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Comment by legutierr | Hacker News Reader

North Korea is building nuclear weapons in order to threaten the United States and its allies with them. Tens of thousands of American soldiers are stationed in South Korea in order to defend it from North Korean aggression. The war between the US and North Korea—which began 70 years ago when the current dictator’s grandfather invaded the South and declared war on the United States—is technically not over, and the possibility that active hostilities may resume at any time still exists.

Sanctions are one of the few tools that the US has to exert leverage against the North Korean regime, and Virgil Griffith is alleged to have travelled to North Korea specifically to help North Korea in violating those sanctions. What he is alleged to have done has been illegal for 70 years.

This is not just about one guy giving a talk.

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In 2019 our own President went there to discuss peace. Dennis Rodman and many other Americans have visited NK at various times. I don't think it's moral to arrest someone for speaking about publicly available information. There's nothing Virgil could have told them that they couldn't find on GitHub or YouTube. And yes, Kim's lackeys definitely have access to the internet.

Sanctions seem to work for nothing. NK got nukes anyways. The middle east is still a mess. Iran is still a problem 50 years later. Cuba still a mess. China is arguably our biggest threat but no sanctions there. Russia has diversified itself away from the Petrodollar as much as possible for these reasons. This US Dollar empire is on its last legs. The US isn't 25% of global GDP anymore. None of this is sustainable.

At any rate, I'm sure Kim's hackers are incapable of learning cryptocurrency from any one of thousands of online resources. Crisis averted. Lock him up.

Say what you will about the effectiveness of sanctions and the current state of American foreign policy, United States citizens shouldn’t undertake expressly illegal overt acts on enemy soil to assist hostile governments in undermining that foreign policy—regardless as to whether or not the information they share is already known by that hostile government—without at least expecting to attract unwanted attention from their own government.

We live in a country that has the rule of law, you can't just arbitrarily use a vague characterization of a country being "hostile" to abridge the rights of someone. I would be alright with this if the us had a formal declaration of war with north Korea, but it doesn't.

The US hasn't formally declared war on anyone since World War 2. Not Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, nor any of the many smaller conflicts we've fought.

However, the United Nations did declare war on North Korea, with US support, and the US is the major participant in that war; and no peace treaty was ever signed, merely a cease fire.

that's exactly correct. If we're going to start abridging freedoms (which I concede may be necessary in exigencies), we'd better get a congressional vote on it.

I'm afraid you're just stating how you'd prefer things to be instead of discussing (and considering) how things actually are.

The truth of the matter is that declarations of war are patently irrelevant regarding whether a nation is deemed hostile or not.

Yes, of course. This whole thread is about how we would prefer things to be, it's about the ethics of whether or not someone should have been arrested. He was arrested. That is the "truth of the matter".

As mentioned earlier in the thread, the US is technically still at war with North Korea. If there were to be one and only one country on the face of the planet that you should not be giving any kind of information or money to as a US citizen, it is North Korea.

This isn't vague or arbitrary. The sanctions against NK are very specific, and lengthy.

> US is technically still at war with North Korea

No we are not. The constitution specifically says that only congress can declare war, and congress has made no such declaration.

This is factually true and irrelevant. War is no longer declared; even when taking on actions that normally require war

So we were never at war with Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam. Sweet. I guess we're still on our perfect win streak yeah?

Edit: I feel bad about being facetious, but I feel like the point is relevant. The US, in a practical sense, does not need congress to ok war. Pointing that out as a reason to doubt the basis for strict treatment of North Korea is like pointing out the speed-limit is 55 when someone travelling 56 gets T-boned.

Hm. There seems to be a correlation between declaring war and winning them.

> No we are not. The constitution specifically says that only congress can declare war, and congress has made no such declaration.

Do note that the US never declared war on Iraq, and that did not stopped it from fighting two wars that were very real, both of which with the support of an international coalition.

> We live in a country that has the rule of law, you can't just arbitrarily use a vague characterization of a country being "hostile" to abridge the rights of someone.

There is no ambiguity in the classification of North Korea as a hostile regime. Not only there is the fact that the Korean war never ended with a peace treaty an only had an armistice, there is also the hostile and recently degrading relationship that in 2020 escalated to the total elimination of official communication lines between north and south Korea.

There is indeed no ambiguity with Korea, but there is a worrying spectrum of hostility - from Russia to china to iran. I detest all of those regimes, but we absolutely must be careful about using a vague characterization as a pretense for the our regime to take arbitrary and unjust actions against us citizens that are have family or are doing legitimate businesses there.

> but we absolutely must be careful about using a vague characterization

I should point out that there is nothing vague about sactions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_North_Korea

If a country like the US imposes sanctions on a country which includes, quite prominently, restrictions on investment and financial activities, and afterwards you go out of your way to provide assistance on how to circumvent those restrictions on investment and financial activities... Where's the surprise that your assistance gets you in jail?

Should giving technical assistance to a sanctioned regime be treated as protected speech? Is that the right that was abridged here? If Virgil Griffith goes to trial, I imagine we will eventually see whether the Supreme Court considers what he did to be protected speech, or not. Personally, I don’t think they would even hear his case if he were to appeal on those grounds.

You write as if Congress has not weighed in on this matter, simply because it has not declared war on North Korea. In fact, current North Korean sanctions were codified and authorized by Congress in the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, which expanded upon the sanctions regime that had already been in place. Virgil Griffith’s alleged acts are not illegal because of a vague characterization of North Korea as being “hostile”, but because Congress explicitly made it illegal to travel to North Korea to give technical advice.

> In 2019 our own President went there to discuss peace.

From thereon the relation between north Korea and south Korea/US degraded so badly that official communication lines between north and south Korea were officially severed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93South_Kore...

You can't sanction publicly available information. By that logic every crypto or blockchain website or video on the internet not blocked in North Korea is guilty of violating the sanctions.

This doesn't make any sense, and I feel really bad for people like Griffith getting ground beneath the treads of the unthinking legal machine here.

And shame on the judges for not slapping this law down, because that's they're job to protect people from unthinking and unfair application of the law.

> By that logic every crypto or blockchain website or video on the internet not blocked in North Korea is guilty of violating the sanctions.

Making something available on the internet has non-illegal purposes. Specifically flying somewhere that is sanctioned and presenting the information specifically to them has no non-illegal purpose.

If you drop a $20 bill on the street and a member of a terrorist organization picks it up, it's not really funding terrorism just because you didn't explicitly ensure whoever found it was allowed to have it.

If you go find a terrorist organization and give them $20, you've funded terrorism.

Intent matters.

Your argument makes a lot of sense. What I don't understand though, is if you share publicly available information, how have you done any harm? How can you have violated sanctions?

Then again if you gave aviation lectures to Al Qaeda after 911, you're definitely doing something wrong, even if it's publicly available information.

> is if you share publicly available information, how have you done any harm?

Even if your assistance adds low-value, it's still assistance.

Moreover, I don't believe it's reasonable to ignore the fact that a renowned Ethereum dev providing assistance to a hostile regime, regardless of how lame, does have a goal of conveying credibility and help push public acceptance. As a similar example, see for example how Snowden was blindsided by a guy trying to leverage Snowden's attendance as a way to buy him credibility.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epndnz/the-bizarre-case-of-s...

It's a terrible what the western government will do to it's own people for power and control.

What is the benefit from those sanctions? Don't they just keep North Korea insular?

I am sorry but to me the wording of your comment seems way too political and biased-sounding for hacker news.

I'm sorry, but what? Their comment to me reads like an objective statement of facts. They don't lean one way or another, or even say if they agrees with it or not. You can't even do that on HN?

Give me six facts about the most honest of men, and I'll have enough to hang them.

Which facts you include and exclude is quite relevant to your bias, politics, etc.

This is a philosophical slippery slope. The next question is "what are facts?", or "who decides what's immoral?". I'm not interested in going down this because it's pointless.

Reading the original comment, what can construed as "too political" for HN? There wasn't any strong support or opposition.

"The United States invaded Iraq and killed 500,000 innocent people because of the fragile ego of the Bush-Cheney cabal' is an example of:

1. An utterly reprehensible crime against humanity.

2. An accurate fact that's oft-repeated on HN

3. A highly political fact.

4. Utterly pointless to introduce in any conversation that is not closely related to wars.

5. A necessary reminder that our shit stinks.

Despite all that, it's 'too political' to bring it up in a thread like this - because it has nothing to do with the subject, other than to give people a reason to engage in a nationalistic pissing contest.

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