The commenters saying be reasonable, they were sanctioned, GitHub had to do this, should look into the last time code was made illegal or similar turmoil and what the developer community did in response…It was not accepting sanctions or govt failures to understand code as “well that’s that.”
- Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention.
- Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically
- Clifford Stole spent several years being ignored by every govt agency under the Sun, except for CIA, for finding, attributing and then exposing a widespread KGB hack of govt systems in the 80s
- L0pht testified in front of congress to expose significant internet security risks that were otherwise ignored.
I’m not saying Tornado Cash and related devs were doing a purely moral action. But the automatic siding with the heavy hand of govt sanctions on code the govt doesn’t really understand is pretty shameful for a nuanced technical audience.
- Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention.
- Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically
- Clifford Stole spent several years being ignored by every govt agency under the Sun, except for CIA, for finding, attributing and then exposing a widespread KGB hack of govt systems in the 80s
- L0pht testified in front of congress to expose significant internet security risks that were otherwise ignored.
I’m not saying Tornado Cash and related devs were doing a purely moral action. But the automatic siding with the heavy hand of govt sanctions on code the govt doesn’t really understand is pretty shameful for a nuanced technical audience.