Groundhog Day for the Crypto Wars: The DOJ on Bitcoin Prowl
On April 24, the Department of Justice continued its assault on open source developers, arresting Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill on allegations of money laundering. Rodriguez and Hill, operating the well-known bitcoin application Samourai Wallet, committed the grand offense of writing code.
Under the auspices of money laundering, the DOJ seized servers located abroad, pulled the Samourai website from its domain, and had Google remove the app from its Play Store.
It's a stunning flashback to the 1990s " crypto wars ," when the feds last went after cryptographers and others writing code.
At that time, government officials alleged that producing and sharing encryption technology amounted to exporting weapons. Politicians worried that these privacy technologies would fall into the "wrong" hands, so much so that President Bill Clinton declared a national emergency and then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) introduced a bill to allow the government to spy on text and voice communications .
Philip Zimmermann, a programmer, wrote an encryption software called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) that would thwart the government's snooping efforts. As Paul Detrick explained for Reason , the software was so good that the DOJ launched a criminal investigation in 1993 "on the grounds that by publishing his software he had violated the Arms Export Control Act. To demonstrate that PGP was protected under the First Amendment, Zimmerman[n] got MIT Press to print out its source code in a book and sell it abroad."
