July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: <nettime> Steve Coll: Leaks (The New Yorker)
by John Young 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Like many supporters and detractors of Wikileaks Coll underestimates the intent of the initiative. The comparison to media is fatuous as though media, if not scholars, should be the dominant source of public information about governments and other authoritative institutions. Media and scholars are themselves authoritatives more like governments than different, enjoying privileges and protection all sides grant one another while condemning those outside their fold. None of the authoritatives are insurgencies and assuredly will find ways to "critique" whatever disturbs their perquisites and opportunities, using concepts and language meant to defuse and stigmatize threats. There is overmuch circularity in Coll's apolgia for media in which he presumes an enduring value in responsible media and scholarhip that has been squandered by timid rumination. This marks a failure to go beyond convention. One might suspect Wikileaks is laughing its ass off at the high-value conceit of supporters and detractors who are out to advance their own initiatives under guise of pondering the Wikileaks each has confected for that purpose -- and avoiding the high-risk of taking on a true threat to authoritatives. To be sure, Wikileaks as it has been might morph into a tamed beast like so many short-lived, opportunisticly aggressive insurgencies brought into submission with valorization, condemnation, attention, praise, notoriety, bribery, prizes and embrasure by mightily crafty and extremely well-endowed authoritatives who gobble up ambitious rebels like sweetmeats. Wikileaks would be smart to pull back from Ellsberg and those working diligently to manage it in the most favored direction, the prefabricated heroic, that is, all hat and no cattle. Another New Yorker article this week explores the self-affirming drive toward heroism. If not Assange's heroicly defiant Wikileaks peters out then many others more variable and durable, and that seems to be what's developing under the radar of all too delusional incisiveness. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[liberationtech] HP SEC Disclosure on Area SpA and ZTE
by Collin Anderson 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Libtech, The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission posted the October 2012 response of HP to a request for information on exports to sanctioned countries -- worth the short read; within, the company discloses that its equipment was transshipped through partners, rather than direct sales, to the Italian company Area SpA in the well-publicized Syrian monitoring center project. It also hints at the aggressiveness with which the US government (Commerce's BIS) is pursuing Chinese manufacturers known to sell equipment to Iran -- which it appears to dodge. Cordially, Collin http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/47217/000004721712000035/filename1.h… -- October 9, 2012 Ms. Cecilia Blye Office of Global Security Risk U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 100 F Street, NE Washington, DC 20549 Re: Hewlett-Packard Company Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended October 31, 2011 Filed December 14, 2011 File No. 001-04423 David K. Ritenour Vice President and Associate General Counsel Tel +1 650 857 3059 Fax +1 650 857 4837 david.ritenour(a)hp.com Dear Ms. Blye: This letter supplements our October 9, 2012 response (the b Response Letterb) to your letter dated September 6, 2012 with regard to the above-referenced filing made by Hewlett-Packard Company (b HPb). Pursuant to 17 C.F.R. B'200.83, we are requesting confidential treatment for this letter. *We request that this letter be maintained in confidence, not be made part of any public record and not be disclosed to any person as it contains confidential information. In the event that the Staff receives a request for access to this letter, whether pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act or otherwise, we respectfully request that we be notified immediately so that we may further substantiate this request for confidential treatment*. Please address any notification of a request for access to such information to the undersigned with a copy to General Counsel, Hewlett-Packard Company, 3000 Hanover Street, MS 1050, Palo Alto, California 94304. Comment 1 of your letter cited news reports alleging that HP equipment was sold by Area SpA (b Areab) into Syria. As noted in the Response Letter, HP has confirmed that Area was required under the terms of its contract with HP to comply with all applicable export laws and was specifically prohibited from selling HPbs products into embargoed or sanctioned countries. *HP has also determined that Area did not procure the HP products believed to have been sold into Syria from HP but instead procured those products from an HP partner that was not informed of the ultimate destination for those products.* *Comment 2 of your letter sought information about whether HP had received any communications from the U.S. Department of Commerce relating to ZTE Corporation and/or Beijing 8-Star International Company and, if so, the current status of any resultant proceedings.* As noted in the Response Letter, HP has been contacted by the Bureau of Industry and Security of the U.S. Department of Commerce (the b BISb) relating to ZTE Corporation and Beijing 8-Star International Company and has had several discussions with, and provided documents to, the BIS. Please contact me at (650) 857-3059 if you have any questions about this letter. Very truly yours, /s/ David K. Ritenour David K. Ritenour -- *Collin David Anderson* averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C. -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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<nettime> Report: Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione
by Ned Rossiter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[here's a fascinating report from Brett Neilson on Agamben's latest book, yet to be translated. Among other things, the report nicely illuminates the Schmittian problematic of a 'state of exception' via the Schmitt-Benjamin dialogue, pointing out why such a juridico-political condition remains useful as an object of critique for thinking many current crises in life in the 'global civil war'./Ned] Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Borighieri. 2003 Brett Neilson University of Western Sydney At a time when Australians face trial before U.S. military tribunals, asylum seekers languish in camps like Baxter and Nauru, and new government legislation allows the detention of Australian citizens themselves, the prose of Giorgio Agamben burns with relevance for those who live on the southern continent. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's latest offering, an extension and deepening of Homo sacer (1995)--of which it announces itself as Volume II, Part 1. Growing more directly from this earlier text than Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), Volume III of Homo sacer, the book is at once more historically grounded and more politically audacious. Agamben steps away from the pessimistic analytic of 'bare life' to recover some of the redemptive energy that inhabits La communit} che viene (1990), his best-known work among English language readers. Perhaps it is the force with which emergency powers have gripped the world in the past two years that lends Stato di eccezione a political intensity that remains wholly current even as it interrogates Roman republican law and plummets the ontological depths of early 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. In the opening pages of Stato di eccezione, Agamben announces that 'before the unstoppable progression of what has been identified as a "global civil war," the state of exception tends ever more to present itself as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.' The reference to 'global civil war' signals an immediate concern with the current transformations of world order, even as the text notes that this term first appears in 1961 (both in the work of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt). Agamben identifies the 'military order' issued by George W. Bush on 13 November 2001 (subjecting non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities to indefinite detention and military tribunals) as the most recent in a line of emergency measures that open a no-man's-land between the political and the juridical. The French Htat de siKge (which finds its origins in the eighteenth century Revolution), article 48 of the Weimar constitution (mobilized over 250 times before 1933), the Italian decreto di urgenza (which became the normal means of governmental legislation following World War II), the emergency powers of the British parliament (introduced with the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914), and the capacity of the U.S. president to issue 'executive orders' (which allowed Lincoln to suspend to writ of habeas corpus in 1861, Wilson to assume emergency powers in 1917-18, and F.D. Roosevelt to declare a national emergency six hours after assuming power in 1933)--all of these attest the inextricable link between the state of exception and the normal functioning of the bourgeois democratic state. Far from being a hallmark of totalitarian rule, the state of exception 'presents itself as a zone of indetermination between democracy and absolutism.' Thus even those who argue that emergency powers are necessary to safeguard democracy, such as Clinton. L. Rossiter--author of Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (1948, must recognize the mutual implication of the emergency state and absolutist government, noting that 'the constitutional use of emergency powers is becoming the rule and not the exception.' As in Homo sacer, Agamben's argument finds its point of departure in Carl Schmitt's Political Theology. Schmitt describes the state of exception as a kind of legal vacuum, a 'suspension of the legal order in its totality.' But for him, the issue is to ensure a relation, no matter what type, between the state of emergency and the legal order: 'The state of emergency is always distinguished from anarchy and chaos and, in the legal sense, there is still order in it, even through it is not a legal order.' The state of emergency introduces a zone of anomy into the law, and thus it can be presented as a doctrine of sovereignty. The sovereign, who proclaims the state of emergency, remains anchored in the legal order. But precisely because this decision concerns a nullification of the norm, and consequently, because the state of emergency represents the control of a space that is neither external nor internal, 'the sovereign remains exterior to the normally valid legal order, and nevertheless belongs to it.' In Stato di eccezione, Agamben works to sever this link between sovereign power and legal order, revealing an 'essential fiction' that underlies the push to 'global civil war.' The book thus points to a 'countermovement' that separates life from law--a force that 'melts that which has been artificially and violently linked.' There are three main moments to this countermovement. 1. First is Agamben's interpretation of the term 'force-of-law,' which, as he notes, supplies the title for a 1990 lecture by Jacques Derrida. For Agamben, it is astounding that, despite the debate between philosophers and legal theorists occasioned by this lecture, there has been little analysis of the 'enigmatic formula' that provides its title. Following article six of the French constitution of 1791, he finds the term 'force-of-law' to designate the indestructible character of the law--the supreme value of acts expressed by an assembly representative of the people (which the sovereign can neither abrogate nor modify). In the technical sense, 'force-of-law' refers not to the law itself, but to decrees that have, as the expression goes, 'force-of-law'--decrees that executive power can be authorized to give, and most notably in the state of exception. The term identifies a gap between the efficacy of the law and its formal essence, and this means that acts that do not have the value of law can acquire the 'force-of-law.' For Agamben, this separation between law and 'force-of-law' characterizes the state of exception. In the state of exception, the 'force-of-law' can exist without law. There is a radical separation between potential and act as well as a mystical element or fiction that seeks to eliminate this disconnection. Far from leading back to the legal order, as Schmitt contends, the state of exception exhibits the 'impossible conjuncture' between norm and reality, or between the law and its application. It is a limit zone where logic and practice intermingle and a pure violence without logos activates an enunciation with no real referent. 2. To deepen his case against Schmitt, Agamben offers an analysis of the Roman republican convention of the iustitium--an ancient precedent for the state of exception. When the Roman senate was alerted to a situation that seemed to threaten or compromise the republic, they pronounced a senatus consultum ultimum. This involved the declaration of a tumultus or a state of emergency whose consequence was the proclamation of the iustitium. The iustitium involved not a suspension of the framework of justice but a suspension of the law itself. Following Adolphe Nissen's Das Iustitium (1877), Agamben distinguishes the legal void of the iustitium from the paradigm of dictatorship. Under the Roman constitution, a dictator was a special type of magistrate selected by the consuls, whose wide powers were conferred by means of a lex curiata that defined their scope. In the iustitium, by contrast, there was no creation of a new magistrate. The powers enjoyed by the magistrates under the iustitium resulted not from the conferment of a dictatorial imperium but from the suspension of laws that limited their actions. Agamben points out that the same is true for modern emergency powers. It is a mistake to confuse the state of exception with dictatorship (a fullness of powers or pleromatic state of law)--and this is, indeed, the limit of Schmitt's analysis. In spite of the common view, neither Hitler nor Mussolini was a dictator. Hitler, in particular, was Chancellor of the Reich, legally appointed by the president. What was so dangerous about the Nazi regime is that it allowed the Weimar constitution to remain valid, while doubling it with a secondary and legally non-formalized structure that could only exist alongside the first by virtue of a generalized state of emergency. For one reason or another, the existence of such spaces devoid of law seems so essential to the legal order that the latter must make every possible effort to assure a relation to the former, as if the law in order to guarantee its functioning must necessarily entertain a relation to anomy. 3. In this perspective, Agamben reads the debate on the state of emergency that pitted Carl Schmitt against Walter Benjamin from 1928 to 1940. Schmitt's influence on Benjamin has always appeared scandalous, but Agamben attempts to reverse this scandal, suggesting that Schmitt's theory of sovereignty must be read as response to Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence.' In this 1921 essay, Benjamin posits the existence of a 'pure' or 'revolutionary' violence--that is, violence outside the law, a violence that ruptures the dialectic between the violence that institutes the law (constituent power) and the violence that upholds the law (constituted power). Agamben argues that the state of emergency is the means invented by Schmitt to respond to this postulation of a pure violence. For Schmitt, there can be no violence absolutely exterior to the nomos, because revolutionary violence, once the state of emergency is established, always finds itself to be included in the law. Benjamin's definitive response to Schmitt is the famous passage in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' where he surmises that 'the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.' But before revisiting those important lines, Agamben detours through Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which contrasts Schmitt's theory of sovereign decision with the notion of sovereign indecision. Far from deciding on the state of exception (and thereby including it in the legal order), the sovereign in the German tragic drama aims to avoid such emergency measures (to keep them separate from the legal order): 'Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty amounts to a supreme executive power on the part of the prince, the baroque concept emerges from a discussion of the state of emergency, and makes it the most important function of the prince to avert this.' Confronted with the decision to proclaim an emergency, the sovereign reveals that 'he is almost incapable of making a decision.' The fracture between sovereign power and the capacity to act thus becomes impassable. For Benjamin, the state of exception leads not to the restoration of legal order but to a generalized catastrophe. And in this catastrophe, the transcendental claims of sovereign power are vanquished: 'However highly he is enthroned over subject and state, ... [the sovereign] is confined to the world of creation; he is lord of the creatures, but he remains a creature.' This figure of generalized catastrophe under a sky void of transcendental authority haunts Agamben's description of a 'global civil war' characterized by 'governmental violence that ignores international law externally and produces a permanent state of exception internally, while all the time pretending to uphold the law.' Far from facilitating a return to the 'state of law,' the current global emergency throws the very concepts of the 'state' and 'law' into question. Today the state of exception has reached its 'maximum planetary unfolding' and manifests itself as an unrestrained festival in which pure violence is exercised in full freedom. Not accidentally does the term iustitium, after the fall of the Roman republic, come to designate the period of public mourning following the sovereign's death. According to classicist Karl Meuli, anomic festivals (such as the Roman saturnalia, the charivari, and the medieval carnival) display a connection with the situations of suspended law that characterize certain archaic penal institutions. They thus reveal the anomic drive that lies at the very heart of the nomos. As Agamben explains, 'in the exhibition of the mournful character of every festival and the festive character of every mourning, law and anomy show their distance and, at the same time, their secret solidarity.' This double movement adds a new level of disingenuousness to one of the most feted comments of recent Australian public life--Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock's description of the former Lager at Woomera: 'It's not a holiday camp, nor should it be seen as one.' For Agamben, the Western political system is founded in the double movement between two heterogeneous and antithetical elements: nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence, the law and the forms of life whose articulation is guaranteed by the state of emergency. In opposition to the movement that seeks to maintain the relation between these elements, he poses a countermovement that seeks to break the fictional link between violence and the law. He thus understands contemporary Western culture as a 'field of tensions' in which two opposing forces clash--one that institutes and imposes, the other that deactivates and deposes. There can be no hope of flattening these forces onto indifference, or containing them in the synthesizing logic of dialectic. But equally it is only possible to distinguish them by virtue of their articulation in the biopolitical machine--'bare life is a product of the machine and not something that pre-exists it.' The task of a radical politics is to break the link between violence and the law, an action that implies not the return to an original state but the accession to a new condition. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's most sustained blueprint of this politics-to-come, a document that charts an ethical and conceptual path beyond the state of exception by providing tools to break into and move through it. Dr. Brett Neilson Centre for Cultural Research University of Western Sydney PENRITH SOUTH DC NSW 1797 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61-2-4736-0387 Fax: +61-2-4736-0224 http://www.uws.edu.au/ccr Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle ... and Other Tales of Counterglobalization http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/neilson_free.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo(a)bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)bbs.thing.net --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: [tahoe-dev] Resurrecting Mojo Nation
by James A. Donald 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 2012-06-12 11:04 AM, Jack Byer wrote: > (This is a cross-post from: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86384) > > > > A market mechanism for buying and selling hard drive space would look > a lot like the commodity markets. If you express a contract in a > standard form they can be traded on an exchange to achieve price > discovery. The following is not a complete specification but just an > example of how such a system might work. Price discovery, when done by human agents, is expensive. The stock exchange and its traders have a lot of overheads. One explanation for the failure of Mojo Nation was that people would not take the time to do price discovery for micro transactions. Not that I know why Mojo Nation failed. I have not seen a post mortem from anyone knowledgeable. _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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<nettime> Report: Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione
by Ned Rossiter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[here's a fascinating report from Brett Neilson on Agamben's latest book, yet to be translated. Among other things, the report nicely illuminates the Schmittian problematic of a 'state of exception' via the Schmitt-Benjamin dialogue, pointing out why such a juridico-political condition remains useful as an object of critique for thinking many current crises in life in the 'global civil war'./Ned] Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Borighieri. 2003 Brett Neilson University of Western Sydney At a time when Australians face trial before U.S. military tribunals, asylum seekers languish in camps like Baxter and Nauru, and new government legislation allows the detention of Australian citizens themselves, the prose of Giorgio Agamben burns with relevance for those who live on the southern continent. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's latest offering, an extension and deepening of Homo sacer (1995)--of which it announces itself as Volume II, Part 1. Growing more directly from this earlier text than Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), Volume III of Homo sacer, the book is at once more historically grounded and more politically audacious. Agamben steps away from the pessimistic analytic of 'bare life' to recover some of the redemptive energy that inhabits La communit} che viene (1990), his best-known work among English language readers. Perhaps it is the force with which emergency powers have gripped the world in the past two years that lends Stato di eccezione a political intensity that remains wholly current even as it interrogates Roman republican law and plummets the ontological depths of early 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. In the opening pages of Stato di eccezione, Agamben announces that 'before the unstoppable progression of what has been identified as a "global civil war," the state of exception tends ever more to present itself as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.' The reference to 'global civil war' signals an immediate concern with the current transformations of world order, even as the text notes that this term first appears in 1961 (both in the work of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt). Agamben identifies the 'military order' issued by George W. Bush on 13 November 2001 (subjecting non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities to indefinite detention and military tribunals) as the most recent in a line of emergency measures that open a no-man's-land between the political and the juridical. The French Htat de siKge (which finds its origins in the eighteenth century Revolution), article 48 of the Weimar constitution (mobilized over 250 times before 1933), the Italian decreto di urgenza (which became the normal means of governmental legislation following World War II), the emergency powers of the British parliament (introduced with the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914), and the capacity of the U.S. president to issue 'executive orders' (which allowed Lincoln to suspend to writ of habeas corpus in 1861, Wilson to assume emergency powers in 1917-18, and F.D. Roosevelt to declare a national emergency six hours after assuming power in 1933)--all of these attest the inextricable link between the state of exception and the normal functioning of the bourgeois democratic state. Far from being a hallmark of totalitarian rule, the state of exception 'presents itself as a zone of indetermination between democracy and absolutism.' Thus even those who argue that emergency powers are necessary to safeguard democracy, such as Clinton. L. Rossiter--author of Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (1948, must recognize the mutual implication of the emergency state and absolutist government, noting that 'the constitutional use of emergency powers is becoming the rule and not the exception.' As in Homo sacer, Agamben's argument finds its point of departure in Carl Schmitt's Political Theology. Schmitt describes the state of exception as a kind of legal vacuum, a 'suspension of the legal order in its totality.' But for him, the issue is to ensure a relation, no matter what type, between the state of emergency and the legal order: 'The state of emergency is always distinguished from anarchy and chaos and, in the legal sense, there is still order in it, even through it is not a legal order.' The state of emergency introduces a zone of anomy into the law, and thus it can be presented as a doctrine of sovereignty. The sovereign, who proclaims the state of emergency, remains anchored in the legal order. But precisely because this decision concerns a nullification of the norm, and consequently, because the state of emergency represents the control of a space that is neither external nor internal, 'the sovereign remains exterior to the normally valid legal order, and nevertheless belongs to it.' In Stato di eccezione, Agamben works to sever this link between sovereign power and legal order, revealing an 'essential fiction' that underlies the push to 'global civil war.' The book thus points to a 'countermovement' that separates life from law--a force that 'melts that which has been artificially and violently linked.' There are three main moments to this countermovement. 1. First is Agamben's interpretation of the term 'force-of-law,' which, as he notes, supplies the title for a 1990 lecture by Jacques Derrida. For Agamben, it is astounding that, despite the debate between philosophers and legal theorists occasioned by this lecture, there has been little analysis of the 'enigmatic formula' that provides its title. Following article six of the French constitution of 1791, he finds the term 'force-of-law' to designate the indestructible character of the law--the supreme value of acts expressed by an assembly representative of the people (which the sovereign can neither abrogate nor modify). In the technical sense, 'force-of-law' refers not to the law itself, but to decrees that have, as the expression goes, 'force-of-law'--decrees that executive power can be authorized to give, and most notably in the state of exception. The term identifies a gap between the efficacy of the law and its formal essence, and this means that acts that do not have the value of law can acquire the 'force-of-law.' For Agamben, this separation between law and 'force-of-law' characterizes the state of exception. In the state of exception, the 'force-of-law' can exist without law. There is a radical separation between potential and act as well as a mystical element or fiction that seeks to eliminate this disconnection. Far from leading back to the legal order, as Schmitt contends, the state of exception exhibits the 'impossible conjuncture' between norm and reality, or between the law and its application. It is a limit zone where logic and practice intermingle and a pure violence without logos activates an enunciation with no real referent. 2. To deepen his case against Schmitt, Agamben offers an analysis of the Roman republican convention of the iustitium--an ancient precedent for the state of exception. When the Roman senate was alerted to a situation that seemed to threaten or compromise the republic, they pronounced a senatus consultum ultimum. This involved the declaration of a tumultus or a state of emergency whose consequence was the proclamation of the iustitium. The iustitium involved not a suspension of the framework of justice but a suspension of the law itself. Following Adolphe Nissen's Das Iustitium (1877), Agamben distinguishes the legal void of the iustitium from the paradigm of dictatorship. Under the Roman constitution, a dictator was a special type of magistrate selected by the consuls, whose wide powers were conferred by means of a lex curiata that defined their scope. In the iustitium, by contrast, there was no creation of a new magistrate. The powers enjoyed by the magistrates under the iustitium resulted not from the conferment of a dictatorial imperium but from the suspension of laws that limited their actions. Agamben points out that the same is true for modern emergency powers. It is a mistake to confuse the state of exception with dictatorship (a fullness of powers or pleromatic state of law)--and this is, indeed, the limit of Schmitt's analysis. In spite of the common view, neither Hitler nor Mussolini was a dictator. Hitler, in particular, was Chancellor of the Reich, legally appointed by the president. What was so dangerous about the Nazi regime is that it allowed the Weimar constitution to remain valid, while doubling it with a secondary and legally non-formalized structure that could only exist alongside the first by virtue of a generalized state of emergency. For one reason or another, the existence of such spaces devoid of law seems so essential to the legal order that the latter must make every possible effort to assure a relation to the former, as if the law in order to guarantee its functioning must necessarily entertain a relation to anomy. 3. In this perspective, Agamben reads the debate on the state of emergency that pitted Carl Schmitt against Walter Benjamin from 1928 to 1940. Schmitt's influence on Benjamin has always appeared scandalous, but Agamben attempts to reverse this scandal, suggesting that Schmitt's theory of sovereignty must be read as response to Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence.' In this 1921 essay, Benjamin posits the existence of a 'pure' or 'revolutionary' violence--that is, violence outside the law, a violence that ruptures the dialectic between the violence that institutes the law (constituent power) and the violence that upholds the law (constituted power). Agamben argues that the state of emergency is the means invented by Schmitt to respond to this postulation of a pure violence. For Schmitt, there can be no violence absolutely exterior to the nomos, because revolutionary violence, once the state of emergency is established, always finds itself to be included in the law. Benjamin's definitive response to Schmitt is the famous passage in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' where he surmises that 'the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.' But before revisiting those important lines, Agamben detours through Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which contrasts Schmitt's theory of sovereign decision with the notion of sovereign indecision. Far from deciding on the state of exception (and thereby including it in the legal order), the sovereign in the German tragic drama aims to avoid such emergency measures (to keep them separate from the legal order): 'Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty amounts to a supreme executive power on the part of the prince, the baroque concept emerges from a discussion of the state of emergency, and makes it the most important function of the prince to avert this.' Confronted with the decision to proclaim an emergency, the sovereign reveals that 'he is almost incapable of making a decision.' The fracture between sovereign power and the capacity to act thus becomes impassable. For Benjamin, the state of exception leads not to the restoration of legal order but to a generalized catastrophe. And in this catastrophe, the transcendental claims of sovereign power are vanquished: 'However highly he is enthroned over subject and state, ... [the sovereign] is confined to the world of creation; he is lord of the creatures, but he remains a creature.' This figure of generalized catastrophe under a sky void of transcendental authority haunts Agamben's description of a 'global civil war' characterized by 'governmental violence that ignores international law externally and produces a permanent state of exception internally, while all the time pretending to uphold the law.' Far from facilitating a return to the 'state of law,' the current global emergency throws the very concepts of the 'state' and 'law' into question. Today the state of exception has reached its 'maximum planetary unfolding' and manifests itself as an unrestrained festival in which pure violence is exercised in full freedom. Not accidentally does the term iustitium, after the fall of the Roman republic, come to designate the period of public mourning following the sovereign's death. According to classicist Karl Meuli, anomic festivals (such as the Roman saturnalia, the charivari, and the medieval carnival) display a connection with the situations of suspended law that characterize certain archaic penal institutions. They thus reveal the anomic drive that lies at the very heart of the nomos. As Agamben explains, 'in the exhibition of the mournful character of every festival and the festive character of every mourning, law and anomy show their distance and, at the same time, their secret solidarity.' This double movement adds a new level of disingenuousness to one of the most feted comments of recent Australian public life--Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock's description of the former Lager at Woomera: 'It's not a holiday camp, nor should it be seen as one.' For Agamben, the Western political system is founded in the double movement between two heterogeneous and antithetical elements: nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence, the law and the forms of life whose articulation is guaranteed by the state of emergency. In opposition to the movement that seeks to maintain the relation between these elements, he poses a countermovement that seeks to break the fictional link between violence and the law. He thus understands contemporary Western culture as a 'field of tensions' in which two opposing forces clash--one that institutes and imposes, the other that deactivates and deposes. There can be no hope of flattening these forces onto indifference, or containing them in the synthesizing logic of dialectic. But equally it is only possible to distinguish them by virtue of their articulation in the biopolitical machine--'bare life is a product of the machine and not something that pre-exists it.' The task of a radical politics is to break the link between violence and the law, an action that implies not the return to an original state but the accession to a new condition. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's most sustained blueprint of this politics-to-come, a document that charts an ethical and conceptual path beyond the state of exception by providing tools to break into and move through it. Dr. Brett Neilson Centre for Cultural Research University of Western Sydney PENRITH SOUTH DC NSW 1797 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61-2-4736-0387 Fax: +61-2-4736-0224 http://www.uws.edu.au/ccr Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle ... and Other Tales of Counterglobalization http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/neilson_free.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo(a)bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)bbs.thing.net --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: [tahoe-dev] Resurrecting Mojo Nation
by James A. Donald 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 2012-06-12 11:04 AM, Jack Byer wrote: > (This is a cross-post from: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86384) > > > > A market mechanism for buying and selling hard drive space would look > a lot like the commodity markets. If you express a contract in a > standard form they can be traded on an exchange to achieve price > discovery. The following is not a complete specification but just an > example of how such a system might work. Price discovery, when done by human agents, is expensive. The stock exchange and its traders have a lot of overheads. One explanation for the failure of Mojo Nation was that people would not take the time to do price discovery for micro transactions. Not that I know why Mojo Nation failed. I have not seen a post mortem from anyone knowledgeable. _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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why hyperelliptic curves?
by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Oh, and by the way the way that TahoeLAFS uses public key cryptography highlights some of the weaknesses of current public key techniques and some of the strengths of possible future techniques such as hyperelliptic curves. (I know that Tanja Lange has done a lot of work on those.) TahoeLAFS generates a unique public-private key pair for each mutable file and each directory. (Immutable files don't use public key cryptography at all -- they are secured solely with a stream cipher and secure hashes.) The "file handle" or "capability" to a mutable file or directory contains the actual public key (if it is a read- only capability) or the actual private key (if it is a read-write capability). Therefore some of our most important measures of performance are public key size and keypair generation time. Unfortunately, we blundered into using one of the worst possible public key signature algorithms for such requirements: RSA! Our current project is replacing RSA with ECDSA. TahoeLAFS v2.0 will support ECDSA-based capabilities (in addition to RSA-based ones for backward compatibility). TahoeLAFS also requires more than two levels of privilege. With traditional public/private keys there are exactly two levels: you either know the private key or you don't. We need to have an intermediate level of privilege -- someone who doesn't know the private key but who does know something that not everyone knows. (Everyone knows the public key.) We use these three levels of privilege to create read-write capabilities, read-only capabilities and verify capabilities. (A verify capability gives the ability to check integrity of the ciphertext, which everyone has, because everyone knows the public key). If this doesn't make sense to you then see if my longer explanation in lafs.pdf makes any more sense. Anyway, if it is true that hyperelliptic curves have a security level commensurate with the number of bits in the public key, then hyperelliptic curves with semi-private keys would be the ideal public key crypto signature scheme for TahoeLAFS. Unfortunately, semi- private keys aren't proven secure nor properly peer-reviewed, and hyperelliptic curves aren't well implemented or widely appreciated. Hopefully someday TahoeLAFS v3.0 will support semi-private- hyperelliptic-curve-based capabilities (in addition to RSA and ECDSA for backward compatibility). Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn P.S. Oh, I told a lie in the interests of brevity when I said that file handles contain actual public keys or actual private keys. RSA keys are way too big for that. So instead we go through interesting contortions to make a "surrogate" value which can be used to check the correctness of the RSA key (i.e. the surrogate value is derived from the RSA key by secure hashing) as well as can be used to control access to the RSA key (the RSA key is encrypted with a stream cipher using the surrogate value as the symmetric encryption key). The surrogate value therefore offers the same integrity and access control properties as the RSA key itself (when the user also has access to the encrypted RSA key itself), but it is sufficiently short to embed directly into the file handles a.k.a. capabilities. This too is explained more fully in lafs.pdf. [1] http://allmydata.org/~zooko/lafs.pdf [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/217#comment:50 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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The Meaning of Security
by Mises Daily Article 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1619>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1619 The Meaning of Security by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [Posted September 20, 2004] Let's think about the word security, which has been in the news lately because the Bush administration seeks a major shift in the way funds are spent in Iraq. It wants $3 billion moved from spending on reconstruction to spending on "security." There's a political science lesson in that usage. The reason for the shift, of course, is the obvious unraveling of anything resembling civilization in Iraq: bombings, killings, mini-wars are everywhere. Whole regions of Iraq are lost to US control, and not even Baghdad is holding. Of the $18 billion congress allocated for public works, the Bush administration argues that it makes sense to divert some to bring a measure of public stability to the country. But what are we really talking about when we say "security"? It is money taken from you and me to be spent to force the Iraqi population to submit to the puppet government that rules only because of the US. It is money to pay for more police, weapons, bullets, bombs, spying, arresting, torturing, jailing, maiming, and killing. The theory is that more fear and more fear-inspiring bloodshed will tame the guerrillas and stop them from plotting more bombings, shootings, killings. The money will buy compliance, and pay the bills of those who use force to try to bring it about. Many people would be happy for an end to violence, to be sure, but the primary purpose is the protection of the state from rebels. Submission and compliance: that is what is meant by the term security in the state's lexicon. It is an interesting choice of words. Its use in public life dates at least to the advent of Social Security, a tax scheme that promises to put you on welfare in your old age in exchange for paying 14 percent of your income to support current retirees who constitute the wealthiest demographic slice of the American population. Even in this case, the term security meant compliance, as shown by the tendency of recipients to back ever more redistribution. Now we have the Department of Homeland Security, a gargantuan agency that administers foreign and domestic spying, sends hither swarms of agents to harass us at airports, conduct drills in the event that the government decides that martial law is the only option, and generally suppress any and all signs of insurrection wherever they might appear. Here too the term security means submission, control, compliance, obedience, and stability for the state. Who is this security trying to secure? We are told it is for our own benefit. It is government that makes us secure from terrible threats. And yet, if we look closely, we can see that the main beneficiary of security is the state itself. We all understand this intuitively. Let's say you know that someone is after youan ex-spouse, for exampleand threatens your very life. Would you call the Department of Homeland Security and expect a response? No, the DHS is there is protect the state, as evidence by the comparatively energetic response that a threat to the president's life would elicit. Of course, there is a need and demand for authentic security. We all seek it. We lock our doors, deter criminals with alarms, arm ourselves in case the alarms dont do it, prepare for the worst in the case of natural disaster, save for the future, and construct our professional lives in ways that minimize the chance of disadvantageous turns of events. This is what security means to us in the real world. It is not unexpected that the state would seek the same thing: security not for us but for itself and its employees. The state has a special reason to desire security: its agents are always a minority of the population, funded by eating out their substance, and its rule is always vulnerable. The more control it seeks over a population, the more its agents are wise to watch their backs. Where does that leave the rest of us in our demand for security? In the world of ideas, a vigorous debate is taking place about the extent to which private enterprise is capable of providing security, not only as a supplement but as a full replacement for state-provided security. Advocates of fully privatized security point out that in the real world, most of the security we enjoy is purchased in the private sector. Vast networks of food distribution protect against starvation, private agents guard our homes, insurance companies provide compensation in the event of unexpected misfortune, and the locks and guns and gated communities provided by private enterprise do the bulk of work for our security in the real world. In our community, we spent days preparing for what was expected to be the terrible hurricane Ivan. It didn't do much damage here, but in all the preparations, this much is clear: no one counted on the government to do anything to protect us. And no one counts on the government to do any reconstruction either. We depend entirely on our own efforts, while post-disaster clean up would have been done entirely by private contract. The message of this school of thought is that liberty and security (real security) are not opposites such that one must choose between them. They go together. Liberty is the essence of the free enterprise system that provides for all our material needs, that helps us overcome the uncertainties and contingencies of life. As for the public agencies, how do they act in a crisis? They are reduced to sending out warnings to "stay alert" and otherwise blowing big alarms as if no one can look outside their windows, listen to the radio, or check the web. This is pretty much all Homeland Security does with its laughable system of color-coded alerts. They also order us to leave our homes, search us, and threaten us with arrest if we protest. The truth is that government has less ability to protect us in an emergency than we have to protect ourselves. And despite all the propaganda you hear about brave public workers, the same was true during 9-11. The bottom line is that it represented the greatest failure of state security in a generation. That is the real lesson from that day. Iraq too demonstrates a lesson concerning public and private security. When it is politically feasible, the big mucks in Iraq choose to use private security firms to protect themselves. This was the major undertaking of its mercenaries when the US civilian government was running matters. How ironic that even the state chooses private contractors when it can. When it seeks genuine security, it too buys it on the free market. Americans have something in common with Iraqis: experience has told us that when the government promises to bring us security, it means only that it wants more control over our lives so that the state can enjoy longevity and peace at our expense. The real choice isn't between liberty and security; it is between our security and the state's. ____________________________ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president of the Mises Institute and editor of <http://www.lewrockwell.com>LewRockwell.com. <mailto:rockwell@mises.org>rockwell(a)mises.org. Post comments on the <http://www.mises.org/blog>blog. In response to many requests, it is now possible to set your credit-card contribution to the Mises Institute to be recurring. You can easily set this up on-line with a donation starting at $10 per month. See the <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Membership Page. This is one way to ensure that your support for the Mises Institute is ongoing. <http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1619>[Print Friendly Page] <http://www.mises.org/blog/> <http://www.mises.org/elist.asp>Mises Email List Services <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Join the Mises Institute <http://www.mises.org/store>Mises.org Store <http://www.mises.org/>Home | <http://www.mises.org/about.asp>About | <http://www.mises.org/elist.asp>Email List | <http://www.google.com/u/Mises>Search | <http://www.mises.org/contact.asp>Contact Us | <http://www.mises.org/journals.asp>Periodicals | <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp>Articles | <http://www.mises.org/fun.asp>Games & Fun <http://www.mises.org/StudyGuideDisplay.asp?SubjID=117>EBooks | <http://www.mises.org/scholar.asp>Resources | <http://www.mises.org/catalog.asp>Catalog | <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Contributions | <http://www.mises.org/calendar.asp>Freedom Calendar You are subscribed as: rah(a)ibuc.com Manage <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=prefs&pre=l&e=13958347&pw=1tyvx5to…>your account. Unsubscribe <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=unsub&pre=l&e=13958347&pw=1tyvx5to…>here or send email to <mailto:article-unsub-13958347@mises.biglist.com>this address. --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0

why hyperelliptic curves?
by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Oh, and by the way the way that TahoeLAFS uses public key cryptography highlights some of the weaknesses of current public key techniques and some of the strengths of possible future techniques such as hyperelliptic curves. (I know that Tanja Lange has done a lot of work on those.) TahoeLAFS generates a unique public-private key pair for each mutable file and each directory. (Immutable files don't use public key cryptography at all -- they are secured solely with a stream cipher and secure hashes.) The "file handle" or "capability" to a mutable file or directory contains the actual public key (if it is a read- only capability) or the actual private key (if it is a read-write capability). Therefore some of our most important measures of performance are public key size and keypair generation time. Unfortunately, we blundered into using one of the worst possible public key signature algorithms for such requirements: RSA! Our current project is replacing RSA with ECDSA. TahoeLAFS v2.0 will support ECDSA-based capabilities (in addition to RSA-based ones for backward compatibility). TahoeLAFS also requires more than two levels of privilege. With traditional public/private keys there are exactly two levels: you either know the private key or you don't. We need to have an intermediate level of privilege -- someone who doesn't know the private key but who does know something that not everyone knows. (Everyone knows the public key.) We use these three levels of privilege to create read-write capabilities, read-only capabilities and verify capabilities. (A verify capability gives the ability to check integrity of the ciphertext, which everyone has, because everyone knows the public key). If this doesn't make sense to you then see if my longer explanation in lafs.pdf makes any more sense. Anyway, if it is true that hyperelliptic curves have a security level commensurate with the number of bits in the public key, then hyperelliptic curves with semi-private keys would be the ideal public key crypto signature scheme for TahoeLAFS. Unfortunately, semi- private keys aren't proven secure nor properly peer-reviewed, and hyperelliptic curves aren't well implemented or widely appreciated. Hopefully someday TahoeLAFS v3.0 will support semi-private- hyperelliptic-curve-based capabilities (in addition to RSA and ECDSA for backward compatibility). Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn P.S. Oh, I told a lie in the interests of brevity when I said that file handles contain actual public keys or actual private keys. RSA keys are way too big for that. So instead we go through interesting contortions to make a "surrogate" value which can be used to check the correctness of the RSA key (i.e. the surrogate value is derived from the RSA key by secure hashing) as well as can be used to control access to the RSA key (the RSA key is encrypted with a stream cipher using the surrogate value as the symmetric encryption key). The surrogate value therefore offers the same integrity and access control properties as the RSA key itself (when the user also has access to the encrypted RSA key itself), but it is sufficiently short to embed directly into the file handles a.k.a. capabilities. This too is explained more fully in lafs.pdf. [1] http://allmydata.org/~zooko/lafs.pdf [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/217#comment:50 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

1 0

The Meaning of Security
by Mises Daily Article 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1619>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1619 The Meaning of Security by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [Posted September 20, 2004] Let's think about the word security, which has been in the news lately because the Bush administration seeks a major shift in the way funds are spent in Iraq. It wants $3 billion moved from spending on reconstruction to spending on "security." There's a political science lesson in that usage. The reason for the shift, of course, is the obvious unraveling of anything resembling civilization in Iraq: bombings, killings, mini-wars are everywhere. Whole regions of Iraq are lost to US control, and not even Baghdad is holding. Of the $18 billion congress allocated for public works, the Bush administration argues that it makes sense to divert some to bring a measure of public stability to the country. But what are we really talking about when we say "security"? It is money taken from you and me to be spent to force the Iraqi population to submit to the puppet government that rules only because of the US. It is money to pay for more police, weapons, bullets, bombs, spying, arresting, torturing, jailing, maiming, and killing. The theory is that more fear and more fear-inspiring bloodshed will tame the guerrillas and stop them from plotting more bombings, shootings, killings. The money will buy compliance, and pay the bills of those who use force to try to bring it about. Many people would be happy for an end to violence, to be sure, but the primary purpose is the protection of the state from rebels. Submission and compliance: that is what is meant by the term security in the state's lexicon. It is an interesting choice of words. Its use in public life dates at least to the advent of Social Security, a tax scheme that promises to put you on welfare in your old age in exchange for paying 14 percent of your income to support current retirees who constitute the wealthiest demographic slice of the American population. Even in this case, the term security meant compliance, as shown by the tendency of recipients to back ever more redistribution. Now we have the Department of Homeland Security, a gargantuan agency that administers foreign and domestic spying, sends hither swarms of agents to harass us at airports, conduct drills in the event that the government decides that martial law is the only option, and generally suppress any and all signs of insurrection wherever they might appear. Here too the term security means submission, control, compliance, obedience, and stability for the state. Who is this security trying to secure? We are told it is for our own benefit. It is government that makes us secure from terrible threats. And yet, if we look closely, we can see that the main beneficiary of security is the state itself. We all understand this intuitively. Let's say you know that someone is after youan ex-spouse, for exampleand threatens your very life. Would you call the Department of Homeland Security and expect a response? No, the DHS is there is protect the state, as evidence by the comparatively energetic response that a threat to the president's life would elicit. Of course, there is a need and demand for authentic security. We all seek it. We lock our doors, deter criminals with alarms, arm ourselves in case the alarms dont do it, prepare for the worst in the case of natural disaster, save for the future, and construct our professional lives in ways that minimize the chance of disadvantageous turns of events. This is what security means to us in the real world. It is not unexpected that the state would seek the same thing: security not for us but for itself and its employees. The state has a special reason to desire security: its agents are always a minority of the population, funded by eating out their substance, and its rule is always vulnerable. The more control it seeks over a population, the more its agents are wise to watch their backs. Where does that leave the rest of us in our demand for security? In the world of ideas, a vigorous debate is taking place about the extent to which private enterprise is capable of providing security, not only as a supplement but as a full replacement for state-provided security. Advocates of fully privatized security point out that in the real world, most of the security we enjoy is purchased in the private sector. Vast networks of food distribution protect against starvation, private agents guard our homes, insurance companies provide compensation in the event of unexpected misfortune, and the locks and guns and gated communities provided by private enterprise do the bulk of work for our security in the real world. In our community, we spent days preparing for what was expected to be the terrible hurricane Ivan. It didn't do much damage here, but in all the preparations, this much is clear: no one counted on the government to do anything to protect us. And no one counts on the government to do any reconstruction either. We depend entirely on our own efforts, while post-disaster clean up would have been done entirely by private contract. The message of this school of thought is that liberty and security (real security) are not opposites such that one must choose between them. They go together. Liberty is the essence of the free enterprise system that provides for all our material needs, that helps us overcome the uncertainties and contingencies of life. As for the public agencies, how do they act in a crisis? They are reduced to sending out warnings to "stay alert" and otherwise blowing big alarms as if no one can look outside their windows, listen to the radio, or check the web. This is pretty much all Homeland Security does with its laughable system of color-coded alerts. They also order us to leave our homes, search us, and threaten us with arrest if we protest. The truth is that government has less ability to protect us in an emergency than we have to protect ourselves. And despite all the propaganda you hear about brave public workers, the same was true during 9-11. The bottom line is that it represented the greatest failure of state security in a generation. That is the real lesson from that day. Iraq too demonstrates a lesson concerning public and private security. When it is politically feasible, the big mucks in Iraq choose to use private security firms to protect themselves. This was the major undertaking of its mercenaries when the US civilian government was running matters. How ironic that even the state chooses private contractors when it can. When it seeks genuine security, it too buys it on the free market. Americans have something in common with Iraqis: experience has told us that when the government promises to bring us security, it means only that it wants more control over our lives so that the state can enjoy longevity and peace at our expense. The real choice isn't between liberty and security; it is between our security and the state's. ____________________________ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president of the Mises Institute and editor of <http://www.lewrockwell.com>LewRockwell.com. <mailto:rockwell@mises.org>rockwell(a)mises.org. Post comments on the <http://www.mises.org/blog>blog. In response to many requests, it is now possible to set your credit-card contribution to the Mises Institute to be recurring. You can easily set this up on-line with a donation starting at $10 per month. See the <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Membership Page. This is one way to ensure that your support for the Mises Institute is ongoing. <http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1619>[Print Friendly Page] <http://www.mises.org/blog/> <http://www.mises.org/elist.asp>Mises Email List Services <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Join the Mises Institute <http://www.mises.org/store>Mises.org Store <http://www.mises.org/>Home | <http://www.mises.org/about.asp>About | <http://www.mises.org/elist.asp>Email List | <http://www.google.com/u/Mises>Search | <http://www.mises.org/contact.asp>Contact Us | <http://www.mises.org/journals.asp>Periodicals | <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp>Articles | <http://www.mises.org/fun.asp>Games & Fun <http://www.mises.org/StudyGuideDisplay.asp?SubjID=117>EBooks | <http://www.mises.org/scholar.asp>Resources | <http://www.mises.org/catalog.asp>Catalog | <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Contributions | <http://www.mises.org/calendar.asp>Freedom Calendar You are subscribed as: rah(a)ibuc.com Manage <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=prefs&pre=l&e=13958347&pw=1tyvx5to…>your account. Unsubscribe <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=unsub&pre=l&e=13958347&pw=1tyvx5to…>here or send email to <mailto:article-unsub-13958347@mises.biglist.com>this address. --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0