Here is where the missunderstanding seems to keep happening (regarding White Phosphorous and Tornado Cash). The mere existence of tools like Tornado Cash or White Phosphorous is not illegal (at least wasn't until yesterday), but illegal use of those always was.
The distinction is important, but seems to have been lost somewhere along the way.
Reading through "The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons" again, since it was a long time ago, I don't find anything supporting this.
Its main purpose is to ban/restrict usage of inhumane weapons, not the production of such. But I might have missed something. If so, mind pointing me to the right section?
It's illegal (1) against civilians, (2) against military targets in concentrations of civilians if delivered by air attack, (3) against military targets in concentrations of civilians by non-air attack unless the military targets are separated from the civilians and you take all reasonable precautions to limit incidental damage to the civilians, and (4) to use it on forests or plant cover unless they are being used to cover or conceal or camouflage military targets.
I don't think I'd describe that as "generally illegal" since it leaves a heck of a lot of situations where it is legal to use it.
> going to open a huge can of worms if you are going to start prosecuting people for software pull requests
Tornado is sanctioned, not the underlying code. Contributing to the project is legally tantamount to coding for a North Korean entity. This isn’t a start to anything, it’s established law and practice.
Simply pulling shouldn't be a problem. But I can see law enforcement getting a subpoena for a list of accounts that pulled that repo to find and stop copycats.
What would be the legal consequences of forking the project and create a new project with the code?
And speaking of code - North Korea has their own os which is essentially a reskinned version of Linux. Does that mean that the US government could go after people who contributed to the Linux project?
> Does that mean that the US government could go after people who contributed to the Linux project?
No. You’re comparing money laundering, which has stricter controls, to exporting software, which doesn’t. (If you knowingly provide support to Pyongyang, probably.)
No, because the US will invade and then perform war crimes on you if you imply that one of their soldiers has maybe performed war crimes and deserves to be tried for it.
In my experience in Afghanistan, it was other countries that performed more "war crimes" than the US (as in violating Geneva Conventions). Why do you think they make it such a big deal when the USA does it? Is it only because the US just prosecutes their own and doesn't recognize the international court? The international court does a much better job of keeping their decisions and the soldiers being punished, private. The US makes quite an example of theirs.
But the US does not prosecute its own. Instead they go after the messenger e.g. Julian Assange. They also usually find the lowest scapegoat they can get instead of having the responsibility be at the command level.
In my personal experience, I've seen a captain go back to a 2nd lieutenant (and I think some other punishments) just for giving an illegal order trying to cover up a "small" oil spill, still cost several million dollars to repair the damage to the ecosystem.
I don't know about Julian Assange, personally. However, Julian isn't a US citizen or in a military, so a different set of laws and standards apply.
Before Abu Grab, interrogators were allowed to "do anything as long as it didn't cause 'permanent' damage to their body." It is pretty clear people took that to mean they were allowed to do some pretty fucked up shit. Now the laws are much more stringent. AFAIK, those whistleblowers weren't hunted down.
But in more general, if you murder someone in self-defense, you still murdered someone. A court probably won't prosecute you, but you still did the act, even if it was self-defense. The same applies to "government secrets." Even if the secret is disgusting and terrible, it was still a secret. Whether anyone will convict them for revealing those secrets is a gamble, and probably better to run away instead of taking that chance.
In my experience, there are some pretty fucked up people everywhere, it doesn't matter which country they are from.
I'll likely get downvoted straight to Hell for this, but grammatical errors going uncorrected become common errors as they spread to others… This particular one is already extremely common.
