At 7:16 PM -0800 11/27/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:

Since this time I was trying to distill a formal protocol specification, I was a lot more critical about fine points.

Bell handwaved on the point of obtaining digital cash for paying the assassin with. Bob the broker can go to the

There's often "hand-waving" when reasoning about digital cash and how it is transferred, spent, redeemed, etc. Bell is not a cryptographer. Also, he didn't claim to have built a working system. (I think any of us could be called as witnesses to refute a state claim that he was deploying a real system!) However, much of your reasoning below is _also_ hand-waving. Fortunately, there's a way to cut through it. I'll cover this at the end, after your included section (which I would normally snip, but won't this time).

bank and obtain it in the usual way, of course - but then has to transfer it to Alice the assassin, and there's a sticky point involved. If he just "copies" the money to Alice, she can double-spend with impunity and it's Bob's identity that will be revealed.

Conversely, if she provides tokens for the bank to sign, then Bob has a major problem getting them past the cut-and- choose protocol at the bank. Even if she provides enough tokens to completely populate the cut-and-choose protocol, those tokens still have to have splits of valid identification information for somebody in them - and giving them all to Bob so that Bob could complete the protocol with the bank - would imply that Bob is privy to that information. Worse, the bank will have the information from the cuts it didn't choose, and has to make sure it all matches. Thus, Bob the Broker and Dave the Banker can identify Alice - or at the very least someone whose identification Alice has stolen.

Finally, Carol the contributor has to have a way to check the digital cash that was sent Alice - to make sure Bob is not holding out her contribution. This works if Carol's original coinage is simply encrypted under the key that the successful predictor used - because Carol can perform the same computation and make sure that bit string appears in the "payment" package. But then Carol has the same problem where Alice can double-spend with impunity and it's Carol's identity that will be revealed. On the other hand, if Carol's digital cash is transferred to Bob by protocol, there's no way she can recognize it later under encryption. (and under commercial digital cash protocols now in use, no way Bob can retransfer it to Carol). So if Bob deposits the money and obtains new digital cash, Carol needs a way to look at that digital cash and know that it does in fact carry the bank's signatures for the proper amounts - she can't recognize her own bills, but she can check that the total is correct from the last point at which she could. But Carol has to be provided this information without providing her enough information to just spend the cash herself.

In short, AP as described by Bell appears to depend on digital cash having some exotic and not-otherwise-very- useful properties, including a bank with a protocol that allows issue-by-proxy, which has no readily apparent commercial use. No protocol for digital cash that I'm yet aware of has these properties. Hence, without some major engineering work, and probably the active cooperation of some bank, AP as described cannot be implemented.

It's simple: If payer-anonymity (payer is untraceable by the payee) and payee-anonymity (payee is untraceable by the payer) exists, then the buyers and sellers of some "thing" are untraceable to each other. Whether that "thing" is a piece of warez or a bet in a murder pool (cf. Jack London for a much earlier discussion that Bell's). Arguing how complicated or confusing digital cash can be by citing a specific market like AP is what I mean by hand-waving. If, for example, the Mojo Nation folks succeed in making "mojo" both payer-anonymous AND payee-anonymous, then all of the hand-waving above is beside the point.

I think some of these problems could be solved by engineering; but A, it would be non-trivial work, and B, I don't think I care to waste any effort on figuring out secure ways to kill people outside the law.

Bear

RTFM. --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)

The affidavit/complaint we link to at cluebot.com contains an allegation from the Feds that Bell only 'fessed up to (in previous interviews with l.e.) authoring the AP essays. I do not recall reading about, or writing about, Bell being charged with deploying a working AP system. No, they've been prosecuting him using far more mundane allegations of SSN misuse, stinkbombs, and stalking. AP just gives it all spice, I suppose. -Declan On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 11:46:14PM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

At 7:45 PM -0800 on 11/27/00, Tim May wrote:

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(I think any of us could be called as witnesses to refute a state claim that he was deploying a real system!)

Which, unfortunately, and IIRC, he actually *pled* to, nonetheless.

Sheesh.

Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

Maybe it was Toto's ersatz-AP web page I was remembering, now that I think about it, which, of course, Toto *didn't* plead to...

But the prosecutors did not quite get the joke. It was quite obvious that the site was rigged to a small and preselected handful of entries. Kind of like the last election. alan@ctrl-alt-del.com | Note to AOL users: for a quick shortcut to reply Alan Olsen | to my mail, just hit the ctrl, alt and del keys. "In the future, everything will have its 15 minutes of blame."

At 1:19 AM -0500 11/28/00, Declan McCullagh wrote:

The affidavit/complaint we link to at cluebot.com contains an allegation from the Feds that Bell only 'fessed up to (in previous interviews with l.e.) authoring the AP essays.

I do not recall reading about, or writing about, Bell being charged with deploying a working AP system. No, they've been prosecuting him using far more mundane allegations of SSN misuse, stinkbombs, and stalking. AP just gives it all spice, I suppose.

More than spice, I think. I think _this_ time they plan to make AP part of their case. As your own article said, "When the feds searched Bell's home earlier this month, according to a one-page attachment to the search warrant, agents were looking for "items which refer to Assassination Politics."" I won't engage in the kind of speculation about how they might build their case, but I think this is where they are going. Granted, they will not try to claim that Bell was running a real AP lottery. But they may make claims that he was planning an assassination. Some jurors might be swayed by the language in AP and by the (alleged) utterance: "Say goodnight, Joshua." (Wasn't Joshua the computer in "War Games"?)

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 11:46:14PM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

...

At 7:45 PM -0800 on 11/27/00, Tim May wrote:

...

(I think any of us could be called as witnesses to refute a state claim that he was deploying a real system!)

Which, unfortunately, and IIRC, he actually *pled* to, nonetheless.

Sheesh.

No, I don't recall any such plea. Inasmuch as AP is some years off into the future, as even Bell would probably acknowledge (and may have acknowledged, if one dredges up all of his posts and looks at them carefully), I doubt he'd make a plea agreement that he had deployed a working AP system. I think AP was just hovering on the periphery in the first two rounds. This time they may try to make it a more central part of some case. Hence my comment that some of us may be called by the defense to explain why AP could not possibly be an operational system at this time. --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)

At 11:26 PM 11/27/00 -0800, Tim May wrote:

Some jurors might be swayed by the language in AP and by the (alleged) utterance: "Say goodnight, Joshua." (Wasn't Joshua the computer in "War Games"?)

Joshua was Dr. Richard Falken's kid's name, which Matthew Broderick's character guessed was the password for his account on WOPR, the computer. "Would you like to play a game?" It was also the password for rfalken's free trial account on the new MCImail service :-) [I was at the NSA Crypto museum last weekend, and one machine they had on display was a Connection Machine massively parallel processor. The Connection Machine has a blinkenlights panel that was inspired by and resembles WOPR's blinkenlights.]

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On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 11:46:14PM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

...

At 7:45 PM -0800 on 11/27/00, Tim May wrote:

...

(I think any of us could be called as witnesses to refute a state claim that he was deploying a real system!)

Which, unfortunately, and IIRC, he actually *pled* to, nonetheless.

No, I don't recall any such plea. Inasmuch as AP is some years off into the future, as even Bell would probably acknowledge (and may have acknowledged, if one dredges up all of his posts and looks at them carefully), I doubt he'd make a plea agreement that he had deployed a working AP system.

Agreed - Bell may be frightfully clueless on some things, but he was quite clear that his system depended on both untraceable anonymous communications and anonymous digicash, neither of which existed at that time nor yet today. Remailers then and now were untraceable as long as nobody was attacking them (because you can't divulge logs you didn't keep), but weren't designed for the kind of attack than an ongoing publicly announced assassination pool would produce. Bell might have been doing wishful thinking about AP, but the activities he was directly involved in were misuse of SS numbers (which he pled to), and that common-law court thing that was harassing government officials (I don't think he pled to anything on that or on the statute-of-limitations-earlier stinkbombing of the IRS office.) But he was ordered not to do a lot of things which he might or might not have been careful enough to avoid while keeping tabs on Gordon.

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"When the feds searched Bell's home earlier this month, according to a one-page attachment to the search warrant, agents were looking for "items which refer to Assassination Politics.""

Yeah, right. They lost their copy and can't find it on the net? Must be tough to have the cops have a built-in excuse to search your house any time they want to go fishing, and I see they've decided to accuse him of once buying (legal) chemicals for cooking meth. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

At 10:18 PM 11/27/00 -0500, Ray Dillinger wrote:

Bell handwaved on the point of obtaining digital cash for paying the assassin with.

He observed it is a requirement to have strongly anon cash. The details of that are very complicated, but that is not the point. Assume for the moment that it exists.

I don't think I care to waste any effort on figuring out secure ways to kill people outside the law.

Would you feel better if it were within the law? The US (for instance) is not above putting bounties on people's heads. That they do so overtly only signifies their self-confidence. If the US could construct an anonymous payment system that only works for <insert country here>, they'd have uses for it. In any case, what you or I deem gentlemanly technical pursuits certainly is no constraint on anyone else...alas

At 08:21 PM 11/28/00 -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:

I see no reason why I personally should be called upon to be part of that machinery though -- nor any good reason why, if called, I should comply.

Well, I'm into Thoreau too. Even swam in his pond once. The point of any serious futurist (including JB) is to look to possibilities... AP is possible and probable... given certain infrastructures. Bell:AP::Tesla:AC Or not.

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If the US could construct an anonymous payment system that only works for <insert country here>, they'd have uses for it.

Yep. This is pretty much my opinion about the whole assassination thing; if an anonymous market for assassination existed, people would be likely to use it the way the traditional assassination markets are used; Governments to eliminate dissidents, major corporations to eliminate competitors with better products and innovators with ideas that threaten major markets, and the sheeple to get rid of the people their spouses were sleeping with (or maybe their spouses). Millionaire brats would use it to accellerate their inheritances, rogue cops would use it to destroy people whom they were unable to get quality evidence on, etc... Bell's idea that government would feel the lash more deeply than anyone else is plain nuts IMO.

I can't argue with that. An armed, anonymous society is a damned polite society. Paraphrasing you know who.

Anybody want to bet Jeff Gordon has more money to spend on AP than James Bell? I mean, if it came down to it, who could afford to have whom eliminated?

Bear

If Alfred Nobel were blown up by dynamite, it would not be significant, only ironic. Cheers, DH