Some people used their tool for money laundering, just as some people have surely used encrypted messaging and VPNs for theft, terrorism, child abuse, and other crimes.
The point is that online privacy always has significant legitimate, non-criminal use cases, and developers can have legitimate, non-criminal (noble, even) reasons for building for those use cases.
And the larger point is that, if we want to have tools that give us any meaningful online privacy, we must stand up for the developers that build such tools when they are (inevitably, perennially) accused of aiding criminals and terrorists.
See page 24
Not "they created a tool and it got misused" but instead "these specific criminally sanctioned folks are using our tool to launder 600 million dollars, and we know, should we do something about that?"
Their messages back up that they know it was being used in a specific instance, by criminals, to launder money, and they did nothing.
Sorry, no sympathy. I'm with you that we need to ensure tools are available, and i'm even okay arguing about KYC/etc.
But when you have specific, actual, knowledge that a criminal actor is using your tool to launder money, and you do nothing, sorry, that's just aiding and abetting.
If you create parts for a bomb and hand them to someone else, knowing they are likely to use it as a bomb, and they in fact do, you are as guilty of conspiracy as the actual bomber.
Your crime was complete when you gave them the parts, which is an overt act (some act in furtherance of the conspiracy).
(Unlike the typical gun analogies that get brought up in response, i'm choosing something that does not have a legitimate purpose and is in fact illegal to create as-is)
If you create a thing in the US that is required to comply with KYC/AML and don't, and someone users it to launder, and you know they use it to launder, you are still guilty even if you couldn't stop them from using it.
Again, your crime is complete at the point you complete an overt act .
You have to withdraw from the conspiracy before then.
Here, the government is charging them for the website, mainly, not the smart contracts
But regardless of intentions, not following KYC/AML rules is illegal.
KYC/AML rules are of questionable legitimacy themselves, IMHO.
With less and less of society allowing to pay in anonymous currency (i.e. cold hard cash), either because it's dropped for "security" (i.e. shop owners don't want to pay for security to make sure the cash ain't stolen) or because of legal requirements (see e.g. Italy limiting cash transactions to 5.000€ in value, or Germany requiring a notification if you pay more than 10.000€ in value for a car), and many people moving to card payments due to convenience, there will be no way to escape the dragnet of governmental and private surveillance as all bank accounts are identifiable per KYC/AML regulations and virtually all banks report all account holders to Equifax and the other credit bureaus so to find out where a person banks is only a subpoena or a hack away. Oh, and completely forget about hiding legal but still sensitive payments: sex work of all kinds, political engagement, everything becomes yet another line in a trove of data lakes.
And that doesn't even touch the subject of card processing fees. Mastercard and Visa are rent-seekers of the worst kind, and no one seems to be willing to break them up or cap their fees, with PayPal close behind. Instead, everyone looks away when they cave to Evangelical pressure campaigns and drop sex workers left and right.
KYC/AML regulations deserve to be torn apart, and the people deserve privacy in their lives. Or, alternatively, we should force elected officials to open up their bank accounts to the public. If we can't have privacy, they certainly don't deserve it either.
But that's not what the law is, and law enforcement agencies as well as the court system only deal with what the law actually is.
You can (and should!) agitate and work towards changing the law to be more in line with what you think is right. That's the sort of change that is entirely possible in our system. But until then, the law is what the law is.
Making a crowbar isn't illegal. Buying a crowbar isn't illegal. Emailing your buddy and talking about how you're going to bust up a person and their shop because they aren't paying you protection money, then making or buying the crowbars? That could be evidence of an overt act in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy.
> And the only thing I would add is a few other scenarios. The third scenario: A person says to themselves "I'm going to go out and buy a crowbar to [...]" and then I go out and buy a crowbar. Still not a crime because there's no conspiracy, i.e. an agreement with another person.
> [...] And then there's the fourth scenario: A person says to themselves "I'm going to go out and buy a crowbar to [...]", buys the crowbar, and and then actually starts hitting people [...] Now there's still no conspiracy, but you've taken a substantial step towards the crime and and likely completed the crime and you're guilty of the initial crime.
As far as I can tell these people created a business to profit off of money laundering, and they were helping teach people how to hide their identity.