The Legal Collapse
Part Two of Three: How Regulators Went After the Developers Because They Couldn’t Beat the Protocol — And What the Resulting Wreckage Means for Institutional Exposure
Part One established the technical picture: mixing protocols that work are forensically hard in ways that chain analytics marketing will not fully acknowledge, the threat model driving regulatory action was state-level actors who continued using the protocols after every enforcement intervention, and the retail privacy user was a rounding error in the flow data throughout. This piece covers what happened when regulators decided the appropriate response to an undefeatable protocol was to prosecute the people who wrote it.
There is a theory of deterrence in which you cannot stop a weapon, so you go after the armourer. It has some logic. It also has a legal requirement: the armourer must have known what the weapon would be used for, must have intended to facilitate that use, and must have taken actions that constitute a crime rather than the exercise of a legitimate profession.
