy cabal, they are programmers and mathematicians who think sometimes people might not want the world to see where they are spending their money. Crazy right?
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      > ...they are programmers and mathematicians who think sometimes people might not want the world to see where they are spending their money. Crazy right? The IRS and bodies responsible for enforcing laws like those against "funding terror" (remember that?) certainly think that is crazy.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? It looks like it was just the three creators. If they’re smart, this is a prelude to announcing a legal defence fund.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? I'd say that this is a significant risk that people doing DeFi need to have a long, hard think about. Without a clear organization, without clear leadership, one cannot draw a bright line around those who deserve sanctioning. In court, efforts made towards plausible deniability might pay off. But github is not the courts, its interest is its own liability.
- junon 4y ago
  Then the thread has shifted tone from when I first read through it.
- garfieldnate 4y ago
  This is chilling for me. I've contributed to plenty of projects during my 10 years of using GH. Little PR's here and there, sometimes just typos, sometimes just issues. If one of those projects runs into trouble with the law or with GH, will GH delete my account? This would be disastrous for me.
nurettin 4y ago
I have no sympathy for crypto whatever and I really don't care about who sanctioned whom and for what reason, but... Sanctioned project's contributors must be deleted from the server - where is that written in the list of things Microsoft has to do since you went out of your way calling everyone on the reply train ignorant?
- nojito 4y ago
  > These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. It's pretty cut and dry.
  - treesprite82 4y ago
    Cut and dry if the open-source contributors are "blocked persons", but are they? They'd no longer be allowed to contribute to the project, but does someone having contributed in the past mean the sanction on the project extends to their person? Github themselves provided hosting to the project.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      It's quite possible these contributors had forks, which is why they were blocked.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        More importantly, these contributors are likely to have local forks when they can quickly upload under a different name. They can still create new accounts though.
        8note 4y ago
        And GitHub can continue to ban them under OFAC compliance?
cdiddy2 4y ago
The people were not sanctioned only the onchain addresses of Tornado were. Github was not providing any service to the onchain addresses.
- kube-system 4y ago
  The first two lines in the list were not ETH addresses: > TORNADO CASH (a.k.a. TORNADO CASH CLASSIC; a.k.a. TORNADO CASH NOVA); > Website tornado.cash;
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    Which is a company name and a website, not people. A company name listed in this manner does not extend to its employees unless they are acting on behalf of the company; any sanctions against individuals specify the individual's name.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      That’s correct. But given that GitHub is a publicly available website, the only way they can prevent employees of that company from being aided by the GitHub website is to remove that company’s code from their website. And because users can create accounts freely without proving employment information, their only way of determining which users could be affiliated is by activity.
deleted 4y ago
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subjectsigma 4y ago
The amount of people replying "Code is free speech! You can't do this!" shows you about how much Twitter understands laws.
- junofan 4y ago
  That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation.
  - subjectsigma 4y ago
    > This is a law. > No, it is not. > That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation.
- viraptor 4y ago
  You can understand the law and still disagree with it for the same reason. Laws are not set in stone.
- orangeoxidation 4y ago
  Well... that's an old argument (the PGP book) and there's even support from the courts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
  - subjectsigma 4y ago
    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.
    - orangeoxidation 4y ago
      > 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 don't see how it couldn't be a form of "speech", just like books, poems and music are. Speech is regulated of course, e.g. bomb-building instructions are illegal to publish in the US. Maybe you could make a case this crypto shuffling method is similar and spreading the know-how on how to do it should be forbidden, but that doesn't make it not speech.
RobertoG 4y ago
>>People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. I don't know but there are some comments asking for an distribute alternative to GitHub. That was pretty funny.
seydor 4y ago
To be clear, they did it proactively, not because they were ordered to. For example, many organizations and conferences make exceptions for students from Iran
outsidetheparty 4y ago
> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. You'd think after 16 years I'd be used to it, but it still kinda blows my mind that the social network designed for context- and detail-free hot takes is the one people use for political discussion.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Most political discussion fits your description perfectly, so of course it does. Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct.
  - bdw5204 4y ago
    > Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct. Typically, people just take a paragraph or so of a long form political argument out of context and use it to call the person making the argument evil. Which is basically the same principle as the typical political attack ad where you take a sentence your opponent said out of context to make your opponent look like a crazy extremist. With a short form discussion platform, you can just go straight to the personal attacks, name-calling and out of context distortions of the other side's beliefs. Then we wonder why we suddenly live in a country where the 2 political parties can't compromise on anything and where one of the top political priorities for both parties is prosecuting and jailing their political opponents. I think its very dangerous to view most political discussion being short form context free hot takes as either inevitable or healthy for a government based on free and fair elections (such a norm, however, is probably beneficial to the long term stability and security of a dictatorship). In a society with a democratically elected government, you need free, civil and respectful discussion of issues and a basic level of respect for those who disagree with you. Remove those things and democracy dies just like a plant dies if you deprive it of water and dirt.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      You’re missing the forest for the trees. What actually happened was social media allowed the weaponisation of microtargeted psychological warfare. Read the books “mindfucked” and “targeted” for the detail on Cambridge Analytica (actually Strategic Communications Laboratory or SCL group) how it was a cognitive warfare firm developed for counter terrorism which was unleashed on the American, British (and now presumably Brazilian, Italian and French public). People are not polarized just due to social media - social media is now a cognitive warfare battleground where cognitive heuristics are the trenches.
dingleberry420 4y ago
So making a PR to some project the US government might decide to sanction means github is going to delete my account?
- salawat 4y ago
  Yes, pretty much. This is why I'm surprised more people aren't way more terrified about OFAC than there are. It's probably one of the nastiest diplomatic tools the U.S. has in its arsenal.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    Nice, what's next? Jailing everyone who ever had an abortion? Why aren't y'all americans doing that yet, if it's apparently acceptable to punish people for things they did before the supposed crime was made illegal?
    - ilikehurdles 4y ago
    - salawat 4y ago
      Look, the legal system, and political edifice is scary as all hell to anyone actually paying attention. It's literally a game where those in power have a large warchest with which to ruin people's lives, with the only limiting factor being that someone has to do the paperwork, and that paperwork will be checked. With technology obviating the burden of actually doing paperwork, and essentially cranking the efficiency of the bureaucratic state sky high, as well as equipping it with the tools it needs to keep the checkers/whistleblowers at bay, you've got a frightningly powerful tool poised to crush anything in it's way. These aren't the days of "no man can do much damage in 4 years" anymore. One of the great Checks, is becoming much less of one every day. It's scary as hell.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      > before the supposed crime was made illegal The laws against money laundering aren't new.
tromp 4y ago
> GitHub had to do this. They only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction. It's not clear that they limited themselves to those. It would in fact seem to be hard to contribute in the limited time range between establishing the sanction and removing the project. There is also the collateral damage of removing unrelated projects that happened to be owned by these people. Couldn't github preserve such projects while putting them in some ownerless state?
- eropple 4y ago
  Any chance the blocked accounts had forks of the repository? That'd be an unsurprising heuristic.
  - Bedon292 4y ago
    I would expect they all did. Typically I have my fork and PR from the fork in anything I contribute to. Edit: Unless it was members of the organization who had direct write access to the repos? Which I saw mentions of in other comments.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction The people who built Tornado Cash are already in trouble. The crime--facilitating money laundering--has already been committed. OFAC is an enforcement office. Its lists are more like wanted posters than rules. GitHub is cutting ties with people likely to be charged with federal crimes. If some of them are going to continue contributing to the project, GitHub doesn't want to be the conduit through which it is done. This is all standard sanctions compliance.
  - tromp 4y ago
    > The crime--facilitating money laundering Did the people who built blockchains with built-in mandatory mixing (Monero) or optional completely obscured transaction inputs (ZCash) also facilitate money laundering? If not, what is the crucial difference? Am I myself in trouble for having (co-)designed a mixing service [1]? [1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal
Hermel 4y ago
If taken literally, this would mean that the founders could not even do their groceries any more, right?
- Bedon292 4y ago
  I don't think so. The sanctions are against Tornado Cash the entity, as well as specific ETH addresses associated with it. No individuals are cited in the sanction that I am aware of.
ransom1538 4y ago
"GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned." This makes no sense. They could have just blocked the Tornado project. Suspending individual accounts and contributors seems punitive. I was banned on github https://github.com/ransom1538 https://github.com/ransom1538 (unrelated) - it is pretty devastating. No recourse. Just gone. If something involves your lively hood (uber,grubhub,paypal,github, etc) you should be able to state your case.
freedomben 4y ago
> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. I think it's the culture of reacting to 240 characters or less. People already know what they want to feel and finding a quick and completely baseless confirmation bias on twitter is easy and rewards you greatly with dopamine. Smart, mature people gather information before making a decision. Dumb people knee-jerk react based on low information. Twitter heavily encourages the latter by making the former very difficult to do.
sneak 4y ago
Tornado is code, not an entity. AFAIK it isn't a corporation, group, or anything else - it is a smart contract address and a website. The people who wrote the code were not sanctioned. The repo hosting the code was not sanctioned. GitHub did not have to do this. This is Microsoft's legal department and the concept of "an abundance of caution". Nothing about hosting open source code is at issue here. Tornado (the smart contract) was financially sanctioned; it is still fine to host source code.
jmount 4y ago
> People on Twitter are either wil[l]fully dumb or simply ignorant. Can't repeat that often enough. No matter how much I think I have internalized this, it is a continuing lesson.
superkuh 4y ago
>GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned. Does anyone know if this sanction, "contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for...", applies also to individual human persons not associated with a corporate or institutional entity? Is there somewhere I can read about what sactions are, what they mean, and who they apply to? If it's just a Microsoft problem and not a human person problem then the solutions are many and obvious for any tool that's useful. git itself is already pretty distributed friendly.
boredumb 4y ago
> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. The nicest way i'd choose to describe the people of twitter.
thisisanotherte 4y ago
> GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned. You just gave the best 3-sentence argument for not using GitHub. Given how capricious US government has become, it's unreasonable to host your code in Github.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
GitHub is, by their own choice, a massive global library or bookseller of code. They effectively made the choice to take books off their shelves and cease accepting new ones from specific authors, because the US government made them afraid. This should not happen in a country governed by our First Amendment. And, having chosen to take on this responsibility, GitHub/Microsoft’s attorneys should have to courage to stand up for those principles and be rightly criticized if they fail to. Note that hosting code and free developer accounts does not require GitHub to accept or pay money to the developers (who are not named explicitly in the sanctions order, by the way.) ETA: Big tech companies have a lot of resources and freedom to devote those resources to defending their users (see Google and Twitter lawsuits.) But they’re self-interested and won’t do that if they think their user-base won’t hold them responsible for doing that. I think GitHub is responsible here and I wish the HN commentariat would recognize that their opinion matters. By excusing the company’s cowardice here, we are incentivizing more of it in the future.
mbrochh 4y ago
"People on Twitter" are the exact same people that are also on HN, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok etc etc etc.

by junon 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

paulgb 4y ago

Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? (It’s not clear from the thread whether the people blocked contributed after, or only before, the sanction.) For what it’s worth, I don’t see much evidence of people being upset at GitHub in the thread. There’s talk about decentralized alternatives, but not much actual pinning the blame on them.

oliwary 4y ago
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 mean that anyone who has previously worked with them or bought their electronics has done so illegally? If so, that sounds like a significant impediment to commerce, since nobody can predict who will be sanctioned in the future.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  A government can pretty much do whatever it wants in the realm of foreign relations, things it can't usually do to it's citizens (such as retroactively applying sanctions). If you have a problem with it, take it up with the government.
- nuclearnice1 4y ago
  I agree with your analysis. Ex post facto criminal laws are barred by the constitution for good reason. Retroactive punishment leaves people guessing what actions might or might not be punished.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Well, Github blocking an account is not considered "punishment" according to criminal law or constitution, only standard contract law would apply and I believe Github has the right to terminate such contracts if they wish. This consideration would apply if and only if the government would actually pursue criminal charges against someone who contributed to TornadoCash - which they possibly would if someone would do stuff after these sanctions e.g. try to circumvent this GitHub block, make and advertise a replacement service, etc; do not do this if US laws apply to you.
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      > Github blocking an account is not considered "punishment" according to criminal law or constitution I understand this to be the case. I don’t understand how anyone considers this to be even remotely sane.
      - junon 4y ago
        Sanctions are orders to cease providing service, aid, goods or funding. Which part is unclear?
    - oliwary 4y ago
      I agree - GitHub can block whoever they want. But doing so despite not being required to by law is a valid reason to criticize them.
seydor 4y ago
isn't git decentralized already?
- rurban 4y ago
  Issues not, unless you use git-bug
- krono 4y ago
  Git is not GitHub
  - ezfe 4y ago
    A Github repository is decentralized among everyone who has cloned it, nothing about Github changes that. The other parts, like issue tracking, obviously are not.
    - krono 4y ago
      It's not decentralized in any practical manner when everyone's local clone is pointing to the same, now no longer available, origin. This could have been mitigated by having a pre-determined fallback origin (which could very well be something they had in place - I'm not familiar with this project).
      - catlifeonmars 4y ago
        > It's not decentralized in any practical manner when everyone's local clone is pointing to the same, now no longer available, origin. On the contrary, removing the common, centralized origin makes the project decentralized by definition.
        krono 4y ago
        Some form of distributed authority could have been implemented as a more practical alternative to the scattered remnants that they might be left with now. You're right, of course. My previous post was written up a bit too hasty :)
PeterisP 4y ago
I'm assuming that the problem for Github is that they can't reliably know which of the contributors are "currently part of" TornadoCash and which ones are unrelated people who just contributed code some time ago, and since they absolutely must block the former, in the case of uncertainty the only safe option was to block everyone who seems related.
- px43 4y ago
  None of the Tornado developers are anonymous. They are all well known and respected members of the security/privacy community, and I have personally hung out with them multiple times in the US at public events, where they often speak etc. This isn't some shadowy cabal, they are programmers and mathematicians who think sometimes people might not want the world to see where they are spending their money. Crazy right?
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > ...they are programmers and mathematicians who think sometimes people might not want the world to see where they are spending their money. Crazy right? The IRS and bodies responsible for enforcing laws like those against "funding terror" (remember that?) certainly think that is crazy.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? It looks like it was just the three creators. If they’re smart, this is a prelude to announcing a legal defence fund.
klyrs 4y ago
> Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? I'd say that this is a significant risk that people doing DeFi need to have a long, hard think about. Without a clear organization, without clear leadership, one cannot draw a bright line around those who deserve sanctioning. In court, efforts made towards plausible deniability might pay off. But github is not the courts, its interest is its own liability.
junon 4y ago
Then the thread has shifted tone from when I first read through it.
garfieldnate 4y ago
This is chilling for me. I've contributed to plenty of projects during my 10 years of using GH. Little PR's here and there, sometimes just typos, sometimes just issues. If one of those projects runs into trouble with the law or with GH, will GH delete my account? This would be disastrous for me.

nurettin 4y ago

I have no sympathy for crypto whatever and I really don't care about who sanctioned whom and for what reason, but... Sanctioned project's contributors must be deleted from the server - where is that written in the list of things Microsoft has to do since you went out of your way calling everyone on the reply train ignorant?

nojito 4y ago
> These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. It's pretty cut and dry.
- treesprite82 4y ago
  Cut and dry if the open-source contributors are "blocked persons", but are they? They'd no longer be allowed to contribute to the project, but does someone having contributed in the past mean the sanction on the project extends to their person? Github themselves provided hosting to the project.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    It's quite possible these contributors had forks, which is why they were blocked.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      More importantly, these contributors are likely to have local forks when they can quickly upload under a different name. They can still create new accounts though.
      - 8note 4y ago
        And GitHub can continue to ban them under OFAC compliance?

cdiddy2 4y ago

The people were not sanctioned only the onchain addresses of Tornado were. Github was not providing any service to the onchain addresses.

kube-system 4y ago
The first two lines in the list were not ETH addresses: > TORNADO CASH (a.k.a. TORNADO CASH CLASSIC; a.k.a. TORNADO CASH NOVA); > Website tornado.cash;
- freeone3000 4y ago
  Which is a company name and a website, not people. A company name listed in this manner does not extend to its employees unless they are acting on behalf of the company; any sanctions against individuals specify the individual's name.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    That’s correct. But given that GitHub is a publicly available website, the only way they can prevent employees of that company from being aided by the GitHub website is to remove that company’s code from their website. And because users can create accounts freely without proving employment information, their only way of determining which users could be affiliated is by activity.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

subjectsigma 4y ago

The amount of people replying "Code is free speech! You can't do this!" shows you about how much Twitter understands laws.

junofan 4y ago
That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation.
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  > This is a law. > No, it is not. > That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation.
viraptor 4y ago
You can understand the law and still disagree with it for the same reason. Laws are not set in stone.
orangeoxidation 4y ago
Well... that's an old argument (the PGP book) and there's even support from the courts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  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.
  - orangeoxidation 4y ago
    > 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 don't see how it couldn't be a form of "speech", just like books, poems and music are. Speech is regulated of course, e.g. bomb-building instructions are illegal to publish in the US. Maybe you could make a case this crypto shuffling method is similar and spreading the know-how on how to do it should be forbidden, but that doesn't make it not speech.

RobertoG 4y ago

>>People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. I don't know but there are some comments asking for an distribute alternative to GitHub. That was pretty funny.

seydor 4y ago

To be clear, they did it proactively, not because they were ordered to. For example, many organizations and conferences make exceptions for students from Iran

outsidetheparty 4y ago

> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. You'd think after 16 years I'd be used to it, but it still kinda blows my mind that the social network designed for context- and detail-free hot takes is the one people use for political discussion.

kranke155 4y ago
Most political discussion fits your description perfectly, so of course it does. Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  > Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct. Typically, people just take a paragraph or so of a long form political argument out of context and use it to call the person making the argument evil. Which is basically the same principle as the typical political attack ad where you take a sentence your opponent said out of context to make your opponent look like a crazy extremist. With a short form discussion platform, you can just go straight to the personal attacks, name-calling and out of context distortions of the other side's beliefs. Then we wonder why we suddenly live in a country where the 2 political parties can't compromise on anything and where one of the top political priorities for both parties is prosecuting and jailing their political opponents. I think its very dangerous to view most political discussion being short form context free hot takes as either inevitable or healthy for a government based on free and fair elections (such a norm, however, is probably beneficial to the long term stability and security of a dictatorship). In a society with a democratically elected government, you need free, civil and respectful discussion of issues and a basic level of respect for those who disagree with you. Remove those things and democracy dies just like a plant dies if you deprive it of water and dirt.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    You’re missing the forest for the trees. What actually happened was social media allowed the weaponisation of microtargeted psychological warfare. Read the books “mindfucked” and “targeted” for the detail on Cambridge Analytica (actually Strategic Communications Laboratory or SCL group) how it was a cognitive warfare firm developed for counter terrorism which was unleashed on the American, British (and now presumably Brazilian, Italian and French public). People are not polarized just due to social media - social media is now a cognitive warfare battleground where cognitive heuristics are the trenches.

dingleberry420 4y ago

So making a PR to some project the US government might decide to sanction means github is going to delete my account?

salawat 4y ago
Yes, pretty much. This is why I'm surprised more people aren't way more terrified about OFAC than there are. It's probably one of the nastiest diplomatic tools the U.S. has in its arsenal.
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  Nice, what's next? Jailing everyone who ever had an abortion? Why aren't y'all americans doing that yet, if it's apparently acceptable to punish people for things they did before the supposed crime was made illegal?
  - ilikehurdles 4y ago
  - salawat 4y ago
    Look, the legal system, and political edifice is scary as all hell to anyone actually paying attention. It's literally a game where those in power have a large warchest with which to ruin people's lives, with the only limiting factor being that someone has to do the paperwork, and that paperwork will be checked. With technology obviating the burden of actually doing paperwork, and essentially cranking the efficiency of the bureaucratic state sky high, as well as equipping it with the tools it needs to keep the checkers/whistleblowers at bay, you've got a frightningly powerful tool poised to crush anything in it's way. These aren't the days of "no man can do much damage in 4 years" anymore. One of the great Checks, is becoming much less of one every day. It's scary as hell.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    > before the supposed crime was made illegal The laws against money laundering aren't new.

tromp 4y ago

> GitHub had to do this. They only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction. It's not clear that they limited themselves to those. It would in fact seem to be hard to contribute in the limited time range between establishing the sanction and removing the project. There is also the collateral damage of removing unrelated projects that happened to be owned by these people. Couldn't github preserve such projects while putting them in some ownerless state?

eropple 4y ago
Any chance the blocked accounts had forks of the repository? That'd be an unsurprising heuristic.
- Bedon292 4y ago
  I would expect they all did. Typically I have my fork and PR from the fork in anything I contribute to. Edit: Unless it was members of the organization who had direct write access to the repos? Which I saw mentions of in other comments.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction The people who built Tornado Cash are already in trouble. The crime--facilitating money laundering--has already been committed. OFAC is an enforcement office. Its lists are more like wanted posters than rules. GitHub is cutting ties with people likely to be charged with federal crimes. If some of them are going to continue contributing to the project, GitHub doesn't want to be the conduit through which it is done. This is all standard sanctions compliance.
- tromp 4y ago
  > The crime--facilitating money laundering Did the people who built blockchains with built-in mandatory mixing (Monero) or optional completely obscured transaction inputs (ZCash) also facilitate money laundering? If not, what is the crucial difference? Am I myself in trouble for having (co-)designed a mixing service [1]? [1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal

Hermel 4y ago

If taken literally, this would mean that the founders could not even do their groceries any more, right?

Bedon292 4y ago
I don't think so. The sanctions are against Tornado Cash the entity, as well as specific ETH addresses associated with it. No individuals are cited in the sanction that I am aware of.

ransom1538 4y ago

"GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned." This makes no sense. They could have just blocked the Tornado project. Suspending individual accounts and contributors seems punitive. I was banned on github https://github.com/ransom1538 https://github.com/ransom1538 (unrelated) - it is pretty devastating. No recourse. Just gone. If something involves your lively hood (uber,grubhub,paypal,github, etc) you should be able to state your case.

freedomben 4y ago

> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. I think it's the culture of reacting to 240 characters or less. People already know what they want to feel and finding a quick and completely baseless confirmation bias on twitter is easy and rewards you greatly with dopamine. Smart, mature people gather information before making a decision. Dumb people knee-jerk react based on low information. Twitter heavily encourages the latter by making the former very difficult to do.

sneak 4y ago

Tornado is code, not an entity. AFAIK it isn't a corporation, group, or anything else - it is a smart contract address and a website. The people who wrote the code were not sanctioned. The repo hosting the code was not sanctioned. GitHub did not have to do this. This is Microsoft's legal department and the concept of "an abundance of caution". Nothing about hosting open source code is at issue here. Tornado (the smart contract) was financially sanctioned; it is still fine to host source code.

jmount 4y ago

> People on Twitter are either wil[l]fully dumb or simply ignorant. Can't repeat that often enough. No matter how much I think I have internalized this, it is a continuing lesson.

superkuh 4y ago

>GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned. Does anyone know if this sanction, "contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for...", applies also to individual human persons not associated with a corporate or institutional entity? Is there somewhere I can read about what sactions are, what they mean, and who they apply to? If it's just a Microsoft problem and not a human person problem then the solutions are many and obvious for any tool that's useful. git itself is already pretty distributed friendly.

boredumb 4y ago

> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. The nicest way i'd choose to describe the people of twitter.

thisisanotherte 4y ago

> GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned. You just gave the best 3-sentence argument for not using GitHub. Given how capricious US government has become, it's unreasonable to host your code in Github.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

GitHub is, by their own choice, a massive global library or bookseller of code. They effectively made the choice to take books off their shelves and cease accepting new ones from specific authors, because the US government made them afraid. This should not happen in a country governed by our First Amendment. And, having chosen to take on this responsibility, GitHub/Microsoft’s attorneys should have to courage to stand up for those principles and be rightly criticized if they fail to. Note that hosting code and free developer accounts does not require GitHub to accept or pay money to the developers (who are not named explicitly in the sanctions order, by the way.) ETA: Big tech companies have a lot of resources and freedom to devote those resources to defending their users (see Google and Twitter lawsuits.) But they’re self-interested and won’t do that if they think their user-base won’t hold them responsible for doing that. I think GitHub is responsible here and I wish the HN commentariat would recognize that their opinion matters. By excusing the company’s cowardice here, we are incentivizing more of it in the future.

mbrochh 4y ago

"People on Twitter" are the exact same people that are also on HN, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok etc etc etc.