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I was disappointed to see all the knee-jerk reactions to the Tornado sanctions, and I'm happy to see Matt and the EFF push back on the chilling effect on open source development. age is a privacy tool that's been used for ransomware, but its development is protected speech, too.

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Matthew Green

@matthew_d_green

Aug 22

There are a lot of thorny issues around the OFAC/Treasury sanctioning of an open source project, and what it means for freedom of speech. To help figure those out, the EFF has agreed to represent me. eff.org/deeplinks/2022

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You don't advertise and use age in an active service that you directly profit from, though. From my PoV the EFF is dangerously conflating code with it's use in active criminal enterprise, which worryingly weakens their position considerably for everyone in future

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The developers of Tornado Cash did not host it as a service. It was hosted on Ethereum with control by a decentralized organization which had to decide to deploy their changes. You're also implying services like WhatsApp are somehow less or not legal because of profit from it.

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You don't get the luxury of committing crimes as a group by calling yourselves a DAO. Prosecutors can and must prove that defendants Operate the service rather than just maintain the code - other than this there is very little complexity or ambiguity

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They aren't calling themselves a DAO. The developers were not the ones in control of the contract on Ethereum and claiming that the service was hosted by someone other than Ethereum miners doesn't really make much sense. It's not how this project worked. It's still there working.

8:53 AM · Aug 23, 2022Twitter Web App

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*Someone* deployed that smart contract into the network, just as someone might host an illegal webservice. Deliberately obfuscatory implementation details like DAOs and miners have absolutely no relevance

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What crime do you think they committed, and why haven't they been charged with it? They're being held without charges. Accusation levelled against them is they wrote and published code people used to launder money. People who used it to hide proceeds of crimes committed a crime.

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