Topic: Risk of jail for developers. Should you be anonymous? - page 2. (Read 2132 times)

You are literally a wizard, time traveler or both 

Should public developers be anonymous? Now I think this is not going to help at all, since the intelligence agencies (the real predators) already have a dossier of them. Look at how they completely doxxed the Samourai developers during the takedown.

Best thing to do is to have the ability to organize a good legal defense.

Open source needs more lawyers.

There are a few good suggestions like using adblockers and other chrome plugins but some of those plugins still collect your data and sell it to the same companies which you are trying to protect yourself from.

I remember there was a popular plugin called ghostery and it was doing this exactly. So don’t download random plugins just because they offer privacy/adblocking features.

You will be replacing one evil for another.

Cheap VPN services do it too even though they claim they don’t.

We have seen mixing services doing it also, so stay alert.

Unless you can see what code you are running, it could be anything.

Maybe label Wasabi as "captured?"

hahahahaha

Those allegations of being captured or overly cooperating with persons who could "give up" personal data had already existed through some of the battles between Samurai and Wasabi in the past few years.

Let me just point out that to this day nobody has done anything to Wasabi developers ... For those who don't know, Wasabi devs cooperate with blockchain analysis companies that deanonymize transactions such as the ones that go through Wasabi as a mixer!

Can we start calling Wasbi a honeypot yet?

I had not been online in the past 15 hours or so, and so I had not know about this, so I did a quickie google search and found a few links, and yeah it is all over the news, and yeah sure maybe several of the on-the-spot articles are saying the same things, and probably there is going to be all kinds of discussion of the significance of these kinds of matters and potentially ways to fight what the US Govt is deeming to be crimes..

And yeah, is the USA Govt going to be successful in terms of going after individuals who are going to get put in jail and faced with potentially expensive legal fees (and perhaps in need of some pretty good lawyers, which surely we likely realize that even the lawyers might have difficulties arguing against overreach, injustices and rights to privacy, self-sovereignty and financial freedoms), and sure when you identify individuals, that will scare others away from developing and working on such privacy services, including like you suggested, the potential of ramping up the kinds of targets all the way down to node operators and perhaps the operators of private wallets too... so yeah, overreach and desperation of the USA hegemony tends to have snowballing effects.

1) https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/04/24/samourai-wallet-founders-arrested-and-charged-with-money-laundering/

2) https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/federal-prosecutors-charge-samurai-wallet-founders-with-money-laundering/

3) https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/04/25/samourai-wallet-charges-raise-existential-questions-for-privacy-tech/

4) https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/samurai-wallet-gets-the-chop-as-feds-twist-the-knife

5) https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/the-state-of-things-open-source-developers-arrested-for-writing-code

With the news of Samurai Wallet developers being set to jail and having their lives permanently ruined, this thread seems pretty relevant. Luckily I do not work into anything that would be at risk of this, but you can see how the governments don't give a shit about your pro-privacy arguments.

Yes, you should have a right to not disclose your Bitcoin funds to whoever you are paying to, so using a mixer is the only solution for that, but governments have decided to threat anyone using them as dodgy by default. In this case they are going to jail and they will be bankrupt for life since they claim all the money that went through their software is money laundering by default. So basically they are screwed.

I wonder how long the will come up with some excuse to claim running nodes is money laundering too, while drones clap about the price going up with the ETFs. I always thought that BTC is increasingly useless unless it's KYC'd because governments are ruining any usage of it that isn't KYC'd, so if you don't have all the records, there is no incentive to do anything with it, since they don't provide any alternatives.

Not all good developers are good actors, it's another angle of this argument and I've gone through most responses and found that everyone thinks positive of every dev. Some of them develop the scam altcoins or project using the blockchain, which has lured investors to lose funds. Consequently, the good players also need to stay careful, because the security agencies think in weird ways once they're ordered to carry out a search spree on blockchain developers, out of what a bad player has committed using the network, maybe. So, I think that should be the foundation of this conversation, and only a few developer would go scot free since these law enforcement agencies employ literally top technicians from every department in the world to join their security agencies, it'll be easier to track down them developers. It takes a hacker to get a hacker. Except those who has stopped online activities, every developer who works online stand a risk of being caught, as I've realized recently, after the chipmixer scandal, that the FBI are well prepared tech wise, yet I believe some people, the few, can beat the system and still remain anonymous.

You raise an interesting problem here. If we focus on mixing service providers, the chance that they are doing something wrong besides providing a mixing service is quite high. I am not referring to something illegal, only something wrong. For example, they have both cryptocurrency and fiat funds and can't prove the origin because they don't have perfect accounting. The authorities could surveil them and find that they can't successfully prosecute them solely based on providing a mixing service, but they can collect much more data about the person as soon as they identified who is behind that service. Putting together a case that will lead to some result is probably easy. Not many people have perfect accounting books for the cryptocurrency transactions and I guess that someone providing a mixing service is probably literally mixing up some of the things that concern their private cryptocurrency dealings as well.

It could be all kinds of things that authorities put together. Perhaps the mixing service provider gambles sometimes and there you go, you make the case for money laundering unless the person can perfectly prove that the money has a legal origin and was not laundered. That can turn out to be very difficult. But there are countless other potential accusations besides the mixing service to take someone down. The podcast mentioned here proves that well. The surveillance can simply be extended to areas not connected to the mixing service and the case becomes so complex that properly defending yourself becomes prohibitively expensive. Even more so if your funds are frozen anyway...

A few days ago, I had listened to a Citadel Dispatch podcast (from April 13) in which Matt Odell interviewed two attornies (Mike Hassard and Tor Ekeland) about the Roman Sterlingov case.

Their description of the situation comes off as quite the shitshow in which the USA govt is using (or claim to be using) chain analysis tools in order to provide evidence in order to support their prosecution of the operators of mixing services or whatever it might happen to be that the govt is claiming to unlawful, and part of the beef that the lawyers have about this whole case is that the govt is having a tendency to make elaborate claims about their surveillance capabilities, but not showing either the evidence or the ways that their surveillance tools are working.... and therefore they are coming to wrong and unjust conclusions and likely able to prosecute anyone that they want based on flimsy evidence (including that many times the accused peeps are tending to not even be able to fight charges because their funds get frozen.. and they just end up pleaing to charges that might not even be sustainable if they were to be fought in a court of law).

Yes absolutely true. People don't realise that info is more that a money maker. It's a weapon these days. Economic weapon, financial weapon and even military weapon. People actually fucking dye out of information leaks as we see in Russia and other such countries where you get poisoned and thrown out of windows because THEY know where you are, what you do, your habits, etc.

Yes, ad-blockers and other tools can be used but sometimes is a PITA because they break sites' functionalities. I use uBlock Origin, noscript, decentraleyes and ad-block. I know some of these overlaps themselves, but sometimes when site functionality gets broken, I try to deactivate one to see if site works or not. And this is boring sometimes, but I still do it.
Degoogling is another thing I started doing. Deleting Google emails, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Drive and other google services. Another gial is de-Android me. lol, but that needs a new phone that can use for instance, Debian or so!
That's a lot to do regarding opsec.

If I live in the USA and use a Russian based VPN, will I get punished for that? I've never heard about that, are you really sure?
Also, if the USA was so strict regarding to things that they can't control, then why do they let Tor project to exist? Tor is based in Winchester, New Hampshire.
They can't control bitcoin but no one will arrest you for using one, right? While I agree with you on social media thing, still, you can use VPN to bypass restrictions and access vk.com or any other website and no one will arrest or punish you for that.

Well let's focus our firepower at one specific target - the internet makes a good candidate for that.

We currently have:

- Adblockers
- Do Not Track
- Private browsing windows
- VPNs
- encrypted DNS
- Profile containers
- Tor (but hardly anyone uses that)

You'll get most of these when using Firefox/Chromium. And yet, data brokers are still reaping user information at obscene rates. It's because most of these users have poor to no opsec, give out swathes of their personal information to social media sites and "surveys" looking to make a quick buck, or they're making the fatal mistake of using Google Chrome without any add blockers.

And even here, privacy solutions do exist for that particular part of the problem: Private email a la protonmail and tutanota, one-time-use email addresses for signing up to stuff, and so forth.

Most people do not periodically review the sites they have connected to Google and MS. So it really comes down to users not being vigilant.

This is actually true, if they would attack the developers then much better they'll target the criminals that are surfing in the blockchain technology and crypto. As devs want to gain the trust of people they are putting their identity on public. Which is not actually good for them, it would be better red tagged criminal activities that are harmful for the community. But of course revealing those identity could led to even more worse scenarios. Such as hacking their IP address, threat and more worse crime. Which could be hard for them to escape those scenarios since people would always do something in the internet.

True but this circles back to it being because no one is building privacy preserving technology for day to day life. Everyone is comfy consuming centralized proprietary software so this is what we get.

Regardless the fact what you say is true, but it is also impossible, at least the part of chasing criminals instead of chasing devs. Some of the biggest criminals are politicians, gnterprise groups CEOs, friends, family, etc. And these people are the ones making the rules and avoiding them when they don't serve them.

I agree that if I was a dev, I wanted to be anonymous, only know by aliases. But this is also very difficult, because you don't think of this at born time (so to speak), therefore, early in life you start handing out info about you everywhere by means of when your parents give you a smarphone, a console, a laptop, etc. And when the time comes, you realise that you need to be annonymous but it's late because your info is already everywhere.
Removing all your traces from the internet is quite difficult because many times, it forces you to change many aspects of life.

These people should leave cryptocurrency developers alone. They are  trying to make the world a better place alone and instead they should go after those who they know are actually using bitcoin for various illegal purposes like money laundering financing terrorism etc. They know because they have their surveillance everywhere.

And yes, please developers should remain anonymous. Because they are easy targets for the security agencies, the Feds, the good, the bad and the ugly in the world. Besides, I have never seen a developer who doesn't hold their privacy and security in high esteem. One more thing for developers is to obey the laws and regulations binding cryptocurrency in any country so as to avoid legal and regulatory problems..

Another problem is that where Bitcoin Core (te most used client) is hosted in a platform already owned by one entity that likes to keep things in secret (closed source) and I believe that they would also be collecting data from its users. So, an interesting idea could be to have an alternative repository where to host the software, like Gitlab or maybe to create something new in nostr! Decentralize it!

That's only true in fairylands not in reality
In reality the laws can change or even interpreted the way they want it to.

Let's use a better example: social media and VPNs. If you ask anybody in US if social media or using VPN is illegal they will tell you no after laughing at you for asking such a silly question.
The reality is that the authoritarian regime doesn't want you to use anything they can not control (sounds familiar? They can't control bitcoin either) they are making it illegal to use any social media that is not in full control of the authorities in this so called "democracy" where they can censor anything they don't like and not to mention the punishment for using VPNs that are not US and its allies honeypot would be up to 20 years in prison. They ensure these things by passing laws similar to the recent shenanigans with the legislation act 686 with the fancy name "Restrict Act". That's only one of many acts

The difference is really intention in some cases but in other cases it's whether or not you have paid off the correct people. It might help to both have good intentions and pay some bills here and there.

The law is not as clear as you are proclaiming it to be.  There is no world-wide law that determines what is legal, illegal, criminal, civil, even though code can have world-wide impacts.  There are also various free speech angles (defenses) and even questions of how to read intent versus outcome, and whether there are commercial purposes or communicative purposes that are facilitate through software.. Also is there self-dealing and obfuscation in regards to what is happening or not. 

I doubt that the standards are even close to as clear as you are describing them to be - even if there are proponents of various standards, and you may well take a different perspective if you are developing software, using the software or someone who is looking at enforcement of laws (such as prosecutors in various jurisdictions).