IMHO that kind of projects should simply go anonymous.
You can’t really take on governments and then complain that they are fighting you back.
It’s pretty clear that the gvts are following the money trail to take down people and organization they consider a security risk. The whole financial system and sanction system are built upon this, that’s why there’s KYC everywhere.
I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect to get away with building a machine that takes away this tool from the regulators and law enforcement. They will obviously hold you accountable for the instances that your code makes their system useless. In the case of Tornado Cash, you can't even claim that this is an unintended consequence.
Therefore I don’t believe that there are any implications about writing open source code at all.
Just don’t mess with the systems that run the society and take credit for it and not have the means to stay beyond the reach of those you are messing with - all at the same time. That’s hardly a new concept. Revolutionaries are never “the good guy” until the revolution succeeds.
Being revolutionary is hard, its not an entitlement. It's not unusual in this endeavour to die in a ditch or your head paraded on tip of a spear. You are literally the enemy of the state, a terrorist, an illegal when you take on a state. You are not even "the hero of the people", at best you are the hero of a group of the people who share your deals and everyone else sees you as undesirable, especially the people who are the beneficiaries of the system you are trying to take down and they don't even have to be bad people.
Also, just because you take on a powerful organisation doesn't even make you the righteous one. Awful lot of people depend on these organisations for stuff like following the money to catch other "revolutionaries" who blown up their metro stations for example. It's very likely to be vilified when you decapacitate the governments.
I don't judge the enemy of the state, merely point out your status when you take on a state.
Also, "they just wrote some code" isn't a defense. Some of the greatest criminals just pushed some buttons. Adding extra steps or using a device to do what you do doesn't change the nature of your actions. The people who you are trying to take down and label as oppressor just happen to write stuff on paper or on a computer too.
If you think that all the monetary transactions should be unstoppable and anonymous(which I actually agree with, IMHO the state should be taking on criminals through proper police action and not meddle with other systems or force companies act like police to make its job easier) and you make a device that helps people do that and if the state disagrees with you you become a criminal.
If I ever build a money laundering device, I wouldn't be claiming responsibility for it or say it can't be illegal because "its just some code".
Yes. I specifically avoid any projects adjacent to things which would work “against” the interests of any powerful government that I might be subject to.
I don’t believe that I can hide. I think if I was in Russia or China and wanted to take on some of these interesting projects I might consider some of them if I didn’t super love traveling.
But the only way to do work in those types of interesting spaces is to be very clearly aligned with your government and ideally positioning yourself towards partnering with your government.
I don’t think heroes are stupid as long as they understand the likely consequences and are willing to be “martyred”. But many of the people working in these spaces are merely greedy with delusions of grandeur or invincibility, or naive … not heroic. A select few have qualified as heroes e.g. TrueCrypt or Aaron Swartz or LavaBit. Though Swartz I also believe was naive, but he faced consequences that simply didn’t make sense, so I don’t entirely blame him for believing whatever consequences he would face might be more endurable than what he was threatened with - I make the assumption that he was resolved to face reasonable consequences.
Snowden would have counted as a hero to me if he only released documents relating to illegal domestic surveillance and not released operational details of legal international spouting. He was more resolved to deal with the consequences than any other character I can think of.
You can’t really take on governments and then complain that they are fighting you back.
It’s pretty clear that the gvts are following the money trail to take down people and organization they consider a security risk. The whole financial system and sanction system are built upon this, that’s why there’s KYC everywhere.
I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect to get away with building a machine that takes away this tool from the regulators and law enforcement. They will obviously hold you accountable for the instances that your code makes their system useless. In the case of Tornado Cash, you can't even claim that this is an unintended consequence.
Therefore I don’t believe that there are any implications about writing open source code at all.
Just don’t mess with the systems that run the society and take credit for it and not have the means to stay beyond the reach of those you are messing with - all at the same time. That’s hardly a new concept. Revolutionaries are never “the good guy” until the revolution succeeds.