Untraceable Contract Killings

[Mark M.]

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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
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