When Did Privacy Become a Bad Word?

The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) indictment against the Tornado Cash developers, filed Wednesday, is commensurate with the government’s seeming disdain for privacy.

Across the government, there seems to be an entrenched assumption that an individual’s desire to keep the details of their life private means they’re engaging in wrongdoing. This overly simplistic assumption is not supported by the law or the reality of exactly why privacy is so important to countless law-abiding citizens in their everyday lives.

Nor does it adequately balance the 21st century citizen’s right to privacy with the need to ensure the government can effectively enforce the law.

Miller Whitehouse-Levine is the CEO of the DeFi Education Fund and Amanda Tuminelli is the chief legal officer of the DeFi Education Fund.

In the last century the world has changed in ways that make almost every one of our daily activities far less private than ever before. In our digital lives, some third party is often involved in almost every conversation we have, every place we go and what we spend our money on — tracking and often retaining that information in insecure databases.

See also: Tornado Cash Devs Are Caught in a U.S. Dragnet | Opinion

When people traded gold and later, cash, there was no way for the government to trace the transactions, whether illicit or legitimate, without a warrant or subpoena. When people went about their daily routines, they did not create a permanent digital record.

Question any time there is wholesale disapproval of new technology simply because it affirms an individual’s well-established right to privacy.

The government, if it suspected a person of committing a crime, was forced to do some good old fashioned police work: following people around and marking bills to follow the money.

More recently, the government has gained much more insight and powers of preemptive surveillance into our financial lives. For example, with the enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970, financial institutions have to engage in record-keeping and reporting in order to assist the government in its efforts to prevent money laundering, and as a result, most of the information we provide to our banks can easily be viewed by the government.

Moreover John Doe subpoenas to financial institutions allow the…