Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, asked a federal judge in the United States to acquittal of the sole conviction for unlicensed money transmission, and ju-seekers’ hang count asked for a count for money laundering and sanctions violations, claiming that the prosecutors had not proven to help the bad actors misuse the encrypted mixed party.
According to legal documents filed September 30 and reviewed by the Cointelegraph, Storm’s defense attorneys alleged that the prosecutors were unable to prove they could help illegal actors use Tornado Cash.
“The argument was that Storm and the bad actors knew they were using tornado cash and were unable to take sufficient steps to stop them. This is a theory of negligence,” reads the preliminary statement.
The defense further argued that “there is a lack of positive evidence that Mr Storm acted with the intention of supporting a bad actor,” and the government sought to address the deliberate burden by claiming that the defendant could not prevent misuse. “It’s an argument that opposes intentional standards and is not supported by the law,” the motion states.
The submission is part of the claim of innocence and asks the judge to abandon the charge or verdict as the prosecution’s evidence is true, but legally insufficient.
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Fight for the right to privacy
Tornado Cash is a decentralized, non-curricular, smart contract-based ether (ETH) mixer that leverages zero-knowledge proof-based encryption to enhance transaction privacy. Launched in 2019 by Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, users can break ETH’s on-chain traceability.
The service was said to have been used primarily to wash billions of dollars in illegal funds, including funds related to North Korean hackers, which led to legal trouble. Tornado Cash has also been accused of promoting money laundering, with the US Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) dealing with more than $7 billion in digital currencies since 2019, with 30% of which being linked to illegal activities.
Storm was arrested in late August 2023, and co-founder Semenov was added to OFAC’s specially designated Nationals list. The arrest was made in late August by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. and the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, with U.S. Department of Justice officials opposed Storm’s retrial.
The incident has attracted acute criticism from the crypto industry. In August, the Pro-Crypto US Lobby Group Blockchain Association said that Storm’s beliefs can set “dangerous” precedents for developers and privacy. The group also pointed out that Storm had no control over the ciphers that passed the protocol.
“Roman Storm has built a privacy technology operated without custody/control over the funds of Tornado Cash users. […] Tornado Cash served as a non-radical software. This means that users always maintain complete control of their assets. ”
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The crypto community at the forefront of the fight for privacy
Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader crypto community emerged from the procryptography movement known as Cypherpunks. While much of the Crypto community now focuses solely on the financial aspects of blockchain technology, privacy remains a central battlefield for the industry.
Last week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin criticized the European Union’s proposed “chat management” law, warning that it would threaten the privacy rights of digital communications. The law in question requires a messaging platform to implement client-side pre-encrypted scanning of content of illegal content.
“We can’t make society safe by making people uneasy,” Buterin argued. He also emphasized that the background built for law enforcement is “inevitably hackable” and undermines the safety of everyone.
Some experts view this as a regulatory misstep, urging users to resort to government-free Web3 alternatives. Hans Rempel, co-founder and CEO of Diode, recently told Cointelegraph that the law is a dangerous overview and that “giving near-unlimited visibility to inherently corrupt entities into an individual’s private life is incompatible with the honest value statement of digital privacy.”
magazine: Can privacy survive the US crypto policy after the conviction of the Roman Storm?