An anonymous person quoted a Nando.net news story
ROME (May 23, 1997 3:43 p.m. EDT) - Italy on Friday mourned the judge whose ground-breaking Mafia investigations led to his murder five years ago. .... http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/052397/world14_3679.html
There are some similarities between Mafia and CIA assassinations and the kinds of AP that will become possible with widespread truely anonymous communications and payment mechanisms, but also a lot of differences. First of all, very few people think Mafia assassinations are a good idea :-) On the other hand, in both cases, some good guys will get unfairly murdered, as well as bad guys, innocent bystanders, and clueless henchpersons, and in both cases there will be a chilling effect on the target population. Both systems depend on anonymity and webs of trust. With remailers, you're trusting the remailer operator not to rat on you, but you can chain several independent remailers together and be fairly secure. With Mafia assassinations, Don Vito doesn't usually call a hit man directly - he expresses to one of his trusted lieutenants that Big Paul has been a real irritant to him lately and that something substantial needs to be done about it. And maybe the lieutenant arranges something himself, or maybe he talks to a guy who doesn't do "work", but has a friend who does. You've got plausible deniability for the guys on top, and they've got really strong personal trust in the anonymity of their communications, because not only are there family relationships going back generations, and a code of honor that says you don't rat on your friends, but it's backed up by the fact that everybody you're dealing with knows your True Name and if you double-cross them your life won't be worth the crabgrass growing on the unmarked graves where your various body parts will end up when they're done with you :-) One of the big differences is that the overhead required to maintain a Mafia infrastructure is substantial - it's necessary for a high-class full-time pre-information-age criminal organization to do something like that, but it's also something that's mainly affordable only by mafias, governments, and similar organizations that have lots of money and time to waste. AP in a remailer environment needs perhaps less infrastructure, and it's infrastructure that's worth developing anyway for other reasons - but as a side effect it lets the ordinary person afford to have unpopular people killed off just like the Big Players can. It's still a government-like activity, just more decentralized, and without the pretense of legitimacy. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)