Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"The prosecution’s flailing attempts to navigate around the Blanche memo exemplify the incoherence of the Trump administration’s approach to cryptocurrency enforcement: sweeping regulatory rollbacks that primarily benefit wealthy crypto operators, while simultaneously pushing ahead with aggressive prosecutions of developers like Storm to avoid the appearance of being soft on North Korea or cybercrime more broadly. The result is a prosecution that must somehow prove that Storm failed to implement specific compliance controls, without being able to point to any regulations outlining these controls that he supposedly failed to follow.</p><p>With their legal theory in shambles, prosecutors have resorted to tenuous guilt-by-association arguments and mischaracterized evidence. They’ve tried to hold Storm responsible for scams that may not have even touched Tornado Cash, argued that he should be culpable for not helping scam victims in ways that would not have been technically possible, and built a case for intent around chat messages that turned out to be forwarded news inquiries rather than evidence of criminal conspiracy. What remains is less a coherent prosecution than a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting political imperatives drive criminal cases."</p><p><a href="https://www.citationneeded.news/tornado-cash-roman-storm-prosecution/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">citationneeded.news/tornado-ca</span><span class="invisible">sh-roman-storm-prosecution/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/TornadoCash" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>TornadoCash</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Crypto</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Cryptocurrencies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Cryptocurrencies</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Ethereum" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Ethereum</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenSource" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>OpenSource</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Anonymity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Anonymity</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a></p>