Variola wrote...
Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always be defeated by cranking up the police state a notch. This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems. This is why there are carnivore boxen aplenty. The knurls on the police-state knob are getting worn, it is cranked up so frequently now.
Useful resistance comes from asymmetric physical feedback such as experienced in Lebanon, S. Arabia, off the coast of Yemen, in a few embassies somewhere in africa, in the trains of Madrid, Okla city, and some degenerate US east coast cities a few years back, the latter indicating that "geographically removed" is less important, and the only incident that Joe Voter is likely to remember. Until the next one, of course; Joe's buffer is not terribly capacious.
Well, perhaps. Then again, consider though primordial blacknet systems currently labeled P2P. They don't currently present a big problem to Group-of-Bandits X, but it does cause some of their bigger enablers (ie, the record industry) to bitch a bit. As a result, they are turning up the pressure slowly, but only just fast enough for such systems to proliferate while evolving a nice protective coating (despite all the recent lawsuits). By the time these systems represent a destabilising influence (ie, you can pay someone for a file over anonymous swarmed P2P) it'll be too late. In short, Group-of-Bandits X is a group of bandits precisely because they couldn't survive otherwise...ie, they're not smart enough. They'll eventually go the way of the dodo, though they can prolong their exodus somewhat through drastic means. The OBL route, however, does seem to have its merits and is historically quite effective (Algeria, Iraq...). A little too messy for my tastes, however, and blowing up the building I work in won't be worth the number of virgins I'd have coming to me. -TD