Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a prominent digital rights group, has submitted an amicus card to support novel Storm, a developer of Crypto Privacy Protocol Tornado Cash (torn).

Storm is charged with conspiracy to facilitate money laundering, operate an unlicensed money sending and offending sanctions in relation to his work with Tornado Cash Protocol.

“The government’s prosecution raises major concerns about civil freedoms that can cool the future development of privacy -enhancing technologies more broadly,” Eff wrote in the brief.

EFF claims that Storm’s prosecution is threatening open source innovation, as the core problem in case of keeping developers responsible for how their tools are used, rather than prosecuting bad players directly, could have a cool effect on privacy-focused software development.

“Almost all protective tools for privacy and anonymity are tools for double use. Like a physical mask or paper contains, they often provide, often critical protections for users, but can also be used by bad actors to help hide their crimes,” EFF wrote.

In the prosecution of storm, the government is dependent on International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows it to impose financial sanctions and limit transactions into national emergencies. This application claims EFF, is inappropriate.

“If the government thinks it is appropriate to criminalize these technologies, it must seek relief from Congress and not trust IEEPA and the other laws that ambit for these laws,” Eff wrote.

If Congress wants to regulate tools like Tornado Cash, Eff claims, it has the authority to pass a law that clearly separates legal use, but the prosecution in this case fails to give this clarity.

The cracked token has risen almost 50% in the last month, according to market data, on the optimism of a favorable result for storm.

Storm is going back to court in April.