Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina has pleaded guilty to treason charges after she was arrested for donating money to a charity supporting Ukraine.
Russian prosecutors are seeking a 15-year sentence after the security services accused Ms Karelina of collecting money that was used to purchase tactical supplies for the Ukrainian army.
She was detained by authorities in Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow after a family visit in February.
The sentence comes one week after Russia and the West carried out the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, where 24 people jailed in seven different countries were exchanged.
Ms Karelina’s lawyer said the prosecutors’ request for a 15-year sentence in a penal colony was too severe as the defendant had cooperated with the investigation.
Mikhail Mushailov also said it was “impossible” for Ms Karelina to have been included in the recent prisoner exchange, because an exchange can only happen once the court verdict comes into force.
When people ask why we need digital money with high privacy guarantees, this is why.
Taler, credit cards, money transfers… all allow have the structure to allow this to happen.
I’d consider any of the current cryptocurrencies to be overall failures. They’re a way for tech-bros to piss away money on “investments” and for Chinese-owned mining firms to make a profit at the expense of the environment.
I agree that an anonymous digital currency is a fantastic idea, but how do you keep it from just turning into another Bitcoin?
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https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
We focus on the attributes of possible solutions, and use it for transactions.
The page you linked talks about privacy, but it makes no mention of abuse by investors or the environmental impact of miners.
Nobody will deny that cryptocurrency is good for privacy, but that doesn’t negate all of its damaging aspects.
Most crypto-currencies are horrible for privacy, as every transaction is public and is permanently linked to a specific wallet. So the only privacy preserving aspect is that it isn’t always easily possible to link a wallet to a person. One slip-up linking a payment to a person (like giving an address to ship for example, having your device confiscated, or you know… exchanging fiat money at a legal exchange) and all your past transactions can be linked to you easily.
Most, Except Monero which the privacy guide link talks about.
abuse by investors
You want a stablecoin linked to USD that doesn’t have price manipulation
E.g. https://ethglobal.com/showcase/zkcoin-sb6dz
or the environmental impact of miners.
Modern blockchains use energy efficient proof of stake, not wasteful proof of work.
nano uses very little energy, I’ve heard some claims that it uses less per transaction than SEPA. combine it with the privacy of Monero and now the only problem is volatility.
True, but it beats 15 years in a russian jail.
FUD regarding Taler. This kind of thing is exactly what could not be traced with a Taler based payment.
Remember the threat in this scenario is the authoritarian government with full banking authority to legally inspect all transactions, as well as token timings.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding how Taler works. Yes KYC exists for it, but the exchange can only know that you exchanged money for Taler token, not what you spend them on. And on a cross-border payment like this the government doesn’t have “full banking authority” either.
https://taler.net/files/taler-book.pdf
2.2.1 Exchange Compromise modes
If the exchange is inside of Russia, which for a Russian user with a Russian bank account, seems likely, these compromise methods can be used by the central authority to deanonymize wallets created from the Russian Exchange.
The Taler defense against this is the Auditor system, but when the compromise is being done by the central authority its moot.
Not even to mention the 2.2.3 Perfect Crime Scenario revocation method.
The most likely scenario is people are going to mint coins EXACLTY when they want to spend them, so just looking at the exchange timing and the spend timing is enough to reveal most users… to the central authority.
Taler is designed from the ground up to crack down on illegal business activities, which is fine until the central authority deciding the illegal business activity is something we disagree with (like funding human rights related relief in a war zone)
I do agree that Taler is better for privacy then credit cards, but it wouldn’t help our ballerina, if your spending can put you in jail or get you killed, Taler is not appropriate for the threat model
Ok, can you please quote the exact part in those two sections that would allow to deanonymize the payer of a specific transaction?
I read both sections you mentioned, and 2.2.1 only seems to have one rare case where the merchant is a fake honeypot and the exchange is totally compromised, which clearly wouldn’t be the case in our scenario, where the merchant is in another country and the attacker doesn’t know either the merchant nor the customer in advance. And 2.2.3 talks about a hypothetical modification of GNU Taler,
which would be incompatible with the version the merchant in another country is using(and anyways tries to deanonymize the merchant and not the customer),and again afaik wouldn’t work retroactivelyEdit: would need to be done while transaction is in process, and aims to catch a merchant that forced someone to pay anonymously in a ransom case or so (meaning the payer is already known or at least suspected). And this would also be massively disruptive to all other customers of the same exchange.Compromise of the Master Key If the master key was compromised, an attacker could de-anonymize customers by announcing different sets of denomination keys to each of them. If the exchange was audited, this would be detected quickly, as these denominations will not be signed by auditors.
This is not possible retroactively, and any exchange doing that would be quickly detected and not accepted by the merchant which is not under control of the government because they are based in another country. Edit: Basically for this to work, the exchange, the auditor and the merchant would need to be under full control of the hostile government and the system actively compromised before the transaction takes place.
So Russia is looking to stock up on its supply of prisoners to trade with…
Guess thats how they spell honor over there
- Commit a crime.
- Be detained.
- ???
- profit
“I like autocrats if others are the victims!”
“I like criminals if the victim is someone I don’t like!”
(Almost) Nobody here likes autocrats, my friend. But I guess everyone here has a problem with people who violate the law. Now I can see that the laws in Russia are not what you, personally, think is right. FWIW, each country has laws which other countries don’t agree with.
That’s a horrible take. Most people don’t care about whether things are legal, they care about whether things are morally right.
I’ll note that I don’t have a legal background, so the following is largely intuition.
Law is usually supposed to codify moral behavior. It’s a way to help different people talk about right/wrong and help them share moral concepts. So far, so good. However, not only does law fall short in terms of codifying moral behavior quite frequently, we also start from our morals and cross-check whether law aligns with those.
Most people don’t care about whether things are legal, they care about whether things are morally right.
That sounds right at first, but you fail to realise that morality is not an objectively measurable unit. Whose morality should apply to everyone? Yours? Mine? The Russian ones? Why?
In this case, I am obviously going to use my own morality (which does appear to match what other people in this sub think). I can only judge the world through my own eyes anyway. I am very far removed from knowing what any one Russian citizen might think regarding this case.
Lol, my dude. She is an American citizen who donated to an American NGO while in America. It’s not a crime, as the actions were legal in the jurisdiction of the state where it happened.
Russia is just creating a legal farce that is not concurrent with international law, or their own legal code. According to your own argument your claims are just a pile of internal contradictions.
Welcome to the fun rabbit hole of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritorial_jurisdiction
Thank you for speaking openly and consistently.
Not every government or company is going to have the same approach to morality, laws, ethics, fairness.
People who don’t like abusive governments - great, I understand, let’s build systems to resist government abuse.
People who want more government control over everything, ok, I dont agree, but I can see the benefits and the view point.
People who hate abusive governments externally, but want more centralized power where they live… Surprises me with the contradictory viewpoints.
But I guess everyone here has a problem with people who violate the law.
That’s stupid. You can use this argument to justify basically everything, including Nazi Germany.
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(Almost) Nobody here likes autocrats, my friend.
Yet I have the feeling I found one of the few that does.
I guess everyone here has a problem with people who violate the law. Now I can see that the laws in Russia are not what you, personally, think is right. FWIW, each country has laws which other countries don’t agree with.
Alrighty, let’s put that to the test: do you want Snowden and Assange locked up behind bars?
e: “Runterwählen ist kein Gegenargument”, don’t forget that… ;)
Yet I have the feeling I found one of the few that does.
I have the feeling that you misjudge (at least) one person here.
do you want Snowden and Assange locked up behind bars?
Thank you for confirming what I was getting at: Assange was held in accordance with the law, although I personally don’t think journalism should be penalised. Snowden hasn’t had a trial yet, so I can’t make a qualified comment on that.
I understand that the Russian laws don’t suit you. I don’t like the US laws either. But they are still the laws in force.
e: “Runterwählen ist kein Gegenargument”, don’t forget that… ;)
I can assure you that I not only take this sentence to heart, but - in view of the reactions to my comments here - find it absolutely apt once again.
Assange was held in accordance with the law, although I personally don’t think journalism should be penalised.
So you didn’t object his prosecution? Can we make this point clear? Although you personally don’t think journalism should be penalised, you were okay with him living the life he did for the last years and openly said so?
I understand that the Russian laws don’t suit you.
Yup, especially since we are talking about those that have been imposed or tightened in line with Russia’s invasion. I oppose these laws as I oppose their cause: the barbaric and imperialistic war Russia brings to Ukraine until this very day. And so should you, btw.
Although you personally don’t think journalism should be penalised, you were okay with him living the life he did for the last years and openly said so?
I openly denounced the fact that our “friends” from the “Western values” are imprisoning a journalist for doing his job. I demanded that they raise their laws to a non-dictatorial level. The fact that international and national law are not always the same thing has once again been clearly demonstrated here.
But what does this excursion into whataboutism have to do with the criminals being prosecuted in Russia?
the barbaric and imperialistic war Russia brings to Ukraine until this very day
Treason is not only a crime during a war.
I openly denounced the fact that our “friends” from the “Western values” are imprisoning a journalist for doing his job. I demanded that they raise their laws to a non-dictatorial level. The fact that international and national law are not always the same thing has once again been clearly demonstrated here. But what does this excursion into whataboutism have to do with the criminals being prosecuted in Russia?
So "I like criminals if the victim is someone I don’t like!” is apparently something you are as equally guilty of as those you are trying to attribute it here. It would have been more consistent for your standpoint if you had actually also applied it towards those criminals you feel inclined to.
Treason is not only a crime during a war.
It is not. But as you can read in the article, it has recently been tightened in line with fear of growing criticism of the Russian war of aggression. Of course you might choose to defend this. Maybe as it isn’t, for a change, a war of - your words and punctuation - our “friends” of “Western values” and some might find it challenging to escape from their traditional world view with America as the force behind wars. Or maybe because you simply support Russian nationalism and aggression, I don’t know. It is, however, a very strange look and a weird hill to die on.
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The crime of … donating to charity?
Do all laws in your country make sense to you?
