US: Post Election Protests

juan juan.g71 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 10 14:11:09 PST 2016


On Thu, 10 Nov 2016 20:26:48 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> 
>  From: juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com>
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2016 14:14:50 -0500
> Steve Kinney <admin at pilobilus.net> wrote:
> 
> >  Bounties for killing the
> > operators of an AP system, offered through more old fashioned means,
> > would be extraordinarily high - requiring bullet proof anonymity in
> > the presence of uber-motivated adversaries with global network
> > surveillance capabilities.
> 
> >    Hey, but Jim's system (which Tim May 'invented' before Jim I
>  >   believe?) would be protected, by, GET THIS, TOR.

> That depends on how much you want to distort reality. 

	Not much I hope =P - I'm mostly asking about the timeline
	(also, I have my views on so called intellectual property...)


> I was unaware
> of the existence of the CP list prior to about May 1995, as I recall.
>  (Someone I don't recall forwarded a copy of AP part 1 to the CP
> list, and then alerted me to the list's existence.) Prior to that, I
> was unaware of anything about Tim May except that he had worked for
> Intel (in Santa Clara, California) in the late 70's and early 80's,
> and he had discovered that alpha particles (charged helium nuclei)
> were the main cause of 'soft errors' in DRAMs of that era.  As I
> learned, much later, May (and others) invented the idea of an
> "Assassination Market", at least what I now call the "Anonymous
> Person A hires Anonymous Person B to kill Person C" version.

	OK, thanks.


>  Entirely unaware of their specific work (but, as I vaguely recall,
> aware of this general concept; I'd probably heard of it, indirectly,
> from a third person whose identity I don't recall), I thought of the
> "Hundreds, or thousands, or millions of 'Person A's', make anonymous
> contributions to a general offer to potentially any 'Person B' to
> reward him for 'predicting' the date of death of 'Person C'. Are
> these two models alike?  Kinda-sorta, I suppose.

	Well, the part about a date for a predicted 'accident' or event
	is more original I think (though I certainly haven't researched
	it thoroughly), however the bit about something being funded by
	many people seems more like the standard working of markets and
	so is rather old?


> But I think they
> would be enormously different in effect, for many reasons I need not
> go into here.  If 'Assassination Markets' were limited to the former
> model, very few people would be hated, enough, by only one person to
> obtain a donation sufficient to buy a death.  In the latter model, a
> few million 25-cent donations would get rid of nearly all potential
> targets. I suggest that I did indeed advance the rhetorical
> state-of-the-world.

	
	I think Steve's point about high value targets being hard to
	attack is valid. But on the other hand what would happen if
	'law enforcement' 'agents' were targeted? The price to get rid
	of lowly anonymous cops would be a lot smaller. Working as a cop
	would stop being appealing. And with no state 'law'
	'enforcement' there are no state's 'laws' and ultimately no
	state.
 

	
> 
> >    Only very ignorant people would fail to realize that TOR
> >    provides bullet proof anonimity, especially against the
> >    pentagon.

> I didn't mention TOR to imply that it is, in its current form,
> entirely suitable for use in a functioning AP system. 

	Fair enough.


> Rather, my
> intent was to show that the kind of tools necessary to implement AP
> are being considered and produced.  Just "the kind of tools", not
> necessarily the tools themselves.  TOR should be made stronger, with
> more hops, more exit nodes, and more transfer nodes, filler traffic,
> for some examples of improvements. 

	Tor is a brand of the tor corporation which in turn means the
	pentagon. It's pretty much a dead end (and that's the way its
	owners intend it to be, obviously)

	The problem of anonymous communications remains pretty much
	unsolved and it will not be solved by tor inc. Anyway, I
	thought I'd mention that =P


> Bitcoin needs an upgrade, for
> example to Zerocoin, to provide true anonymity, rather than mere
> pseudonymity.  

	Yes...

	(rest of your message is a reply to Steve so I won't comment)



> 
> > The betting pool itself would alert

> No, it would not.  Unlike the Federal Government's short-lived
> proposal in 2003, PAM "Policy Analysis Markets", (FutureMAP),
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market   in which the
> state of the betting itself alerts people to threats, a well-designed
> AP system would carefully avoid alerting the public (or anyone) to
> bets, ideally until later, after the event predicted had materialized
> or failed to materialize.  The 'money' for the bet might be inside an
> encryption envelope, without the name of the target or date.  Another
> encryption envelope, inside the first one, could contain the target
> and date information.  The AP organization could decrypt the first
> (outer) envelope, and be unable to decrypt the inner one, at least
> until the password is sent in by the predictor. The AP organization
> would, however, publish the decrypted contents of the outer envelope,
> so that everyone would know that a prediction with $X of value came
> in on a specific date and time. Nobody, except the predictor, would
> know the identity or date.  Eventually, the inner password would be
> sent in, used to decrypt the inner envelope, with the results
> published online.  If the AP organization cheats, by not failing to
> perform one of these steps, the predictor could publish the inner
> prediction key himself, disclosing to the public that the
> long-since-published content of the outer encryption envelope was a
> valid prediction, and for some reason (fraud?) the AP organization
> did not play fair.   That would destroy the credibility of that
> specific AP organization; others would soon take its place.
> 
> > potential targets to take proportional defensive measures, which "at
> > best" would inhibit the social progress promoted by the system.
> The system would adapt.  Consider Le Chatlier's
> Principle.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier%27s_principle
> A working AP system might, for example, authorize spending (for
> concreteness) 10% of donations on defensive contracts:  Consider the
> effect of a $250,000 reward on the prosecutor in a case alleging an
> AP action, or $500,000 for a judge.   Or perhaps a reward of $100,000
> for each juror who participated in such a trial, and voted for
> acquittal, where the outcome was such that a retrial would be
> impossible, or at least did not occur.    Such rewards could become
> very high, in large part because there would rarely be legal cases in
> which they would have to be paid.  
> 
> > But other than that...\
> 
> "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
>         Jim Bell
> 
>    



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