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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law. Every country recognizes warrants for this reason.

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> The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law.

With your logic we’d lose 100% of our privacy.

Privacy of your own home? You could setup a drug lab.

Privacy of your own phone/computer? Can run an illegal operation.

Privacy of your own USD cash? Could be used for illegal transactions.

The better question: what privacy is there that couldn’t theoretically be used to evade the law?

You are cherry picking part of my comment and reducing it to absurdity. Obviously any implementation needs to be more nuanced than a single sentence generalization. I mentioned warrants for a reason!

Encrypted communication protocols are also useful for evading the law; do you think they should also be banned and the developers arrested?

No, that's not what they said. They said if you are using it to break laws, then you can't not expect to be arrested.

A money laundering operation can hardly been seen as fundamentally a way to provide privacy but as a way to change dirty money into clean. It's like claiming that an illegal brothel provides employment services as well as anything dodgy that people might use it for!

It absolutely protects your privacy in a system where the movement of money is public. Donations to politically sensitive organizations can be used against you, this technology limits that possibility, just as the traditional banking system does not make your transactions public. Many places in the world people do not enjoy your privilege of immunity from state violence due to support for activism.

Nobody said it didn't protect privacy. Obviously, that is the technology's function.

Above, we were talking about whether one has a right to that privacy. That right is observed differently by location, but it is commonly accepted to have at least some exceptions.

> A money laundering operation

Tornado Cash is not a money laundering operation. It is a privacy tool.

Nobody has said it is not a privacy tool. It is a privacy tool that has documented use in money laundering. Building tools is generally legal, using them to commit crimes is something different. The developer here is not accused of building privacy tools, they are accused of knowingly being in on the money laundering and profiting from it.

It's not clear from their vague, weasely language whether they're accusing him of any involvement beyond building the privacy tool. If they had any evidence of that, presumably they would have said so.

> suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering

Press releases are usually summaries, not all encompassing dumps of evidence.

Of course; what I'm suggesting is that they would have simply used less ambiguous language like "working with" or "providing support to". Their weasely language suggests that they need plausible deniability because their insinuations may turn out to be baseless.

The local mob-owned laundromat is also a privacy tool. Both are meant to hide the provenance of money from others. What's the difference besides the implementation details?

The difference is that one provides privacy exclusively to money launderers, while the other is a generic tool which anyone can use to obtain financial privacy.

> The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law.

Sufficiently good use of sufficiently good privacy technology would make this judgement impossible. What happens then? Good luck not becoming a police state.

You might be able to encrypt some information associated with a crime, but you can't encrypt the real world manifestation of crime. https://xkcd.com/538/

The comic proves the parent's point. Drugging and hitting people with a wrench (i.e. torturing) to extract information is exactly what police states do.

The comic has a non-literal meaning as well. (i.e. see the alt-text) The wrench can be a warrant, a confidential informant, or it can be a security camera, etc. Obviously, the world consists of more sources of information than encrypted data on your laptop and the information inside of your head.

Crimes happen in the real world, not behind a cipher. Some element of any crime is unencrypted and unencryptable.

I have to disagree with the alt-text. (For me it says, "In actual reality, nobody cares about his secrets.") It's flippant and out of touch. Because somebody does care about his secrets, otherwise mass surveillance wouldn't have reached totalitarian levels along with privacy becoming increasingly criminalized. So the more resource-intensive using the "wrench" is, the more privacy is protected.

Fuck the law when civil asset forfeiture and qualified immunity exist.

Except the Seychelles. There is a reason why dirty money and shell companies make the Seychelles their home as well as the wealthy elites mentioned in the Pandora Papers.

That's not how universal rights work. You can say privacy is not a universal right. But if it is, governments have no say on if it ever "ends."

Technically correct, I was just supporting my argument with evidence. The UDHR also doesn't recognize a right to absolute privacy. They only recognize a right to be free from arbitrary interference with privacy. The idea that privacy is absolute and has no exceptions is very extremist, and not really supported by anyone other than absolutist internet commenters.

You've obviously never heard of the Fifth Amendment. It's actually quite the opposite, the Constitution enhances your right to privacy (by refusing to talk about something) when doing so could be used to prosecute you for a crime.

The 5th doesn't give you privacy to anything outside of your thoughts inside your head, which isn't related to anything being discussed here. Everything else in the US is covered by the 4th.

Wrong. For example courts have consistently ruled that you can’t be compelled to unlock your phone or decrypt your hard disk if you’re invoking the 5th

That is a perfect example of how my statement is 100% correct. (many/most) Courts in the US have ruled that you can't be compelled to provide a decryption key only when it is, as I said:

> inside your head

If it is written down, biometric, etc it does not get protection under the 5th. Those realms are not inside your head, and so they are protected by the 4th, and subject to warrant.

"courts have consistently ruled that you can't be compelled to unlock your phone ... if you're invoking the 5th."

This is demonstrably false.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/nj-supreme-court...

That’s NJ Supreme Court, not federal court. They’re notorious for getting overruled at the federal level.

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