On Wed, 25 Sep 1996, jim bell wrote:
At 11:50 PM 9/24/96 -0400, Brian Davis wrote:
... Amen to that. Add that at least one lawyer (and former prosecutor) on the list is confident that successful prosecutions will ensue is AP ever gets off the ground.
I don't doubt that there will be harassment. (you can't deny that charges would be brought even if it is tacitly agreed that no crime has been committed; "the harassment-value" of such a prosecution would be desired even if there is ultimately an acquittal.) AP will resemble, more than anything, gambling. While gambling is illegal in some areas, it is quite legal in others and there is no reason to believe that locales can't be found in which an AP system could operate legally.
By "successful prosecutions" I mean convictions. You can call a cow a duck, but it's still a cow.
Make American laws apply everywhere? That'll be hard to justify, unless you
You obviously are unfamiliar with the established concept of extraterritorial jurisdiction.
want to unleash a world where an all people can be subject simultaneously to the laws of EVERY country, should they choose to enforce them! Would you like to be arrested in Red China for something you said years earlier in America about their leadership?
And are you ignoring the fact that the intentional isolation of one ^^^^^^^^^^^ Are you ignoring the principle of "willful blindness"?
participant from the knowledge of the actions and even the identity of the others makes opportunities for prosecution on "conspiracy" charges mighty slim. And since AP can operate across traditional jurisdictional
I'm curious as to your qualifications to make the "mighty slim" judgment ...
boundaries, you're going to have to explain how you can prosecute Person A in Country B for giving a donation to an organization in Country C, to be paid to a person D in country E for correctly predicting the death of person F in country G, particularly when none of the identities of these people or countries can be easily known given a well-crafted cryptographic and message-routing system.
Be glad too. How much can you afford?
Further, as you probably know as well as any, in order (at least, supposedly!) to get a conviction you need to prove "mens rea," or "guilty mind," and I suggest that none of the more passive participants in the AP system have that. (The ones who DON'T pick up a gun, knife, bomb, poison, etc.) Sure, they are aware that somewhere, sometime, somebody _may_ commit a crime in order to collect a lottery, but they don't know who, what, when, where, or how this will occur, if at all. (either before or after the fact!) In fact, since it is possible for a target to collect the reward himself (to be directed toward his designee, obviously) by committing suicide and "predicting" it, it isn't certain to the other participants that there has even been any sort of crime committed!
Moo moo.*
Based on the mens rea requirement, I propose that there is plenty of room for most of the participants to reasonably claim that they are guilty of no crime. They have carefully shielded themselves and others from any guilty knowledge, and presumably they are entitled to protect themselves in this way. Morally, you could argue that these people are countenancing something nasty, in the same sense that somebody could equally well argue that if you buy a cheap shirt in Walmart you're partly responsible for sweatshop labor in El Salvador. True, I suppose, but moral guilt does not always translate into legal guilt.
Moo moo.*
And yes, I've read Jim Bell's manifesto. The fact that no lawyer has dissected it from a legal standpoint has been used by Mr. Bell as support for the propostion that it is legal.
I suggest that there is a greater likelihood that the "powers that be" will just abandon all pretense of legality, and attempt to strike at the participants if they can find them without benefit of any sort of trial. This is a more plausible conclusion, because it cuts through all of the legal difficulties which would hinder prosecution. In effect, a low-level undeclared war.
I disagree that that will be the response, but you should be willing to allow one group of people to fight fire with fire. EBD
Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com
* Calling a cow a duck doesn't make it one.