geographically removed?

[Tyler Durden]

Variola wrote...

>Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always be
>defeated by cranking up the police state a notch.  This is eg why
>e-cash systems have anonymity problems.  This is why there are
>carnivore boxen aplenty.  The knurls on the police-state knob
>are getting worn, it is cranked up so frequently now.
>
>Useful resistance comes from asymmetric physical feedback such
>as experienced in Lebanon, S. Arabia, off the coast of Yemen,
>in a few embassies somewhere in africa, in the trains of Madrid,
>Okla city, and some degenerate US east coast cities a few
>years back, the latter indicating that "geographically removed" is less
>important,
>and the only incident that Joe Voter is likely to remember.  Until the
>next one, of course; Joe's buffer is not terribly capacious.

Well, perhaps. Then again, consider though primordial blacknet systems 
currently labeled P2P. They don't currently present a big problem to 
Group-of-Bandits X, but it does cause some of their bigger enablers (ie, the 
record industry) to bitch a bit. As a result, they are turning up the 
pressure slowly, but only just fast enough for such systems to proliferate 
while evolving a nice protective coating (despite all the recent lawsuits). 
By the time these systems represent a destabilising influence (ie, you can 
pay someone for a file over anonymous swarmed P2P) it'll be too late.

In short, Group-of-Bandits X is a group of bandits precisely because they 
couldn't survive otherwise...ie, they're not smart enough. They'll 
eventually go the way of the dodo, though they can prolong their exodus 
somewhat through drastic means.

The OBL route, however, does seem to have its merits and is historically 
quite effective (Algeria, Iraq...). A little too messy for my tastes, 
however, and blowing up the building I work in won't be worth the number of 
virgins I'd have coming to me.

-TD