The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a potential futures trading market in which speculators would wager on the Internet on the likelihood of a future terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a particular leader. A Web site promoting the plan already is available. ... A graphic on the market's Web page Monday showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown. ... ``Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?'' he said. ... Trading is to begin Oct. 1. The market would initially be limited to 1,000 traders, increasing to at least 10,000 by Jan. 1. The Web site says government agencies will not be allowed to participate and will not have access to the identities or funds of traders. ... Wyden said $600,000 has been spent on the program so far and the Pentagon plans to spend an additional $149,000 this year. The Pentagon has requested $3 million for the program for next year and $5 million for the following year.
<Kalkor> The man who wrote the following story is from my hometown, and has been in and out of prison for such horrible crimes as "using false social security numbers" and "interfering with IRS agents". Everytime they let him out, and begin to surveil him, he in turn surveils the agents and they arrest him for doing this.
Assassination Politics by Jim Bell (3 April 1997?)
Part 1 I've been following the concepts of digital cash and encryption since I read the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American on"encrypted signatures." While I've only followed the Digitaliberty area for a few weeks, I can already see a number of points that do (and should!) strongly concern the average savvy individual:
1. How can we translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life?
2. How can we keep the government from banning encryption, digital cash, and other systems that will improve our freedom?
A few months ago, I had a truly and quite literally "revolutionary" idea, and I jokingly called it "Assassination Politics": I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly "predicted" the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash.
I also speculated that using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous "digital cash," it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given. Even the organization itself would have no information that could help the authorities find the person responsible for the prediction, let alone the one who caused the death.
It was not my intention to provide such a "tough nut to crack" by arguing the general case, claiming that a person who hires a hit man is not guilty of murder under libertarian principles. Obviously, the problem with the general case is that the victim may be totally innocent under libertarian principles, which would make the killing a crime, leading to the question of whether the person offering the money was himself guilty.
On the contrary; my speculation assumed that the "victim" is a government employee, presumably one who is not merely taking a paycheck of stolen tax dollars, but also is guilty of extra violations of rights beyond this. (Government agents responsible for the Ruby Ridge incident and Waco come to mind.) In receiving such money and in his various acts, he violates the "Non-aggression Principle" (NAP) and thus, presumably, any acts against him are not the initiation of force under libertarian principles.
The organization set up to manage such a system could, presumably, make up a list of people who had seriously violated the NAP, but who would not see justice in our courts due to the fact that their actions were done at the behest of the government. Associated with each name would be a dollar figure, the total amount of money the organization has received as a contribution, which is the amount they would give for correctly "predicting" the person's death, presumably naming the exact date. "Guessers" would formulate their "guess" into a file, encrypt it with the organization's public key, then transmit it to the organization, possibly using methods as untraceable as putting a floppy disk in an envelope and tossing it into a mailbox, but more likely either a cascade of encrypted anonymous remailers, or possibly public-access Internet locations, such as terminals at a local library, etc.
In order to prevent such a system from becoming simply a random unpaid lottery, in which people can randomly guess a name and date (hoping that lightning would strike, as it occasionally does), it would be necessary to deter such random guessing by requiring the "guessers" to include with their "guess" encrypted and untraceable "digital cash," in an amount sufficiently high to make random guessing impractical.
For example, if the target was, say, 50 years old and had a life expectancy of 30 years, or about 10,000 days, the amount of money required to register a guess must be at least 1/10,000th of the amount of the award. In practice, the amount required should be far higher, perhaps as much as 1/1000 of the amount, since you can assume that anybody making a guess would feel sufficiently confident of that guess to risk 1/1000th of his potential reward.
The digital cash would be placed inside the outer "encryption envelope," and could be decrypted using the organization's public key. The prediction itself (including name and date) would be itself in another encryption envelope inside the first one, but it would be encrypted using a key that is only known to the predictor himself. In this way, the organization could decrypt the outer envelope and find the digital cash, but they would have no idea what is being predicted in the innermost envelope, either the name or the date.
If, later, the "prediction" came true, the predictor would presumably send yet another encrypted "envelope" to the organization, containing the decryption key for the previous "prediction" envelope, plus a public key (despite its name, to be used only once!) to be used for encryption of digital cash used as payment for the award. The organization would apply the decryption key to the prediction envelope, discover that it works, then notice that the prediction included was fulfilled on the date stated. The predictor would be, therefore, entitled to the award. Nevertheless, even then nobody would actually know WHO he is!
It doesn't even know if the predictor had anything to do with the outcome of the prediction. If it received these files in the mail, in physical envelopes which had no return address, it would have burned the envelopes before it studied their contents. The result is that even the active cooperation of the organization could not possibly help anyone, including the police, to locate the predictor.
Also included within this "prediction-fulfilled" encryption envelope would be unsigned (not-yet-valid) "digital cash," which would then be blindly signed by the organization's bank and subsequently encrypted using the public key included. (The public key could also be publicized, to allow members of the public to securely send their comments and, possibly, further grateful remuneration to the predictor, securely.) The resulting encrypted file could be published openly on the Internet, and it could then be decrypted by only one entity: The person who had made that original, accurate prediction. The result is that the recipient would be absolutely untraceable.
The digital cash is then processed by the recipient by "unbinding" it, a principle which is explained in far greater detail by the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American. The resulting digital cash is absolutely untraceable to its source.
This overall system achieves a number of goals. First, it totally hides the identity of the predictor to the organization, which makes it unnecessary for any potential predictor to "trust" them to not reveal his name or location. Second, it allows the predictor to make his prediction without revealing the actual contents of that prediction until later, when he chooses to, assuring him that his "target" cannot possibly get early warning of his intent (and "failed" predictions need never be revealed). In fact, he needs never reveal his prediction unless he wants the award. Third, it allows the predictor to anonymously grant his award to anyone else he chooses, since he may give this digital cash to anyone without fear that it will be traced.
For the organization, this system also provides a number of advantages .By hiding the identity of the predictor from even it, the organization cannot be forced to reveal it, in either civil or criminal court. This should also shield the organization from liability, since it will not know the contents of any "prediction" until after it comes true. (Even so, the organization would be deliberately kept "poor" so that it would be judgment-proof.) Since presumably most of the laws the organization might be accused of violating would require that the violator have specific or prior knowledge, keeping itself ignorant of as many facts as possible, for as long as possible, would presumably make it very difficult to prosecute.
Anglosphere: Granaries and ironclads By James C. Bennett
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- We perennially decry the stupidity of bureaucrats, and ponder how citizens and their representatives can hope to impose some control on the bureaucracy. However, this past week we have seen the opposite problem present itself: how can we protect smart bureaucrats from stupid politicians? The cancellation of the idea-futures program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a project that promised a substantial improvement in our ability to forecast events in the Middle East, was, simply put, a victory for Osama bin Laden.
More frightening than the demise of the program, however, was the manner of its demise. Not only have we been deprived of the information the program would have given us, but we have sent a powerful message to those on the front lines of defense against terror. That message is "Don't think. Don't Innovate. Don't take risks." It's not as if these characteristics have been so predominant in the civil service that we can afford to suppress them gratuitously.
Of course, stupidity in bureaucracy has never been its real problem. Anyone who has dealt extensively with the civil service of a major industrial nation, particularly at its higher levels, knows that many bureaucrats are, as individuals, quite intelligent. Bureaucracies are a bit like computers: they do what they're programmed to do, so you had better understand exactly what you are asking them to do. If you're not happy with the results you're getting, it's more likely to be a problem with the instructions you are giving (i.e., the software) than a defect in the components, whether they are silicon or flesh and blood.
Why have conventional bureaucracies gotten a reputation for stupidity? It would help to remember the origins of the civil service system. In the Anglosphere, the forms of the modern civil service date back to the second British empire, particularly in the imperial civil services founded to administer India and elsewhere. Unlike previous British administrative structures, which were founded upon partisan favoritism and corruption, the imperial models strove above all for objectivity, impartiality and administrative competence.
In forming them, the classically educated and well-traveled 19th century British reformers drew upon the experiences of the Roman empire and the example of the imperial Chinese civil service, the mandarins. Eventually, the United States, which had retained a politically driven spoils system in the civil service, adopted a version of the British system.
But what was the ultimate purpose of the imperial bureaucracies upon which the Anglo-American civil service systems were formed? It was to serve a system drastically alien from our modern industrialized world. Pre-industrial states such as China depended ultimately upon massive state-run irrigation projects requiring the coordination of the hand labor of millions of people stretched over thousands of miles, and which needed to be maintained for centuries in more or less their original form. The information tools available for this task were basic: Scribes copying handwritten documents, and couriers distributing them.
In such an environment, the first and most important virtue was consistency. The only real way to effectively coordinate actions was to lay down an unvarying routine and punish departure from it severely. Innovations were highly suspect: after all, the existing system worked, and if the innovation were to fail, everyone would starve. The risk-reward ratio was heavily weighted against risk.
This was one of the models upon which the U.S. civil service was ultimately based: a rule-based administrative system that worked well in guaranteeing uniformity of action over time. For some tasks, this is an admirable virtue. For disaster relief, for example, it is useful to have a corps of people who remain ready to deal with an emergency that might not happen for 50 years, but that is massively deadly when it does. Lessons learned from 50 or 100 years ago must remain encoded into the bureaucratic regime, because they would otherwise have to be relearned at great cost. We have not had a health crisis on the scale of the great influenza epidemic since it peaked in 1919, for example, but it is certain that one day we will again, and we must retain against that day the lessons of the emergency public health measures that were used then.
The other model is the military model, which evolved independently in Western Europe over the past 400 years. This model also had to deal with the maintenance of long-term war-fighting activities over wide areas of the planet, and to coordinate far-flung units of men with primitive information and communication tools. Unlike the classical imperial model, it had to do so against a background of accelerating innovation. The risk-reward matrix was also different. For civilian civil service, the ultimate upside was promotion, which was achieved by avoiding departure from the rulebook; the ultimate risk was dismissal and loss of pension, which was the result of embarrassing the system. For the military, the upside was victory, and the downside was defeat and death.
During peacetime, military bureaucracies historically tended to follow the pattern of civilian ones: stick to the rules, and beware innovation. During the stress of wartime, especially when things weren't going well, militaries, to be successful, had to find a way to encourage and use innovation. Thus the military, unlike civilian bureaucracies, had legends of rule-breaking innovators that saved the day -- sometimes literally. During the American Civil War, the innovative Union armored warship Monitor steamed into Hampton Roads the day after the similarly innovative Confederate ironclad, the Virginia, had decimated the wooden-hulled Union fleet. It is also a comment on the relative flexibility of military bureaucracies versus civilian ones to note the amount of time it took the British admiralty to give up on the wooden warship once news of that battle reached London: all wooden warships under construction were cancelled the next day.
Thus, when in 1957 the Soviets challenged the West by launching the first satellite, Sputnik, President Eisenhower reacted by creating two new government organizations. One became NASA, which went on to create the American civil space program (also conveniently drawing attention away from the already-massive American military space program, which had been drawing close to deploying the first reconnaissance satellites.) The second was a military agency, DARPA, which was a classic example of the military reaction under challenge -- innovate and take risks. Although NASA became instantly famous, DARPA labored in mostly-welcome obscurity for decades, creating the occasional little invention like the Internet.
DARPA was deliberately sheltered from many of the bureaucratic constraints under which the rest of the government was required to run. Its modus operandi was to take a few smart people, give them substantial budgets and authority, and turn them loose. The idea-futures market DARPA had created to improve predictive capability about Middle Eastern affairs was a classic example of the innovation it was chartered to exercise. Hopefully the idea-futures market will go forward under private auspices, but we have lost valuable time we may soon come to regret.
America and all the world's strong civil societies are under challenge. Our opponents have been quite innovative and clever in their grisly way, working with tools of suicidal attack that we cannot copy. Victory will require innovation, a quality America and its allies have in abundance. But we cannot make use of it if innovators are forced to operate under rules originally devised to maintain the ever-normal granaries of the Ming emperors. The truly appalling aspect of this incident is that we have succeeded brilliantly in fostering innovation in government, only to have it sabotaged by a handful of cheap grandstanding politicians.
The remedy for the problems of democracy, of which this episode is one, can only be more democracy. Let us hope that people like Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., are called to account for their sabotage of America's defense before too long.
RE: virus: Re:Hypocricy
« Reply #2 on: 2003-08-04 20:38:48 »
[Article Quote] <snip> The idea-futures market DARPA had created to improve predictive capability about Middle Eastern affairs was a classic example of the innovation it was chartered to exercise. Hopefully the idea-futures market will go forward under private auspices, but we have lost valuable time we may soon come to regret.
[Kalkor] The idea-futures market seems fairly similar if not identical in most respects to the "Assassination Politics" proposal made by Jim Bell. My point was to indicate the hypocricy of this procedure, jailing someone for making a proposal and then 6 years later developing a national system so similar to the original proposal.
My first objection to such a system was that it would reveal vulnerabilities, or targets for which the players held value, and would thus assist the terrorists inn target selection. I realized, however, that DARPA would've been aware of the 'winners' as soon as, if not sooner than, terrorists, and vulnerable valuable targets that had been previously overlooked could then be quickly protected. I also wondered about mahipulating such a market for monetary gain concommitant to a terrorist attack, but, considering what happened to certain airline stock futures immediately before 9/11, I realized that this fear has already been realized, and a wider knowledge could only mitigate such dangers rather than exacerbate them.
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