Re: Cyberspatial governments?
At 11:39 AM 8/30/94 EDT, Jason W Solinsky wrote:
You were writing about the problems of anonymous entities and suggested that you would have difficulty dealing with such entities because there is no way for you to know when a company you are dealing with undergoes a substantial change. But look at the physical realm. What is it that makes companies disclose changes in their upper management? Why do they announce major deals publicly? Why do they discuss strategy in their quarterly filings? They might well be motivated to disclose positive things without SEC regulations, but negative events show up because a government is forcing them to make those disclosures.
An advanced telecommunications environment offers a number of ways to protect yourself against the problems involved in dealing with anonymous entities in a situation in which there is no monopoly Government. (Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate government or engine government.) When one's PBX finds that one's call is not going through via a particular long distance carrier, it automatically switches to another one. It is easy to imagine one's intelligent agents testing various sorts of transaction completions and switching vendors when one fails. Professional checkers can supply information on vendor status for a fee. After all, we don't care if a company we are dealing with changes if its service is unaffected. Eric Hughes is working on another approach, an Open Books protocol which will let companies post anonymous but checkable sets of accounts which can be accessed by anyone on the nets, can't be easily spoofed but give no private info to anyone else. Sort of Zero Knowledge Proof Bookkeeping. (Could we call this triple-entry bookkeeping?) It is important to note in any case that the use of third-party escrow as a substitute for Government regulation was a feature of the Northern European semi-anarchies of Iceland and Ireland that have informed modern libertarian thought. I doubt that my old Poli Sci prof Don Balmer would consider an escrow company to be the equivalent of the Government of the United States. DCF "Though he may be poor He will never be a slave"
Duncan writes: | (Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper | case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a | lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate | government or engine government.) As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge, monolithic enemy. It is a multitude of huge enemies. If you think of it as a single entity, you will often miss the subtelties in its actions. If you don't understand why your enemy is doing what they are doing, you will have trouble opposing it. If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation comes from bureaucratic turf wars. Seeing 'Government' as your great enemy is a damaging misnomer. I'm not arguing *for* government here, I'm simply pointing out that seeing government as a monolith is like seeing any large entity as a monolith. Its really made up of small parts that interact in strange & unpredicatble ways. Adam
As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge, monolithic enemy. It is a multitude of huge enemies. This was my best joke during my crypto presentation at HOPE a couple of weeks ago. I was describing threat models for remailer networks. 1. Recipient -- any indirection works 2. Sysadmins, and then I added, "or anyone else with root access". That got a big laugh. 3. Operators of the remailer nodes 4. Gov't -- law enforcement 5. Gov't -- national security It was during my explanation on why the FBI doesn't really get access to National Technical Means, e.g. NSA SIGINT, that I got the BIG laugh. Eric
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> writes:
Duncan writes:
| (Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper | case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a | lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate | government or engine government.)
As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge, monolithic enemy. It is a multitude of huge enemies. If you think of it as a single entity, you will often miss the subtelties in its actions. If you don't understand why your enemy is doing what they are doing, you will have trouble opposing it.
Right on. And as Eric pointed out on May 14, ``Misallocation of attention leads one down false trails. Who has the excess brainpower for that waste?''
If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation comes from bureaucratic turf wars.
But their power comes from their clients --- the hundred million of our ``friends and neighbors'' who plot and scheme to wield these agencies on their behalf. The agencies are just, well, agents. Remove them and their principals will immediately erect new ones in their place. Who are their principals? They are legion: Every person who solicits their services or even just gratuitously accepts their services.
Seeing 'Government' as your great enemy is a damaging misnomer.
There's nothing wrong with Duncan's proposal to distinguish ``Government'' from ``government'', just so it's understood that ``Government'' includes most of the population.
I'm not arguing *for* government here, I'm simply pointing out that seeing government as a monolith is like seeing any large entity as a monolith. Its really made up of small parts that interact in strange & unpredicatble ways.
Yes. We cannot afford to misperceive it if we hope to successfully defend ourselves against it. John E. Kreznar | Relations among people to be by jkreznar@ininx.com | mutual consent, or not at all. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLmRFzcDhz44ugybJAQGqtwP/fq39qTFpzXfVmDt6zFc0s4FdahMigY4D EAqtlrLuOIB/c4NMpffWuOa2Rc4PXFfhgpEgccaqcmRePfMbht6rR2vcSHlV0Trb LDIaA8b9tc0qemqZiITE0qsE1HnEPHNorxPcmGloES7avnKJzH0q+GlfImimR0Aw m8zq0FazEeA= =v8mM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation comes from bureaucratic turf wars. Seeing 'Government' as your great enemy is a damaging misnomer.
Indeed, many government policies can be understood only from this perspective. Clipper is a perfect example. Key escrow exists only because the NSA doesn't want to risk blame if some terrorist or drug dealer were to use an unescrowed NSA-produced algorithm. The fact that a terrorist or drug dealer can easily go elsewhere and obtain other strong or stronger algorithms without key escrow is irrelevant. The NSA simply doesn't care as long as *they* can't be blamed for whatever happens. Classic CYA, nothing more. A similar analysis applies to the export control regulations regarding cryptography. Phil
Indeed, many government policies can be understood only from this perspective. Clipper is a perfect example. Key escrow exists only because the NSA doesn't want to risk blame if some terrorist or drug dealer were to use an unescrowed NSA-produced algorithm.
If this is indeed the case, Matt Blaze's results should be particularly devastating to them. - Bill
participants (6)
-
Adam Shostack -
Bill Sommerfeld -
frissell＠panix.com -
hughes＠ah.com -
jkreznar＠ininx.com -
Phil Karn