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Comment by ricochet11 | Hacker News Reader

We should not have our rights removed because other people who break the law might also benefit from. We cannot have a free society if every decision is "Wont somebody think of the children" or "but the terrorists".

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.

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When you say "might" - you're aware Tornado was actually used for these things to the tune of at least half a billion dollars?

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.

HSBC laundered $881 million for the Sinaloa cartel. How much of that ended up causing human suffering and the loss of life?

The solution must be to ban all banks and cash as they are the instruments that facilitated these transactions.

I am saying the rights of my sister and brothers, friends and colleagues are far more important to me than clamping down on north korean hackers. I would much rather live in a world where we are free to use tornado cash and maintain our privacy in these networks, than live in a world where code can be overnight made suddenly illegal, everyones accounts historically associated with that code blacklisted, the developers then sit in jail for a month with 0 charges against them.

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.

> I am saying the rights of my sister and brothers

Username checkout, is your brother Pinochet?

We remove rights all the time, because bad people do bad things. You have to follow road rules for example, you are not allowed to buy components which could be used to build a nuclear bomb, all countries restrict access to weapons (they just draw the line at different places).

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.

What right is being removed? And is it protected under law in your jurisdiction?

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