While Tornado Cash is now under sanctions in the United States, it seems that some actors are being zealous… Its code has just disappeared from the GitHub platform, a nonsense for part of the community.
You will no longer find the code of Tornado Cash on GitHub
As a reminder, GitHub is a platform that allows, among other things, to share open source code, we found the code of Tornado Cash until recently. But that was before the US Treasury decided to sanction the cryptocurrency mixer. The latter found itself in turmoil this week, as players located in the United States now face a ban on interacting with Tornado Cash.
But also with its code? This is the interpretation that GitHub seems to have made, since the source code of Tornado Cash has been removed from the site. In addition, developers who have worked on the platform have had their accounts suspended. This is the case of Roman Semenov, one of the main actors of the project:
“My GitHub account has just been suspended. Is it now illegal to write open source code?”
Is GitHub going too far?
This is indeed a question worth asking. As a reminder, the U.S. Treasury sanctions were specifically targeted at Tornado Cash, because the mixer was allegedly used to launder funds by the North Korean hacker group Lazarus.
But its open source code, which is available and can be reused over and over again, is itself only an architecture. Restricting access to it is therefore like suppressing documentation that is not in itself illegal. In this sense, some consider the publication of the code as a matter of freedom of expression. An interpretation that had been established by a legal precedent dating from 1996:
“Although the Tornado [Cash] code is functional – it allows Ethereum transactions to be mixed in order to make them more difficult to trace – publishing the code itself falls within the scope of freedom of expression, even though the code may be used illegally.”
In the United States, removing the code could indeed be a violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. So a legal battle could be played out in the coming months.
A questioning that goes beyond the laws
Beyond these legal considerations, and as pointed out by several members of the community, this raises the question of interference of entities on resources that are considered neutral. This is the eternal debate that comes up when we talk about cryptocurrencies: should we target them because some actors are malicious? And in that case, why don’t we target euros or dollars that are used for all sorts of illegal acts?
On the other hand, the freedom to express oneself and share with one’s peers is also a freedom to do so privately – for whatever reason. If platforms like Tornado Cash exist, it is because they meet a need, which must be separated from potential illegal uses. The current case is therefore particularly crucial for the ecosystem.
