6 ms·

Well, they expect OFAC-based legal action by the government, of course.

by guipsp 4y ago

mmaunder 4y ago
Green wouldn’t have standing for EFF to participate if USA goes after MS. So I’m curious what they’d go after Green for.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  He's the maintainer on the repository - so presumably that. (https://github.com/tornado-repositories https://github.com/tornado-repositories)
altairprime 4y ago
If he stands up and operates a for-profit instance of the service, then he will have committed the crime that led to the sanctions against the original operators of the service. If he does not, then he is not a participating entity in the sanctioned service, and is unlikely to attract serious attention from the Justice Department. It’s nice of the EFF to throw down a gauntlet about free speech, but I expect it will be ignored in favor of sanctioning others who operate cryptohash laundering services.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I don't think there's any for-profit argument by the Treasury against Tornado Cash. But for what it's worth, the smart contract is still live on the Ethereum mainnet. Given that it is immutable, it is not possible to take it down. It's also trivial to fork and I imagine several forks already exist on mainnet and across various EVM forks by now.
  - _ugfj 4y ago
    Potentially you are challenging one of the world's largest governments to find a way to stop it. I dunno what they can or what they will do but imagine this scenario: they sanction it in a way that you are guilty of money laundering if a copy is found on your computer -- now running the Ethereum mainnet or any fork that contains it is illegal in the United States. Do not think the DoJ won't. Refer https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ or James Mickens' https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf for some hilarious hard truth on what happens when cryptographic research meets a real world government agency. Also refer the old saying "never wake a sleeping lion".
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      > you are guilty of money laundering if a copy is found on your computer -- now running the Ethereum mainnet or any fork that contains it is illegal in the United States This is well beyond the regulatory and legal powers of the U.S. Treasury and the DOJ. That is not the letter of the law with regards to money laundering, and the agency cannot invent new laws out of thin air. Nor can they blanket ban a technology or code just because they have to learn new stuff. Could Congress pass such a law? Sure, but even then, we'll go to the mats in the court and in state legislatures. Nevermind that criminalizing and demonizing a large portion of the population hurts your re-election chances. Even torrenting, as egregious as the copyright abuse was in Pirate Bay's heyday, was never banned in such a way. Email scams from Nigeria never necessitated the shutdown of email. VPNs continue to operate. Nevermind that similar cases with regards to cryptography have already gone to court, which ruled in favor of speech: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab... The XKCD example is amusing, but fails even the most basic cross-examination. Surely officers with a court-issued warrant for probable cause of a crime should be able to inspect a person's home or things. Maybe they could find a private key written on a post-it note somewhere in the person's home. That's all fair and good, and no one is arguing against that. Clearly, it's not very scalable, nor should it be. We operate under the presumption of innocence in free societies. We all have a problem with illegal, abusive, mass surveillance. It is a violation of human liberty and a disturbing trend that has to be pushed against to prevent a full-on dystopian, authoritarian hellscape where you don't even have paper cash as an outlet from the panopticon. To avoid that future outcome, to preserve the freedom of your children, you have to fight for privacy and transactional liberty. My ancestors were willing to bleed and die for liberty. Some of us still are, today. Never wake a sleeping lion, indeed.
  - altairprime 4y ago
    Unprofitable money laundering operations collapse from the costs of meeting demand at scales large enough to offend the United States government, and so require no special prosecution or censure in order to fail. Cryptocoin laundering is highly desired by those that would launder currency, and so is not exempt from this outcome.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Immutable smart contracts on blockchains are available to anyone with the few dollars worth of ether or other base chain currency necessary to execute the contract on-chain. They do not cost anything to operate after being deployed. In that sense, Tornado Cash is a protocol, that has more in common with HTTPS than with a business operation. Smart contracts can be thought of as software-defined protocols. Given that HTTPS and other forms of encryption are used on the regular, for both good and nefarious purposes, I see no reasonable argument against mixers. There has to be a path for on-chain privacy. It is a human right. It's also a U.S. constitutionally protected 4th amendment human right.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - altairprime 4y ago
        Whatever their benefits, mixers also enable and support the laundering of illegally-obtained currency and the circumvention of government sanctions. These points are both reasonable arguments against mixers. It remains to be seen whether society as a whole will accept your argument that mixers are an innate human right, protected under the constitution. However, I observe with these sanctions that both the US judiciary and those of many others countries has decided cryptocoin laundering is not a protected human right, due to the balance of harm caused to societies outweighing the rights of the individual. It’s your right here in the US to declare that they’re wrong, but I do not see in your reply any new evidence or arguments presented that would change the course of the US government.
        d4rti 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I agree, but GitHub is going out of their way to censor this code, and developers in other countries are being arrested for writing it. Maybe a high profile case of "the code will remain available" will dissuade those who intend to follow suit.

Well, they expect OFAC-based legal action by the government, of course.

by guipsp 4y ago

Well, they expect OFAC-based legal action by the government, of course.

Green wouldn’t have standing for EFF to participate if USA goes after MS. So I’m curious what they’d go after Green for.

mikeyouse 4y ago
He's the maintainer on the repository - so presumably that. (https://github.com/tornado-repositories https://github.com/tornado-repositories)

altairprime 4y ago

If he stands up and operates a for-profit instance of the service, then he will have committed the crime that led to the sanctions against the original operators of the service. If he does not, then he is not a participating entity in the sanctioned service, and is unlikely to attract serious attention from the Justice Department. It’s nice of the EFF to throw down a gauntlet about free speech, but I expect it will be ignored in favor of sanctioning others who operate cryptohash laundering services.

chrisco255 4y ago
I don't think there's any for-profit argument by the Treasury against Tornado Cash. But for what it's worth, the smart contract is still live on the Ethereum mainnet. Given that it is immutable, it is not possible to take it down. It's also trivial to fork and I imagine several forks already exist on mainnet and across various EVM forks by now.
- _ugfj 4y ago
  Potentially you are challenging one of the world's largest governments to find a way to stop it. I dunno what they can or what they will do but imagine this scenario: they sanction it in a way that you are guilty of money laundering if a copy is found on your computer -- now running the Ethereum mainnet or any fork that contains it is illegal in the United States. Do not think the DoJ won't. Refer https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ or James Mickens' https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf for some hilarious hard truth on what happens when cryptographic research meets a real world government agency. Also refer the old saying "never wake a sleeping lion".
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    > you are guilty of money laundering if a copy is found on your computer -- now running the Ethereum mainnet or any fork that contains it is illegal in the United States This is well beyond the regulatory and legal powers of the U.S. Treasury and the DOJ. That is not the letter of the law with regards to money laundering, and the agency cannot invent new laws out of thin air. Nor can they blanket ban a technology or code just because they have to learn new stuff. Could Congress pass such a law? Sure, but even then, we'll go to the mats in the court and in state legislatures. Nevermind that criminalizing and demonizing a large portion of the population hurts your re-election chances. Even torrenting, as egregious as the copyright abuse was in Pirate Bay's heyday, was never banned in such a way. Email scams from Nigeria never necessitated the shutdown of email. VPNs continue to operate. Nevermind that similar cases with regards to cryptography have already gone to court, which ruled in favor of speech: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab... The XKCD example is amusing, but fails even the most basic cross-examination. Surely officers with a court-issued warrant for probable cause of a crime should be able to inspect a person's home or things. Maybe they could find a private key written on a post-it note somewhere in the person's home. That's all fair and good, and no one is arguing against that. Clearly, it's not very scalable, nor should it be. We operate under the presumption of innocence in free societies. We all have a problem with illegal, abusive, mass surveillance. It is a violation of human liberty and a disturbing trend that has to be pushed against to prevent a full-on dystopian, authoritarian hellscape where you don't even have paper cash as an outlet from the panopticon. To avoid that future outcome, to preserve the freedom of your children, you have to fight for privacy and transactional liberty. My ancestors were willing to bleed and die for liberty. Some of us still are, today. Never wake a sleeping lion, indeed.
- altairprime 4y ago
  Unprofitable money laundering operations collapse from the costs of meeting demand at scales large enough to offend the United States government, and so require no special prosecution or censure in order to fail. Cryptocoin laundering is highly desired by those that would launder currency, and so is not exempt from this outcome.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Immutable smart contracts on blockchains are available to anyone with the few dollars worth of ether or other base chain currency necessary to execute the contract on-chain. They do not cost anything to operate after being deployed. In that sense, Tornado Cash is a protocol, that has more in common with HTTPS than with a business operation. Smart contracts can be thought of as software-defined protocols. Given that HTTPS and other forms of encryption are used on the regular, for both good and nefarious purposes, I see no reasonable argument against mixers. There has to be a path for on-chain privacy. It is a human right. It's also a U.S. constitutionally protected 4th amendment human right.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - altairprime 4y ago
      Whatever their benefits, mixers also enable and support the laundering of illegally-obtained currency and the circumvention of government sanctions. These points are both reasonable arguments against mixers. It remains to be seen whether society as a whole will accept your argument that mixers are an innate human right, protected under the constitution. However, I observe with these sanctions that both the US judiciary and those of many others countries has decided cryptocoin laundering is not a protected human right, due to the balance of harm caused to societies outweighing the rights of the individual. It’s your right here in the US to declare that they’re wrong, but I do not see in your reply any new evidence or arguments presented that would change the course of the US government.
      - d4rti 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I agree, but GitHub is going out of their way to censor this code, and developers in other countries are being arrested for writing it. Maybe a high profile case of "the code will remain available" will dissuade those who intend to follow suit.