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Comment by chrischattin | Hacker News Reader

Any constitutional law experts care to comment?

If the US government put pressure on Github to remove the code and delete their accounts, it seems like a clear violation of the developer's first amendment rights – "code is speech" being precedent.

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Not all speech is legal. If I write a virus and unleash it on the internet it's not unconstitutional to arrest me.

It could be argued the sole intent of unleashing a virus on the internet is malicious. The sole intent of publishing a privacy protocol on GitHub is not. Look at Tor for comparison.

GitHub has a section on this[1]. There should be no problem with allowing this software online for research and educational purposes.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...

Does anyone want to dispute that Tornado Cash is a money laundering tool? When at least 20% of the money that has moved through it is already known to be ill-gotten gains, with the rest being indeterminant, it's kind of hard to say it's a anything but a money laundering tool. I've only seen childish arguments that "money laundering is a fake crime", not that Tornado Cash isn't a money laundering tool.

It is a tool for privacy, full stop. Criminals can use this for criminal activity, law abiding citizens can use this for law abiding activity. Also see end-to-end encrypted chat apps, VPNs, onion routing and other privacy tools that are widely used by criminals.

also consider applications that might be illegal but often considered moral like paying for an abortion with tornado cash ETH in a state where abortion is illegal, or donating to a state that your current regime is at war with.

So "privacy of money movement" is not "money laundering". I see.

Y'all always wanna talk about what people could use the system for and never what people actually are using it for.

Well, if it's just about privacy, then I guess those people could use other forms of money laundering. Aherm, I mean "privately moving large sums of money around to avoid regulatory oversight".

People are using the system for these reasons. Vitalik himself has gone on record saying he has used Tornado Cash to donate large sums of money anonymously to Ukraine.

Conveniently no way to actually verify that

lol, the goalposts have shifted from “nobody uses it for this” to “we can’t know if people use it for this.”

Imagine applying this logic to E2EE chat: we can’t know if anybody is using it for legitimate reasons, because we can’t see their messages.

Besides, you can check the chain yourself - if Vitalik is truthful, you should see at least that some tornado linked funds have been donated to Ukraine after the point he placed them in the protocol.

When governments are not able to know wth you're doing all the time they get worried.

Remember the Patriot act? Or that it went after Phil Zimmermann (creator of PGP)? I see some parallels here.

PGP can be used for law abiding private communication as well as non-law abiding private communication. Maybe we need to rethink the use of https?

A little of a stretch, but you can say that there are law abiding gun owners and non law abiding gun owners. What should we do about that?

I tend to raise an eyebrow, when the government uses the excuse kids/guns/terrorist/criminals to intrude into my privacy.

I will dispute that. It's a privacy tool. Just because you don't want the world to know what you spent your money on, doesn't mean you are doing anything illegal.

What if it's a virus that targets politicians?

Then it would be malicious?

IANAL; even in the USA not all speech is protected under the law. See libel laws.

Here it is less about the code as speech, but code as an illegal business and product. It's not an either//or situation. Code is more than just one thing.

Code is never an illegal business. You have to run the code to do an illegal business. In this case running the mixer is apparently illegal (wonder if at all or with just some specific cases), but maintaining and improving the code to run such a mixer certainly not.

crypto wars 2.0

Working for an illegal business (tornado cash isn't just some code repository, it's basically a SaaS business backed on a chain), on its product, usually makes you liable. That's why people working for cartels are prosecutable.

edit: I believe the term is "criminal facilitation."

Not a lawyer, but there is a difference between providing a service (GitHub) and "code is speech". This has nothing to do with code.

GitHub are no longer legally able to provide the service, and so those people no longer have access to GitHub the service. Nothing code-related.

How is code speech? To me it is the equivalent to nuts and bolts of a machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

> After four years and one regulatory change, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.

Hopefully the next time something like this gets trounced it is congress turning the IRS into like, 20k LOC, instead of ... a bureau.

The 9th Circuit has also ruled that bees are fish[1], and has regularly bucked precedent that to most of the country is settled jurisprudence. [2] This escalating to a point one of the Circuit's own judges began lambasting the Circuit itself. [3]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/us/california-bees-fish-court...

https://www.courthousenews.com/carrying-guns-in-public-is-no...

https://reason.com/2022/01/26/a-federal-judges-satirical-opi...

You'll understand if what the 9th Circuit declares has lost a touch of automatic deference from an intellectual, rational consistency, and linguistic abuse point of view, I hope.

The US has expansive view of what is speech. A theater play satirizing the US congress is definitely a political statement, yet it also just code for actors, right?

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