Because the standard playbook for "cracking down" is to first win cases against the least sympathetic, most prosecutable targets. Once that's under your belt, you gradually expand outwards to increasingly ordinary people. It's why slippery slope is such a big deal in civil liberties and constitutional law.
When drug prohibition started, they started by arresting kingpin gangstas not students with dime bags. As abortion laws restart, states won't begin by arresting anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood. But if left unchecked, some will eventually get there.
First thing, you can't arrest people for prior donations as postfacto laws are unconstitutional.
Second, if abortion is considered murder, why should it be legal to fund illegal abortions? We generally don't allow people to fund criminal activity for good reasons.
Do you think it should be legal to donate to criminal organizations?
What are your thoughts on donations to Al-Qaeda?
Dude, as someone in the system, ex post facto happens all the time. In my case I can challenge it, but if I get slapped with lets say a completely 'theoretical' $5000 ex post facto "fine" it's going to cost more in lawyers to challenge, plus piss off my judge/PO for wasting time. As someone who can't get a job due to my record and can't afford a lawyer I have 'access' to the court for remedy, but I don't have access to a lawyer for remedy. The Constitution and our government are two different things.
If something gets ruled unconstitutional, that doesn't suddenly free prisoners in the USA. Each prisoner needs to then challenge their conviction in court, and get past the high procedural bar (as a Fed prisoner, do you submit to the circuit in which you are now unconstitutionally imprisoned, or the circuit that convicted you unconstitutionally? Depends on the argument you are making, either could be right or wrong. Pick the wrong one and you waste three months minimum (so much for speeding trial, that only applies to your initial trial according the the supreme court) for the court to come back and say 'they don't have jurisdiction'. Not forward to the correct court, just denied for lack of jurisdiction. For you challenging something already found unconstitutional that should just be immediate release upon Supreme Court ruling. And don't forget, you have a time limit to challenge something found unconstitutional. You took too long? To bad, you're now stuck in prison for something found unconstitutional because you didn't understand your rights and navigate the bar placed in the form of the court system in a timely), nevermind hurdles placed in prison (mailroom only open from this time to this time, mail room not certifying your mail or 'losing' it, law library copyers broken, commissary 'out' of law library typewriter ribbons for sale), etc. If the Constitution was law, those people held unconstitutionally would be released upon Supreme Court findings. The fact they aren't and can be kept in prison for 'taking to long' to challenge their Supreme Court determined unconstitutional conviction shows the Constitution is just a 'guideline' in the USA.
The system shouldn't work like insurance claim submissions that if you fight long enough/hard enough or can pay someone to fight for you ultimately grudgingly your constitutional rights are recognized. Remember, China's constitution includes democracy and free speech too, but just like our rights they enacted 'reasonable rules that happen to be barriers to those rights as an unfortunate side effect'.
Can you give an example of one such time?
Because it's not murder. Legislating that it is does not make it so. Full stop. That's like a government trying to legislate that the sky must always be blue, or that it's illegal to frown, or that 2+2=5. Just because it's a law does not make it just or sensible, and I would hope that in modern society we would not blindly obey unjust/unnecessary/unwelcome laws without questioning.
Is it intentionally ending the life of a human being? Well, what life, what is a human being?
It's intentionally terminating a pregnancy? Yes. Is that bad? Well, if the would-be-mother doesn't want it it's definitely bad, and if the would-be-mother wants it then it definitely seems cruel to not do it, but when society tries to impose whatever morals on these people the arguments start to look very silly very soon.
The main argument against abortion is a strange begging the question fallacy mixed with consequentialism: if the abortion would not happen then things would go great and a human would born (the implied assumption is that it's somehow unquestionably good).
I fundamentally disagree. You objectively cannot “kill” something that is not “alive”. That is just a fact of life itself. A government can legislate all they want, but it does not make an unborn fetus any more alive. And thus any law rooted in this idea is fundamentally absurd, preposterous, and so downright stupid that on the principle alone (aside from the many others) any such ban shouldn’t be followed.
To entertain the idea that government can legislate whatever it wants is to imply that a government can dictate the laws of physics. It’s just nonsensical.
The fetus is alive. It's a bunch of cells. There's a causal interaction to remove it from the host which makes it a bunch of dead cells.
Legislatig physics is stupid, but what if some state said by law which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one? Stupid, but not much different than building codes. Or say that prions are alive and can run for office... stupid, but there used to be a lot of absurd laws. (If someone works on Saturday they shall be put to death. Sure, what's work? And then there are many many many interpretations of what's work.)
Whether it’s the former or the latter cannot be determined from this arrest alone.
This is a hysterical prediction.
Sure, the government might make it illegal to donate to Planned Parenthood in the future but per the constitution they can't make prior donations illegal.
The sentencing range wasn't changed, just the sentence the judge was required to give, but the range isn't a rule so it's ok. And if the judge sentences outside the guideline the prosecutor can challenge for 'sentence outside guideline range'. The constitution has been lawyered into oblivion.
There's a lot of room to re-interpret laws that were already on the books in ways that make prior "crimes" illegal today when they wouldn't have been interpreted that way when they happened.
There's other things that can be done as well, like searching their residence for every single code violation possible, daily police visits, civil asset forfeiture, fine-comb tax auditing, etc. It's a pretty well oiled machine for finding ways to convict people or make their life hell through the legal system if that's the goal.
Even if a court ruling or legal interpretation gets overturned later, that doesn't allow you to prosecute people who were relying on that legal interpretation.
Judges aren't mindless machines and they realize the importance of avoiding postfacto prosecutions.
and below still stands:
>There's other things that can be done as well, like searching their residence for every single code violation possible, daily police visits, civil asset forfeiture, fine-comb tax auditing, etc. It's a pretty well oiled machine for finding ways to convict people or make their life hell through the legal system if that's the goal.
If the powers that be want to punish those who contribute to abortion, they will find a way to do it, even ex-post-facto.
In that case there is no room for crypto. Totalitarian regimes can execute anyone suspected of holding it.
Does that somehow invalidate your point?
"12 states prohibit state family planning funds from going to any entity that provides abortions."
https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-family...
That's assuming you're correct they would try to ban private funds. A big assumption.
No, ex post facto laws aren't legal.
If the state law says so, yes, you could get an out-of-state charge for providing financial aid to an abortion operation after contributing to an organization that funds them. With Roe v Wade gone, I am not sure there is a federal precedent for how to handle crimes relating to committing a murder in one state that is not considered a murder in another state.
> No state has yet enacted a law to ban this travel. But it has been attempted: In Missouri, a bill is pending that would enforce abortion restrictions through civil lawsuits if the abortion is administered outside the state.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/can-states-punish...
I wonder how long it will be before SCOTUS kills off these attempts to use civil litigation to end-run the Constitution. The Texas law matched the court's ideology, so they let it stand, but now that Roe is overturned I expect the court to dispense with the law before places like California can use it to render the 2A moot.
If they let this continue, the court will become irrelevant in a hurry. They may have granted themselves sweeping authority a long while back, but that can be changed easily via legislation.
You can't prohibit private money use in a situation like this - especially not for a political funding thing. That is actually a freedom of speech issue.
Headline: Arrest of developer with suspected ties to North Korean money laundering
Body: He has also previously contributed to Tornado Cash.
But all we know is what they decided to tell us... he's a developer of privacy tech. If the facts change, I'll change my mind.
“With suspected ties to X“ isn't necessarily an element of the charges being brought. And the police can and do lie (or state “suspicion” on a very flimsy basis) when making public announcements related to arrests, and headlines often credulously repeat police spin rather than being grounded in facts.
While this tends to get the most attention (and still then not enough for the press to change) around police spin and media coverage related to police shootings, it is true far beyond that.
I dunno, there's a pretty big trend going on right now of producing tv shows / prodcasts about how ineffective (with a strong hint of incompentence) cops can be.
This didn’t happen with no lead up or context
Should we arrest the Tor developers because North Koreans use Tor?
“On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash”
So the suspicion is that he didn’t only develop the tool, but was involved in its illegal use, too.
Weird take because taking one or a few persons out of a large crowd is a standard LE tactic for attacking protests and similar stuff.
My point is, there are a lot of people on HN who seem to think any arrest or prosecution of anyone who is involved in crypto is due to a shadowy push by the establishment to maintain control of the money supply and thus our lives. I'm trying to point out (1) there are simpler explanations, and (2) if you keep trying to defend everyone involved in crypto without knowing the facts, you're going to get burned and normies are going to be a lot more skeptical about crypto in the future. Just... be careful, guys.
Finally, I’m not optimizing for credibility when stating my opinion, nor am I defending a single person. I do not think arresting developers is an effective solution for preventing money laundering. It matters not to me who the “bad people” may be.
Bad people can also work in groups.
> I do not think arresting developers is an effective solution for preventing money laundering.
You're essentially reducing his role to "Just a developer" while ignoring that he might be a lot more than just a developer and might be involved with actual money laundering at many different stages of the process other than "Just writing a little bit of code".
Im not defending one side or the other, just pointing out that by ignoring everything else and calling him "Just a developer" you're not being objective.
> "Across the world, HSBC likes to sell itself as ‘the world’s local bank,’ the friendly face of corporate and personal finance. And yet, a decade ago, the same bank was hit with a record U.S. fine of $1.9 billion for facilitating money laundering for ‘drug kingpins and rogue nations.’"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61349754-too-big-to-jail
This isn't a simpler explanation than the even simpler one that goverments have decided that cracking down on crypto is a good idea for a wide variety of reasons, and are executing on this decision. The way governments do this kind of thing is by starting to prosecute people who they think they have the best chance of willing a case against. This doesn't mean the case, ultimately, has merit, just that they've decided it's the most likely success.
Because he was working on something specialized, where he was in effect a supplier to a single customer. Thus, he's turned into a ready scapegoat.
You can't easily scapegoat someone if their pieces of code (or ideas) are also used, say, in every browser for securing connections, or whatever.
If you're closer than arm's length from some people who are engaging in criminal activity, an in particular doing exclusive work for them, you are prosecutable.
The whole point of my comment was that he was probably arrested for more than that... Or at least, we should wait to see what the evidence against the guy is.
If you go around saying "the sky is falling! they're coming for the developers!" then it turns out the guy was actually doing bad stuff to help launder money, you're going to make it that much harder to get people's attention when there is an actual abuse of police power.
I don't know that, but that currently appears to be the case and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
EDIT: The title of the page is "Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash". So they are certainly making it appear that they consider having developed Tornado Cash to itself be worthy of arrest.
But was he arrested for _just_ the code he wrote? Or more, and the code was just an ancillary property of the person being arrested?
I get that you really want to defend crypto, but I think a simpler explanation is that they have good reasons to believe that this guy was doing more than just the stuff you're trying to defend (making privacy code).
It would be like... if two dozen people were picketing outside of a big corporation, and the police came and arrested one dude. You would be the guy saying "they're coming for the protesters!" and I'm the guy saying "Well, if they're really after protesters why didn't they arrest all of them? And isn't that the guy they were investigating for a bank robbery?"
Defending literally every crypto guy is short-sighted if you're a true proponent of the tech. It's possible that there are bad people involved in crypto, and you'll be a lot more credible as an advocate if you acknowledge that possibility and wait for the facts.