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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

I would keep in mind that the US has weird antiterror laws about assisting enemies and also laws which construe bypassing system designs as hacking.

For instance, Virgil Griffith is being held and charged for giving a high level description of bitcoin transactions at an academic conference in North Korea.

This is incredibly more specific and more technical of an act.

https://www.coindesk.com/usa-v-virgil-griffith-what-we-know-...

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Virgil Griffith was told not to enter North Korea by the US government, and snuck in through China anyway. He admitted to specifically talking about how to use cryptocurrencies to avoid sanctions, and admitted he knew at the time that that was illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/north-korea-virg...

Can someone who is a lawyer comment on this, please?

edit: further.. how is Signal shielded (if at all) from providing services to anyone in Iran? Wouldn't they be a target in such a case? The blog post is an explicit call for assistance specifically to do so.

> Executive order 13722, signed by President Donald Trump in 2016, prohibits U.S. persons from exporting services to *North Korea*.

Edit: You might find GitHub's description of how they handle this interesting: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...

Not a lawyer, but details of the sanctions are public[1], including Iran General License D-1 which covers services, software, and hardware incident to personal communications. The license has details for fee based and generally public free-of-charge services. We want Iranians to be free to communicate.[2]

[1]: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...

[2]: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm0322

This law is trivially easy to get on the wrong side of. Something like this would be definitely in scope of the anti-terror law you're talking about. American HN users beware.

I wonder how many First Amendment lawyers would be champing at the bit to take a case where a prosecutor was dumb enough to charge someone with a crime for assisting dissidents to communicate.

Problem is that to many from the other side of the Atlantic "dissidents" look an awful lot like "terrorists".

Calling everybody "terrorists" is for politicians and pundits. Judges spend all day seeing through hyperbole like that.

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