"Griffith was arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in November 2019 after he travelled to North Korea to give a talk on blockchain and crypto."
This is pretty wild to me. The guy gave a talk in North Korea and gave them non-classified information they could easily find on YouTube or any other public website. And now he's facing 20 years.
North Korea is building nuclear weapons in order to threaten the United States and its allies with them. Tens of thousands of American soldiers are stationed in South Korea in order to defend it from North Korean aggression. The war between the US and North Korea—which began 70 years ago when the current dictator’s grandfather invaded the South and declared war on the United States—is technically not over, and the possibility that active hostilities may resume at any time still exists.
Sanctions are one of the few tools that the US has to exert leverage against the North Korean regime, and Virgil Griffith is alleged to have travelled to North Korea specifically to help North Korea in violating those sanctions. What he is alleged to have done has been illegal for 70 years.
In 2019 our own President went there to discuss peace. Dennis Rodman and many other Americans have visited NK at various times. I don't think it's moral to arrest someone for speaking about publicly available information. There's nothing Virgil could have told them that they couldn't find on GitHub or YouTube. And yes, Kim's lackeys definitely have access to the internet.
Sanctions seem to work for nothing. NK got nukes anyways. The middle east is still a mess. Iran is still a problem 50 years later. Cuba still a mess. China is arguably our biggest threat but no sanctions there. Russia has diversified itself away from the Petrodollar as much as possible for these reasons. This US Dollar empire is on its last legs. The US isn't 25% of global GDP anymore. None of this is sustainable.
At any rate, I'm sure Kim's hackers are incapable of learning cryptocurrency from any one of thousands of online resources. Crisis averted. Lock him up.
Say what you will about the effectiveness of sanctions and the current state of American foreign policy, United States citizens shouldn’t undertake expressly illegal overt acts on enemy soil to assist hostile governments in undermining that foreign policy—regardless as to whether or not the information they share is already known by that hostile government—without at least expecting to attract unwanted attention from their own government.
We live in a country that has the rule of law, you can't just arbitrarily use a vague characterization of a country being "hostile" to abridge the rights of someone. I would be alright with this if the us had a formal declaration of war with north Korea, but it doesn't.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, the US is technically still at war with North Korea. If there were to be one and only one country on the face of the planet that you should not be giving any kind of information or money to as a US citizen, it is North Korea.
This isn't vague or arbitrary. The sanctions against NK are very specific, and lengthy.
So we were never at war with Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam. Sweet. I guess we're still on our perfect win streak yeah?
Edit: I feel bad about being facetious, but I feel like the point is relevant. The US, in a practical sense, does not need congress to ok war. Pointing that out as a reason to doubt the basis for strict treatment of North Korea is like pointing out the speed-limit is 55 when someone travelling 56 gets T-boned.
> No we are not. The constitution specifically says that only congress can declare war, and congress has made no such declaration.
Do note that the US never declared war on Iraq, and that did not stopped it from fighting two wars that were very real, both of which with the support of an international coalition.
The US hasn't formally declared war on anyone since World War 2. Not Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, nor any of the many smaller conflicts we've fought.
However, the United Nations did declare war on North Korea, with US support, and the US is the major participant in that war; and no peace treaty was ever signed, merely a cease fire.
that's exactly correct. If we're going to start abridging freedoms (which I concede may be necessary in exigencies), we'd better get a congressional vote on it.
Yes, of course. This whole thread is about how we would prefer things to be, it's about the ethics of whether or not someone should have been arrested. He was arrested. That is the "truth of the matter".
Should giving technical assistance to a sanctioned regime be treated as protected speech? Is that the right that was abridged here? If Virgil Griffith goes to trial, I imagine we will eventually see whether the Supreme Court considers what he did to be protected speech, or not. Personally, I don’t think they would even hear his case if he were to appeal on those grounds.
You write as if Congress has not weighed in on this matter, simply because it has not declared war on North Korea. In fact, current North Korean sanctions were codified and authorized by Congress in the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, which expanded upon the sanctions regime that had already been in place. Virgil Griffith’s alleged acts are not illegal because of a vague characterization of North Korea as being “hostile”, but because Congress explicitly made it illegal to travel to North Korea to give technical advice.
> We live in a country that has the rule of law, you can't just arbitrarily use a vague characterization of a country being "hostile" to abridge the rights of someone.
There is no ambiguity in the classification of North Korea as a hostile regime. Not only there is the fact that the Korean war never ended with a peace treaty an only had an armistice, there is also the hostile and recently degrading relationship that in 2020 escalated to the total elimination of official communication lines between north and south Korea.
There is indeed no ambiguity with Korea, but there is a worrying spectrum of hostility - from Russia to china to iran. I detest all of those regimes, but we absolutely must be careful about using a vague characterization as a pretense for the our regime to take arbitrary and unjust actions against us citizens that are have family or are doing legitimate businesses there.
If a country like the US imposes sanctions on a country which includes, quite prominently, restrictions on investment and financial activities, and afterwards you go out of your way to provide assistance on how to circumvent those restrictions on investment and financial activities... Where's the surprise that your assistance gets you in jail?
> In 2019 our own President went there to discuss peace.
From thereon the relation between north Korea and south Korea/US degraded so badly that official communication lines between north and south Korea were officially severed.
You can't sanction publicly available information. By that logic every crypto or blockchain website or video on the internet not blocked in North Korea is guilty of violating the sanctions.
This doesn't make any sense, and I feel really bad for people like Griffith getting ground beneath the treads of the unthinking legal machine here.
And shame on the judges for not slapping this law down, because that's they're job to protect people from unthinking and unfair application of the law.
> By that logic every crypto or blockchain website or video on the internet not blocked in North Korea is guilty of violating the sanctions.
Making something available on the internet has non-illegal purposes. Specifically flying somewhere that is sanctioned and presenting the information specifically to them has no non-illegal purpose.
If you drop a $20 bill on the street and a member of a terrorist organization picks it up, it's not really funding terrorism just because you didn't explicitly ensure whoever found it was allowed to have it.
If you go find a terrorist organization and give them $20, you've funded terrorism.
Your argument makes a lot of sense. What I don't understand though, is if you share publicly available information, how have you done any harm? How can you have violated sanctions?
Then again if you gave aviation lectures to Al Qaeda after 911, you're definitely doing something wrong, even if it's publicly available information.
> is if you share publicly available information, how have you done any harm?
Even if your assistance adds low-value, it's still assistance.
Moreover, I don't believe it's reasonable to ignore the fact that a renowned Ethereum dev providing assistance to a hostile regime, regardless of how lame, does have a goal of conveying credibility and help push public acceptance. As a similar example, see for example how Snowden was blindsided by a guy trying to leverage Snowden's attendance as a way to buy him credibility.
I'm sorry, but what? Their comment to me reads like an objective statement of facts. They don't lean one way or another, or even say if they agrees with it or not. You can't even do that on HN?
This is a philosophical slippery slope. The next question is "what are facts?", or "who decides what's immoral?". I'm not interested in going down this because it's pointless.
Reading the original comment, what can construed as "too political" for HN? There wasn't any strong support or opposition.
"The United States invaded Iraq and killed 500,000 innocent people because of the fragile ego of the Bush-Cheney cabal' is an example of:
1. An utterly reprehensible crime against humanity.
2. An accurate fact that's oft-repeated on HN
3. A highly political fact.
4. Utterly pointless to introduce in any conversation that is not closely related to wars.
5. A necessary reminder that our shit stinks.
Despite all that, it's 'too political' to bring it up in a thread like this - because it has nothing to do with the subject, other than to give people a reason to engage in a nationalistic pissing contest.
Just because information is publicly available does not mean they know how to best utilise that information. You can find guides online on how atomic bombs work, but if a physicist traveled to North Korea and gave a talk instructing them how to build an atomic bomb that person should absolutely be arrested.
The Ethereum Foundation dev was arrested over a year ago after US authorities claimed then-36-year-old’s conference presentation contained info that North Korea could leverage to launder money and skirt sanctions.
Griffith was denied permission to travel to North Korea by the State Department but decided to attend the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference anyway.
North Korea is reportedly keen to find ways to get around sanctions imposed by what it regards as a US-led financial system.
He gave a talk that instructed NK how to use cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions imposed by the US government, after the US government explicitly forbade him from giving that talk.
The US government forbidding a citizen from giving a talk sounds quite totalitarian to me. Looks like the constitution of the US is not worth any more than the paper that it is written on.
Information is power. Sharing critical information with a hostile nation can be incredibly dangerous and can lead to many people being killed. Labeling that as "just giving a talk" is misleading. Any government on earth will arrest people that share critical information with a hostile nation. If doing so makes a government totalitarian then every government on earth is totalitarian, which simply means the totalitarian label is meaningless.
There is nothing critical about open source software. There's teens shilling how to use crypto on TikTok. We use it to breed virtual cats and buy expensive jpegs. You think Kim's hackers don't have access to YouTube? You think they didn't start mining Bitcoin 9 years ago? It's not that critical.
"hostile" is too vague. The us is not supposed to be just "any government on earth" In order to arbitrarily declare someone to have transgressed post facto, there had better be a declared state of war. Otherwise, the government should enumerate exactly what can and can't be said in the laws, and some fed tapping you on the shoulder and saying "don't do that" should not carry water unless that fed points to the specific provision of the law preventing it. Especially when the action is just presenting freely available information. Otherwise anyone who has made a freely available YouTube video on the Blockchain should ALSO have charges levied against them, starting with Grant Sanderson (who I love, btw).
The sanctions imposed by the US government describe explicitly what is and isn’t allowed, and there is a very specific law mentioned in the article.
Griffith was arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in November 2019 after he travelled to North Korea to give a talk on blockchain and crypto.
None of this is post facto - he was warned what he was doing violated a law, did it anyway, and is now facing charges for violating that law.
What’s wild to me is that someone would think that it’s a good idea to give talks about anything in North Korea, a regime that has murdered and starved millions of people.
Also, the people of North Korea do not have access to the internet or Youtube as far as I know.
Sorry how is that regime any different from the US?
No idea what he had to gain by travelling to north korea, but more power to him. If it's public info then yeah this is a sham considering that the international financial system is a cartel.
"Sorry how is that regime any different from the US?" - is that an honest question? Do you really not know how western democracy is different from dictatorial and oppressive regimes in Russia, China, or North Korea?
It's not an elaboration -- I never elaborated because the previous person was confused about what I was referring to.
Essentially the US does a lot of things well, like freedom of speech and private property. What it doesn't do well is genocide/murder/starvation, just like DPRK.
Yup. Only a few businessmen who work for the North Korean dictator, and they are up to no good.
Anyone else using the internet not doing work for the North Korean government would be murdered if caught.
In North Korea they have the "intranet" which is an internal network of learning resources you can use at the local North Korean libraries and schools! It is all propoganda.
People who "need access" doesn't everyone brainwashed by an authoritarian dictator need access to the internet to help themselves escape?
Not everyone who needs access has access. A select few who are at the mercy of the dictator do to do his work.
Some people have been known to try to sneak across the border and meet Chinese people in the woods to exchange goods.
Some people send balloons with notes from the outside world over the border to reach people inside.
Perhaps a select few have some garnered enough information about how to use the internet without getting caught they are willing to risk being murdered to do so if they find something dire enough using the internet for but to say people who "need" the internet fire up wiregaurd and call it a day before watching their daily stream of YouTube influencers is an understatement to say the least...
> "During and after the conference, Griffith was alleged to have discussed means through which North Korea could use cryptocurrency to evade economic sanctions."
How do I tell you this? People in North Korea don't have access to YouTube and the internet.
Are you aware of what life is like for the people of North Korea?
Only a few select businessmen working for leaders of North Korea are ever allowed to leave and they usually travel to china for unknown business.
Giving a talk like this in North Korea is like teaching businessmen how to engage in moving criminal/ terrorism money without getting caught.
No normal citizen can run the internet/has access to the internet and if they were caught doing so they would be murdered so there's no way any of them could engage in this anyways.
I'm so sorry noone told you what North Korea is like.
The fact that he was allowed to give the talk indicates that the North Korean government was happy for these people to know this information. So they also would have been fine with giving the same people the same information from the internet.
The point about the information being publicly available on the internet is that it's public information. Not that your average Joe in NK can access it. The regime most certainly does have internet access though, so pretending like this guy gave some top secret info worth locking him up for 20 years of his life for is ridiculous. Nevermind that in 2019 we were in active peace talks with North Korea and even Trump was seen walking across the border without secret service protection to speak with Kim Jong Un that year.
> The point about the information being publicly available on the internet is that it's public information.
Modulo local government laws.
I am not disagreeing with your larger opinion but we have to be careful about “it’s on the internet hence anyone can access it” line of argument.
For instance Pornhub is blocked in India. So if someone were to access it from within India through VPN or whatnot then they are breaking a law and have to face the consequences.
In 2019 we were in active peace talks with North Korea and our own president even stepped foot in the country to collaborate on peace. It didn't pan out the way we hoped but it was worth a shot.
The problem is, do you think it helps the NK people when you make an embargo? The government gets his caviar and plasma tv's anyway, AND the gorverment has a good/true point that the rest of the world is evil.
Embargoes just don't work in such a closed down country.
This is pretty wild to me. The guy gave a talk in North Korea and gave them non-classified information they could easily find on YouTube or any other public website. And now he's facing 20 years.