<story><title>Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/business/tornado-cash-treasury-sued.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikece</author><text>Banning a service because it &amp;quot;might be used for illegal purposes&amp;quot; is insufficient.  This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work.  This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more.  I would rather money-launderers get away with things and for freedom to prosper than to have an all-encompassing surveillance state.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>woodruffw</author><text>&amp;quot;Might be used for illegal purposes&amp;quot; is a significant understatement. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is &lt;i&gt;in and of itself&lt;/i&gt; a crime in both the US and Netherlands.&lt;p&gt;Normally, there&amp;#x27;d be an aspect of plausible deniability: torrent index operators can, for example, rightfully claim that they&amp;#x27;re facilitating legal filesharing, or that they&amp;#x27;re entirely agnostic to the content being shared (if all they&amp;#x27;re doing is sharing URLs). What&amp;#x27;s key in this case is that law enforcement &lt;i&gt;claims&lt;/i&gt; that Pertsev was aware of the crimes his service was being used for. Whether or not that&amp;#x27;s actually true is up to a court to decide.</text></comment>
<story><title>Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/business/tornado-cash-treasury-sued.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikece</author><text>Banning a service because it &amp;quot;might be used for illegal purposes&amp;quot; is insufficient.  This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work.  This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more.  I would rather money-launderers get away with things and for freedom to prosper than to have an all-encompassing surveillance state.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JustLurking2022</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a service specifically designed to facilitate money laundering. It&amp;#x27;s a bit like running a business that produces paperwork to make stolen cars indistinguishable from legal ones - there&amp;#x27;s no reason such a service should be allowed to exist.</text></comment>