At 1:51 PM -0500 4/13/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
Even though I'm PLUNKED, and he is currently on a lawyer-hate rampage...
Tim May said:
For those of you who don't fully appreciate what I am getting at, being newcomers, let me move away from such banalities as "kiddie porn" market--though this is a real market which any truly untraceable tools will facilitate, obviously--and focus instead on the "credit rating market."
Ah, yes. The (illicit) "credit rating market."
If you claim to know about it, how do you actually know so _little_ about it? Yes, I have your post filtered into my Trash folder. Sometimes I look, sometimes I don't. For someone who presumably graduated from a real law school and passes a real bar exam, you have a demonstrated tendency to ramble and just "ditz" your way through arguments. Do you ever write in complete sentences, in complete paragraphs, arguing complete points?
Thank you for the "Dick & Jane" version. I may not be the smartest kid in the class, but I am going to skip a grade, and address the value proposition Mr. May is *really* talking about, although with a twist of legitimacy:
Found in my inbox: ========================
1. MERCHANT INFORMATION BANKING - "Open Source Intelligence Haven" STEELE: http://www.oss.net/infoMerchantBank.html
"A twist of legitimacy"? Some kind of appeal to authority/ As it happens, I've known Robert Steele since his first got invited to the Hackers Conference...must have been around 1993-4 or so. Talked to him at length. Several other list members know him, too. He's been pushing this Del Torto-esque "hackers will be our real agents" project for a while. Nothing wrong with the "open intelligence" idea...except that it's not his idea. The intelligence agencies of the world have been vacuum sweeping the Net since its earliest days. I don't mean in some paranoid sense, but in the sense of what is readily known. The "Analyst" project at the CIA, for example, has been going on since at least the early 80s, monitoring publically visible (and perhaps less visible stuff gotten from the NSA, DIA, NRO, etc.) material. We knew by 1993 that the NSA and CIA had folks reading our list...I talked to a couple of these readers at the Hackers Conference in Lake Tahoe and at a conference at Asilomar. "Open source intelligence" is just his buzz phrase for "observe what's happening."
Steele, March 23 Letter to President: http://www.oss.net/Papers/white/LettertothePresident.doc)
Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers of sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la BlackNet) is an important goal.
Agora, hm.
Learn our terms as we learn your terms.
I find open source information banking/trading/merchant (whatever) systems problematic propositions, beyond anonymous cash, especially viewed in light of this hypothetical on a distributed open source intelligence haven-brokerage.
i.e. How do you set yourself up as an anonymous, neutral, info-Switzerland? ...How will you obtain critical mass and critical trust? ...Where is your back-door, infosec accountability if you are nothing but digital wind? ...How do you set up a buy-sell marketplace for intelligence -- the value of which cannot be determined prior to analysis, even where there is a robust reputation capital metric in place? ...How do you enforce polycentric merchant society rules in the context of an anonymous transactional system? ...Requirements for admission? ...Quality control? Reputational systems?...What is your post-transactional enforcement mechanism? ...MUST you have anon cash? (Just lotsa questions.)
Read the hundreds of articles on these matters. Read "The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State," by Bruce Benson. Read David Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," and his other books. Read... The point is, Aimee, _read the background material_. Then you can ask specific questions, instead of just throwing a dozen or two dozen points of confusion you have against the wall and asking me to make it all clear to you. As it is, you have yet to contribute anything interesting, at least that I have seen. I admit I don't see most of your contributions these days, but the lack of follow-up from others tells me that others are also not finding much of substance. Given that you write in a confusing, ditzy way, perhaps they just can't extract the nuggets from the mud. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns