Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)

[Tim May]

At 1:51 PM -0500 4/13/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
>Even though I'm PLUNKED, and he is currently on a lawyer-hate rampage...
>
>Tim May said:
>>  For those of you who don't fully appreciate what I am getting at,
>>  being newcomers, let me move away from such banalities as "kiddie
>>  porn" market--though this is a real market which any truly
>>  untraceable tools will facilitate, obviously--and focus instead on
>>  the "credit rating market."
>
>Ah, yes. The (illicit) "credit rating market."

If you claim to know about it, how do you actually know so _little_ about it?

Yes, I have your post filtered into my Trash folder. Sometimes I 
look, sometimes I don't.

For someone who presumably graduated from a real law school and 
passes a real bar exam, you have a demonstrated tendency to ramble 
and just "ditz" your way through arguments. Do you ever write in 
complete sentences, in complete paragraphs, arguing complete points?
>
>Thank you for the "Dick & Jane" version. I may not be the smartest kid in
>the class, but I am going to skip a grade, and address the value proposition
>Mr. May is *really* talking about, although with a twist of legitimacy:
>
>
>Found in my inbox:
>========================
>	> 1. MERCHANT INFORMATION BANKING - "Open Source Intelligence Haven"
>	> STEELE:
>	http://www.oss.net/infoMerchantBank.html

"A twist of legitimacy"? Some kind of appeal to authority/

As it happens, I've known Robert Steele since his first got invited 
to the Hackers Conference...must have been around 1993-4 or so. 
Talked to him at length. Several other list members know him, too.

He's been pushing this Del Torto-esque "hackers will be our real 
agents" project for a while. Nothing wrong with the "open 
intelligence" idea...except that it's not his idea. The intelligence 
agencies of the world have been vacuum sweeping the Net since its 
earliest days. I don't mean in some paranoid sense, but in the sense 
of what is readily known.

The "Analyst" project at the CIA, for example, has been going on 
since at least the early 80s, monitoring publically visible (and 
perhaps less visible stuff gotten from the NSA, DIA, NRO, etc.) 
material.

We knew by 1993 that the NSA and CIA had folks reading our list...I 
talked to a couple of these readers at the Hackers Conference in Lake 
Tahoe and at a conference at Asilomar.

"Open source intelligence" is just his buzz phrase for "observe 
what's happening."

>
>Steele, March 23 Letter to President:
>http://www.oss.net/Papers/white/LettertothePresident.doc)
>
>>Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers
>>of sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la
>>BlackNet) is an important goal.
>
>Agora, hm.

Learn our terms as we learn your terms.

>
>I find open source information banking/trading/merchant (whatever) systems
>problematic propositions, beyond anonymous cash, especially viewed in light
>of this hypothetical on a distributed open source intelligence
>haven-brokerage.
>
>	i.e. How do you set yourself up as an anonymous, neutral, 
>info-Switzerland?
>...How will you	obtain critical mass and critical trust? 
>...Where is your
>back-door, infosec accountability	if you are nothing but digital wind?
>...How do you set up a buy-sell marketplace for	intelligence 
>-- the value
>of which cannot be determined prior to analysis, even where there	is a
>robust reputation capital metric in place? ...How do you enforce polycentric
>merchant	society rules in the context of an anonymous 
>transactional system?
>...Requirements for	admission?  ...Quality control? Reputational
>systems?...What is your post-transactional	enforcement mechanism? ...MUST
>you have anon cash? (Just lotsa questions.)

Read the hundreds of articles on these matters. Read "The Enterprise 
of Law: Justice without the State," by Bruce Benson. Read David 
Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," and his other books. Read...

The point is, Aimee, _read the background material_.

Then you can ask specific questions, instead of just throwing a dozen 
or two dozen points of confusion you have against the wall and asking 
me to make it all clear to you.


As it is, you have yet to contribute anything interesting, at least 
that I have seen. I admit I don't see most of your contributions 
these days, but the lack of follow-up from others tells me that 
others are also not finding much of substance.

Given that you write in a confusing, ditzy way, perhaps they just 
can't extract the nuggets from the mud.


--Tim May

-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns