In my essay, "Assassination Politics," I pointed out that it would be relatively easy to deter such official-type actions if enough of us simply said, "NO!" and denominated it in terms of dollars and cents. After all, with four million Compuserve users, if they each were willing to donate a penny to see this latter-day Fuhrer dead, that would be $40,000. (Pardon me if I don't translate this into marks and other currencies.)

In practice, of course, if such a system were in place, it is highly unlikely that he would have even dared try to put pressure on Compuserve, and Compuserve wouldn't have dared respond cooperatively to such outrageous influence.

In reality, four million compuserve users would not donate a penny each. It is likely that a few hundred people who felt strongly about the cause (and didn't mind a little bloodshed) might be willing to put up funds in amounts of around $20. Of course nobody would want to advertise under their real name that they have a contract out on some gummint agent. This would require the existance of a "Murder, Inc." as an escrow agent for the money. (There would likely be several such agents as it it unlikely people would trust just one.) Each person would give the escrow agent their contribution toward the elimination of the gummint troublemaker. Anyone who was willing to do the hit could post an encrypted claim, in advance, stating the time and date or method he plans to use, and where to send payment. Once the act was done, the hitman posts the decryption key so that everyone can see that he did it, and he collects the money. If after some reasonable amount of time, nobody takes out the gubmint asswipe, then the escrow agent returns all the money. It's quite feasable, and not especially difficult. The hardest thing is convincing people that the escrow agent is trustworthy, and to convince people that they really want to pay to have someone murdered. There is something a little chilling about that thought... On the other hand, the US government seems to feel that it's okay to kill people if they can get away with it (Ruby Ridge, Waco, that guy in California (forgot his name) who got shot on his ranch over bogus drug charges, etc.) So although murder is a Bad Thing(tm), the gubmint has set a very bad precedent in making it look "okay". Hence it becomes "okay" for people to do the same to them (for example the recent Oklahoma incident). It's okay for the government to randomly pick on innocent people to make a statement, hence it becomes okay to derail random trains to make a statement. (For the record, I am absolutely not defending what those people did to that Amtrak train in Arizona, just pointing out the psycology of it. If you're mad at the government then fucking kill some government people - What the hell did the amtrak passengers do to you?) Unfortunately it seems to be becoming okay to pick on random people to make an unrelated point (or just boost your ego) The government is using this tactic too, for example pick on a few porno collectors to demonstrate your "authority" in cyberspace. Same thing with picking on random gun owners to make a statement against RKBA. So maybe it will become popular to kill a random politician (or anyone) just to make a statement against the government. This is turning into a rant. I'll shut up now.