He Built a Privacy Tool. Now He’s Going to Prison.

Comments

• Sandbar_Trekker@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  A 1 hour long video…

  Might be interesting, but looking up his name (Keonne Rodriguez) for a Wikipedia article gave me what I wanted to know:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keonne_Rodriguez

  I’ll just paste the current summary here for anyone, but the full article is short and worth a read:

  Keonne Rodriguez is an American software developer and co-founder of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet designed to enhance transaction privacy for Bitcoin users. In 2024, Rodriguez and fellow co-founder William Lonergan Hill were arrested and later plead guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business for creating the software for the application. His prosecution drew criticism from privacy advocates and civil liberties groups, who argued that the case threatened financial privacy, open source development, and the principle of code as speech.

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  • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I mean the full story is worth reading/watching/listening, IMO (I listened). Especially regarding the legal details. About how he was charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, even though he’s not a bank and handled no money at any time, and even though legal precedent says otherwise.

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• iloveDigit@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I wonder if I’ll end up in prison for any of the projects I work on even as a non-coder. Hopefully the devs doing the actual coding work on these projects can keep themselves more anonymous and safe than me at least

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• kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Molly White’s coverage:

  …maintained that they were merely developing privacy-preserving software, and that they were not responsible for criminal use of the software. Prosecutors have argued that the developers actively intended the software to be used for criminal purposes, pointing to marketing aimed at “Dark/Grey Market participants” and those engaged in “Illicit activity”.

  Judge Cote cited a letter to the court in which Rodriguez continued to say that he was merely motivated by a desire to protect financial privacy and not “a desire to facilitate criminal activity” as evidence that Rodriguez “has not come to terms with what he did. … The letter indicated to me that you were very much still operating in a world with moral blinders on.”

  www.citationneeded.news/issue-96/#samourai-wallet

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