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Comment by bouncycastle | Hacker News Reader

There's currently one open source software dev / researcher in the US who's facing prison time after talking about open source software at a conference in North Korea. His name is Virgil Griffith. The speech he gave was nothing more than information that was already public.

He's also known for the WikiScanner.

More details here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbrett/2020/01/11/internet-...

His personal home page http://virgil.gr/

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I mean I don't think he should be thrown in jail for that, but you can't just go do that and not expect to get in trouble. Sanction violations are something the feds take extremely seriously. It's one of the few ways to actually get the corporate death penalty if you're a company.

> Sanction violations are something the feds take extremely seriously.

This is just FUD.

While it's true, the level you would have to be at to have to worry about sanctions puts you into "too big to fail" territory.

The point of the above posts though is that Virgil Griffith is probably going to prison because he wasn't paying attention to sanctions though? Or, the case of Meng Wanzhou who is a Chinese citizen who avoided connecting flights through the US and was arrested in Canada anyway for violating trade sanctions with Iran?

That's a problem and likely isn't going to go away unless something big happens with the political system, like maybe a third party taking over.

Not surprising knowing Meng Wanzhou is daughter of a Huawei founder.

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