CDR: Re: Jim Bell arrested, documents online

[David Honig]

At 03:11 PM 11/22/00 -0500, Alan Olsen wrote:
>On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, David Honig wrote:
>> 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.)

These are engineering problems, and I'll handwave the term "distributed"
for now.

>> To see this, you need to imagine truly anonymous payment schemes
>> and truly anonymous information publishing.  
>
>The host of the site is the only one with his ass left hanging out.

When I wrote "truly anonymous" I meant those systems where no one's
ass is endangered.  If there's an ass to fry its not anonymous.

>> 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.

Sure, it would be entirely limited by cost, as is everything traded in such a
future. I think the argument is that anyone who pissed off a lot of people
would be culled more quickly than others, and civil servants tend to be in
that category.

For instance, an obnoxious neighbor offends a dozen people.  A politician
who passes laws restricting freedom offends many orders of magnitude more.
Assassination won't get cheaper because the detection hazards remain in an
AP future.


>And what about those people who have lots of money and little or no
>personal ethics?  

They go into politics, which Mr. Bell has addressed.


>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.)

Nice Gibson effect there.  

There's a bit of a problem with obvious motive, that mass-offenders don't
present.  In fact, since AP says that everyone will have 'means'
and 'opportunity' the only barrier is sufficient motivation.  One could
fear that motivation alone might be enough to convict in future courts.

You know, a number of Intel engineers die, and AMD execs are
nearly-automatically jailed.

Still, AP is an observation about what is possible.  It doesn't have
to be pleasant.  

>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.

You could say the same about gunpowder or Napster... or any tech
whose components appear in the memepool at the same time.. yielding ideas
which *will* be used, *orthogonal* to whether they are *good* or *fair*..

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

Alfred Nobel spent the rest of his life getting over his guilt about
stabilizing nitro. He shouldn't have.  Realizing that something is possible
--or even advocating it-- is not the same as doing wrong with it.  WRT AP,
assasination is obviously a good thing at times.