New York, April 13 (AP): A cryptocurrency expert was sentenced Tuesday to more than five years in federal prison for helping North Korea evade US sanctions.
Virgil Griffith, 39, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy, admitting that he showed up at a cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang in 2019 even after the US government denied his request to travel there.
A known hacker, Griffith also developed "cryptocurrency infrastructure and equipment within North Korea," prosecutors wrote in court documents. At the 2019 conference, he advised more than 100 people, including several who appeared to work for the North Korean government, on how to use cryptocurrency to evade sanctions and gain independence from the global banking system.
The United States and the UN Security Council have imposed increasingly stringent sanctions on North Korea in recent years to try to curb its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The US government amended sanctions against North Korea in 2018 to bar "a US person, wherever located" from exporting technology to North Korea.
Prosecutors said Griffith acknowledged that his presentation amounted to a transfer of know-how to conference attendees.
"Griffith is a United States citizen who chose to evade his own country's sanctions in order to provide services to a hostile foreign power," prosecutors wrote. "He did it knowing that that power, North Korea, was guilty of atrocities against his own people and has threatened the United States citing its nuclear capabilities." Defense attorney Brian Klein described Griffith as a "brilliant Caltech-trained scientist who developed a curiosity bordering on obsession" with North Korea. "He saw himself, albeit arrogantly and naively, as acting in the interests of peace," Klein said. "He loves his country and he never meant to do any harm." Klein added that he was disappointed with the 63-month prison sentence, but "pleased that the judge recognized Virgil's commitment to moving forward with his life in a productive way, and that he is a talented person who has a lot to do." contribute". technologist," Griffith became something of an enfant terrible of the tech world in the early 2000s. In 2007, he created WikiScanner, a tool that aimed to unmask people who were editing entries anonymously on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.
Basically, WikiScanner could determine the companies, institutions or government agencies that owned the computers from which some edits were made. He quickly identified businesses that had sabotaged competitors' entries and government agencies that had rewritten history, among other findings.
"I am very pleased to see the mainstream media enjoying the fireworks of public relations disaster as I did," Griffith told The Associated Press in 2007.
Klein has previously said that Griffith cooperated with the FBI and "helped educate law enforcement" about the so-called dark web, a network of encrypted Internet sites that allow users to remain anonymous. (AP)CK
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