AP deconstructed: Why it has not happened yet, and will not

[jim bell]

 My comments inline:

    On Sunday, August 5, 2018, 9:36:18 PM PDT, Steve Kinney <admin at pilobilus.net> wrote:  
 
 >Listen up you punks...
>I will assume that readers already know how "Assasination Politics"
>a.k.a. AP works.  If not, look it up:  I consider it a brilliant idea.
>But like many brilliant ideas, one can find structural flaws if one
>looks closely enough.  Here's my set:


Remember, my AP essay was written in 1995-96, before Ethereum, Augur, Bitcoin (and the other coins, including anonymous coins like Zcash), TOR, etc.

>1)  AP treats anonymity on the networks as a 'primitive', that is, a
>Platonic ideal:  One either has anonymity or not, and if one does,
>nobody can remove it regardless of resources brought to bear.


Ideally, that would be the case.  But donor-anonymity, especially for donors who donate a dollar or so, might not be important.  

>I see anonymity on the networks as nearly always relative and nearly
>never absolute.  To achieve absolute anonymity, an individual must
>commit "the perfect crime" by connecting to the networks once, briefly,
>by physically breaking in at an access point not personally associated
>with him or herself.


Typically, that's the case.  But how far this can be achieved will probably depend on how Ethereum/Augur is being implemented.  

>If not seen coming or going (a tricky prospect in 'civilized' countries
these days), and all digital fingerprints left behind present a generic,
non-traceable profile, success:  Unbreakable anonymity.  But any lesser
feat of operational cyber-warfare leaves some smaller or larger
probability that the message in question will be attributed to the right
person.


Maybe you are thinking that "government" will have enough time to not merely stop AP, but in fact survive.

>I say "message" rather than "messages" because each instance of 100%
anonymous network access presents a fresh challenge.  Re-using the same
access point and/or techniques could potentially create an identifiable
profile.  "Really anonymous" network access presents as a job for well
trained intelligence officers and/or assets, not John and Jane Q. Public
looking to fund the removal of a politician they don't like.


I've long believed that AP will "work" if only a few thousand well-targeted government employees are killed.It's basically a race:  If the public is shown good evidence that government can be taken down, they will decide that government SHOULD be taken down.

>Designers and operators of anonymizing overlay networks generally agree,
their tools do not by themselves provide "life safety" grade protection
against an adversary with global network surveillance capability.


True.  But with millions of donors, and potentially thousands of killers, that may not make much of a difference.

>Within the borders of a given State with a highly funded intelligence
establishment, such global adversaries already exist.  If AP rears its
very interesting head, the first response from the community targeted
for termination would include command directives and blank checks to
turn the AP process inside out.  Thus would exploitable gaps in network
surveillance close up fast.


>AP depends on the ready availability of anonymity to thousands or
millions bettors, and dozens or hundreds of professional assassins.


I don't think that anonymity to bettors is particularly necessary, especially if the bets are small.  "They" can't drag 100,000 people into a courtroom to try them for the same crime.

"Participation in any 'lottery of the doomed' (RIP Spain Rodriguez - and
Trashman, agent of the 6th International) would immediately become a
Federal felony with stiff minimum mandatory sentences."

Buying illegal drugs from Silk Road and its successors was similarly illegal, yet they lasted for years, until and including today.  In addition, such black markets weren't (and are presumably not yet) protected by an AP-type system.  If 1% of the gross margin of the current version of a Silk Road operation was dedicated to pay assassins of anyone who prosecutes judges such a case, I suspect that will become impregnable.  

 > The
unavailability of absolute anonymity for assassins, or even half-assed
anonymity for John and Jane Q. Public, would at best seriously degrade
the whole program.


Again, it's a question of time.  A working, efficient AP-type system could take down governments much faster than governments could react to that event.  An analogy:  Any fire department would eventually put out just about any house fire.  But that doesn't mean that the house would remain habitable.  

>2)  Large numbers make fools of us all.  AP appears to presume that
abusive politicians. and the cartels of billionaires who elect and
direct them, can not out-spend 'honest' participants in AP by orders of
magnitude at need.  Well... they can.  And if required, they will.


How would that work?  I like to point out that the Federal government taxes at least 3 trillion dollars per year.  If each taxpayer were willing to pay 1% of their paid taxes to an AP-type fund, that would be $30 billion.  If an average killing cost $100,000, that would be 300,000 killings.  Do you believe that the Federal government could survive even a tenth of that number of well-targeted deaths?  And by 'well-targeted', I mean the people at the top, not just random droids at the bottom.  

"Bounties on actual and perceived "enemies of the State and ruling class"
participating in the AP process would greatly exceed bounties on State
and corporate offenders within weeks of the first pay-out by an honest
AP game. "

You need to quantify that!!  A "bounty" only works to deter people, if they can be deterred.  How many hundreds of people each day get medical death-sentences, diagnoses of lethal diseases.  It's hard to deter a person who knows he's going to be dead soon, especially if an AP-type system promises to reward his family with, say, $100,000.

 "Massive bounties for "information leading to the arrest and
conviction" of AP operators and anyone collecting bets made in that
lottery would greatly exceed those available to "honest" assassins who
play by the rules of AP."

You seem to be assuming that such bounties can actually be paid?  People have to be confident that they will actually be PAID these "massive bounties".  Why wouldn't a well-functioning AP system target the recipients of any such "massive bounties" as its own protective measure?   And if such payoffs are done REALLY secret, how does the average person hoping to receive such a bounty actually know they are being paid?

 >" (Anyone here naive enough to believe that AP
lotteries can not and will not be outlawed within days of a perceived
reason to do so?)  Combined with top priority directives to /all/
intelligence and law enforcement agencies to shut that shit down PRONTO,
hostile AP-like games would create a steep uphill climb for honest AP
participants and winners."


So far, the Ethereum/Augur/Forecast Foundation system hasn't been outlawed.

For a quick correction to "common sense" assumptions about income
disparity in the USA - which is less than asset disparity by a couple of
orders of magnitude - see http//lcurve.org

>3)  As a general conclusion, I think that for AP to work as intended and
usher in an age of NAP based Anarchist society - an objective no truly
sane individual could oppose IMO - it would be necessary for only
"honest" lotteries that deny targeting of "Libertarian" figures to
present games.  But two can play at any game, as long as the second
players in question happen to be filthy rich.


Who has the motivation to use an AP-system?  Generally, anybody who aggresses against him.  Collecting taxes is aggressing against people.  Those people would, and should, be targeted first.  

>In real life, "Operate an AP lottery, die within weeks of announcing it
to the public and getting enough capital under management to motivate an
assassin."  Or in a best case scenario, pull 20 years without parole in
a Federal prison.  That same sentence would also be available to any
random participant who happens to get "outed" by any of several
technical means readily available to the NSA and comparable signals
intelligence services.

I suppose you are assuming that "they" will be able to give "convictions".  In America, that requires that (usually) 12 jurors agree.  It doesn't take many people to decide than AP is actually a GOOD thing, and the enemies of the AP system (the government) are the bad people.  It wouldn't take more than a few rejections by jurors to derail that "20-years without parole" thing.   Also, if the public can be convinced that the Federal government won't LAST more than a few years, "20 years" can't be much of a deterrent.  
Recall back in the mid-to- late 1990's, one pessimistic idea was something like, 'if AP starts operating, they will just shut down the Internet!!!.'    And that might actually have seemed plausible in 1995.  Few people had access to the Internet, and far fewer actually depended on it.  But by 2000, it was only barely plausible that "the government" would have been able to shut down the Internet, at least without an enormous outcry and disruption.  Does anybody believe that the Internet could have been plausibly shut down in 2005?  2010?  2015?   Not a prayer.  

"I do believe that the above factors explain why Assassination Politics
has not been implemented in the 20 or so years the instructions have
been floating around.  As far as I know, nobody has even tried."


I was never under the impression, when I wrote AP, that the system would be easy to implement.  I figured it might take 10 years.   It would have been an enormous software task.  But by now, TOR and Bitcoin have been implemented.  (I'm not saying they'd be directly usable in AP, it's just that they represent the magnitude of effort involved.)   And now Ethereum and Augur are going on, and explicitly providing an example of a death-prediction market.  True, there are distinct differences between the 'Forecast Foundation' operation and my AP idea, but those differences are almost entirely like 'software switches', easily changed in order to make it work like AP.   I don't consider FF's operation "a mistake", merely that I think they are trying to avoid a shock and enormous outcry, an outcry that might never arrive.How do we know?  Do a google search for  'ethereum augur assassination' and see how the Overton Window has changed.  In 1995, it was virtually sacreligious to talk about an "Assassination Market" in anything more than theoretical terms.  Now, people show what they really want.  

>Alas, for those who want to Change The World from the bottom up, it
looks to me like conventional populist political warfare - the darkest
of the Dark Arts - in the sense that nearly nobody outside agencies
tasked to prevent it knows the first damn thing about how it works -
remains the only game in town.

It's been a long time coming.  I wish it had been much faster.  But at some point, the issue would be, does the public actually want the status quo, or would they prefer a society without wars, militaries, nuclear weapons, one where 250 million people were killed by governments in the 20th century.  Do they want a repeat of this?  Do you have a solution better than AP?  If you don't, you need to explain why people will choose the status quo over an AP solution.
                                     Jim Bell




  
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