Well, I mean, the fact that cryptocurrencies are helping North Korea is pretty much undisputed. They've been stockpiling it to run their ballistic missile program. [1] According to the United Nations Security Council, they had almost $700MM back in May. [2]
The system is designed to skirt sanctions after all, it's kinda the raison d'être.
Money laundering, ransoms and fraud are pretty much the only actual use cases other than speculation— which is essentially just people extracting profits from criminals in a way that makes them feel distanced from engaging in a criminal conspiracy.
> Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship.
Source? I find that hard to believe considering the prevalence of fraud. In fact, dealing with fraud is one of the primary reasons transactional banking exists in the first place.
Notes and other negotiable instruments were in widespread use even when there existed universal gold- or silver-denominated currencies that made direct payments nominally simple and convenient.
The claim as I read it was that most financial censorship befalls innocent accountholders. But while there are countless examples we can find online about people wrongly censored or accused, actual fraudsters don't go complaining on Twitter.
Fraud is a huge problem. The usual reason for why we can't have nice things--a high-trust civil society--is because of bad people. Because no system is perfect, our transactional and legal systems have to balance administrative efficiency and fairness. The more you try to be fair, i.e. improve your accuracy (fewer false positives), the higher your costs (less efficacy at stopping bad guys and/or more resources need to be expended); the more you aim for administrative efficiency (lower costs but better at stopping bad guys) the more fairness will tend to suffer (more false positives).
Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, but would still like to see data. That notwithstanding, it would still be wrong to characterize such a system as arbitrary simply because of that skewed result; it could just be a manifestation of a high efficiency but low fairness enforcement mechanism. Maybe it is arbitrary, but I doubt it.
I had never heard the phrase "financial censorship" before. Perhaps a better term here would be financial blacklisting. The EFF's page, https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship, conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive. Everybody trying to shoehorn their issues into the free speech debate tends to obfuscate problems and potential solutions; and I suspect it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. Before I even read the EFF's issue page--and definitely so, afterwards--the very phrase "financial censorship" brought to mind Citizens United v. FEC. Keep going down that road and there's no limit--I could just as well characterize murder laws as violating my free speech.[1]
For the record, I protested in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested way back when. I do take these issues seriously.
[1] In fact, IIRC not long after Citizens United the very same conservative justices upheld the criminal convictions of people who gave to a charity and advocacy organization implicated in funding terrorist organizations. The juxtaposition of the two decisions seemed to me to evidence the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the conservative's free speech crusade; such inconsistency and hypocrisy is inevitable once you start to characterize everything that's incident to speech as speech itself.
> Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it,
Ok, then you can rephrase my argument as "one of the most common examples of financial censorship", or "common enough that it is still bad", instead of "the most common".
It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point.
> conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive
People who are doing the censoring, or support the censorship, usually don't want their actions to be called censorship, yes.
I think it is a good term, though. The reason is because I am specifically referring to financial transactions that are perfectly legal, and are being censored for the political content of transaction.
The examples I gave were donations to WikiLeaks, which were perfectly legal, but were arbitrarily blocked, due to the political nature of such a donation, as well as the example of sexual content related financial transactions, which are also legal, but often arbitrarily blocked.
> it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process.
I am not really sure how it could backfire, to give people more ways of making perfectly legal financial transactions, that are more difficult to arbitrarily block, due to the political content of those transactions.
If you think something is bad, and should be blocked, then make a law. Don't rely on intermediaries to block things that aren't illegal.
> It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point.
Dramatically more people, indeed the whole world potentially, stand to lose from these countries avoiding sanctions than from the handful of people who can’t currently access their questionable but legal sexual content online.
Are all laws just and all criminals bad people? Being gay was illegal in most of the western world up until a few decades ago. Alan Turing was only pardoned decades after his death, the way that man was treated was utterly horrendous despite playing a pivotal part in defining the 20th century and saving millions of lives on both sides. Then again he did break the "law" and was chemically castrated for it.
Would you help Alan Turing avoid punishment given the chance?
Just a hypothetical to ponder before blindly accepting the status-quo.
Oooh, quite the straw man you've constructed. But everybody already knows that laws aren't perfect. If you want to use the "being gay was illegal" line of argument, you have to demonstrate that either a) gay people are using Bitcoin to be gay in places where being gay currently is illegal, or b) you have to make a case that things like "money laundering, ransoms and fraud" are mistakenly illegal, and in a few decades we'll all realize how perfectly normal and acceptable they are.
> But everybody already knows that laws aren't perfect.
Do they really? I'd argue the complete opposite and indeed my main reasoning for writing the original comment.
The biggest destinations on Earth for money laundering all hypocritically accept the money without shame, all Western countries with strong legal systems, so why is this occurring? Many of them proudly proclaim how much they are against money laundering. Do you know how complicit those governments are at virtually all levels happily accepting the illegal money that clearly is flowing into their suburb/state/nations?
The rest of the world begs these places to please stem the tide of illegal funds or at the very least investigate the people spending this cash and yet nothing happens. Corrupt Russian real estate purchases in London is basically a joke for locals now. A common joke. Are Londoners not complicit in this? Or is there enough separation to wipe their hands clean?
Very eager to hear your defense given the site we are on and the decent chance you have personally benefited from your own governments intentional willingness to ignore the huge amounts of corrupt, illegal money flowing into the west in the last few decades. Laundering into the West funds entire industries built around it and the blatant complicity from regulators/homeowners is on show for all to see.
You need more identification to get a library card than buy a house here. Does that not strike you as strange?
My own example: the biggest real estate purchase in Australia happened years ago, a massive mansion in Sydney, it was on the front of most newspapers, including the biggest newspaper read by millions. We only just discovered it was illegal despite many suggesting it at the time. The property has now been confiscated by the government years later. The owner simply fell foul of the government rather than any real insistence on justice or some sort of semblance about money laundering, it simply doesn't register for most.
Sydney, Vancouver and London are all singled out as the main destinations on Earth for clearly illegal money, The Australian government has sat on proposals for basic laws to ascertain ownership of the money for well over a decade at the behest of the real estate industry to not investigate this stuff.
Hopefully I had a decent crack at one of your points there.
But that said you didn't answer my "strawman", so here's the question again:
> Given the chance would you personally help Alan Turing avoid punishment for the law he broke that resulted in his chemical castration and ultimate death?
Simple yes or no suffices here.
Not all laws are good, not all criminals are bad people. These things are gray at the best of times.
> Assistant Attorney General John Demers said: “Despite receiving warnings not to go, Griffith allegedly traveled to one of the United States’ foremost adversaries, North Korea, where he taught his audience how to use blockchain technology to evade sanctions. By this complaint, we begin the process of seeking justice for such conduct.”
Wow, that seems like an incredibly dumb thing to do. Isn't all that information readily available on the internet anyway? I'm sure the NK govt. has access to the web.
There's an adrenaline rush from going to somewhere where travel is explicitly prohibited, and it's not that expensive to boot. I've seriously considered going on my non-American passport but have decided not to for two reasons:
* Even though my birth country is on allied terms with NK, I'm unsure how my dual citizenship with the US would pan out. I do not want to be considered a spy and imprisoned.
* I do not feel comfortable contributing to a totalitarian economy, even if the individual citizens (guides, translators, etc) benefit a lot from payment.
And there are probably many other valid reasons not to go, but those are the most immediately obvious to me.
FWIW, a friend is a dual US-Canadian citizen and visited without problems using his Canadian passport. He was even allowed to take pictures, mostly unrestricted. Having said that, he went with an organized tour so the places he visited were highly curated.
I would be very worried about going to NK if there was even the slightest possibility that they could think that you were trying to conceal your U.S. citizenship from them. That, it seems to me, would actually be a legitimate reason for them to suspect you of being a spy. Not that that really matters. The North Koreans are perfectly happy to detain U.S. citizens for non-legitimate reasons. Going there as a U.S. citizen seems to me like a crap shoot with terrifyingly high stakes.
(Not that I ever really seriously considered going there before, but I am definitely not going now that I've posted this!)
For some people it's not an adrenaline rush but a strong curiousity about what the US gov doesn't want you to know. Like all the warnings I received about travel to East Germany even after the wall came down (I was working for a defense contractor at the time). Project security warned us that there would be spies hiding behind every bush.
When we got to Checkpoint Charlie there were just a few tourists milling about the small section of wall that remained, and an old German couple renting a hammer and chisel so you could chip off a piece of the wall yourself. When we spoke to the old couple they suddenly became alert and asked us, rather loudly, if we were Americans. Immediately, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench look up, and a young guy dart out of a doorway and start walking our way. We took the hammer and chisel and started chipping at the wall while keeping an eye on the locals nearby, who suddenly seemed very interested in us. An older man standing close to the wall reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter but did not light the cigarette hanging from his mouth, an obvious signal to other members of his surveillance team.
When a German couple posing as tourists came up and asked us where we were from we recognized that they were obviously trying to recruit us to spy for the Eastern Bloc. But we were too clever, pretending that we were drunk and did not speak English, and meandered back to the train station with our chunk of the wall.
A video call would be just as illegal. If he insisted on giving individual advice to NK instead of just publishing the same information then he needed to cease being a US person first.
Maybe I've become a very cynical person, but all the comments above seem very naive to me. He isn't a tourist and plays at the NK gov level. He doesn't care about the legal status of his actions. NK wants him to assist with money laundering on a very large scale and he probably wants something in return. Regular video calls with money transfers would be enough and way safer for him. So I'm asking the same question: what NK can possibly offer that can't be had in other countries and requires an in person visit?
My guess would be "Joy Division"[0], meaning women brainwashed (or forced) by the state to sexually satisfy high-ranking officials as well as occasionally distinguished guests.
Is not the same at all, the ones there can be virgins at request, there is no pedophilia laws, and in general the power dynamics are extremely different when done for money than for your life.
He sounds like he might be someone with a pathological need to be relevant to authorities. Interpol, Singaporean Police, FBI, DOJ who will talk to him?
> ... announced today the unsealing of a criminal complaint charging VIRGIL GRIFFITH, a United States citizen, with violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) by traveling to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“DPRK” or “North Korea”) in order deliver a presentation and technical advice on using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to evade sanctions.
And he thought he’d get away with this how? Jeez..
I'd imagine in three ways: (1) the host country refuses to admit you (2) the host country stamps your passport and you're totally SOL at the border on your way back in, or commit some sort of fraud if they ask you where you went and you don't answer truthfully which brings us to (3) exactly like this haha.
I think this is the norm for some of the more “controversial” countries. I went to Cuba (with permission from the State Department) before Obama eased sanctions and I was quite disappointed that they didn’t stamp my passport. Instead I got a little slip of paper that was about the size of a page in my passport. It was my understanding that the Cuban government had designed the visa system this way on purpose to allow Americans to more easily skirt the sanctions.
And once I got past border patrol and saw all of the items coming out with the luggage (car parts, toilet seats, televisions, a grill, etc.) it was clear that this system allowed the wealthier families to avoid most of the inconveniences of the US embargo.
There host country could just admit you and not stamp your passport. I've been on several cruises and had to go out of my way to get my passport stamps. Honestly they seemed annoyed I even wanted the stamp.
Yeah the Israelis are known for doing this as many middle-eastern countries refuse to admit foreigners with Israeli stamps in their passports. If you ask, they'll stamp a slip of paper instead.
At first I was concerned that the US was overstepping it's bounds a bit with cryptocurrency. But then I read the charge, and he apparently literally traveled to North Korea to advise them how to evade sanctions -- pretty stupid if you ask me.
I think that's a very aggressive level of skepticism for what's outlined here. It seems very unlikely the DOJ could mistakenly think he attended this conference, or that the messages of his they say they have are all fabrications.
Sure, but it also seems unlikely that anyone would be this dumb.
OP’s point isn’t that Griffith is innocent, just that we’re likely missing some piece of info which would make his motivations/thought process make more sense.
I don't have any real wish to defend this guy since he likely did some really boneheaded things, but "advise them to evade sanctions" could easily just mean "explained to them how to install a crypto wallet on a computer."
His best defence will be he didn't specifically explain how to evade sanctions. But the government can make "evading sanctions" any off-mainstream network finance stuff. It's easy to twist this stuff in a court room.
But of course any sort of technology transfer which would help them in their effort, even indirectly but still very obviously possible to any rational person, which the courts very much take into account (in this case an expert in the field) could fall into breaching embargos.
In this case it's like selling a terrorist group's local community police force non-military low-power handguns, possibly believing they aren't practical for a military effort. But you're still giving a terrorist group firearms which could none-the-less be useful for their overarching cause.
I highly doubt he practically helped them hide any significant amount of money. Billions aren't flowing through blockchains into their pockets without notice. But the whole idea of sanctions is to make everything, even small-time indirect help off-limits... even banks doing business with legitimate NK businesses.
Which any reasonable person could have predicted would be used by the North Korean government to evade sanctions.
I get why a defendant might say, "Yes, your honor, he did say he wanted to kill his wife and then asked to borrow my gun. And yes, I did then give him my gun. But there's no way I could have foreseen him using my gun to kill her." But I don't think we're under any obligation to take that line of argument seriously.
Wouldn't it be pretty different if he travelled to North Korea to help the people living there, maybe even to help them against the North Korean government. Instead of actually helping the North Korean government itself?
Why the "but" ? If you explain to someone how to install a crypto wallet on a computer knowing that this installation will help that person do tax fraud, then you're an accomplice to tax fraud; and if you explain to someone how to install a crypto wallet on a computer knowing that this will help DPRK evade santions, well, that's a crime on its own. Telling others how to do simple things (that they could find on the internet on their own) and providing trivial, simple help may be a crime depending on the intent.
There's no requirement to provide some unique, significant, irreplaceable insight or service, knowingly providing any help whatsoever is sufficient. Helping a buddy wash his car is a simple, nice thing to do; but helping a buddy wash blood off of his car before the police gets to it is a crime.
I know Virgil. I was at the lunch in Palo Alto where he suggested "GAS" should be the name of the internal accounting unit for smart contracts. As with many of the early Ethereum adopters he was quite gifted, a bit eccentric, and leaned a bit in an ideological direction.
Offhand I can't see any reason why he would go out of his way to N. Koreans advice on how to evade sanctions, so I will look forward to some statement on his part. 20 years is a long time.
I know he was working for the Ethereum foundation recently but doubt that the foundation would go out of the way to anger the US government (although they reportedly have a lot of Chinese government involvement).
Or, considering this guy is said to be pretty eccentric, just for the sake of it. Working against the system. Being rebellious. Just the faint idea of having a global impact on the distribution of power. Similar reasons, aside from money, drove people like Karl Koch to do what they did.
Yes this argument explains why the military-industrial complex and war media constantly bombard us with the constant message of, "FEAR! KILL! FEAR! KILL!" They gotta send the kids to college, you know. Remember the Maine.
There's virtually no chance that he'll serve anything resembling 20 years, despite the almost theatrical stupidity of the crime he has allegedly committed. The DOJ ignores the sentencing rules in these press releases. Google [whale sushi sentence] for details.
Espionage cases are traditionally resolved with harsh penalties and no reductions for good behavior. The government wants a clear message sent to anyone else thinking of doing similar things.
The only way you can get off is if your trial would reveal sources and methods the government doesn't want to disclose.
Second, you can simply read the sentencing guidelines, which will include the statute he's charged under, and see how the sentence is actually computed. We don't have to try to reason to it from first principles.
that assumes that his talk constituted a financial transaction. it's not clear that this is the case. if he was paid to speak, then it does seem plausible, but that doesn't seem to be disclosed in the press release. if he went for free (and, one would assume, would have needed to pay for the ordinary admission fee), then it's possible to consider it as non-commercial, so that would be only 15-21 months.
Both that this US Citizen ignored direct warnings from the US Federal Government not to attend and teach at the Pyongyang Blockchain Conference, and then volunteered to travel back the United States.
And that the US Federal Government is worried about North Korea getting their hands on the WMD-level technology that are Ethereum Tokens.
May I ask what exchanges you are using? There is 1.5M in dai liquidity on uniswap and as you can see plenty of people are moving huge sums without incurring noticeable slippage.
> And that the US Federal Government is worried about North Korea getting their hands on the WMD-level technology that are Ethereum Tokens.
There's significant evidence that North Korea has been using cryptocurrency to evade sanctions and prop up their murderous regime, so I don't see what seems ridiculous to you about that.
We're going to stop murderous regimes by creating a totalitarian centralized global financial surveillance system, and imprisoning anyone who uses financial channels that don't comply with it?
Opposing murderous regimes is worthwhile. Doing it by criminalizing financial privacy and creating surveillance systems that are more expansive than anything the world has ever seen and that everyone is strong-armed into using them, is not.
Mandates to comply with an Orwellian warrantless surveillance system in Xinxiang are, according to the Chinese government, justified by the threat of terrorism. This is how these kinds of totalitarian impositions are always rationalized. There's always a good reason for them, to advance public safety and national security, according to their advocates.
What about a semi-hidden webpage meant primarily for them?
Or how about a general developer FAQ that would get anybody dev-minded up to speed?
Where do we draw this line of "aiding and abetting"? Material good? Information? Congratulations? This appears to be strongly a 1st amendment issue of speech. Not that I like NK, but that point is a distractor. Why is it a crime to talk about cryptocurrency and monetary censorship of countries?
Attorney here! (Not providing legal advice - seek licensed counsel in your jurisdiction if you need legal advice.)
Any act that would provide material assistance is sufficient. Criminal law is pretty liberal about what constitutes an "act" in furtherance of a crime. If it concerns you, stay far far away.
But merely publishing information in a book or on a publicly-accessible website for all to see is not generally going to get in you trouble (subject of course to copyright, publishing classified information, etc.).
>>But merely publishing information in a book or on a publicly-accessible website for all to see is not generally going to get in you trouble
They Tried that, but that pesky 1st amendment got in the way. Research the CyptoWars (which is seems are heating up all over again) and the PGP Source Code Book.
The US Government has been attempting to censor speech for as long as it has been in existence. the latest attack on crypto by the US Government for "national security" reasons is just the latest in the long line of abuses
The answer to "where do we draw the line" is that all the things you describe would be aiding and abetting if a jury would be convinced that you did it with an intent to aid them.
If you write "a general developer FAQ that would get anybody dev-minded up to speed" with the intent to help general developers everywhere and DPRK uses that, that's okay; but if you write the exact same FAQ content with an intent to help DPRK get that information because you figure out that just sending it directly in an email might be too visible, then that would be a crime, if intent can be established - based on e.g. your earlier communication and writings.
It's a prohibition on trying to achieve a specific result, not on a prohibition on any particular means of achieving that result.
...information can be things like the names of US spies embedded with the Taliban or Isis. Or the the blind spot of USA defense systems. Or how to poison (insert city) water supply... you get the point.
I get your point, but then again, classified information is protected and different from the technical information shared in this case, and how to poison a water supply is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_terrorism
Many types of technical information are also protected. Not in the "classified" sense but in the sense that there are legal controls around exporting it to certain nations. Especially nations under UN sanctions.
Fair enough. Just offering an alternative/oldskool reading of this situation (this thread started out surprisingly negative against a mindset that used to be common among hackers). Laws on sharing information can sometimes be at odds with the hacker spirit of freeing information, for instance in the case of Aaron Swartz.
- went back to the US several time after traveling to the DPRK despite being warned not to by the US state department
- had several consensual interviews with FBI agents
- consented to a search of his phone
It's hard to read this and not think that he brought this upon himself. If you really want to do what he did, get a lawyer, don't travel back to the US, don't speak to law enforcement.
Entrapment by what, reverse psychology? He didn’t walk into a sting set up by FBI agents; he went to a real conference in the real North Korea despite official warnings not to do so.
North Korea has killed or tortured over 1 million in death camps and threatens nukes at the whim of 1 man who recently used anti aircraft guns to kill his uncles. In my opinion this moron deserves life in jail
Please don't take HN threads further into political or national flamewar. We're not going to get anything better than a generic discussion out of this and probably a nasty one.
While the leaders of North Korea have, without question, done a lot of horrible things, the anti-aircraft-gun story has appeared repeatedly in conjunction with numerous people, many of whom have reappeared alive afterwards, or who have been confirmed executed by other, more ordinary, methods. It's not clear if these anti-aircraft gun executions have ever been carried out, or if it's simply a recurrent rumor.
Also seems like a pretty quick/painless -- if dramatic -- way to go. They'd have a lot of cleaning up to do afterwards of course, but that's obviously not my problem lol.
Different intelligent agencies have confirmed numerous deaths as well as reputable journalists from multiple witnesses. I’m sure some are exaggerated and run wild with but there is too much evidence to suggest ALL are fake
Some of the deaths have been confirmed. As far as I'm aware, though, none of the ridiculous methods of execution reported in the media (shot by anti-aircraft guns, torn apart by dogs, etc) have been confirmed. Moreover, the recurrent nature of these rumors suggests that they're long-running myths about North Korean execution methods that get attached to whichever official is rumored to have been executed recently.
> Finally, GRIFFITH announced his intention to renounce his U.S. citizenship and began researching how to purchase citizenship from other countries.
At first I thought maybe there was some monetary incentive to going to NK that might not be unsealed, but now I doubt it.
It sounds like this guy was simply a crypto “believer”, with probably a bit of an ego. To these people the inability of governments to enforce control on crypto is one of the biggest features, and I’m sure he wanted to see that used in the real world.
Yes indeed, the cold hard world order came crashing down on this dude.
It's not much research to figure out how to buy a passport from somewhere else, the BBC has a nice write-up [1].
1. Malta wants $1.15M for a full EU passport, and Bulgaria is another popular choice.
2. Sant Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda will give you a passport for a donation of around $100K to charity or if you buy some real-estate around the half million mark.
3. The cheapest possible if you don't mind limited travel options is the Comoro Islands, $45K all-in.
> At no time did GRIFFITH obtain permission from OFAC to provide goods, services, or technology to the DPRK.
I think in this case intent matters. If you ask permission to travel as a formality, but provide some goods and services while there then that’s very different things.
Maybe I phrased it wrong, but I think the intent was to help them circumvent the sanctions, despite that he may have asked the government for permission to visit NK.
>To these people the inability of governments to enforce control on crypto is one of the biggest features, and I’m sure he wanted to see that used in the real world.
Not just the inability but also the lack of legitimate authority (emphasis on legitimate).
After the 6+ murder-for-hire allegations and related publicly released chat logs, not so much. Only people who think the chat logs are doctored (which I personally find extremely unlikely) still support him.
Even if he did try to order murders (which I disagree that he did), the penalty for conspiracy to commit murder for hire is 10 years. Yet he wasn’t charged with that, and instead has double-life + 40 years.
Ross was made an example of, no question. I see no reason to keep him in jail, nor the hundreds of thousands of other non-violent criminals the US houses in prisons.
I read that as someone not native in English trying to say "staffer" or "employee" but I don't know anything about the structure of organizations behind ethereum, whether it has a lot of employees or whether they really mean "contributor".
Edit: I see the title has been edited to match the DOJ website rather than this seemingly ungrammatical summary.
Is the logical endpoint that any U.S. person with a "technical" blog might need to block IPs from NK, Iran, Venezuela, etc? At some point the rule swallows the exception in an open, democratic society.
AFAIK intent matters. There was a story from a while back where a seller of "secure" android phones got busted because he was knowingly selling to criminals. "knowingly" as in, his customers told him that they were going to use it for illegal activities, but he sold it to them anyways. It's the same principle why sellers of cannabis paraphernalia explicitly label their products "for tobacco use only".
Looks like from a prior HN discussion, maybe if he published a book and mailed it to the conference, it would be ok?[1]. But export of electronic code is not ok?
I also am under the impression the case is about unlawful export, but perhaps they're concentrating on a different theory.
So, it's illegal for me to explicitly talk about things that could be illegal?
That seems to fly in the face of the 1st amendment. He was teaching about a skill that could be used to break law, but also be used in legal transactions.
Seems more like thoughtcrime, than actual crime. And if talking about implementation of technology is a crime, it shouldn't be.
I still see nothing wrong with that. It's words, either spoken, written, or on a screen. It matters not that he's in person, or remote.
They could derive that from the multitude of developer FAQs, Stack Exchange, or other sources.
Long story short, this is the US government throwing a fit about a US citizen in NK. Have to set an example.
Now, if he gave them cryptocoins or other assets, then there might be a legitimate case of breaking international law. But you know, there's this pesky thing called 'proof'.
It matters very much, both legally, and morally (unless, of course, you support the humans rights abuses going on in the DPRK[1]). The law differentiates between words put in a book and the same words said to a criminal in order to further a crime[2], and it's pretty obvious that Griffith was intentionally providing assistance to a country that commits human rights abuses that are crimes under the legal systems of many, many other countries.
Do you know what the DPRK is? It commits human-rights violations on a pervasive basis and massive scale (relative to the size of its populace). The US is nowhere near as bad as it.
The only viable options we have for pressuring them to stop their atrocities are sanctions and an actual war. Unless you either support their human-rights violations or actually losing lives in a war, then you should be applauding those sanctions.
We need more imagination than this, and more hope. Lots of situations have been defused through dialogue rather than aggression. Maybe DPRK is uniquely awful. However, we've been aggressive for nearly seven decades now. When our goofball President tried dialing back the aggression a few notches, he was pilloried for it. How many more decades must the aggression continue with no good result before we can stop "applauding"?
Before you repeat for the nine-trillionth time that KJU is a bad guy... yes, we know. He might suffer for his sins, in this world or the next, he might not. He might be a lot worse than other autocrats, whom USA supports, he might not. Why is it important that we distill every situation into the most cartoonish good-guy/bad-guy terms? Cui bono?
The goal of sanctions (which are part of extensive dialogue) is to limit the DPRK's ability to threaten even more people, and to push them back toward more discussion and more engagement. I'd love it if that had been even more successful, but if you think "no good result" has been achieved, you haven't been following the situation.
The idea that anyone, Kims included, in DPRK wants to transition from the current luxurious situation of absolute personal sovereignty to a more glassed-over desert type situation is an example of the cartoon thinking I described above. No one in DPRK with a hand on any button is insane. (Can USA make that claim?) I agree that the absence of nuclear destruction is better than its presence, but let's not be cute. It is the warhawks like Bolton and HRC and Elliott Abrams who always want to ratchet up the pressure because the sky is falling, whether that's the sky over Libya or Korea or Venezuela or wherever. Many people without a financial interest in the inexorable conversion of USA resources into armaments are fine with less: less pressure, less haste, less aggression, less isolation, less single-mindedness, less faux "certainty".
What I do believe is that Kim, like many dictators, is aware that there's no falling from #1 to #2. He won't go from absolute monarch to being like Queen Elizabeth. Maybe he gets a modestly comfortable exile in China with an ongoing risk of trial or revenge killing, but more likely he goes like Gaddafi or bin Laden: him and his heirs shot and dumped in unmarked graves, forever reviled.
So he doesn't have to be insane at all to be willing to shell Seoul or nuke Fairbanks. He just has to believe that might be enough to save his life and let him hold on to power. (Or, if he thinks he can't, to want revenge.) And of course to believe that other people's lives are entirely unimportant compared to his, which is pretty obvious given how he treats the people he rules. Or how he treated his half brother.
I agree that Bolton and the warhawks are nearly as monstrous. But that doesn't mean that the widely agreed policy of containment through sanctions is driven by them. Indeed, Bolton publicly argued for a first strike. Which to my mind makes him as sociopathic as Kim.
Sure, it might be true that DPRK is a uniquely threatening situation. It might be true that the right way to deal with this unique situation is constant aggression, over the decades even unto centuries. That's certainly what we've read in the papers.
Except, we've read that of at least ten other situations in the last two decades. Over the last seven decades, we've read that of probably thirty more. As history has unfolded, that claim has never been true. The war media might be right eventually, and maybe DPRK will be the place. It's just that they've been wrong so much, at least since the Mexican-American War.
Mainstream journalism's war on the American people is not only an assault on peace, on innocents in other lands, or on our wallets. It is primarily an attack on epistemology. We have been gaslit our entire lives. If the world were not dangerous enough to require vast nuclear and other lethal arsenals, how would we know?
The complaint[1] leads with the allegation that the State Department denied him permission to travel to DPRK and attend this conference. How does that work? Did he seek permission from State and receive a denial, then go ahead and do it anyway?
Edit: 15(c) alleges that he did in fact seek prior approval. Well, I guess it's no mystery why he's in deep trouble now.
That's part of it. But I think it's bigger-- when it comes to topics like this, especially legal/economic ones, a community that ordinarily impresses on technical and scientific subjects as wise and timeless, displays a bizarre groupthink that levels at a secondary school-level sophistication. It's sad.
There is a definite right-libertarian bias on HN, whether you want to acknowledge that or not. Everything not toeing that line is attacked and downvotedhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432833
If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged. It's always been this way.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643695
There are just as many claims of the opposite; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21449589 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21245485.
In reality, HN is a large pluralistic community, with more than enough material to support any impression of bias that you're primed for. The comments you notice and dislike make a stronger impression than the comments you agree with, building up a feeling that the community is against you. This can't be a function of HN, because HN is the same for everybody. Rather, it's in the eye of the beholder: an afterimage of the things they ran into and disliked here. The phenomenon is so consistent that you can not only predict what someone's opinions are, but also how intensely they hold them, from their image of the community's bias.
I appreciate that you are passionate on the point @dang, but I read those comments you link as confirming there is a perception among users that folks are flaming and downvoting on HN to pursue a political or ideological agenda. They flame and downvote each other, I guess. I love HN, but I'm not impressed by the quality of this discourse or by labels like 'flamebait', anecdotally it's getting worse, and I'm not even convinced the activity even is that authentic or organic.
I don't see a disagreement here? Yes, politically committed users flame and downvote each other, and the quality of the discourse when they do that is unimpressive.
306 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadThe system is designed to skirt sanctions after all, it's kinda the raison d'être.
[1] https://bitcoinist.com/un-north-korea-accumulating-cryptocur...
[2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/N-Korea-at-crossroads/Nort...
For example, at one point, banks blocked donations to WikiLeaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes.
Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship.
Source? I find that hard to believe considering the prevalence of fraud. In fact, dealing with fraud is one of the primary reasons transactional banking exists in the first place.
Notes and other negotiable instruments were in widespread use even when there existed universal gold- or silver-denominated currencies that made direct payments nominally simple and convenient.
I was talking about things like this, and other related situations.
Fraud is a huge problem. The usual reason for why we can't have nice things--a high-trust civil society--is because of bad people. Because no system is perfect, our transactional and legal systems have to balance administrative efficiency and fairness. The more you try to be fair, i.e. improve your accuracy (fewer false positives), the higher your costs (less efficacy at stopping bad guys and/or more resources need to be expended); the more you aim for administrative efficiency (lower costs but better at stopping bad guys) the more fairness will tend to suffer (more false positives).
Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, but would still like to see data. That notwithstanding, it would still be wrong to characterize such a system as arbitrary simply because of that skewed result; it could just be a manifestation of a high efficiency but low fairness enforcement mechanism. Maybe it is arbitrary, but I doubt it.
I had never heard the phrase "financial censorship" before. Perhaps a better term here would be financial blacklisting. The EFF's page, https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship, conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive. Everybody trying to shoehorn their issues into the free speech debate tends to obfuscate problems and potential solutions; and I suspect it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. Before I even read the EFF's issue page--and definitely so, afterwards--the very phrase "financial censorship" brought to mind Citizens United v. FEC. Keep going down that road and there's no limit--I could just as well characterize murder laws as violating my free speech.[1]
For the record, I protested in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested way back when. I do take these issues seriously.
[1] In fact, IIRC not long after Citizens United the very same conservative justices upheld the criminal convictions of people who gave to a charity and advocacy organization implicated in funding terrorist organizations. The juxtaposition of the two decisions seemed to me to evidence the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the conservative's free speech crusade; such inconsistency and hypocrisy is inevitable once you start to characterize everything that's incident to speech as speech itself.
Ok, then you can rephrase my argument as "one of the most common examples of financial censorship", or "common enough that it is still bad", instead of "the most common".
It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point.
> conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive
People who are doing the censoring, or support the censorship, usually don't want their actions to be called censorship, yes.
I think it is a good term, though. The reason is because I am specifically referring to financial transactions that are perfectly legal, and are being censored for the political content of transaction.
The examples I gave were donations to WikiLeaks, which were perfectly legal, but were arbitrarily blocked, due to the political nature of such a donation, as well as the example of sexual content related financial transactions, which are also legal, but often arbitrarily blocked.
> it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process.
I am not really sure how it could backfire, to give people more ways of making perfectly legal financial transactions, that are more difficult to arbitrarily block, due to the political content of those transactions.
If you think something is bad, and should be blocked, then make a law. Don't rely on intermediaries to block things that aren't illegal.
Dramatically more people, indeed the whole world potentially, stand to lose from these countries avoiding sanctions than from the handful of people who can’t currently access their questionable but legal sexual content online.
Would you help Alan Turing avoid punishment given the chance?
Just a hypothetical to ponder before blindly accepting the status-quo.
Do they really? I'd argue the complete opposite and indeed my main reasoning for writing the original comment.
The biggest destinations on Earth for money laundering all hypocritically accept the money without shame, all Western countries with strong legal systems, so why is this occurring? Many of them proudly proclaim how much they are against money laundering. Do you know how complicit those governments are at virtually all levels happily accepting the illegal money that clearly is flowing into their suburb/state/nations?
The rest of the world begs these places to please stem the tide of illegal funds or at the very least investigate the people spending this cash and yet nothing happens. Corrupt Russian real estate purchases in London is basically a joke for locals now. A common joke. Are Londoners not complicit in this? Or is there enough separation to wipe their hands clean?
Very eager to hear your defense given the site we are on and the decent chance you have personally benefited from your own governments intentional willingness to ignore the huge amounts of corrupt, illegal money flowing into the west in the last few decades. Laundering into the West funds entire industries built around it and the blatant complicity from regulators/homeowners is on show for all to see.
You need more identification to get a library card than buy a house here. Does that not strike you as strange?
My own example: the biggest real estate purchase in Australia happened years ago, a massive mansion in Sydney, it was on the front of most newspapers, including the biggest newspaper read by millions. We only just discovered it was illegal despite many suggesting it at the time. The property has now been confiscated by the government years later. The owner simply fell foul of the government rather than any real insistence on justice or some sort of semblance about money laundering, it simply doesn't register for most.
Sydney, Vancouver and London are all singled out as the main destinations on Earth for clearly illegal money, The Australian government has sat on proposals for basic laws to ascertain ownership of the money for well over a decade at the behest of the real estate industry to not investigate this stuff.
Hopefully I had a decent crack at one of your points there.
But that said you didn't answer my "strawman", so here's the question again:
> Given the chance would you personally help Alan Turing avoid punishment for the law he broke that resulted in his chemical castration and ultimate death?
Simple yes or no suffices here.
Not all laws are good, not all criminals are bad people. These things are gray at the best of times.
You won't mind giving up your privacy if you have nothing to hide.
Wow, that seems like an incredibly dumb thing to do. Isn't all that information readily available on the internet anyway? I'm sure the NK govt. has access to the web.
* Even though my birth country is on allied terms with NK, I'm unsure how my dual citizenship with the US would pan out. I do not want to be considered a spy and imprisoned.
* I do not feel comfortable contributing to a totalitarian economy, even if the individual citizens (guides, translators, etc) benefit a lot from payment.
And there are probably many other valid reasons not to go, but those are the most immediately obvious to me.
That was about 5 years ago though.
(Not that I ever really seriously considered going there before, but I am definitely not going now that I've posted this!)
When we got to Checkpoint Charlie there were just a few tourists milling about the small section of wall that remained, and an old German couple renting a hammer and chisel so you could chip off a piece of the wall yourself. When we spoke to the old couple they suddenly became alert and asked us, rather loudly, if we were Americans. Immediately, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench look up, and a young guy dart out of a doorway and start walking our way. We took the hammer and chisel and started chipping at the wall while keeping an eye on the locals nearby, who suddenly seemed very interested in us. An older man standing close to the wall reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter but did not light the cigarette hanging from his mouth, an obvious signal to other members of his surveillance team.
When a German couple posing as tourists came up and asked us where we were from we recognized that they were obviously trying to recruit us to spy for the Eastern Bloc. But we were too clever, pretending that we were drunk and did not speak English, and meandered back to the train station with our chunk of the wall.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kippumjo
And he thought he’d get away with this how? Jeez..
from what I could gather from the complaint and his social media (https://twitter.com/virgilgr/status/1161217917427470337), he just never tried to hide it.
And once I got past border patrol and saw all of the items coming out with the luggage (car parts, toilet seats, televisions, a grill, etc.) it was clear that this system allowed the wealthier families to avoid most of the inconveniences of the US embargo.
https://twitter.com/virgilgr/status/1161217917427470337
I can't comprehend how someone could think any of this was a good idea.
OP’s point isn’t that Griffith is innocent, just that we’re likely missing some piece of info which would make his motivations/thought process make more sense.
But of course any sort of technology transfer which would help them in their effort, even indirectly but still very obviously possible to any rational person, which the courts very much take into account (in this case an expert in the field) could fall into breaching embargos.
In this case it's like selling a terrorist group's local community police force non-military low-power handguns, possibly believing they aren't practical for a military effort. But you're still giving a terrorist group firearms which could none-the-less be useful for their overarching cause.
I highly doubt he practically helped them hide any significant amount of money. Billions aren't flowing through blockchains into their pockets without notice. But the whole idea of sanctions is to make everything, even small-time indirect help off-limits... even banks doing business with legitimate NK businesses.
I get why a defendant might say, "Yes, your honor, he did say he wanted to kill his wife and then asked to borrow my gun. And yes, I did then give him my gun. But there's no way I could have foreseen him using my gun to kill her." But I don't think we're under any obligation to take that line of argument seriously.
There's no requirement to provide some unique, significant, irreplaceable insight or service, knowingly providing any help whatsoever is sufficient. Helping a buddy wash his car is a simple, nice thing to do; but helping a buddy wash blood off of his car before the police gets to it is a crime.
> For persons convicted under civilian federal law after November 1, 1987, federal parole has been abolished [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_parole_in_the_United_S...
Offhand I can't see any reason why he would go out of his way to N. Koreans advice on how to evade sanctions, so I will look forward to some statement on his part. 20 years is a long time.
I know he was working for the Ethereum foundation recently but doubt that the foundation would go out of the way to anger the US government (although they reportedly have a lot of Chinese government involvement).
Here is his twitter: https://twitter.com/virgilgr?lang=en
The only way you can get off is if your trial would reveal sources and methods the government doesn't want to disclose.
Second, you can simply read the sentencing guidelines, which will include the statute he's charged under, and see how the sentence is actually computed. We don't have to try to reason to it from first principles.
So still kinda long 5 years.
edit (can't reply yet): I arrived at this number by searching for USC and U.S.C in the press release, then googling IEEPA, finding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom..., then finding 50 U.S.C. § 1701, then going to https://guidelines.ussc.gov/si, putting in 50 U.S.C. § 1705, figuring §2M5.1 is relevant, then putting 14 in https://guidelines.ussc.gov/grc.
Both that this US Citizen ignored direct warnings from the US Federal Government not to attend and teach at the Pyongyang Blockchain Conference, and then volunteered to travel back the United States.
And that the US Federal Government is worried about North Korea getting their hands on the WMD-level technology that are Ethereum Tokens.
I suppose they'll be rounding up the people who built https://ethereum.org/developers/#getting-started next?
https://uniswap.info/token/0x6b175474e89094c44da98b954eedeac...
There's significant evidence that North Korea has been using cryptocurrency to evade sanctions and prop up their murderous regime, so I don't see what seems ridiculous to you about that.
Opposing murderous regimes is worthwhile. Doing it by criminalizing financial privacy and creating surveillance systems that are more expansive than anything the world has ever seen and that everyone is strong-armed into using them, is not.
Mandates to comply with an Orwellian warrantless surveillance system in Xinxiang are, according to the Chinese government, justified by the threat of terrorism. This is how these kinds of totalitarian impositions are always rationalized. There's always a good reason for them, to advance public safety and national security, according to their advocates.
So in-person talks is aiding and abetting?
What about videoconference?
What about emails?
What about a semi-hidden webpage meant primarily for them?
Or how about a general developer FAQ that would get anybody dev-minded up to speed?
Where do we draw this line of "aiding and abetting"? Material good? Information? Congratulations? This appears to be strongly a 1st amendment issue of speech. Not that I like NK, but that point is a distractor. Why is it a crime to talk about cryptocurrency and monetary censorship of countries?
Any act that would provide material assistance is sufficient. Criminal law is pretty liberal about what constitutes an "act" in furtherance of a crime. If it concerns you, stay far far away.
But merely publishing information in a book or on a publicly-accessible website for all to see is not generally going to get in you trouble (subject of course to copyright, publishing classified information, etc.).
They Tried that, but that pesky 1st amendment got in the way. Research the CyptoWars (which is seems are heating up all over again) and the PGP Source Code Book.
The US Government has been attempting to censor speech for as long as it has been in existence. the latest attack on crypto by the US Government for "national security" reasons is just the latest in the long line of abuses
The answer to "where do we draw the line" is that all the things you describe would be aiding and abetting if a jury would be convinced that you did it with an intent to aid them.
If you write "a general developer FAQ that would get anybody dev-minded up to speed" with the intent to help general developers everywhere and DPRK uses that, that's okay; but if you write the exact same FAQ content with an intent to help DPRK get that information because you figure out that just sending it directly in an email might be too visible, then that would be a crime, if intent can be established - based on e.g. your earlier communication and writings.
It's a prohibition on trying to achieve a specific result, not on a prohibition on any particular means of achieving that result.
- went back to the US several time after traveling to the DPRK despite being warned not to by the US state department
- had several consensual interviews with FBI agents
- consented to a search of his phone
It's hard to read this and not think that he brought this upon himself. If you really want to do what he did, get a lawyer, don't travel back to the US, don't speak to law enforcement.
> helping North Korea
Something here just doesn't add up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21666273 and marked it off-topic.
https://www.38north.org/2016/09/aabrahamian090216/
At first I thought maybe there was some monetary incentive to going to NK that might not be unsealed, but now I doubt it.
It sounds like this guy was simply a crypto “believer”, with probably a bit of an ego. To these people the inability of governments to enforce control on crypto is one of the biggest features, and I’m sure he wanted to see that used in the real world.
It's not much research to figure out how to buy a passport from somewhere else, the BBC has a nice write-up [1].
1. Malta wants $1.15M for a full EU passport, and Bulgaria is another popular choice.
2. Sant Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda will give you a passport for a donation of around $100K to charity or if you buy some real-estate around the half million mark.
3. The cheapest possible if you don't mind limited travel options is the Comoro Islands, $45K all-in.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-27674135
He asked the state department before leaving, he knew what he was doing.
I think in this case intent matters. If you ask permission to travel as a formality, but provide some goods and services while there then that’s very different things.
Not just the inability but also the lack of legitimate authority (emphasis on legitimate).
Yet he is a hero of the crypto community (and of HN).
Even if he did try to order murders (which I disagree that he did), the penalty for conspiracy to commit murder for hire is 10 years. Yet he wasn’t charged with that, and instead has double-life + 40 years.
Ross was made an example of, no question. I see no reason to keep him in jail, nor the hundreds of thousands of other non-violent criminals the US houses in prisons.
Edit: I see the title has been edited to match the DOJ website rather than this seemingly ungrammatical summary.
I also am under the impression the case is about unlawful export, but perhaps they're concentrating on a different theory.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885238
That seems to fly in the face of the 1st amendment. He was teaching about a skill that could be used to break law, but also be used in legal transactions.
Seems more like thoughtcrime, than actual crime. And if talking about implementation of technology is a crime, it shouldn't be.
They could derive that from the multitude of developer FAQs, Stack Exchange, or other sources.
Long story short, this is the US government throwing a fit about a US citizen in NK. Have to set an example.
Now, if he gave them cryptocoins or other assets, then there might be a legitimate case of breaking international law. But you know, there's this pesky thing called 'proof'.
It matters very much, both legally, and morally (unless, of course, you support the humans rights abuses going on in the DPRK[1]). The law differentiates between words put in a book and the same words said to a criminal in order to further a crime[2], and it's pretty obvious that Griffith was intentionally providing assistance to a country that commits human rights abuses that are crimes under the legal systems of many, many other countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_North_Korea [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21666553
Standing over a murderer in the act offering personalized advice in real-time, less so.
Every US citizen should be ashamed of their horrible country and its foreign interventions, wars and murders.
Having said that, as an outsider to the US, it's enjoyable to watch its slow demise now that the incompetents are in power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_North_Korea
The only viable options we have for pressuring them to stop their atrocities are sanctions and an actual war. Unless you either support their human-rights violations or actually losing lives in a war, then you should be applauding those sanctions.
Before you repeat for the nine-trillionth time that KJU is a bad guy... yes, we know. He might suffer for his sins, in this world or the next, he might not. He might be a lot worse than other autocrats, whom USA supports, he might not. Why is it important that we distill every situation into the most cartoonish good-guy/bad-guy terms? Cui bono?
And they have been eagerly pursuing nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capacity for decades, complete with long-range missiles: https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/
The goal of sanctions (which are part of extensive dialogue) is to limit the DPRK's ability to threaten even more people, and to push them back toward more discussion and more engagement. I'd love it if that had been even more successful, but if you think "no good result" has been achieved, you haven't been following the situation.
What I do believe is that Kim, like many dictators, is aware that there's no falling from #1 to #2. He won't go from absolute monarch to being like Queen Elizabeth. Maybe he gets a modestly comfortable exile in China with an ongoing risk of trial or revenge killing, but more likely he goes like Gaddafi or bin Laden: him and his heirs shot and dumped in unmarked graves, forever reviled.
So he doesn't have to be insane at all to be willing to shell Seoul or nuke Fairbanks. He just has to believe that might be enough to save his life and let him hold on to power. (Or, if he thinks he can't, to want revenge.) And of course to believe that other people's lives are entirely unimportant compared to his, which is pretty obvious given how he treats the people he rules. Or how he treated his half brother.
I agree that Bolton and the warhawks are nearly as monstrous. But that doesn't mean that the widely agreed policy of containment through sanctions is driven by them. Indeed, Bolton publicly argued for a first strike. Which to my mind makes him as sociopathic as Kim.
Except, we've read that of at least ten other situations in the last two decades. Over the last seven decades, we've read that of probably thirty more. As history has unfolded, that claim has never been true. The war media might be right eventually, and maybe DPRK will be the place. It's just that they've been wrong so much, at least since the Mexican-American War.
Mainstream journalism's war on the American people is not only an assault on peace, on innocents in other lands, or on our wallets. It is primarily an attack on epistemology. We have been gaslit our entire lives. If the world were not dangerous enough to require vast nuclear and other lethal arsenals, how would we know?
Edit: 15(c) alleges that he did in fact seek prior approval. Well, I guess it's no mystery why he's in deep trouble now.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1222646...
I don't really want to comment.. But here we are.
Not sure what to think of this. But it is there.
Arrest of Cryptocurrency and Tor expert [...]
HN often aligns with more Libertarian ideologies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316611
There is a definite right-libertarian bias on HN, whether you want to acknowledge that or not. Everything not toeing that line is attacked and downvoted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432833
Hacker News has become a forum for uber nationalistic right-winged libertarians https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21231654
There's a lot of very neoliberal or libertarian politics going on in the comments round here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21186128
hacker news is a bubble of mostly middle class white male libertarians https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20637454
If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged. It's always been this way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643695
It's totally expected. This is a heavy technolibertarian site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19230037
the techno-libertarian norm around here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671955
Hacker News has a libertarian leaning ideology among both its community and site-runners https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16019694
Because it's HN, where opinions other than "hooray libertarian technocracy" are frowned upon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307091
this site is a haven for alt-right and libertarian people who believe this stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14205262
There are just as many claims of the opposite; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21449589 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21245485. In reality, HN is a large pluralistic community, with more than enough material to support any impression of bias that you're primed for. The comments you notice and dislike make a stronger impression than the comments you agree with, building up a feeling that the community is against you. This can't be a function of HN, because HN is the same for everybody. Rather, it's in the eye of the beholder: an afterimage of the things they ran into and disliked here. The phenomenon is so consistent that you can not only predict what someone's opinions are, but also how intensely they hold them, from their image of the community's bias.