[ad_1]
Remember Virgil Griffith, the Ethereum developer arrested a year ago for violating sanctions after attending a conference in North Korea? US government prosecutors have opposed his defense’s attempts to dismiss the case, saying he knowingly and intentionally broke the law with his actions.
Griffith was released on $ 1 million bail in January 2020 and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
It is yet another demonstration that while technology may provide a means to evade human laws, it does not protect human participants from the consequences once the law decides to be involved.
According to the indictment, Griffith was well aware that his trip to Pyongyang in April 2019 would violate US government sanctions and that the knowledge he imparted in his lecture would help others in North Korea evade those sanctions. Citing text messages he had sent the year before the event, he claimed Griffith knew that knowledge of cryptocurrencies would help people in the DPRK to “circumvent sanctions” imposed as part of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). .
Not only that, but the content of his presentation at the conference was specifically tailored to highlight these benefits, the government said. He also mentioned one or more co-conspirators in the case who had assisted Griffith at various stages.
Griffith’s defense was attempting to dismiss the case for a variety of reasons. He said the information he presented at the conference was of a general nature and the content was widely available to anyone with an internet connection. Furthermore, Griffith had not been paid to attend the conference, so he could not constitute a “service” under the IEEPA.
Defense attorneys also argued that the four-page indictment against Griffith was “short and vague” and violated his rights under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by failing to provide him with adequate information or notice regarding the government case against him. .
Prosecutors have called Griffith’s arguments “absurd”, saying that the sanctions prohibit all such services, both paid and unpaid. They claimed that Griffith recognized prior to the trip that blockchain technology and developers could help evade trade sanctions and that Griffith had arranged to send a transaction from North to South Korea as proof, even mentioning his “co-conspirator” that this action itself would violate sanctions.
As for the information provided in the indictment, they replied that it was sufficient and that prosecutors were under no obligation to provide all the evidence they possessed about Griffith and his accomplices.
Regardless of whether the information presented was available elsewhere, packaging it as a conference and following questions and answers clearly represented a value-added service and was economically beneficial to the attendees. Additionally, Griffith went on with his trip to North Korea despite being denied permission by the US State Department in advance.
The fact that digital assets and blockchain technology could help foreign governments circumvent trade sanctions had long been discussed in industrial circles, but was rarely publicly advertised as a key benefit. Griffith’s case in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is the first to present such a use case, although commentators have noted that it is more a matter of national security that simply includes cryptocurrencies. .
Once again: the code is not law
Why would Griffith continue with his journey and introduction, despite the alleged warnings and knowledge that he would be breaking the law? It could be the arrogance of developers who mistakenly believe that the ability to run a successful process on a technology platform somehow means that human authorities have no recourse. This is false and dangerous to assume.
“Code is law,” the cryptoanarchists’ favorite maxim, only applies to computers. The human operators of those computers and the beneficiaries of their processes are still very much subject to human laws, and governments have a wide range of methods for dealing with them.
Access to services can be severely restricted, even if their use remains available to a few. Humans program and maintain the machines that execute code, and the output of the code influences events in the human world. Although these humans still live in the physical world, they can still be arrested, fined, imprisoned and influenced like anyone else.
Virgil Griffith’s case is ongoing and has yet to be decided by a judge. Regardless of how information and technology may have assisted the North Korean government, this case will have a decidedly humane outcome, something everyone in the tech industry should remember.
Follow CoinGeek’s Crypto Crime Cartel series, which delves into the flow of groups: from BitMEX to Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ShapeShift and Ethereum, which co-opted the digital asset revolution and turned the industry into a minefield for naive (and even savvy) players of the market.
New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek Bitcoin for beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin, as originally intended by Satoshi Nakamoto, and blockchain.
