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.
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 retroactively Edit: 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.
