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> Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on

> Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing. People keep saying this in this thread. Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?

seanw444 4y ago
As usual, it's an argument for harming people that produce legitimately useful things that criminals pervert. It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.
- alsetmusic 4y ago
  > It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US. To be fair, I think most are arguing to restrict guns rather than ban. I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith.
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Taking some leads to all. It's not something that should be compromised on. Gun restrictions won't end until ownership is so legally complex and time consuming that nobody can reasonably do it anymore. Of course it won't be an outright ban. That would never succeed. The frog in boiling water analogy applies here perfectly.
    - Brybry 4y ago
      "Taking some leads to all" logic doesn't really follow. If that idea applied then the US would already not have guns as many types of firearms (ex. fully automatic) and weapons (explosive munitions) are heavily restricted (and have been for a very long time).
      - sgjohnson 4y ago
        > are heavily restricted They aren’t. Just pay the $200 tax and wait for the ATF to process your transfer form. (3 months to a year, generally) Unless explicitly banned your state, if you can legally own a firearm, you can legally own an NFA item. Including explosives and automatic firearms. Which is why the NFA is generally bullshit. It’s pointless extra bureaucracy that ultimately achieves nothing but delays.
        tekknik 4y ago
        Why is this downvoted? This is very much true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons
    - desperadovisa 4y ago
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      Would that really be a bad thing? Most other developed nations seem to get by fine with very strict rules on gun ownership, and coincidentally they have far lower rates for gun violence. When something has far more capacity for harm than practical utility, it makes sense to regulate the crap out of it. Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.
      - loceng 4y ago
        Here's a comedic piece by Awaken with JP, where he points out many historical events where within ~2-10 years of a government taking the guns away from the population then genocide occurred: "Why Guns Must Be Banned Now!" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkNIoJ-9jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkNIoJ-9jY
        SigmundA 4y ago
        This is the same guy who didn't know the difference between Infection Fatality Rate and Infection Fatality Ratio, then compared the The IF Ratio of Covid to the IF Rate of the Flu and proclaimed the Flu was deadlier because math, and straight faced didn't realize he had two orders of magnitude error. Then he post a video making fun of his video getting removed due to misinformation that he never retracted or corrected.
        loceng 4y ago
        [flagged]
        SigmundA 4y ago
        I am claiming this guy puts huge amounts of one sided misinformation out there including this video. 1. Mass shootings are committed by those brainwashed by government psy-ops programs to motivate the masses to outlaw guns so they can become tyrannical. 2. Only tyrannical governments enact gun control 3. Gun control leads to extermination of a population. 4. The USA is following this pattern and I guess the left is essentially compared to Hitler or Stalin rising to power to perform genocide after they successfully disarm the right. He never mentions once all the countries with successful strict gun control and free societies such as most of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. As though by enacting more strict gun control will lead to genocide always with complete surety. His whole channel is an exercise in Brandolini's law and he's is most definitely a huge part of the problem. The funny thing I am a gun owner and support the second amendment, but everyone seems to forget the "well regulated" part of that amendment and the fact that currently there are many "arms" we are not allowed to own, the same ones the military uses. Do you think everyone should own a machine gun if they want? How about a rocket launcher? What about a nuke? We already draw a line at certain arms moving that line or adjusting the regulations around it would not be without precedent.
    - ribosometronome 4y ago
      >Taking some leads to all. Like how the Assault Weapons Ban in 94 in the US led to the complete and total restriction of guns in the US.
      - MrPatan 4y ago
        Like how the Assault Weapons Ban in 94 in the US is leading to the complete and total restriction of guns in the US.
        croes 4y ago
        I see nothing of a ban
        WFHRenaissance 4y ago
        No ban, just increasingly restrictive laws on ownership and use that end up resulting in something tantamount to a ban. Look at gun ownership in most countries in Europe if you want an idea of what the future could look like. Then give some thought to what Europe was like in the early 20th century!
        mulmen 4y ago
        As always, correlation doesn't imply causation. It's not clear that gun laws themselves even enabled the rise of fascism or that they had any negative impact on quality of life. With widespread gun ownership early 20th century Europe could have been even worse. This argument is so tired it has it's own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_argument > "The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country's population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson's suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on."
    - alangibson 4y ago
      > Taking some leads to all No it doesn't. Here in Austria, only cops have pistols and semiautomatic arms virtually don't exist. However most of the guys I know have at least one hunting rifle.
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Ever growing restrictions start creeping in. In many US states where handguns are hard to acquire it is now difficult to buy small caliber rifle ammunition that can be used in some handguns.
        throwaway742 4y ago
        Take for example California's "safe handgun roster". They added a new rule that for every one pistol that is added three are removed. It's hard to construe that regulation as anything other than a backdoor attempt at banning pistols.
  - teakettle42 4y ago
    > I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith. Well, who is “they”? The majority of activist organizations arguing for restrictions absolutely have an end-goal of banning all guns. Claiming “we just want common sense gun laws” is a far larger bad-faith distortion of the truth than “they wanna take all your guns”. Gun laws proposed by these organizations only go one way: more restrictive.
    - ribosometronome 4y ago
      Discussions on the internet are tons of fun and extremely useful when we just ascribe whatever secret end goal on to organizations that we want. May I try? Actually, the majority of activist organizations are fronts for gun manufacturers to create a fear of them being regulated away to help push a buy-now mentality. claiming otherwise is bad faith distortion of reality!
      - teakettle42 4y ago
        Nobody (other than you, with that intentionally ridiculous claim) is ascribing a secret end goal; their goals are quite plainly articulated.
        alangibson 4y ago
        Links? I need to know who to send donations to.
        optimuspaul 4y ago
        donations?! you just buy guns and they get your money, and "bonus" you get a gun.
        alangibson 4y ago
        I think you followed the thread wrong. I was referring to sending money to groups trying to ban all guns.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    To be Fair, based on the History of " restrict guns " it is clear no amount of restrictions is enough to satisfy those that want to restrict guns, confiscation and total ban is the clear end goal it is NOT "bad faith" to say that, when there is clear evidence that no matter how many times compromise is reached they return the very next day asking for more and more restrictions
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      Factually false, if you believe this you are in an echo chamber. Yes, there are a few who want to ban guns, but I know many people, some of whom are gun owners, who support reasonable restrictions. Trying to paint the entire movement with the views of it's most extreme members is absolutely bad faith communication.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        So "gun owners" fall into 2 camps 1. Sport Shooters 2. Self Defenders There are some that over lap, but I am not a sport shooter, i own guns exclusively for self defense, most gun owners that "support reasonable restrictions" do so because they only care about maintaining shooting sports, and are fine with restrictions because normally they are targeted to self defense uses of fire arms. There is also a small subset of gun owners that are ignorant of the current state of law and believe rhetoric like "closing the gun show loop hole" or other such non-sense. None of this however changes the fact that the MAJOR organizations that support gun control, and big name politicians pushing for gun control have their implicit stated goal of total ban of the most common weapons in use today, (Semi-Auto rifles and pistols with capacities greater than 8) So sure maybe they will allow people to have a black power musket, or some other such non-sense and you believe that classifies as "not a total ban" but to me that is a total ban
        shkkmo 4y ago
        > So "gun owners" fall into 2 camps Again, not true. You need to get out of your filter bubble and meet more kinds of people. People own guns for many reasons and those different reasons do drive different gun usage. A ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity pistols is not even remotely the same thing as banning all guns or even banning all non muskets. I don't think such a ban has popular support even among those who do support greater restrictions.
- eternalban 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_Malekpour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_Malekpour https://capitalpunishmentstudies.tumblr.com/post/17208707639/iran-to-execute-programmer https://capitalpunishmentstudies.tumblr.com/post/17208707639... "Iranian authorities arrested Malekpour during his visit, accusing him of designing and moderating pornographic websites. Malekpour had designed photo uploading software, and according to his supporters, that software was being used without his knowledge for the creation of an adult website." Good company there, Canada.
- spyder 4y ago
  The closer analogy would be arresting the gunmakers because people used their product to commit crimes.
- ratg13 4y ago
  KYC is a mandatory requirement for financial service providers everywhere in North America and Europe. Why do you think this guy should be exempt from the rules that everyone else has to follow?
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    he's not a financial service. It's just like being a developer for bittorrent. You can work on a technology without using it
arcticbull 4y ago
> Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication? Of course not, because intent matters. The team at WhatsApp works super hard to keep people who shouldn't be using it off the platform, so that everyone else can derive use and enjoyment. If WhatsApp was built as a platform to facilitate terrorist communication you're damn right you'd be held liable for working there. Tornado was built, and is operated, specifically to facilitate money laundering. It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters if the funds were acquired illicitly. They do not now, and have not ever, attempted to stop the service from being used for this purpose - after all that's why it was created. A shocked pikachu face isn't a defense.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  > It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters the funds were acquired illicitly. This doesn't feel sincere. Obviously money laundering is one reason why anonymity matters, but you can't think of any other reason? I'll give a prompt: Several threads ago, someone expressed their desire to pay for a VPN service in cryptocurrency.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Remind me why you need to launder your crypto to do that?
    - RHSeeger 4y ago
      Because you don't want your crypto currency to be traced back to you... because then the VPN you paid for with it can be traced back to you... and sometimes the entire point of a VPN is so that connections cannot be traced back to you. The funds used to pay for the VPN were not acquired illicitly, but having it traced by to you _could_ be dangerous for you.
      - shkkmo 4y ago
        The VPN has every IP address you connect to it via. I fail to see how laundering your coins before paying for one is going to add any opsec. You are dependent on trusting the VPN for any security or anonymity it provides you.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Most crimes have what's called a 'Mens Rea' element, which means you had to have criminal intent. So before they knew the Taliban uses it, not a crime. Now that they know? Well, kind of a grey area. I bet you could construct an argument that they commited a crime if any NEW feature/code commit somehow benefits the Taliban after they knew the Taliban uses it. It's legal for me to sell someone a car. It's no longer legal for me to sell someone a car if I know they are paying in drug money or they need it to have a new 'anonymous' car while on the run from the police. Funny story. Drug dealers try to do this with analogs. They will go to a lawyer and get the lawyer's opinion that whatever benzo/fentanyl derivative they are ordering from Alibaba does not fall under the Analogs rules. They then try to argue if arrested that this shows that they didn't have criminal intent and went to great lengths to make sure that what they imported was not illegal drugs and hence no Mens Rea. Don't try this. It doesn't work. You have not found that 'one secret the Feds hate'.
- carlosdp 4y ago
  That makes no sense and I don't think that lines up with liability. Every hammer maker knows some people use hammers as murder weapons. Their continued manufacturing of hammers obviously does not constitute a criminal act. This argument makes no sense, and while I'm not a lawyer, I doubt it actually has legal basis (at least in the US).
  - cantSpellSober 4y ago
    Mens rea isn't some radical idea. If hitting specific sales targets on Bushmaster AR-style hammers is tied to your bonus you might end up settling for $73 million when you get caught pushing them too hard and they're used in a bunch of massacres.
    - carlosdp 4y ago
      The developers of Tornado Cash don't directly profit from its use (the article claims that erroneously), it's a fully permissionless immutable smart contract without a fee component. So this argument, while potentially valid, doesn't apply here.
JeremyNT 4y ago
Cryptocurrency mixers exist solely to launder money. This is literally all they are useful for. WhatsApp has legitimate, non-criminal use cases.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  I disagree with that, as there are things you may wanna buy without making public you bought, that is still legal. For example, some specialist hobby you'd rather not want others to know about. Still mostly money laundering though.
- unboxingelf 4y ago
  False. Here is the definition of money laundering: 1. The act of engaging in transactions designed to obscure the origin of money that has been obtained illegally. 2. concealing the source of illegally gotten money Anyone can use a cryptocurrency mixer with legally obtained cryptocurrency. Tornado Cash has legitimate, non-criminal use cases.
  - enlyth 4y ago
    Anyone can, but realistically, it has probably been used almost exclusively for either laundering money or concealing the source of money used to purchase illegal goods. I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal. I'm not advocating for the developer to be prosecuted, I'm just saying in the eyes of the law, they probably won't see it in the way you are describing.
    - unboxingelf 4y ago
      I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal. See my other comment for a concrete, legal use case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443842
joe_the_user 4y ago
I think this sort of question is being argued with youtube-dl and we can see where it goes. The entertainment industry argues the purpose of youtube-dl is to pirate content. Youtube-dl argues that there are in fact many legitimate uses for it and this argument has so far prevailed. In the case of WhatsApp, the app has many legitimate uses, notably speech, which is often protected as a right. In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy. ianal etc.
- andai 4y ago
  Many countries have strong privacy protections. Why should the same not apply to transactions?
  - mavu 4y ago
    Because many countries do not like money laundering and tax evasion.
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  > In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy. There are legitimate using an open ledger as Ethereum, privacy is a right.
  - paledot 4y ago
    Privacy should be a right, with limits (like all rights). I'm not sure where in the world privacy is a constitutional right beyond unreasonable-search-and-seizure.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Yeah, this line of reasoning is exceedingly silly. Stethoscopes can be used to help crack safes, should the people who make them be in legal jeopardy as a result? Good luck convincing anyone to invest in innovation in that kind of legal environment, my friends. Demonstrating that there's one legitimate use should probably be sufficient in most cases. If you want to be uptight you can think about adding a requirement that the best fit use case must always be legitimate
ezoe 4y ago
Let's arrest Satya Nadella, Tim Cook and Linus Torvalds for they are responsible of the three major OSes that are used for the computer related crimes.
closeparen 4y ago
If the law required communication providers to obtain licenses, and as a condition of those licenses to have credible controls against use by terrorists, and Whatsapp just scoffed at all that & went on being trivially used by terrorists, then why not?
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication? If the law is written by authoritarians they very well could be. What is legal has absolutely no relation to what is right, wrong, ethical or unethical. It depends entirely on the people passing the law.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
That's now how our society approaches financial transactions. When funds from every major hack are going into your protocol maybe you're actually doing something bad.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  what about bittorrent? The vast majority of it is used for piracy, and yet the developers haven't been arrested

seanw444 4y ago

As usual, it's an argument for harming people that produce legitimately useful things that criminals pervert. It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.

alsetmusic 4y ago
> It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US. To be fair, I think most are arguing to restrict guns rather than ban. I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Taking some leads to all. It's not something that should be compromised on. Gun restrictions won't end until ownership is so legally complex and time consuming that nobody can reasonably do it anymore. Of course it won't be an outright ban. That would never succeed. The frog in boiling water analogy applies here perfectly.
  - Brybry 4y ago
    "Taking some leads to all" logic doesn't really follow. If that idea applied then the US would already not have guns as many types of firearms (ex. fully automatic) and weapons (explosive munitions) are heavily restricted (and have been for a very long time).
    - sgjohnson 4y ago
      > are heavily restricted They aren’t. Just pay the $200 tax and wait for the ATF to process your transfer form. (3 months to a year, generally) Unless explicitly banned your state, if you can legally own a firearm, you can legally own an NFA item. Including explosives and automatic firearms. Which is why the NFA is generally bullshit. It’s pointless extra bureaucracy that ultimately achieves nothing but delays.
      - tekknik 4y ago
        Why is this downvoted? This is very much true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons
  - desperadovisa 4y ago
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Would that really be a bad thing? Most other developed nations seem to get by fine with very strict rules on gun ownership, and coincidentally they have far lower rates for gun violence. When something has far more capacity for harm than practical utility, it makes sense to regulate the crap out of it. Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.
    - loceng 4y ago
      Here's a comedic piece by Awaken with JP, where he points out many historical events where within ~2-10 years of a government taking the guns away from the population then genocide occurred: "Why Guns Must Be Banned Now!" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkNIoJ-9jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkNIoJ-9jY
      - SigmundA 4y ago
        This is the same guy who didn't know the difference between Infection Fatality Rate and Infection Fatality Ratio, then compared the The IF Ratio of Covid to the IF Rate of the Flu and proclaimed the Flu was deadlier because math, and straight faced didn't realize he had two orders of magnitude error. Then he post a video making fun of his video getting removed due to misinformation that he never retracted or corrected.
        loceng 4y ago
        [flagged]
        SigmundA 4y ago
        I am claiming this guy puts huge amounts of one sided misinformation out there including this video. 1. Mass shootings are committed by those brainwashed by government psy-ops programs to motivate the masses to outlaw guns so they can become tyrannical. 2. Only tyrannical governments enact gun control 3. Gun control leads to extermination of a population. 4. The USA is following this pattern and I guess the left is essentially compared to Hitler or Stalin rising to power to perform genocide after they successfully disarm the right. He never mentions once all the countries with successful strict gun control and free societies such as most of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. As though by enacting more strict gun control will lead to genocide always with complete surety. His whole channel is an exercise in Brandolini's law and he's is most definitely a huge part of the problem. The funny thing I am a gun owner and support the second amendment, but everyone seems to forget the "well regulated" part of that amendment and the fact that currently there are many "arms" we are not allowed to own, the same ones the military uses. Do you think everyone should own a machine gun if they want? How about a rocket launcher? What about a nuke? We already draw a line at certain arms moving that line or adjusting the regulations around it would not be without precedent.
  - ribosometronome 4y ago
    >Taking some leads to all. Like how the Assault Weapons Ban in 94 in the US led to the complete and total restriction of guns in the US.
    - MrPatan 4y ago
      Like how the Assault Weapons Ban in 94 in the US is leading to the complete and total restriction of guns in the US.
      - croes 4y ago
        I see nothing of a ban
        WFHRenaissance 4y ago
        No ban, just increasingly restrictive laws on ownership and use that end up resulting in something tantamount to a ban. Look at gun ownership in most countries in Europe if you want an idea of what the future could look like. Then give some thought to what Europe was like in the early 20th century!
        mulmen 4y ago
        As always, correlation doesn't imply causation. It's not clear that gun laws themselves even enabled the rise of fascism or that they had any negative impact on quality of life. With widespread gun ownership early 20th century Europe could have been even worse. This argument is so tired it has it's own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_argument > "The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country's population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson's suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on."
  - alangibson 4y ago
    > Taking some leads to all No it doesn't. Here in Austria, only cops have pistols and semiautomatic arms virtually don't exist. However most of the guys I know have at least one hunting rifle.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Ever growing restrictions start creeping in. In many US states where handguns are hard to acquire it is now difficult to buy small caliber rifle ammunition that can be used in some handguns.
      - throwaway742 4y ago
        Take for example California's "safe handgun roster". They added a new rule that for every one pistol that is added three are removed. It's hard to construe that regulation as anything other than a backdoor attempt at banning pistols.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  > I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith. Well, who is “they”? The majority of activist organizations arguing for restrictions absolutely have an end-goal of banning all guns. Claiming “we just want common sense gun laws” is a far larger bad-faith distortion of the truth than “they wanna take all your guns”. Gun laws proposed by these organizations only go one way: more restrictive.
  - ribosometronome 4y ago
    Discussions on the internet are tons of fun and extremely useful when we just ascribe whatever secret end goal on to organizations that we want. May I try? Actually, the majority of activist organizations are fronts for gun manufacturers to create a fear of them being regulated away to help push a buy-now mentality. claiming otherwise is bad faith distortion of reality!
    - teakettle42 4y ago
      Nobody (other than you, with that intentionally ridiculous claim) is ascribing a secret end goal; their goals are quite plainly articulated.
      - alangibson 4y ago
        Links? I need to know who to send donations to.
        optimuspaul 4y ago
        donations?! you just buy guns and they get your money, and "bonus" you get a gun.
        alangibson 4y ago
        I think you followed the thread wrong. I was referring to sending money to groups trying to ban all guns.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  To be Fair, based on the History of " restrict guns " it is clear no amount of restrictions is enough to satisfy those that want to restrict guns, confiscation and total ban is the clear end goal it is NOT "bad faith" to say that, when there is clear evidence that no matter how many times compromise is reached they return the very next day asking for more and more restrictions
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    Factually false, if you believe this you are in an echo chamber. Yes, there are a few who want to ban guns, but I know many people, some of whom are gun owners, who support reasonable restrictions. Trying to paint the entire movement with the views of it's most extreme members is absolutely bad faith communication.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      So "gun owners" fall into 2 camps 1. Sport Shooters 2. Self Defenders There are some that over lap, but I am not a sport shooter, i own guns exclusively for self defense, most gun owners that "support reasonable restrictions" do so because they only care about maintaining shooting sports, and are fine with restrictions because normally they are targeted to self defense uses of fire arms. There is also a small subset of gun owners that are ignorant of the current state of law and believe rhetoric like "closing the gun show loop hole" or other such non-sense. None of this however changes the fact that the MAJOR organizations that support gun control, and big name politicians pushing for gun control have their implicit stated goal of total ban of the most common weapons in use today, (Semi-Auto rifles and pistols with capacities greater than 8) So sure maybe they will allow people to have a black power musket, or some other such non-sense and you believe that classifies as "not a total ban" but to me that is a total ban
      - shkkmo 4y ago
        > So "gun owners" fall into 2 camps Again, not true. You need to get out of your filter bubble and meet more kinds of people. People own guns for many reasons and those different reasons do drive different gun usage. A ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity pistols is not even remotely the same thing as banning all guns or even banning all non muskets. I don't think such a ban has popular support even among those who do support greater restrictions.
eternalban 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_Malekpour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_Malekpour https://capitalpunishmentstudies.tumblr.com/post/17208707639/iran-to-execute-programmer https://capitalpunishmentstudies.tumblr.com/post/17208707639... "Iranian authorities arrested Malekpour during his visit, accusing him of designing and moderating pornographic websites. Malekpour had designed photo uploading software, and according to his supporters, that software was being used without his knowledge for the creation of an adult website." Good company there, Canada.
spyder 4y ago
The closer analogy would be arresting the gunmakers because people used their product to commit crimes.
ratg13 4y ago
KYC is a mandatory requirement for financial service providers everywhere in North America and Europe. Why do you think this guy should be exempt from the rules that everyone else has to follow?
- woojoo666 4y ago
  he's not a financial service. It's just like being a developer for bittorrent. You can work on a technology without using it

arcticbull 4y ago

> Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication? Of course not, because intent matters. The team at WhatsApp works super hard to keep people who shouldn't be using it off the platform, so that everyone else can derive use and enjoyment. If WhatsApp was built as a platform to facilitate terrorist communication you're damn right you'd be held liable for working there. Tornado was built, and is operated, specifically to facilitate money laundering. It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters if the funds were acquired illicitly. They do not now, and have not ever, attempted to stop the service from being used for this purpose - after all that's why it was created. A shocked pikachu face isn't a defense.

tadfisher 4y ago
> It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters the funds were acquired illicitly. This doesn't feel sincere. Obviously money laundering is one reason why anonymity matters, but you can't think of any other reason? I'll give a prompt: Several threads ago, someone expressed their desire to pay for a VPN service in cryptocurrency.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Remind me why you need to launder your crypto to do that?
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    Because you don't want your crypto currency to be traced back to you... because then the VPN you paid for with it can be traced back to you... and sometimes the entire point of a VPN is so that connections cannot be traced back to you. The funds used to pay for the VPN were not acquired illicitly, but having it traced by to you _could_ be dangerous for you.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      The VPN has every IP address you connect to it via. I fail to see how laundering your coins before paying for one is going to add any opsec. You are dependent on trusting the VPN for any security or anonymity it provides you.

ROTMetro 4y ago

Most crimes have what's called a 'Mens Rea' element, which means you had to have criminal intent. So before they knew the Taliban uses it, not a crime. Now that they know? Well, kind of a grey area. I bet you could construct an argument that they commited a crime if any NEW feature/code commit somehow benefits the Taliban after they knew the Taliban uses it. It's legal for me to sell someone a car. It's no longer legal for me to sell someone a car if I know they are paying in drug money or they need it to have a new 'anonymous' car while on the run from the police. Funny story. Drug dealers try to do this with analogs. They will go to a lawyer and get the lawyer's opinion that whatever benzo/fentanyl derivative they are ordering from Alibaba does not fall under the Analogs rules. They then try to argue if arrested that this shows that they didn't have criminal intent and went to great lengths to make sure that what they imported was not illegal drugs and hence no Mens Rea. Don't try this. It doesn't work. You have not found that 'one secret the Feds hate'.

carlosdp 4y ago
That makes no sense and I don't think that lines up with liability. Every hammer maker knows some people use hammers as murder weapons. Their continued manufacturing of hammers obviously does not constitute a criminal act. This argument makes no sense, and while I'm not a lawyer, I doubt it actually has legal basis (at least in the US).
- cantSpellSober 4y ago
  Mens rea isn't some radical idea. If hitting specific sales targets on Bushmaster AR-style hammers is tied to your bonus you might end up settling for $73 million when you get caught pushing them too hard and they're used in a bunch of massacres.
  - carlosdp 4y ago
    The developers of Tornado Cash don't directly profit from its use (the article claims that erroneously), it's a fully permissionless immutable smart contract without a fee component. So this argument, while potentially valid, doesn't apply here.

JeremyNT 4y ago

Cryptocurrency mixers exist solely to launder money. This is literally all they are useful for. WhatsApp has legitimate, non-criminal use cases.

Akronymus 4y ago
I disagree with that, as there are things you may wanna buy without making public you bought, that is still legal. For example, some specialist hobby you'd rather not want others to know about. Still mostly money laundering though.
unboxingelf 4y ago
False. Here is the definition of money laundering: 1. The act of engaging in transactions designed to obscure the origin of money that has been obtained illegally. 2. concealing the source of illegally gotten money Anyone can use a cryptocurrency mixer with legally obtained cryptocurrency. Tornado Cash has legitimate, non-criminal use cases.
- enlyth 4y ago
  Anyone can, but realistically, it has probably been used almost exclusively for either laundering money or concealing the source of money used to purchase illegal goods. I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal. I'm not advocating for the developer to be prosecuted, I'm just saying in the eyes of the law, they probably won't see it in the way you are describing.
  - unboxingelf 4y ago
    I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal. See my other comment for a concrete, legal use case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443842

joe_the_user 4y ago

I think this sort of question is being argued with youtube-dl and we can see where it goes. The entertainment industry argues the purpose of youtube-dl is to pirate content. Youtube-dl argues that there are in fact many legitimate uses for it and this argument has so far prevailed. In the case of WhatsApp, the app has many legitimate uses, notably speech, which is often protected as a right. In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy. ianal etc.

andai 4y ago
Many countries have strong privacy protections. Why should the same not apply to transactions?
- mavu 4y ago
  Because many countries do not like money laundering and tax evasion.
stiltzkin 4y ago
> In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy. There are legitimate using an open ledger as Ethereum, privacy is a right.
- paledot 4y ago
  Privacy should be a right, with limits (like all rights). I'm not sure where in the world privacy is a constitutional right beyond unreasonable-search-and-seizure.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Yeah, this line of reasoning is exceedingly silly. Stethoscopes can be used to help crack safes, should the people who make them be in legal jeopardy as a result? Good luck convincing anyone to invest in innovation in that kind of legal environment, my friends. Demonstrating that there's one legitimate use should probably be sufficient in most cases. If you want to be uptight you can think about adding a requirement that the best fit use case must always be legitimate

ezoe 4y ago

Let's arrest Satya Nadella, Tim Cook and Linus Torvalds for they are responsible of the three major OSes that are used for the computer related crimes.

closeparen 4y ago

If the law required communication providers to obtain licenses, and as a condition of those licenses to have credible controls against use by terrorists, and Whatsapp just scoffed at all that & went on being trivially used by terrorists, then why not?

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication? If the law is written by authoritarians they very well could be. What is legal has absolutely no relation to what is right, wrong, ethical or unethical. It depends entirely on the people passing the law.

ymolodtsov 4y ago

That's now how our society approaches financial transactions. When funds from every major hack are going into your protocol maybe you're actually doing something bad.

woojoo666 4y ago
what about bittorrent? The vast majority of it is used for piracy, and yet the developers haven't been arrested