Liberty or death: it is not death of the individual but death of society. The resilience of our social structure is dependent on our freedoms.
I cant say how saddening it is to have lived through the crypto wars in the 90s that were so well defended by tech workers, to now see HACKER news commentators fine with massive government overreach in the name of "safety". lol.
Basically, the case you're making is: they might have actively aided and abetted nuclear proliferation - but they're technologists, so their actions are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to the usual penalities because we've been ultra smart and managed to create an industry where free speech and money laundering can be switched out at will like in a shell game.
The solution must be to ban all banks and cash as they are the instruments that facilitated these transactions.
The large majority users of tornado weren't criminals. Tornado devs had worked on compliance tools to aid governments, doesnt matter they get locked up anyway. The treasury has historically only sanctioned people, doesnt matter apparently they can make themselves new powers and sanction the use of code too.
Username checkout, is your brother Pinochet?
So the argument that we should never use "the terrorists" or "the children" to make policy decisions is overly simplistic. I believe the sort of reasoning is actually counterproductive. Even here on HN many believe a restriction on crypto currencies is justified if it curbs tax evasion, in other words they believe the trade-off between right restriction and societal benefit is worth it. So arguing that we should never use "the terrorists" to argue for restricting rights is very obviously contradicting how we are implementing laws, so it is not convincing. Instead we should argue why the trade-off is such that the argument does not hold in this case.