Long time listener, lurker, thought I’d make a news topic suggestion for the next LWF episode.
Tornado Cash, a “mixer” smart contract on Ethereum. It’s designed to facilitate anonymous wallet funding by maintaining and routing transactions through an anonymity pool.
One of its core developers, Roman Storm has been charged by the DOJ on money laundering chargers among a few others.
What’s really surprising is that Tornado Cash is a self-contained, unopinionated and open source application deployed on Ethereum. The way it’s written, its developers HAVE NO ADMINISTRATIVE RIGHTS over it. And there is no supporting infrastructure that anyone maintains (or needs to) in order use the application. It’s hosted entirely on its Blockchain network.
He didn’t facilitate any specific instance of criminal activity. ALL he did was write open source software. It’s MIT licensed! And somehow there’s a valid case against him? I’ve always thought of writing software as a form of expression, speech. Wouldn’t this be a clear violation of free speech?
What prompted me to bring this topic up is that the case has apparently gone into verdict deliberations, and from how much I have been keeping up with it, the judge (or DA whatever) has instructed the jury to COMPLETELY DISREGARD the fact that all he’s done is write software, and the argument that it is a from of free speech.
refs:
https://x.com/rstormsf/status/1934991987410956609
https://x.com/innercitypress/status/1952366301768229217
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This is a pretty big case. I’m really shocked I haven’t heard of it at all until now. Looks like there have been several posts on StackerNews about it (I rarely check StackerNews or cyrpto news in general). The guy literally just wrote software. This opens the door for all kinds of insane things, like Google going after yt-dlp for circumventing YouTube.
It’s interesting the EFF is not being totally useless in this instance as well. I feel like this should be getting a lot more coverage.
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The EFF took longer than they should have to get involved seemingly because of one of their board members carrying a really stupid opinion: Tornado Cash Is Not Free Speech. It’s a Golem | Lawfare
Although I agree, it’s good to see they eventually stepped up
I’ve found this podcast which goes into a lot of the legal stuff. It’s pretty crazy:
The EFF has been absolutely terrible the past several years. The last time I got to hear EFF lawyers was at Defcon 2016 where they made an amazing argument against the EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” legislation, talking about it was mostly used to hide the crimes of those who could afford to use it. I really agreed with that.
More recently they wrote an unhinged post about Florida prosecutors claiming “no one has been charged with a crime,” even though the statement they explicitly link from the Florida Attorney General states “There is evidence that Moore advertised the performance on social media as “all ages welcome,” which featured adult, sexualized performers.”
It’s like they EFF doesn’t understand the basics of probable cause (more likely they do, but now they’re spinning everything for an underlying agenda).
Doesn’t surprise me at all.
