+On August 8th, 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
+sanctioned the smart contracts associated with Tornado Cash on the terms
+ of facilitating money laundering. This influenced widespread acts of
+censorship on Ethereum to inhibit the usage of the protocol and
+ultimately labels all active users for seeking individual anonymity
+on-chain, as criminals. The public nature of accounting on distributed
+ledgers is a flaw, not a benefit. It's the act of substantiation and
+non-repudiation that gives this enabling technology its true value.
+
+
+
+This is but one link in the chain of manipulative actions which serve
+the goal of bringing into question, and thus attempting to also bring
+into the context of legal frameworks, all the freedom-enabling elements
+which define the life of an individual being. If it becomes necessary to assert
+that privacy is a right, it is also clear that this concept has been opened up
+to legal attacks and rhetorical hijacking by malicious actors. These are the malicious
+actors who at the same time do not adhere to their own laws, the stripping away of personal
+freedom is for them simply a means to an end, and regardless of their motivations, the exact
+way by which evil perpetuates has exactly always been by enacting violence in the name of something
+believed to be "Good", which is objectively violence regardless of whether a perpetrator
+truly believes it to be "Good", and should thus be resisted via disobedience.
+
+
+
+All of the formerly mentioned is not only apparent in OFAC's designation, but also numerous
+proposed and/or accepted regulative frameworks regarding digital currencies, as an example
+the European Commission's Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR) amendment, and the MiCA regulatory
+framework. European law is puppeteered by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) through what is
+called "directives". The FATF, in turn, is an overarching branch of the American government that
+has legal immunity, and no oversight although having global influence in regulation. These
+legislations not only create honeypots of individuals' financial data, but set out to blacklist
+privacy-enabling technologies like Tornado, declaring a war on privacy. Make no
+mistake, any regulative framework introduced is a Trojan Horse which will be used
+to only sell the story of adopting cryptocurrencies in markets, while in reality
+destroying the safety guarantees of permissionlesss and/or anonymous money, with the
+goal being protecting traditional permissioned financial systems which have historically
+ only served to exploit, deceive and manipulate the individual.
+
+
+
+All of this is orchestrated by the same figures that have failed to
+regulate private equity's additional attacks on individual privacy, by accommodating the
+solicitation and commoditization of individuals' sensitive data. Again, these
+people are not set out for your best interest, time and time again they
+have failed the common people. On the profiteering of individuals' data,
+ Joseph Lubin - the man behind ConsenSyS - holds the power to
+de-anonymize almost every single Ethereum transaction. Given the
+notoriety and popularity of the infrastructure that he ultimately
+controls, as the majority shareholder of Infura and MetaMask. To no
+surprise, Infura and other RPC service providers like Alchemy were the
+first entities to censor relays to the Tornado contracts. Let us remind
+you, that these entities are actively profiling your transactional
+footprints, for reasons for solicitation and cooperation with
+authoritative figures to void your economic rights.
+
+
+
+The ripple effects of the sanctions also resonated with "decentralized"
+or, should we say, pseudo-decentralized protocols. Pocket Network, which
+ solicits itself as a permissionless RPC relay protocol, undertook
+efforts to censor all relays. The sheer misleading marketing should
+remind everyone not to trust venture-capital backed entities at face
+value. Another notable accolade for these unjust acts of censorship
+goes to Flashbots, a MEV-specific Ethereum client for capitalizing on
+financial inefficiencies on-chain. Given that a large percentage of
+Ethereum's hashrate uses their client this has immense implications and
+let us remind you, it is also a venture-backed entity. Last we save a
+special homage to TRM labs, which is a digital asset compliance firm to
+assist with the prevention of potential legal contingencies. Not only are
+this firm's tactics completely overamplifying cautionary measures but it
+is backed by entities that have clear conflicts of interest with the nature
+of the industry. Clients of theirs integrated frontend restrictions on
+addresses that have ever transacted with Tornado, either directly through multiple
+degrees of separation. Essentially restricting and mislabelling the large majority
+of Ethereum addresses. Here's a special shout-out to out to the servile TRM Labs
+customer base that is dYdX, Uniswap, AAVE, Balancer, Ren Protocol, and MakerDAO,
+all of which are funded by Silicon Valley vulture capital.
+
+
+
+Lest we forget, we saw 5 years of publicly funded and collective work of
+ open-source software censored overnight. Microsoft - the corporate
+behemoth that tainted Github, once an open collaboration tool for
+publishing software - purged all repositories of the official Tornado
+Cash organization and even went so far as to censor all core
+contributor's personal accounts. This heinous overreach drastically
+stifles the education and innovation of zero-knowledge cryptography.
+Countless individuals referenced the source code for student curricula
+and experimentation, as officially stated by Johns Hopkins University
+professor Matthew D. Green through the advocating support of the
+Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). This is not the first time we've
+seen censorship of open source software, which in itself is a violation
+of free speech.
+
+
+
+The basis of which the sanctions concerning the protocol as a mixer are
+groundless, because of the presence of zero-knowledge cryptography in
+its systematic design. This guarantees, that only the original deposited
+ assets that have been committed can only be redeemed, and not
+commingled funds. Peter Van Valkenburgh, a representative of Coin Center
+ portrays this logic through the precise analogy of safety deposit
+boxes. It is evident, that the policymakers behind the sanctions do not
+understand the subject they are attempting to regulate. We'd like to
+thank both Coin Center and the EFF as the only organizations to advocate
+ and take formal action against this totalitarianism.
+
+
+
+It is apparent that the true colors of actors and organizations reveal
+themselves in a time of crisis, and we encourage everyone who believes
+in freedoms to boycott and scrutinize the entities that have
+over-willingly aided the infringement of digital rights. As a group of
+dedicated contributors to Tornado, old, new, and future. We pledge an
+allegiance to circumvent these acts of censorship. Privacy is an
+individual right that is open to everyone. Community resources to
+archive and accelerate the development and education of the source code
+have been deployed, alongside a Matrix server to align community.
+Active research priorities have revealed themselves at the birth of the
+crisis for the organization going forward. A privacy-preserving,
+censorship-resistant, and network-agonistic RPC solution will be
+actively developed to ensure the accessibility of the protocol.
+Additionally, the legacy infrastructure of the internet is not a
+suitable place for the freedom of expression under the reign of ICANN.
+Thus, efforts will be undertaken to re-empower the original premise of
+the world wide web.
+
+
-