The Value of Cryptocurrencies in Supporting Human Rights

foreign [Music] ceremonies we're gonna kick it off for the talk and to enter that talk a little bit it's important to remember that ethereum ethereum is not just a technology it's a community it's a movement and within those movements within this community we have values and one of those values is the importance of civil liberties civil rights and protecting those and for that I would like to introduce Kurt opsahl from the Electronic Frontier Foundation the deputy executive director and general counsel so big round of applause to Kurt opsel VES uh thank you everybody thank you coach so great to see so many people here today I've had a great time here at Devcon and I'm excited to talk at the closing ceremonies talking about some of the value of cryptocurrencies in supporting human rights these civil liberties privacy free expression these rights that this whole Community holds dear a little bit uh there we go oop back sorry about that so a little bit about the Electronic Frontier Foundation we are a non-profit organization that has been around since 1990 fighting to preserve your rights online fighting for free expression for privacy for Innovation trying to make a world that we would want to live in to make sure that the dystopia is there possible won't happen the Sci-Fi we read is not going to be necessarily the future unless it's the cool sci-fi with the Utopias all right so let's talk about how we as a community can be supporting rights and Liberty there are a number of ways that cryptocurrencies can help support these rights and I'm going to talk about a few of them today because we only have a few minutes but decentralized Financial options can allow and support political social moral views can provide more options by taking away some of the centralized choke points which are often used as a point of failure a point where control can be put onto a system and impose uh or push push back on unfavored or disfavored viewpoints ideologies so one of these Financial censorship this is when a centralized Financial Service is under pressure from political regimes from uh social movements to saying that something that may be lawful that maybe uh you know within the bounds of what the law has said Society can have but it goes outside of their code of conduct or their review or just as subject to pressure and they forbid lawful activities another one which I know is very important to this community is the protection of privacy and I think we'd try to explore that a little bit what do we mean by protecting private what is it doing privacy of course has its own value but it's also fundamental for protecting other rights other rights that we hold the air like freedom of expression freedom of Association and making sure that that your information is protected by due process that governments can't get access to the information without going through the appropriate stats necessary and proportionate steps to ensure that there's not government overreach and another way that we can help doing this is enabling the decentralized web moving away from chunkpoint to have other options that people can choose enable competition and allow it so that there's not a single point of failure that will enable people to choose things that reflect their values and allow for their values so let's dive a little bit deeper into this avoiding Central Financial censorship one of the ways that this first came to my attention was 2010 with Wikileaks where Wikileaks had engaged in uh publishing some material about the Iraq war that upset a lot of people in the U.S government and they put a lot of pressure on MasterCard Visa PayPal the sources of donations for Wikileaks how are you allowing These funds to go to this organization this wasn't a legal plan they didn't pass a law to say that money could not go they just effectively made it extraordinarily difficult for people to fund Wikileaks and one of the ways that Wikileaks was able to get around that was by accepting Bitcoin accepting cryptocurrency as a form of donation because it didn't go through those mechanisms and this is an effective form of censorship or Can Be an Effective form of censorship because these financial institutions are necessary for most people to be able to complete transactions but it can have serious ramifications for free expression by taking away the funding that an organization needs in order to put its expression out there in the world they rely these organizations rely upon financial institutions in order to enable their sites their operations so how does this affect people this comes up in a number of ways you know membership and organizations you often reflect your values by joining an organization eff is one there's the ACLU NAACP the NRA there are many organizations around the world where people band together to reflect their values and they want to join become members and show their financial support but if those organizations are cut off from the financial system it can be harmful to the organizations and make it difficult for people to band together use their right of Association to express their uh the right of expression also it's reflected in media that you purchase they buy supporting artists video artists podcasters book writers who are giving you the information that one you want to read you have a right to read and as part of your right of uh free expression and this is also essential for free expression so you can see the ideas see the discourse and participate it by consuming media but if you can't get access to that because of a financial censorship then that cuts you off and inhibits both the freedom of expression of the site that you're going to the publisher and your own freedom of expression by using your right to read and get these ideas and information and it persists to this day uh you know I pointed out you know saw this with Wikileaks but it continues persist often it comes up in the context of erotic material which is lawful but disfavored and it gets cut off by some of the major uh choke points in financial transactions and these would be things that if under U.S law and a lot of international principles of free expression it would be unconstitutional to say these things are not allowed they are constitutionally permitted to exist but by putting pressure outside of the legislative system outside of that process they can cut off funding and make it more difficult for those things to survive and the internet if it's going to achieve its future as a global forum of expression as a way for people to exchange ideas we cannot deputize intermediaries to become the morality police and go outside of the legislative process go outside of the policy process circumvent that and have a private entity become the morality police now also protecting privacy Pro and if I take a moment here why do we care about privacy what is it doing to do there's a number of ways of looking at it there's a Louis Brandeis quote I put up here on the on the slides that I think capsuers are very well the right to be left alone that's none of your business that's my business just leave me alone allow me to do my thing that is a core autonomy aspect of the right to privacy but it's also control over the flow of your information that whether you give information you know what consents have you given have you consented to give it to one person but then they're going to give it to another where does that go and having some ability to have like I want this information about me to be available to my friends to my family another set of information I want to make available to colleagues a third set to the public but having some control over that flow of information can help bring about a a way you can express yourself and keep the things you want private to be private and also privacy today making your information confidential today it's a protection against dystopian future a future in which what was normal what was okay was not something that you felt endangered about for getting out there in the public today the rules might change a new government comes into power and what was previously no big deal now is a big deal by maintaining your privacy today you're providing a protection against a change in the environment where things that you thought were okay are no longer and you know sort of one a former uh board member of my organization once for this protection against the robots from the future who will be able to look back data mine all the information from your past activities see what you were up to and judge it by then the future standards but if you have that information privacy protected you yourself are protected also as I was mentioning before privacy is fundamental to lots of other rights and we're looking in this case Financial transactions in particular they can reveal deeply personal things like we said this is the this is the mirror image of the expression issue we hit before so Financial censorship was preventing organizational organizations from receiving the funds to have your membership but also your transaction reveals something about you it affects your private information by giving money to that organization just as the the supporting an organization or a media producer by by purchasing their product helps them it also reveals something about you about your interests uh your your ideas that you are consuming uh your medical expenses can reveal a lot about your conditions that you might want to keep private and we also live in an era where some medical uh information can be disfavored some Medical Treatments are politically or socially disfavored and the information that you're using your financial means to purchase these Services can be used against you and use it in prosecution shopping history shows a lot of what your interests are and often is used to make inferences about these interests what you're going to do what what intent do you have now anonymity can provide a lot of protection we're able to do things in an anonymous manner it protects against the tyranny of the majority that allows for views which are not a majority of you not a popular view but you can have them and have protection from retribution for having these views by having anonymity or pseudonymity allowing you to operate in the space without having to reveal critical information about your identity so this comes a little bit of a challenge and one of the things I want to focus on here is when you have a public Ledger and the public Ledger is a list of a lot of transactions and yeah they're going to to a wallet and if you never connect that wallet in any public way with your identity that might be a form of protection but not everybody is able to do that most people will be using a service or at some point we'll use a service that ties their identity to their wallet and if you ever do your whole history of transactions becomes revealed this is a a challenge and then with that Revelation all your shopping entry your interests and such also become revealed and this is a it's a challenging thing to have a situation in which you might be able to use anonymity but if you make a mistake you could have a whole history revealed you know more sophisticated people can do things like have multiple wallets use them for very purpose but you still need to have a uh high level of sophistication and accuracy to do it well so one solution to this which has come up a lot at least so I want to hit on it exactly mixers and in particular tornado cash amen they tornado I'm sure many of you are familiar so I'll just go over very briefly what had happened back in August the uh Office of Financial assets control of fact are part of the Department of Treasury they placed tornado cash on the specially designated Nationals list and they they put a number of wallet addresses and so on but they also put you know tornado cash by name on there and they had a parenthetical AKA Cherno cash classic AKA tornado cash Nova and this was on the list and this struck everybody as kind of weird because this is a you know piece of software it is a smart contract on the blockchain there's also a dow associated with it there is you know the open source project but what do they really mean by tornado cash because this list is usually for entities it can also be about property if you look at the list you'll see some like oligarch boots that are on there but on the whole it is designed and and built up to be about entities particular people and they're listing tornado cash without any further definition was it was vague perhaps deliberately vague uh so this led to some consequences one of the most immediate consequences was that GitHub which had hosted the canonical tornado cache repository took it down uh they also took down the accounts of three of the primary uh Developers and this really uh hit home for eff because code being speech is one of the core things that we've been fighting for we've been fighting for this since the since the 90s coming up in the encryption Wars uh and this was code being taken down uh for well putting on a sanction list not even with a law about it but just placed on this list perhaps even mistakenly perhaps they didn't mean the code itself though if you'll notice in the way they defined it they akas are not easily confused like Katrina cashinova was a beta that they had issued it's not easily confused with an entity now I tend to think that it's more likely that this was they had no idea what they were doing more than you know uh malice or at least malice in the sense that they intended to take it down but they still had no idea what they're doing Secretary of State blinken tweeted out right after the uh ofac listing saying that they had gone after the the North Koreans and and taken them down reflecting a very strong misunderstanding of what tornado cash was that tweet was deleted very shortly thereafter but it might be a clue into some of the confusion that they had but nevertheless it was on the list so one of the things that we did was to uh we represent Professor Matt Greene he's a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins has been involved in uh zcash and zero knowledge proof and he also teaches about the blockchain and he wanted to use tornado cash as part of his teaching but he also wanted to put it back up there in part to show that you can put it up there you do have a right to it so we agreed to represent him in this he made a fork he put it out back up uh and ofek well didn't do anything about this and this helped show people that the code could still be published believe that both GitHub had the right to do it and Professor Green had the right to do GitHub is a private entity as a private entity can choose what is on its platform but they had the right to keep it up and they're the right to keep up Professor Green's copy which they have been doing but there still are a number of unanswered questions so why why do we care about this well I'm sure you all care about this but I think it's good to say what are the principles behind the code to speech issue so cryptocurrencies blockchain Technologies they're expressed in code and you always were saying this is part of a community community that has values you are expressing those values in the code that you write that code has both function and expression but function is a part of this expression when you're making something which is a privacy enhancing technology you're expressing this through the source code saying how it works that has a very clear expression but also having it be functional is part of what you're trying to express and part of that speech recognizing code of speeches I was mentioning we've been fighting this since the the 1990s uh it came up in the encryption context in the first instance and in the export control context was very similar to the sanction context it was a program called snuffle open source encryption program during that time there were expert controls because encryption was being treated like a munition it was something that was a military technology it was a dual use technology but as a dual use technology you had to get permission to export it and there was a silly time period where Netscape Navigator The prominent web browser of that day had an international version and a domestic version and the domestic version had much stronger encryption than the international version with the idea that now the NSA can more easily break the communications of the International Version and uh that you know make their job easier it was ridiculous because it was trivial for someone to get a copy of the domestic version outside of the United States it wasn't very effective but also it was interfering with the free expression of you know the cypherpunks who wanted to have a world which had lots of cryptography in it and expressed that by making freely available code so we had support the first case Bernstein versus the United States recognized the code was a kind of language they likened it to uh German French like you know human languages but also music as a form of a language music isn't done in notation it's much for closer mathematically to code and it is a way of expressing such and established that the source code that was put up by Dan Bernstein was speech uh later there was a case younger versus daily that another point which I think is very critical recognizing that the fact that it curse word is not just speech it's not just a poem but it is a functionality it can be compiled and do things and that does not preclude the Constitutional protection is still speech now to be clear establishing that something is speech is not the end of the story uh there then if it is speech in the United States the government has to pass a test if it is content-based regulation on it it has to go through strict scrutiny and there's intermediate scrutiny and you can look at the functionality as part of that scrutiny when trying to determine is the government doing you know the minimum necessary in order to achieve their function they don't have collateral damage they are not going beyond their power the higher level of scrutiny the harder it is for the government to pass the test but it still has to have that protection and the government has to show why this is the thing to do that is necessary to solve their problem and they are not hitting untended consequences collateral damage along the way now these are United States courts but I wanted to say this is not just a United States principle so a while back uh we did a white paper on the American convention on human rights which is an international treaty throughout Latin America most countries are signatories to it also enshrines freedom of expression in it and we developed the argument looking at cases looking at president that under the American Convention of Human Rights code should also be considered speech and I think this is should be a universal understanding where you have free expression which you have protected and many international human rights treaties that we need to make sure that people understand that code is a form of that expression and should likewise be protected whether you're coding in Latin America in the United States or anywhere around the world which respects human rights so thank you so the ofac did have a response they issued some frequently asked questions and answers uh they did clarify that mere publishing of the source code was okay so that was great Professor Green was was in the clear um they said that there's some dusting that occurred after they did the sanctions and they said that was low priority they didn't say don't worry about it but there was a low priority prosecution uh and they provided people with a way to apply for a license to get their money out of the the mixer though you have to give up the reason you use the mixer the Privacy rights you're trying to protect in order to apply for this license so it's not a really great solution that way they also use this word saying it was okay to interact with the sort of code but that's pretty vague word and the examples they were using like teaching a class about it publishing it studying it um well those are good examples there right but or interact was too vague and I would like to have ofac clarify or maybe we have to have the courts clarify that things like contributing to the code is also okay that publishing the code publishing a compiled version is also okay now as other questions that are open what did they have jurisdiction to do this in the first place as we were mentioning it's super weird to have a piece of source code a piece of software on an entity list and the entity list is a power that is granted through through the statutes as it have they gone beyond that jurisdiction beyond what they're lawfully allowed to sanction so there have been a couple of legal challenges uh coinbase is funding a lawsuit brought by a number of people who are challenging the treasury Department sanctions they're asking for alternative cash to be removed from the sanction list uh this week coin Center also filed a lawsuit uh they're getting together also a bunch of plaintiffs and then in themselves included uh again to de-list tornado cash and their raising a number of these issues some of our focal points are on the jurisdiction of ofac to put software on this whether they have exceeded their Authority whether they've acted arbitrarily and capriciously outside of the scope of what their administrative Authority is and they also raise some of the code of speech issues uh in the coinbase lawsuit it was talking about the ability to write the code to develop the code and brought that at issue in one of their claims and the coin Center they're talking about receiving money anonymously as a non-profit organization or member organization the ability to allow people to fund them in an anonymous and private manner the right of Association which is also under the first amendment in the United States so these cases will be we'll be moving forward and uh you know we may uh file a Mika's brief to help support them uh I think you should continue to follow them but now while we're offending let's take a moment to think about why this all matters why do we care and a lot of it is about open source there's a lot of Open Source as part of what this community builds and it is vital to be able to have lots of contributors adding the code to be able to research develop the code make a pull request modify it find security holds fix them but if the contributors are going to be held responsible if later that software is used for something bad they shouldn't be held responsible merely because they contributed coal that would have a chilling effect on the development of software that is vital to our future and not only is this chilling effect going to be you know bad for Innovation but even the very information that you know the people who want to prevent money from going to uh North Korea and ransomware might like to see The Innovation that might be able to improve upon the code so it can be providing the Privacy that we need and allowing for a way of stopping money from going to ransomware so privacy as we said it is a fundamental right and take a moment to think not just about uh tornado cash mixers as a privacy protective tool but all the other ones that are out there that could be used to protect the privacy of someone who's hiding from the law but nevertheless are important for a free Society encrypted messaging crypto Communications being able to encrypt your information when you store it online anonymous browsing Anonymous servers file transfers all of these things rely on being able to you know protect your rights by providing encryption anonymity technical protections and they are vital for our society even if they could be misused so we want to avoid that chilling effect and I would say that I think that this is your rights to have and that the chilling effect should not dissuade you from writing the code but we want to establish that so hopefully in the courts or by ofac relenting but getting this clarified so we all know that we can go ahead and keep contributing to this code uh and so to wrap up I'm out of time here but hopefully some time for some questions so saying together we can make a brighter future you can help chart this course you can do it through getting informed and getting involved talking to your representative getting involved in policy discussion trying to get your views known and acted upon and you can do it by building tools by building civil liberties privacy into those tools making things safe making them usable making them so that they have privacy built in from day one make sure that they're decentralized there's not a single point of failure that the government can go after can go to try and stop things and together we can make that brighter future thank you awesome incredible we do have time we do have time for some questions uh so we have a couple runners in the audience who has questions in a couple minutes I see one back there one hand up one hand up uh hi there um hello I I definitely uh agree with um all that you've said um except like then how does a criminal get caught um if they're using like the internet for nefarious purposes like um there's been some recent cases uh like there's this documentary I saw on Netflix of uh like a sex cult that was um in South Korea and they only caught them because they were able to find the chat rooms um the secret chat rooms in telegram um that the cult leaders were using um all right a good question right so how how does the police able to do its job when we have all these technological protections well I mean my first response to that is we live in a golden age of surveillance the law enforcement authorities have more ability to conduct surveillance at scale surveillance of uh people like records about where you go your phone uh is constantly talking to cell towers giving your location they can get that information correlated with some other person's phone and see who's traveling together and get an idea of relationships uh the the ways in which the government has investigative tools at their disposal Are Legion and for going into a telegram chat room well traditional investigative measures having someone undercover pretending to be interested in that kind of thing and getting into the chat room that is the most often way in which they get inside encrypted chats opsec is hard and traditional investigative techniques continue to work and what privacy enhancing tools most protect you against is suspicionless surveillance where they want to do it at scale where they don't have a particular reason to go after you if they do have a particular reason to go after you there's other methods like trying to get a uh Network intrusion tool or a knit onto your phone and just look at the endpoint so it gets decrypted by your phone when you get that down there and they look at it at that point and if like the NSA or the Moss ad or the gru is interested in you in particular then probably a lot of these privacy enhancing tools you're going to have to up your upset game a lot and the tools alone won't do it so what I'm trying to protect against is suspicionless mass surveillance the government has to have a reason and want to spend the resources to go after it and not doing it on millions of Ordinary People all right okay hi it's me it's Alex here so first thanks for your work and I definitely agree with everything you said thank you I was just wondering about something you didn't say right I missed seeing your name being talked on the tornado cache and that's of course it's Alex burtsev case and I wonder what any purpose are you did you do you do you want to say something about the case or about him about like so yeah you're talking about the case in in the Netherlands yes so one of the challenging things about the case in the Netherlands is that he was arrested but not yet charged so he's been held and he went to a hearing and asked him like Hey am I free to go and they said no but he still hasn't been charged and I'd like to see what the charges are that they're trying to bring before analyzing that situation because what I don't want to see is that he's been charged merely for contributing to the code but I also don't want to speculate as to what they might have against him that you know it is the government's job to say why someone is in jail why someone has been charged and bring and then we can look at what they say and say why that's wrong why you know what the defenses are so I try not to speculate on things that are not charged but that is not to say I'm not sympathetic for a situation I'm not a Netherlands lawyer so I don't know the Netherlands law uh particularly well but I think as a policy matter it is unconscionable to arrest somebody criminally one and not charge them and let them know what the charges they can build to defense but also to create this chilling effect implication that because he contributed to some code that that's why he was charged and I wish they wouldn't have done that [Applause] we have time for one more question one more question great I'm melon hi Kurt uh I had the pleasure of seeing you at the Z cash convention in Las Vegas a few months ago and now you're here so you're really making the rounds I'm excited about that uh my question is with all of the ZK technology the Privacy protecting technology and Z cash ethereum the competitions that are happening what what's your general thoughts on that and also is there anything that's missing from a lot of the maybe philosophy or values perspective when they're building this so are the good good questions one is that like I think uh zero knowledge Technologies are extraordinarily interesting and the way of being able to prove just one thing without sending extraneous data I think I I've heard like while being here talk to various people and ideas that are underway or being researched that if they come to fruition we'll be able to allow for a number of things that don't have this leakage of metadata around them that we often see so I'm very excited about the possibilities of these Technologies the other part is what more could be done and I I think one of the things that is going to make all of these kinds of Technologies goes on on the blockchain generally smart contracts especially privacy enhancing ones to have the most value they must be able to be used by a wide range of people people who are not technically sophisticated who might not have the latest versions of software who are operating on a five-year-old smartphone that doesn't get updated all the time and still they can make a secure transaction if they can do something in a manner that they feel comfortable knowing what they're doing that they're not going to make mistake and you know lose what they're trying to do so usability security keep it secret keep it safe and I think that would be I mean people are all working on that but that's the area I want to be able to have it so that everyone can take advantage of it in an easy to understand and easy to use correctly way all right thank you everybody awesome amazing let's give let's give a big round of applause for Kirk from the Electronic Frontier fantastic thank you incredible great to be here thank you thank you very nice amazing