A U.S. security researcher is warning of a chilling effect after he was detained on arrival at a U.S. airport, his phone was searched and he was ordered to testify to a grand jury, only to have prosecutors reverse course and drop the investigation later.
On Wednesday, Sam Curry, a security engineer at blockchain technology company Yuga Labs, said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he was taken into secondary inspection by U.S. federal agents on September 15 after returning from a trip to Japan.
In a post, Curry said that in December 2022 he discovered that scammers had inadvertently exposed their Ethereum private key in the source code of a phishing website that had stolen millions of dollars’ worth of crypto.
It was widely shared that the private key was leaked and my background as a security researcher wasn’t enough to dissuade using immigrations and a grand jury to intimidate me,” Curry said in his post.
Curry was flying into Washington, DC to attend an election security research forum set up by U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA to audit U.S. voting machines.
It’s not unheard of for U.S. authorities to target security researchers or journalists with threats of prosecution or other kinds of legal process to compel testimony, like grand juries, which convene in secret to determine if formal criminal charges should be brought against a person.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A U.S. security researcher is warning of a chilling effect after he was detained on arrival at a U.S. airport, his phone was searched and he was ordered to testify to a grand jury, only to have prosecutors reverse course and drop the investigation later.
On Wednesday, Sam Curry, a security engineer at blockchain technology company Yuga Labs, said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he was taken into secondary inspection by U.S. federal agents on September 15 after returning from a trip to Japan.
In a post, Curry said that in December 2022 he discovered that scammers had inadvertently exposed their Ethereum private key in the source code of a phishing website that had stolen millions of dollars’ worth of crypto.
It was widely shared that the private key was leaked and my background as a security researcher wasn’t enough to dissuade using immigrations and a grand jury to intimidate me,” Curry said in his post.
Curry was flying into Washington, DC to attend an election security research forum set up by U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA to audit U.S. voting machines.
It’s not unheard of for U.S. authorities to target security researchers or journalists with threats of prosecution or other kinds of legal process to compel testimony, like grand juries, which convene in secret to determine if formal criminal charges should be brought against a person.
The original article contains 1,066 words, the summary contains 231 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!