An increasing number of crypto and privacy advocates are attempting to fight back against the United States Treasury's decision to ban the popular crypto mixing service Tornado Cash.
Most recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, has expressed concern regarding the Treasury's sanctions against "an open source computer project."
"EFF is deeply concerned that the U.S. Treasury Department has included an open source computer project, Tornado Cash, on its list of sanctioned individuals," the EFF said on Twitter. "Tornado Cash is an open source software project and website that published a decentralized cryptocurrency mixer."
The digital rights organization claimed that,
"Code has long been recognized as speech, so there are clear First Amendment implications whenever the government inhibits the publication of computer code on a public website."
The statement by the EFF comes as GitHub, a Git repository hosting service, suspended the account of Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov in response to the sanctions and also removed the source code for Tornado Cash.
As reported, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash on August 8 for its alleged role in money laundering operations.
Initially, some users noted that this move would only punish US users while real criminals can continue to use the mixing service. “This new legislation is only affecting Americans. It is a sanction *on Americans*, but not the alleged bad actors,” ETH advocate and software engineer Adriano Feria said several days ago, adding:
“This was a political maneuver, orchestrated behind closed doors, that impacts individual freedoms from
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