Why BlackNet *IS* a Data Haven
Jim McCoy and Larry Dettweiler have, in their own ways, raised objections to my characterization of BlackNet (and that class of mechanisms) as a distributed, untraceable, robust "data haven." Without splitting too many semantic hairs about the precise definition of "data haven," let me examine some ways in which BlackNet behaves identically to a conventional data haven. Imagine a piece of data has been outlawed in some jurisdiction. For simplicity, imagine this to be a book, a text. Let's give it a name, "The Necronomicon." This "Necronomicon" is contraband, illegal, forbidden, banned, on The Index in many countries, including the Vatican and the United States. (This is just an example. Replace "Necronomicon" with "child porn" for a more realistic, if distasteful to many, example.) The classical, Sterling-style "data haven" would have it that this piece of data, this book, is stored and is available (perhaps for a price) in a physical site. Maybe Anguilla (thought this is appearing less and less likely), maybe "The Raft," maybe an orbiting DeathStar, maybe a weather balloon drifting in the jet stream... The classical data haven is closely identified with "place." To many people, they naturally assume "data haven" = a haven for data, a "harbor" (same IE root as haven) = a physical place. But is "place" important? Consider someone in the United States who wants a copy of the Necronomicon. He can't get it locally, as it is banned. He can try dialing-in or connecting to a country where it is not banned, but this introduces risks (as with those who download child porn, arrrange to have it shipped to them, etc.). (And the physical jurisdictions which carrry the Necronomicon, or child porn, or Church of Scientology secrets, etc., will likely be under pressure to limit or deny access.) Cryptography offers another way, as it does in so many other areas. A person in the U.S. seeking the Necronomicon posts a message to BlackNet (or any similar forum, using the same methods) asking for a copy of it, or offering to pay for it. (Whether the information is free or for a fee is not central to the idea.) This request is, of course, untraceable. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a copy of this banned material on his or her private machines may see this request and respond, either giving the material away, or negotiating a fee. (As I said before, the absence of a robust digital cash system, bidirectionally untraceable, is a known limitation of all such systems.) Thus, it is as if there is a "virtual data haven" (tm), or a "virtual library," for banned/controversial/etc. materials. Anyone may "check out" materials by submitting requests (and perhaps paying a fee). The source of the materials is, of course, unknown. The receiver of the materials if, of course, unknown. I call this at least as functional as a "physical data haven," where someone might physically travel to Anguilla, say, to buy a copy of the Necronomicon... ...and a whole lot more convenient. This is, then, my vision of a "distributed, robust, untraceable data haven." It's a data haven. And it exists, or at least there are exemplars of it. It's lacking robust digital money, to keep the transactions untraceable, but it's here. The Church of Scientology documents essentially exist at this virtual data haven site. Think about it. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- True, for controversial political and artistic materials whose authors/distributors have an interest in disseminating. However, with neither a government to enforce contracts nor an identifiable location/identity that can be used for the private enforcement of, ahem, contracts, the barrier to entry for anonymous markets in real commercial products seems rather high. How are buyers and sellers to trust each other? How do you build reputation capital from zero? Once you have reputation, transaction costs should be pretty low, but building it? If what you're selling is a physical product, you're ultimately going to have a location. If what you're selling is information, how do you demonstrate the worth and trustworthiness of your data without distributing it? And once you have distributed it, what's to stop a "counterfeiter" from redistributing it, stealing your profits before you have had a chance to establish your reputation capital as the preferred source? I don't see anonymous digital cash as the tightest bottleneck. Distributed trust in an anonymous marketplace seems more difficult. - -rich -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBMhftl5NcNyVVy0jxAQFJNQH/XaNdrku42unvP56Dku+QhPwWged5Qbdw 9wLcrwuSbBLeJg0lgsjN33oXMTTQUWV7JtY8hEhh0zS7WuWcEi5S8A== =oiuA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
1st: apologies to Jim Bell for misquoting him. I think I meant Jim Mccoy.
Without splitting too many semantic hairs about the precise definition of "data haven," let me examine some ways in which BlackNet behaves identically to a conventional data haven.
naw, let's split some semantic hairs. <g> I am willing to agree in principle that blacknet is *similar* to a data haven, as I wrote in my response. it involves similar ideas. however, in your *original* Blacknet announcement it was explicitly portrayed to be essentially an *intelligence*service*. I agree that you could have modified this announcement to pretend that you are also providing "data haven" type services, but you didn't focus on this angle, and I object to you going back and claiming you had some priority on this idea via Blacknet (at least that's what you seem to be doing) when you really did not. of course you have been discussing data haven ideas for about as long as anybody here, and may even have some degree of precedence in inventing aspects of the idea, but I don't think it's fully legitimate to suggest that your blacknet gedanken promoted the concept of a data haven, or even contained it. you neglect key points that I and others are raising. raw data is not the same as intelligence-- it is far different. with raw data you want a mechanism that has the reliability/fidelity and access time of a hard drive, essentially. you want something that doesn't alter or reformulate data-- something the Blacknet announcement never promised at all, and in fact it was clearly implying that the service would be involved in sorting out what data to sell to whom and presumably repackaging it, so to speak. sending requests to blacknet, "can you please send me a copy of [x]" does not fit my idea of a hard drive type request. a data haven and a blacknet intelligence operation share some *similarities* but in principle there would be some vastly different implementation issues for one or the other. again, *in*theory* you could use blacknet for a data haven type arrangement. a company that provided both would make a lot of sense as far as consolodating similar functions. however to claim that you were promoting the idea of a data haven with the initial announcement of blacknet, that's just not correct imho. I'd call that Blacknet II: the Sequel which you recently cooked up.
I call this at least as functional as a "physical data haven," where someone might physically travel to Anguilla, say, to buy a copy of the Necronomicon...
again, your original blacknet service made no guarantee whatsoever about providing data back to someone who sent it in, in unaltered form, something that would be key to a data haven. in fact it implied that the people who sent in the data wouldn't be interested in getting it back--they would only want the cash for its informational value to other buyers. you do however point out that data havens in which material sent in by some people and retrieved by others would tend to be another application. (when I think of data haven I think of person [x] submitting material in secret, and then person [x] downloading it or making it available to others based on his own decision. blacknet was explicitly making the decision of availability on its own) in fact this is a very important attribute you are glossing over with your rather slippery exposition. let's say I submit some secret data to Blacknet, and I want a guarantee they are not going to sell it to other people, even if it is encrypted by me. (otherwise they might sell it to someone who wants to break it.) the original blacknet announcement involved the antithesis of this confidentiality arrangement-- it explicitly suggested that you would use the service only to sell data that others might want. presumably they would have no use for an encrypted file they could not decrypt and might just throw it away. again, the original announcement made *no*guarantee* that Blacknet would even save your data. they could throw it away. that is your idea of a data haven? if it said, "we will also guarantee we will reliably store your data for a fee which you can retrieve"-- just that sentence and I would agree with you that the original blacknet was also a data haven. but lacking that, I disagree. notice that this is quite different than the original announcement, which implied that only the people who wanted to buy the data would submit fees to the service, not those who submit the information (who would in fact be paid by blacknet for the semantic content value)
It's a data haven.
it is, after you revise it as you are doing in your recent essays. again your original announcement did not approach the data haven angle you are now emphasizing whatsoever and in some ways as I enumerate was in direct conflict with it.
participants (3)
-
Rich Graves -
tcmay＠got.net -
Vladimir Z. Nuri