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Comment by dlubarov | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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