At 09:36 -0700 6/9/97, Alan wrote:

On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

Actually, Bell's plan was simply the ultimate adolescent revenge fantasy. Government thugs got your goat (or your computers, your car, your guns?) Wipe them out. Supermarket clerk taking too long? Rub her out. Minivan cut you off on the way to work? Kill them off.

This is the best description of AP so far. Jim had about as much chance of implementing it as most adolescent fantasies. (At least he was not posting about porn fantasies involving the Brady Bunch meets Gilligan's Island or somesuch...)

This is a draft of what I wrote in my Internet Underground article: If nothing else, Bell's plan was inventive: few people like the IRS, but even fewer have ever concocted a way to eliminate it. In fact, Bell had devised the ultimate revenge fantasy. Upset at demanding creditors, former lovers, or jackbooted thugs? The 38-year old computer engineer described how you could find someone willing to kill them -- for the right price. It was sexy, too. Bell's plan relied on the Internet, anonymous remailers, untraceable digital cash, and unbreakable public-key encryption. He even gave it a catchy name: Assassination Politics. [...] Bell was most interested in talking up Assassination Politics and predicting how it would eventually blossom. He had just published an op-ed in a local newspaper saying "the whole corrupt system" could be stopped. "Whatever my idea is, it's not silly. There are a lot of adjectives you can use, but not silly," he told me. "I feel that the mere fact of having such a debate will cause people to realize that they no longer have to tolerate the governments they previously had to tolerate. At that point I think politicians will slink away like they did in eastern Europe in 1989. They'll have lost the war." He told me why he became convinced that the government needed to be lopped off at the knees. Bell's epiphany came after he ordered a chemical from a supply firm and was arrested when he failed to follow EPA regulations. "That radicalized me," he said. "That pissed me off. I figured I'd get back at them by taking down their entire system. That's how I'd do it."' Moral issues aside, one of the problems plaguing Bell's scheme is that it's not limited to eliminating "government thugs who violate your rights," as he likes to describe it. If it existed, anyone with some spare change could wipe out a nosy neighbor or even an irritating grocery store clerk. After I pointed this out to Bell on the phone, he fired email back a few days later saying, "Assuming a functioning Assassination Politics system, nothing stops you from contributing to my death." He suggested that maybe assassins would develop scruples: "You'd be able to purchase deaths of unworthy people, but it might be only at a dramatically higher price. Doable but not particularly economical." -Declan ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> wrote: Moral issues aside, one of the problems plaguing Bell's scheme is that it's not limited to eliminating "government thugs who violate your rights," as he likes to describe it. If it existed, anyone with some spare change could wipe out a nosy neighbor or even an irritating grocery store clerk. Not likely, but for another reason. Assuming you had the money to take out your neighbor, it's going to be fairly obvious who did it. (How many neighbors do you have? Pretty short list of suspects.) Also, killing some nobody in a grocery store is more prone to error, and less widely witnessed, and therefore harder to collect payment on, thus less profitable. The possibility of Microsoft killing their competition's engineers is somewhat more realistic, although lately they've been hiring a lot of them instead, so maybe they don't want to kill them. :)

At 9:34 AM -0700 6/10/97, Alan wrote:

On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Anonymous wrote:

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The possibility of Microsoft killing their competition's engineers is somewhat more realistic, although lately they've been hiring a lot of them instead, so maybe they don't want to kill them. :)

"Ve have veys ov making you vork for us!"

Adds a new twist to hiring practices... Work for us or not at all.

"Microsoft Mach Frie!"

I don't think MS is using the Mach kernel... Maybe you meant "Microsoft macht frei!" Or "McDonald's Makes Fries!" Or, speaking of the Mach kernel, Kernel Jerry Sanders finger-lickin' good tasty bytes. --Klaus! von Future Prime There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

At 4:02 AM -0700 6/10/97, Anonymous wrote:

Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> wrote:

Moral issues aside, one of the problems plaguing Bell's scheme is that it's not limited to eliminating "government thugs who violate your rights," as he likes to describe it. If it existed, anyone with some spare change could wipe out a nosy neighbor or even an irritating grocery store clerk.

Not likely, but for another reason. Assuming you had the money to take out your neighbor, it's going to be fairly obvious who did it. (How many neighbors do you have? Pretty short list of suspects.)

Nonsense. The mechanisms for arranging the hit are untraceable. Thus, it hardly matters who the "suspects" are, as nothing is provable. (Assuming no implicating ephemera are left lying around on disk drives....) By the way, this is not really Bell's "assassination politics," this is just anonymous contract killings, known about to some of us since Chaum's work was first published...cf. my own "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988. I may sound touchy on this issue, but I'm seeing more and more articles here and relayed from outside essentially giving Bell the credit for inventing these kinds of markets, when in fact he's a relative latecomer. --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Tim May wrote:

By the way, this is not really Bell's "assassination politics," this is just anonymous contract killings, known about to some of us since Chaum's work was first published...cf. my own "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988.

I may sound touchy on this issue, but I'm seeing more and more articles here and relayed from outside essentially giving Bell the credit for inventing these kinds of markets, when in fact he's a relative latecomer.

I think the novelty of Bell's scheme is that it allows assassination payments to be pooled from a large number of anonymous payers without explicit coordination (i.e., the payers do not have to communicate with each other to work out a contract, etc.). For killing a neighbor it doesn't improve upon the simple untraceable contract, but it can make a big difference when the target has many enemies (Bell gave politicians as an example). Now in light of the fact that when the target has many enemies the assassination becomes a non-excludable public good, it is almost certain that the scheme cannot actually work in practice. All of the potential payers would rather free-ride and let others pay, so the public good ends up not being "produced".

Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:

TCM

...

Nonsense. The mechanisms for arranging the hit are untraceable. Thus, it hardly matters who the "suspects" are, as nothing is provable. (Assuming no implicating ephemera are left lying around on disk drives....)

By the way, this is not really Bell's "assassination politics," this is just anonymous contract killings, known about to some of us since Chaum's work was first published...cf. my own "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988.

I may sound touchy on this issue, but I'm seeing more and more articles here and relayed from outside essentially giving Bell the credit for inventing these kinds of markets, when in fact he's a relative latecomer.

why be bashful, timmy? go ahead and say it. "I invented the concept of anonymous contract killings via cyberspace, and I'm quite proud of this, and it annoys me when people don't give me proper credit"

And an incredible insight it was, also! Imagine the mind it took to combine the notion of anonymity on the net with contract killings. One boggles at the creativity, the depth, the sheer GENIUS. We shouldn't worry too much about his petty desire to be remembered for his discoveries. Of course, Bell did ADD a significant wrinkle, and deserves credit for his contributions. May and Bell. Names that will be remembered. TruthMonger

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Bill Stewart wrote:

At 05:39 PM 6/10/97 -0700, Wei Dai wrote:

...

I think the novelty of Bell's scheme is that it allows assassination payments to be pooled from a large number of anonymous payers without explicit coordination (i.e., the payers do not have to communicate with each other to work out a contract, etc.).

That's not the novel part - in addition to anonymous contract killings, it's also easy to run an anonymous fund that _claims_ it will use any donations of digicash encrypted to the fund's public key for assassinating the designated target. In both that approach, and Bell's, there's still the reputation problem of making sure the person collecting the money really does pay off the killer.

I don't think this is much of a problem. As long as someone is found dead prematurely, the people who offered money for the assassination got their wish. Whether or not it goes to the real killer is irrelevant. From the killer's point of view, the problem of whether or not he will get his payment is easily solved: Both parties could mutually agree to use an escrow service to take care of releasing or retaining the money. The service wouldn't have to be anonymously run and would remain ignorant of the uses of its service The payer would put up a certain amount of money either equal to, greater than, or less than the cost of the killing depending on the relative reputations of the payer and payee. If the payee doesn't claim the money after x number of days, it gets returned to the payer. If the payee authorizes the release of the money to the payee and the payee claims it, it goes to the payee. And if only one authorizes the release of the money to the payee, it remains with the escrow service. This prevents the payer from ripping off the payee. The only flaw is that the payee could claim the money but the payer could not authorize its release. It's a great way to cheat someone out of a large amount of money, but it doesn't do the cheater any good, because he won't be able to benefit from it (unless the cheater happens to be the escrow agent).

What's novel about Bell's version (and I don't know whether it originate with him or not) is that it provides a cyberspace-only mechanism for the assassin to demonstrate to the payer that he's the one who did the job and isn't some wannabe claiming to have done it to collect the cash. (like the wannabes who called newspapers claiming to have been the World Trade Center bombers, etc.) There are alternatives, like posting a photo of the corpse to a time-stamping service and then to Usenet, though this adds some risk to the assassination, and is less useful for public killings (e.g. if the President gets shot, and there's a well-known address for the assassination pool, the White House Press Corps may try to get their photographs into the pool before sending them to Reuters and, umm, AP.)

Bell's idea was basically that demonstrating foreknowledge of the killing was adequete proof that the person demonstrating this knowledge was the assassin. This generalization can be used for anonymous contract assassinations, also. The assassin could give vague information to the payer such as the method of killing, caliber of bullet used, or the week that the killing is to take place. In fact, anonymous contracts could be viewed as the same thing as AP, except that anonymous assassination contracts don't try to pretend it's just about betting on someone's death. Mark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBM58UBCzIPc7jvyFpAQGKAQf6A9frjblw/ecGYZNxoaU4/KKFUbcYxqGx YZeOJnIpG0cwuOEwiHRZqxZQy2oLV5cL18nfuXbyAoYY4a+voH0KQ+f94i7kJWKd 7pJrL0e+Sm6yT7jnFS4les5YBFVwgumau54BnLC3Th37F+v0slsCIKpkso28tbLW A1mbft6G85RV080yxiat3Ee6dDmfQ33bJvh1/kNmluj+2yaX175LXMs4FS0xLO3G 87nZ4YmHf1KiQPhNEYmnIdVd+MmEnHN+aw+I4G654AEuRoHKQhoeIrdPCNuQJZv0 02dhYiEfqDNxx2GVDqovoxqHLAwuJAPJ5D2jU0HWRiu9fLzCno1Qhw== =0nkq -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----