I met the author, Jim Bell, once or twice, when he came by the computer store I was working in as a kid.
He seemed OK, in the few words we exchanged, and maybe a techie/radio hobbyist (IIRC, his car had many antennae on it).
At that time, in the 1980s, someone remarked that Bell had "had one good idea" (the SemiDisk persistent storage card).
Later on, it looks from Wikipedia like Bell had a lot of troubles.
The light joke about "one good idea" IMHO took on new, darker meaning, after some of the choices during the troubles, including the horrifying idea that's the topic of the post.
I suppose a good SF writer could've started with that idea, and explored an (IMHO likely) scenario of it playing out as a tool of the most corrupt and the most insane, and then the dystopia that results in.
I haven't read much of Bell's writings, so I don't know whether at some point he shifted to a cautionary "we should figure out how to prevent things like this, because they would be bad".
For one thing, life imprisonment (LiP) is a pretty big deterrent, and among the few willing to risk it, defense tech and the surveillance state are generally winning the arms race against individual actors and small groups ("terrorists"). Lots of people want to kill world leaders and yet assassination attempts (let alone successes!) are quite rare. This leaves the question of less-defended people, and there it's more mixed: it's much easier to do but 10^6-10^10 fewer people want to kill them which makes it a lot easier to catch the conspirators simply by tracking who had motive. Finally, everyday victims don't usually have haters with enough capital to motivate someone to risk LiP - again, making it easy to track down the perps by motive.
I don't think that's true, that it's fear of imprisonment etc. Such things definitely matter, but I think the reason for the lack of political assassinations is the same as why we don't get horrible viruses that spread like wildfire and kill Ebola (which I believe to be that bioscience professors aren't usually very evil).
People who could easily murder politicians and others just don't want to. Perhaps they don't hate them all that much, perhaps they like democracy even though it puts people they dislike into high positions, perhaps they're opposed to murder.
We don't see mortar or drone attacks using image recognition (instead of radio control which could conceivably fail if basic precautions had been taken) on presidents and prime ministers in Europe even though such attacks would be trivial and the perpetrators would probably have a decent chance of getting away. It's because people don't hate them all that much and because the people who hate them a lot don't see such attacks as politically productive.
Presumably the reason unfriendly countries don't perform such attacks against those governments that oppose them is that it's not politically productive and would lead to a negative reaction instead of just removing the people the unfriendly country would like to be rid of.
> People who could easily murder politicians and others just don't want to. Perhaps they don't hate them all that much, perhaps they like democracy even though it puts people they dislike into high positions, perhaps they're opposed to murder.
I've wondered what makes unstable Americans conduct school shootings but not targeted assassinations?
Like, there is a part of the population that has no problem killing, and killing for shock value, but for whatever reason their targets are children and not politicians. The 1960s and 1970s were full of assassinations and plane hijackings by all kinds of people but they seem to have been replaced by the mass murder of children.
I think political assassination teens to make little sense most of the time. There is a sort of gentleperson's agreement to not do it, is someone breaks that then no one feels safe and leaders will be assassinating other leaders left and right. At least I think that is the great.
Deterrents only work if they're enforceable. Will you be able to catch someone if they use a drone to take out a target?
After watching what is going with the use of consumer drones in Ukraine I've come to the conclusion that we will soon see this in America. People will start to fight back against corrupt law enforcement sooner or later.
Imagine the world where people in a community brutalized by law enforcement crowd source drone strikes to take out particularly menacing law enforcement officers after they've been let off with paid vacation for the nth time.
The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street.
> The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street.
I don't think that's how this scenario would turn out. Policing would just move explicitly to counter insurgency operations. Laws would change as necessary to give authorities whatever tools they need to do it.
Thought:
The day-to-day situation in Mexico, for a number of decades, give a sinister data-point for the rate at which someone is willing to murder rather ordinary citizens.
Indeed. I'd add that quite a lot of the US mass shootings seem to be "political" in character, in that their perpetrator leaves some kind of manifesto or messageboard postings explaining their motive, but the victims are either random or attending the same school as the perpetrator. There's (fortunately) nobody with an organized program of political violence.
It definitely makes a lot of assumptions that I don't think hold true in practice. As you say, many world leaders would even want to have one another killed (as individuals with both motive and a lot of power to make it happen) and yet it doesn't happen very often. The practicalities of actually _using_ the digital cash, should you win, in a way that wouldn't point the finger at you are also not so simple.
It's an interesting thought experiment though. Would probably make for a cool novel!
It's downright terrifying to think this was written 25 years ago, and now many of the tools that the author describes as being enablers in some of the described activities are readily available to the average person, let alone nation states and governments.
You should feel the opposite: this was written 25 years ago, was stupid when it was written, and as these tools have become ever-cheaper and more ubiquitous, nothing at all like this has ever happened, showing how hopelessly naive Bell was (and, judging from his subsequent activity, still is).
This was the idiotic rambling of someone with a bit of technical skill and a complete and utter lack of understanding of people, politics, or society. This is something a 14 year old computer geek might come up with hanging out with his friends.
I've known about AP and the problems it poses since it was published. I was also the release coordinator for the 2015 Ethereum launch, and wondered if we would see any attempts to implement AP on our infrastructure. I spent some time thinking about how to fix it.
I think the answer is a large anonymous fund, a public good, which simply lists anybody who starts an AP server on a public blockchain on their own AP server.
I think the game theory is sound, which says nothing about either morality, reasonableness, or legality.
Just because Timothy McVeigh was a mass murderer doesn't mean the ATF and FBI agents at Ruby Ridge and Waco weren't murderers too. I realize who did what at Waco is highly disputed, but the rules of engagement being used at Ruby Ridge were straight up murder:
"If any adult in the area around the cabin is observed with a weapon after the surrender announcement had been made, deadly force could and should be used to neutralize the individual."
Waco and Ruby ridge were effectively the same. The end result of their actions was "How would you execute a warrant against El Chapo" and both forced the feds to act in such a way.
There's an initial crime (sex with 12yr old for David Koresh, and selling illegal weaponry to white supremacist criminal orgs for Randy Weaver).
Then they don't engage the legal system normally by hiring a lawyer and fighting the charges -- they hide in a hole hoping to be forgotten about.
When the feds inevitably try to serve a warrant, in both cases they respond in a hostile manner and kill a LEO.
At this point you can basically be expected to be treated like a drug lord -- you're facing charges and responding to warrants by killing officers. So you get besieged like a drug lord.
The main difference for Ruby Ridge is that the government took a bunch of decisions (procedural mistakes, over-eager sniper and rules of engagement) that made them unsympathetic.
But even with this, it's a little absurd to come out and defend the Weavers for playing very stupid games and winning stupid prizes. You kill a law enforcement office in a hostile manner, don't expect to be treated with courtesy.
There's hundreds of cases where LEOs are recklessly killing innocents in manners that should get them lambasted, but Ruby Ridge ain't it.
Perhaps because reality doesn't stop existing if you don't pay attention to it.
Nor do actual threats become any less threatening (if anything, the opposite).
So not paying any attention to the talking points, i.e. not reading TFA, wont have any effect.
Not to mention that the people "sane" enough head the advice and not read it, are the ones who wouldn't do anything shady even if they read it anyway...
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He seemed OK, in the few words we exchanged, and maybe a techie/radio hobbyist (IIRC, his car had many antennae on it).
At that time, in the 1980s, someone remarked that Bell had "had one good idea" (the SemiDisk persistent storage card).
Later on, it looks from Wikipedia like Bell had a lot of troubles.
The light joke about "one good idea" IMHO took on new, darker meaning, after some of the choices during the troubles, including the horrifying idea that's the topic of the post.
I suppose a good SF writer could've started with that idea, and explored an (IMHO likely) scenario of it playing out as a tool of the most corrupt and the most insane, and then the dystopia that results in.
I haven't read much of Bell's writings, so I don't know whether at some point he shifted to a cautionary "we should figure out how to prevent things like this, because they would be bad".
For one thing, life imprisonment (LiP) is a pretty big deterrent, and among the few willing to risk it, defense tech and the surveillance state are generally winning the arms race against individual actors and small groups ("terrorists"). Lots of people want to kill world leaders and yet assassination attempts (let alone successes!) are quite rare. This leaves the question of less-defended people, and there it's more mixed: it's much easier to do but 10^6-10^10 fewer people want to kill them which makes it a lot easier to catch the conspirators simply by tracking who had motive. Finally, everyday victims don't usually have haters with enough capital to motivate someone to risk LiP - again, making it easy to track down the perps by motive.
People who could easily murder politicians and others just don't want to. Perhaps they don't hate them all that much, perhaps they like democracy even though it puts people they dislike into high positions, perhaps they're opposed to murder.
We don't see mortar or drone attacks using image recognition (instead of radio control which could conceivably fail if basic precautions had been taken) on presidents and prime ministers in Europe even though such attacks would be trivial and the perpetrators would probably have a decent chance of getting away. It's because people don't hate them all that much and because the people who hate them a lot don't see such attacks as politically productive.
Presumably the reason unfriendly countries don't perform such attacks against those governments that oppose them is that it's not politically productive and would lead to a negative reaction instead of just removing the people the unfriendly country would like to be rid of.
I've wondered what makes unstable Americans conduct school shootings but not targeted assassinations?
Like, there is a part of the population that has no problem killing, and killing for shock value, but for whatever reason their targets are children and not politicians. The 1960s and 1970s were full of assassinations and plane hijackings by all kinds of people but they seem to have been replaced by the mass murder of children.
After watching what is going with the use of consumer drones in Ukraine I've come to the conclusion that we will soon see this in America. People will start to fight back against corrupt law enforcement sooner or later.
Imagine the world where people in a community brutalized by law enforcement crowd source drone strikes to take out particularly menacing law enforcement officers after they've been let off with paid vacation for the nth time.
The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street.
I don't think that's how this scenario would turn out. Policing would just move explicitly to counter insurgency operations. Laws would change as necessary to give authorities whatever tools they need to do it.
It's an interesting thought experiment though. Would probably make for a cool novel!
Assassination Politics (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544251 - Oct 2013 (62 comments)
Assassination Politics (by Jim Bell) + Bitcoin = ? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500781 - April 2011 (8 comments)
Assassination Politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327329 - Oct 2008 (1 comment)
Assassination Politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119173 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)
This was the idiotic rambling of someone with a bit of technical skill and a complete and utter lack of understanding of people, politics, or society. This is something a 14 year old computer geek might come up with hanging out with his friends.
I think the answer is a large anonymous fund, a public good, which simply lists anybody who starts an AP server on a public blockchain on their own AP server.
I think the game theory is sound, which says nothing about either morality, reasonableness, or legality.
That's the same rhethoric behind Oklahoma city bombing for those at home.
It's the same sort of stochastic terrorists that end up in the QAnon hole these days.
I don't know why we pay their talking points any attention.
"If any adult in the area around the cabin is observed with a weapon after the surrender announcement had been made, deadly force could and should be used to neutralize the individual."
There's an initial crime (sex with 12yr old for David Koresh, and selling illegal weaponry to white supremacist criminal orgs for Randy Weaver).
Then they don't engage the legal system normally by hiring a lawyer and fighting the charges -- they hide in a hole hoping to be forgotten about.
When the feds inevitably try to serve a warrant, in both cases they respond in a hostile manner and kill a LEO.
At this point you can basically be expected to be treated like a drug lord -- you're facing charges and responding to warrants by killing officers. So you get besieged like a drug lord.
The main difference for Ruby Ridge is that the government took a bunch of decisions (procedural mistakes, over-eager sniper and rules of engagement) that made them unsympathetic.
But even with this, it's a little absurd to come out and defend the Weavers for playing very stupid games and winning stupid prizes. You kill a law enforcement office in a hostile manner, don't expect to be treated with courtesy.
There's hundreds of cases where LEOs are recklessly killing innocents in manners that should get them lambasted, but Ruby Ridge ain't it.
Nor do actual threats become any less threatening (if anything, the opposite).
So not paying any attention to the talking points, i.e. not reading TFA, wont have any effect.
Not to mention that the people "sane" enough head the advice and not read it, are the ones who wouldn't do anything shady even if they read it anyway...