> Griffith was arrested in 2019, and in 2021 pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. laws relating to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to North Korea.[5] On April 12, 2022, Griffith was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for assisting North Korea with evading sanctions and is currently in a federal low-security prison in Pennsylvania

Here's the article "He gave a Cryptocurrency talk in North Korea, the US arrested him"

The slides are (or were?) available. None of the content of his talk was secret or beyond what is published on the Bitcoin Wikipedia page.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/north-korea-virg...

Edit: it's worth noting that no transaction took place.. he was arrested because the FBI told him not to go and he did anyway.

Is that assistance? It is just a basic statement of fact. Is wikipedia guilty of providing assistance to NK? They provide far more in depth "assistance" to anyone wanting to perform a Bitcoin transaction.

Bringing this back to my original comment, you can see why the federal government would restrict the flow of fundamental technical knowledge by virtue of this extreme case. No source code or application was shared, no secrets or privileged information, merely encyclopedic facts were deemed illegal to share.

Also if you were facing the indefinite assange treatment I imagine you would seek a plea deal as well..

Also North Korea is a strange hill to die on. It's a brutal dictatorship which represses their own people and threatens to reign nuclear hell on their neighbours and the US. There's a very clear moral line that it's wrong to help them to launder money and evade sanctions, even if it weren't illegal.

This is practically the definition of a grey area, not a clear moral line.

> It's a brutal dictatorship which represses their own people and threatens to reign nuclear hell on their neighbours and the US.

No, North Korea is a group of 25 million people, most of whom are just regular people like you and me.

They are led by a brutal dictatorship but sanctions affect everyone in NK, not just the leadership.

Economic warfare is still warfare and not morally clear at all.

And has the US has not repressed its people and threatened its neighbors? Has not been brutal?

...Yes? The fact that it's basic and they already know how to do it is irrelevant. The law isn't "it's okay to give them advice as long as the advice is sufficiently generic and obvious".

Wikipedia, and the sources where its content comes from, is not intended to help anybody specific. Flying to North Korea and holding a lecture there is firmly beyond the line where the US government starts to care because it demonstrates clear intent. Especially since during the Q&A and other activities other information not available to the public could have been discussed. And even if there was no secret sauce involved, an expert's opinion can still save the North Koreans a lot of time and money when pursuing their goals.