The arrest ramps up the federal government's efforts to tamp down on what it sees as money laundering enabled by privacy tools, setting up a continuation of the conversation on where the right to transact in privacy fits within national security interests.
Is code speech? Are you responsible if you write code and someone else uses it to launder stolen funds? Is that even the correct question, or is that abstracting a legitimate national security issue into a broader hypothetical in an effort to conflate the bigger philosophical question with real illicit activity?
These are now just some of the questions at the heart of a back-and-forth between the U.S. Department of Justice and the crypto industry in the ongoing criminal case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm.
The first argument revolves around the right to privacy in financial transactions, highlighting the necessity for tools that enable privacy in sending money, especially in the crypto space where native privacy functionalities are limited.
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]