Surely most of you know of my interest in enhancing liberty and freedom through strong crypto. (The many newcomers to the list in the wake of the Netscape news may not, but take my word for it...) And I have clearly indicated that many of the implications of strong crypto, anonymous remailers, untraceable digital money, data havens, and so on, will severely undermine many programs that some people think are useful and good. We avoid discussing these issues so as to avoid ideological flame wars, but the effects are still there. In the view of some of us, strong crypto and the swirl of ideas called "crypto anarchy" will mean that the transactions people enter into are the ones they wish to enter into. No more "affirmative action," no more transfer payments to the indigent and lazy (or to anyone else, except by personal choice), no more quotas, no more workplace rules (at least in cyberspace). Transnationalism, regulatory arbitrage, etc. (Granted, this Cyper-Millenium may not arrive by the time the real millenium arrives, and the precise form is unclear. But there is little doubt that the strong crypto most of us advocate will strongly advance the "libertarian" agenda, and will have very negative effects on "traditional liberalism" and law-based "social justice" policies. My personal view is that an ever-shrinking elite (20%, then 10%, then 2%, ...) will dominate high-value transactions, with the mass of humanity offering little or nothing worth buying. Just my view.) But Lucky Green has touched on some items I feel dutybound to comment on: At 8:19 PM 10/8/95, Lucky Green wrote:
Let me illustrate this with an example. During my visit to Dachau Concentration Camp, I saw original lab notebooks of experiments designed to increase the survial rate of pilots downed above the cold waters of the North Sea. A noble cause.
The notebooks contained pages upon pages of tables listing survial times vs. water temperature, the data gained by dropping subjects into a tub containing water of a defined temperature.
There are places and countries which are attempting to outlaw the _use_ of these Nazi medical experiments. The implication: Nazi medical data will be one of the first sorts of information to go into Cypherpunk data havens. Maybe not put there by Lucky, maybe not even by me (though I see nothing wrong with using the data...the Jews are dead, and not using the data does not bring them back, so....). People need to at least think about what our anonymous remailers and data havens are likely to involve. Consider some entries: - results of Japanese medical research on Chinese captives in Manchuria (apparently the experiments were extensive, and American doctors gained access after the war...the experiments gave us our first lead on biological warfare, as the Japanese had exposed a lot of captives to various toxins and biological agents) - results of experiments on live subjects in Third World nations (right now it is "uneconomical" to do much of this, because of the lack of a market for the data) - data on RU-486 abortifacients and similar drugs, and at least _some_ people think abortion is murder. (I hold to the notion that a child can be killed up to the time he is christened, or given a name. This gives from several days to several weeks (or even longer, in some cultures) to decide if the newly-born organism is actually human or not. This has no crypto relevance, except to indicate that many of us hold views considered extreme to others....we're not all just "Pro Choice" in the liberal sense.) - better methods of killing people (not just the pseudo-science in the "How to Kill People" sorts of books that Loompanics and Paladin sell, but a real "information market") - "How to Make Anthrax Bacillus in Your Basement," "Nuclear Triggers," etc. In the next 10 years, expect a couple of "controversial" documents to appear on anonymous sites. In the next 10 years after that, expect an explosion of information. (I could be wrong...I'm trying not to sound optimistic about it happening too soon.)
I them saw more tables of the effects of various methods investigated to revive hypothermia victims who were near death. One of the treatments under investigation was dropping the patient into boiling water. Surely this type of research falls under the category of evil.
Does anyone have a URL for these results?
Ponder this,
Indeed. And crypto anarchy will make this information liquid and widely available, perhaps even stimulating the production of even more such data by various means. ("Evil Hypothetical": The mostly-doomed orphaned street urchins of Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City are grabbed off the street, subjected to various experiments, and the results sold on anonymous information markets....I could even make a kind of argument that since they're going to die anyone, why not get some useful data out of them. And why not subject prisoners facing execution to various experiments? Yes, both paths have problems. Doesn't mean someone won't meet market needs this way, though.) Oh, and did I mention the markets for organ transplants? Anonymous matching of recipient needs could be done, with the only real world contact being the arrangement for the patient to fly to a hospital in Burma or Singapore. The harvesting of organs from the ultra-poor? (The topic of organ-legging has been well-covered by dystopian SF, including works by Niven. Information markets add a new and intriguing dimension.) --Tim May, who will pay $35,000 for accurate mortality studies on at least 20 subjects of Iboviroxinase-D. Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."