So this case sets up a perfect demonstration of anarchist theory and practice. The state claims
to protect us from the criminals while simultaneously criminalizing the tools for the politically
connected. They prosecute developers for writing code while ignoring the banks that actually
launder the money for the actual cartels ensue wearing terrorists. The United States government
wants to imprison a software developer for 45 years because he wrote code that helped people
protect their financial privacy and Roman Storm's trial started on July 14th and what happened
in that Manhattan courtroom will determine whether Americans can still build privacy tools without
federal agents kicking down their doors. And this is the thing that they actually don't want you to
understand about the case. The government is actually lying through their teeth about what
tornado cash actually was. If you're a regular viewer of this channel that comes at no great
shock but they're doing it because they're desperate to try to maintain their surveillance
dragnet over every financial transaction that you make. Now Storm faces three conspiracy charges
money laundering sanctions violations and operating and unlicensed money transmitting
business. Now that last charge is where the desperation really really shines through.
FinCEN the financial crimes enforcement network explicitly stated since 2019 that you need
total independent control over users funds to be considered an actual money transmitter right
and tornado cash never actually had control over anyone's money. Users deposited their own
Ethereum and got a secret code and could withdraw it to a different wallet and the
developers couldn't actually touch those funds even if they wanted to and that technical
reality should absolutely destroy the case alone. But because it's the feds it's like playing chess
with your opponent when your opponent has all queens instead of pawns. Again a kind of tired
analogy if you're a subscriber but before any of the alleged criminal activity happened
the tornado cash developers burned the admin keys to their smart contracts. Now that literally
made it impossible for themselves or anyone else to control or modify that actual protocol.
The smart contracts became immutable code running on Ethereum. The prosecutors of course
want everyone to believe that these developers were running some kind of criminal enterprise and
they couldn't even control it it was so crazy. The government claims that tornado cash actually
laundered over one billion including 455 million from the North Korean Lazarus group after the
Ronan Bridge hack and they're using these kind of scary numbers to try to distract from a very
inconvenient fact buried in their own treasury department data. When you know governments
desperately try to paint this tool as criminal they can't really hide that the overwhelming
majority of users were actually law abiding citizens just trying to protect their privacy
from the constant encroachment of government. Now tornado cash use cases for example were things
like coin center actually used it to accept anonymous donations without exposing donors
to things like extortion or targeted attacks. Ukrainians used it to donate to their country's
defense without any kind of Russian intelligence tracking them down. Vitalik Buterin himself
used tornado cash to donate to Ukraine for example. Regular people used it to keep their
financial lives private from their employers but even more importantly to keep it private
from stalkers and criminals and those who actually scan the blockchain looking for actual
victims and you know given that prosecutors regularly prosecute those stalkers and scammers
obviously they know this. The prosecution's desperation shows in their incompetence
and they built part of their case on this damning quote about wandering 600 million.
This case has a ton of holes but that one is really kind of a big one
as they completely basically misread their own evidence and the quote wasn't from a
tornado cash developer it was actually a forwarded message from a coin desk reporter
asking for a comment in the case. Now they've been caught red-handed manufacturing evidence
yet they're still pushing forward because this kind of whole show that they're doing
is more about precedent than anything else and the kind of great career that the prosecutor
or the United States Attorney, Assistant United States Attorney can have once the case is
actually over with. If publishing software maintaining a website actually makes you liable
for how strangers actually use that software then Linus in fact should be arrested because
people who use Linux sometimes do illegal things with it and every Bitcoin you know core developer
becomes liable then as criminals for criminal use of Bitcoin and every Ethereum developer then
should face prosecution by that logic when someone deploys a scam token. Now keep in mind that
conspiracy charges are the federal prosecutors kind of favorite weapon because they don't need to
actually prove you actually committed the underlying crime just that you actually agreed
with someone somewhere to commit said crime. They've used conspiracy charges to imprison
activists who never actually touched a mom or prosecute protesters who never actually threw a
rot and now they're using it against a developer who never laundered a dollar. The feds love
conspiracy charges because they can rope anyone you know tangentically I should say
connected to that person to make them flip on bigger targets or other people writing code that
someone else uses for crime becomes conspiracy running a website where illegal things happen
becomes conspiracy. The bar is so low that breathing in the same room as an alleged criminal
practically makes you a co-conspirator in their eyes and the government's legal theory gets more
insane when you examine their kind of conspiracy charge in detail. They're not even
alleging Storm ever communicated with the North Korean hackers their theory is that by writing
public code and promoting its use he entered a criminal conspiracy with people he ever met
never talked to and couldn't stop them from using his software even if he actually wanted to.
Judge Catherine Polkfala asked the prosecutors a pretty good question that exposed
their entire scheme here and that was why isn't WhatsApp prosecuted the same way?
People definitely use WhatsApp to coordinate crimes. The prosecution's answer kind of showed
everything. They instantly claimed that tornado cash was different because it was a financial
institution and that it failed to register with FinCEN in a reversal. They dropped that charge
entirely after FinCEN itself contradicted them in the samurai wallet case. So, you know,
communication from timing really shows their kind of political desperation and all that.
OFAC sanctioned tornado cash in August of 2022. CoinCenter sued and won in March of 2025.
Those sanctions were ruled illegal in July of 2025 just days before this trial.
The government actually dropped their appeal completely. They know they had already lost the
legal argument but they were pushing forward with the criminal charges anyway because
they need to kind of terrorize developers that are still out there into compliance.
The Ninth Circuit had ruled in Bernstein v. Department of Justice that source code is
actually protected speech under the First Amendment. Ian the Sixth Circuit affirmed this
in Junger v. Dali, establishing clear precedent that writing code is as constitutionally protected
as writing a book or a newspaper article. Yet here's the government trying to imprison
Storm for exercising that exact same right. The government wants to try to create a world where
writing privacy software makes you responsible for every criminal who ever uses it while banks,
for example, that process billions in real cartel money, get small fines and are taken care of
and there's no executives that actually end up in handcuffs. The SWIFT network processes massive
amounts of illicit funds including transactions with sanctioned Iranian banks, for example,
and nobody arrests SWIFT, board members, and bustles. I don't see anyone with a problem with
them. Legacy financial institutions get regulatory slaps on the wrist when something does happen
for actual money laundering while a developer who wrote non-custodial privacy code
faces 45 years in a federal prison with a really dangerous people. The store maintained the
tornado cash's website and that made the protocol easier to use. Prosecutors claimed that this
proves criminal intent and again becomes a criminal conspirator. Anyone who fixes a bug
in Tor commits a felony by that same logic and anyone who answers a question about Monero on
Stack Overflow joins a money laundering conspiracy. This is the level of stupidity that we're
actually dealing with here. The system is so backwards that the possibility of conviction
is actually in the 90% for all of those who actually go to trial. The government keeps
insisting that Storm should have implemented KYC and demanding he collect user information for
a protocol that was designed to some degree to protect privacy, which makes no sense.
They're literally prosecuting him for not building a surveillance stool, like throwing a safe
manufacturer in prison for refusing to install a government backdoor for said safe.
They want every financial tool to double as a surveillance device feeding data to the same
bureaucrats who use your tax dollars to build their kind of an opticon demanding you thank them
for that actual privilege. They lie when they say the thing they fear is money laundering
and what actually terrifies them is losing the ability to surveil every transaction
to freeze assets at will to financially unperson anyone who challenges their authority.
And I mean the word in the literal sense, not like the stupid YouTube self-sensory way.
They watch Canadian truckers, for example, get their bank accounts frozen for protesting.
In part, power depends on financial surveillance. Every authoritarian regime in history has wanted
to control money flows because controlling money means controlling people and controlling people
is power. The Bank Secrecy Act started in 1970 claiming to stop tax cheats and then expanded
to target drug dealers and then terrorists. And now they're coming for software developers.
You know, it's absolute insanity. For all of human history, until about 50 years ago,
give or take, your financial transactions were private by default. But now they want to imprison
anyone who dares write code that restores that basic human right of privacy. The developer
couldn't stop North Korea from using tornado cash any more than Tim Berns Lee can stop criminals from
using the worldwide web. The protocol was immutable, running on thousands of Ethereum nodes
worldwide, demanding they somehow prevent bad actors from using unstoppable code is demanding
the impossible and then imprisoning them for failing to achieve it. And if you know the federal
government, this is absolutely normal. It makes perfect sense. That's why I don't say the system
is broken. It's not broken. It works exactly the way they wanted to. This trial is the
government's admission that they've lost the technical battle, so to speak. They can't stop
they can't shut down protocols running on decentralized networks. So what do they have left?
Well, all they have left is throwing developers in cages to terrorize others into compliance.
It's the same exact tactic that slavers use to keep others from helping them run away. I mean,
you make an example of one to terrorize the rest into submission. So ask yourself,
if that is true, who then are the non slaves?
Like the prosecution reveals the fraud at the heart of their financial surveillance regime.
They claim that these laws protect us from criminals while exempting the biggest criminals,
which is the banks that launder billions, the government that prints money to fund endless
wars, the Federal Reserve that steals purchasing power through things like inflation. The real
crime is building tools that let people opt out of their system. And if Storm loses this case,
like every privacy tool becomes a potential criminal liability, VPN developers, Github,
contributors, encryption programmers, they all face that threat of federal prosecution
if any criminals actually use their code. The feds will claim it's about stopping crime, but
I would argue that's the least of the issue. Actions speak louder than words and they're sick
of people having, you know, the few shreds of privacy that they currently have and they want
to extinguish them. They can't allow them to even have that. How long till in-camera houses
are mandatory? Like we already have them on all the street corners. All of this in their attempt
to try to ensure that every transaction flows through surveilled channels where they can
monitor, freeze and confiscate at will. The jury in this case really isn't just deciding
Storm's fate. They're kind of deciding whether Americans can build tools that preserve
fundamental human rights. This is like we've been transported back to the 90s with the
crypto wars all over again. They're deciding whether code remains free speech or becomes
criminal conspiracy. They're deciding whether we're accepting total financial surveillance
as a price of participating in some corrupt modern society that's totally surveilled.
And Michael Lewin, a developer in Texas, is already suing the Department of Justice
because he's afraid to even publish his privacy protocols. He knows that under the Southern
District of New York's theory of publishing code in Texas makes you liable for prosecution
in Manhattan if any New Yorker actually uses it. The chilling effect has really already
began. If you want to share the privacy tools you're using, drop them in the comments before
they criminalize them. Nylist, who's a good friend of mine, hosts a bunch of tools on his site
that you can find. The Getia, if you look, this has nothing to do with hiding criminal
activity. We're talking about preserving the basic human right to conduct private transactions
without government surveillance. The government dropped their appeal on the sanctions because
they knew they'd lose. They changed the charges mid-case because Fincent contradicted them and
they misrepresented evidence because they're desperate. What they're doing is persecuting
someone to set a precedent that code is a conspiracy and that privacy is a crime and that
anyone who goes forward is committing the worst crime that could ever be basically committed
and Storm faces 45 years for writing code that worked exactly as it was designed,
code that protected journalists and activists and ordinary citizens from surveillance,
code that did nothing except restore a fragment of the privacy that we all had in the past and
we're all entitled to. And the US government doesn't like that and they want to strip it.
That's what this case is really about at the end of the day.
I'd like to know what you think about all this. Let me know in the comments.
As always, thank you for watching to the end and I'll see you in the next video.