CDR: Re: Jim Bell arrested, documents online

[Alan Olsen]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, David Honig wrote:

> At 08:31 PM 11/21/00 -0500, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> >
> >Even if they couldn't find a specific law to charge the 
> >operator of an AP server with, or couldn't get a conviction 
> >on the laws they'd charged him/her with, they would doubtless 
> >issue a court order commanding the operators of the server 
> >to cease and desist.
> 
> Correct, except that you haven't grasped that it will be impossible
> to trace anything to anyone.

*Except* the hosting server. Legal "whack-a-mole" games will commence soon
after discovery. (Or they will just yank the entries out of the root DNS
servers or screw with the routing tables on the backbone.)

> To see this, you need to imagine truly anonymous payment schemes
> and truly anonymous information publishing.  [The latter tech
> exists, the former has to deal with interfacing with the US dominated
> financial web, and exchanging ecredits for meatthings.  Meat being
> succeptible to guns & cruise missiles, of course.]

The host of the site is the only one with his ass left hanging out.

> Bell's observation is simply: if you have these two (cash & freedom of
> speech), look at what one could build.  And the social implications thereof.

I disagree.  I don't believe Jim really was willing to consider the social
implications of his scheme.

He seemed to think that the only target of this would be the government.

I think that there would be a much bigger field of targets than that.

Think about it.  If you had the chance to have people killed without any
posibility of capture, who would it be?

I think that there are more people out there who would go after Bill Gates
or John Tesh than there would for various little known public officials.
(This could be a case where fame could have an even bigger downside.
About six feet down.)

One of the reasons that this country is so fucked up is that few pay
attention to what their leaders actually do.  You tell them about laws
that are already on the books and they don't believe you. They still buy
into the myth that America is the "Freest Country in the World(tm)".

The people they do hate, however, are those that annoy them. In-laws, bad
TV celebs, evil software moguls, etc.

And what about those people who have lots of money and little or no
personal ethics?  Say that you have a company whos rival has a bunch of
engineers that you want.  They won't work for you, so you have them done
in.  (Or maybe the prosecutors in a big anti-trust trial.)

Free and open assassination markets are a messy thing. True, some good
would come out of them. A whole bunch of bad would come out of them as
well.

Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should.

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