Curriculum·J311 Privacy, Surveillance, and Compliance Exposure·about 34 min
Privacy tooling and its legal reality
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Separate the four categories of privacy tooling by what each actually conceals
- →Name the three distinct legal theories that attach, and what each requires to be proved
- →Compute how often the legal status of one tool changed, and what that implies for planning
- →State why the exposure of a user and the exposure of a builder are different questions
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with Tornado Cash and its legal status, 2022 to 2025.
- What happened
- On 8 August 2022 OFAC added Tornado Cash to the Specially Designated Nationals list, making it unlawful for US persons to transact with it. On 14 May 2024 a Dutch court convicted developer Alexey Pertsev of money laundering and sentenced him to 64 months. On 26 November 2024 the Fifth Circuit decided Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury, holding that the immutable smart contracts were not the property of a foreign national or entity and that OFAC had exceeded its authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On 21 March 2025 OFAC delisted Tornado Cash. On 6 August 2025 a jury in the Southern District of New York convicted co-founder Roman Storm of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business under 18 USC 1960, carrying a maximum of five years, and deadlocked on the money laundering and sanctions conspiracy counts. Separately, the Samourai Wallet founders pleaded guilty to the same money transmitting charge on 30 July 2025 and were sentenced in November 2025 to five and four years.
- The decision point
- The same code was lawful to touch, then unlawful, then lawful again, across thirty-six months, while its authors were prosecuted throughout on theories that did not depend on the sanctions status at all. The legal position of a privacy tool is not a property of the tool. It is a property of a jurisdiction at a date, and it moves faster than any plan built on it.
What you will be able to answer
- →What are the four categories of privacy tooling?
- →What are the three legal theories?
- →How fast did the status change?
- →User exposure or builder exposure?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/08/06/roman-storm-guilty-of-unlicensed-money-transmitting-conspiracy-in-partial-verdict
- https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/05/14/tornado-cash-developer-alexey-pertsev-found-guilty-of-money-laundering
- https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca5/23-50669/23-50669-2024-11-26.html
- https://www.paulhastings.com/insights/crypto-policy-tracker/a-whirlwind-of-change-the-delisting-of-tornado-cash
- https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/founders-of-samourai-wallet-cryptocurrency-mixing-service-sentenced-to-five-and-four-years-in-prison
Confidence medium·Volatility high·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
This lesson describes law and does not give legal advice, and per P6 the uncertainty is the substance rather than a caveat attached to it. Positions differ by jurisdiction, several of the questions here are unsettled, and the Storm jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts, which means those theories are neither accepted nor rejected. Anybody with a live question needs a lawyer in their own jurisdiction, not a lesson.
The EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, is described here as applying from July 2027, with Article 79 restricting regulated providers rather than individuals. Reporting differs on the precise commencement date within that month and implementation detail is still emerging. Treat the direction as settled and the detail as provisional.
This lesson deliberately does not describe how to use any of these tools, and per the course's editorial note it must not read as instruction in evasion. The material a learner needs here is the legal landscape and the categories, which is what supports the compliance decisions in J311-04 and the hygiene in J311-05.