Re: Warrentless Search

Mr. Davis said:

The average citizen operates from a paradigm of self interest, perhaps
extended to his/her family.  If a governmental action does not resonate
with this paradigm- (i.e. "what's in it for me?")- the government action
goes largley unnoticed.  When the Reagan administration exhumed the 1888
Law allowing military to assist law enforcement, but not make arrests, I
took note of that because it directly affected my life.  Almost no one
else paid any attention to it.

<-

What you describe, as near as I can tell, is the effect of
"entrepreneurial politics."  That is when a policy (allegedly) creates
general and widespread benefits at a cost that burdens a small portion of
the popolous.  The incentive is strong for the few opponents to oppose it.
These tend to pass when the opponents are poorly represented and cannot
make their objections widely known.

Compare these with:

Client politics:  When the benefits of a policy are concentrated, but the
burdens widely spread.  Small groups have powerful reasons to support the
regulation/legislation.  The opponents have little reason to resist if
it even is clear that the legislation will effect them.  These usually
pass when watchdog groups are not present.

Interest-Group politics:  Costs and benefits are narrowly concentrated.
The public doesn't have much incentive to be bothered with the legislation
and doubts there is a serious effect to them.  Interest groups usually
carry the day here.

Majoritarian politics:  All or most of society hopes to gain; all or
most hopes to gain.  Interest groups have little incentive to form.


In general what you seem to want to attribute to a basic non-concern by
the people in general is really the fact that none or little of the
citizenry feel themselves effected by the legislation.

The circumvention of the rights against warrantless search in such a major
way is a majoritarian politic issue, and is not comparable to the
example that you gave, (baring more specific information).

Ignoring the potential ramifications of a seizure of constitutional rights
to fight the symptoms of some invented "Crime Crisis" is to me much more
indictive of citizen's apathy.  I make this assertion with the admission
that I don't know the specifics of your example, as you did not provide
them.

I feel this conversation, which facinates me, bears off of the cypherpunks
topic.  Unless the voices calling for a more technical and a less
political subject matter have waned, I think we should consider another
forum.

Personally I find the discussion of centralist issues in general important.
It's the tie in to cryptography and the lack of a comprehensive list
position on the political nexus with the technical that worries me.

Sorry for the bandwidth in any event.
See, J.Q. Wilson, The Politics of Regulation (1980) for a deeper discussion.

-uni- (Dark)

Black Unicorn writes:

...

> I feel this conversation, which facinates me, bears off of the cypherpunks
> topic.  Unless the voices calling for a more technical and a less
> political subject matter have waned, I think we should consider another
> forum.

Unfortunately, there are few other forums for this kind of discussion.
The Extropians list used to have this kind of discussion, though it
was mixed in with all kinds of other stuff--and I hear that list
currently has 80 subscribers (Harry or Ray can tell us the facts),
which is about 12% of what Cypherpunks has, so the discussion universe
may be too small for comfort.

Robin Hanson's "AltInst" list exists to discuss "alternative
institutions." "Libernet" is for the hard-core libertarians, though
most people I know can no longer stand to be on it.

A few other groups and mailing lists exist, also, but the problem is
that they're all "competing in the same memetic space." Most of the
groups are low-volume, so the discussions rarely take off.

But discussing politics here is not at all banned--how could it be?
Politics comes up a lot, including the Clipper debate and all the
recent discussions.

The "Cypherpunks write code" credo is related to the idea that
actually bringing on the future we want to see, via such things as
remailers, anonymity, digital cash (someday), etc., is more
important--and more interesting--than the usual political chatter
about whether the means of production belong to the ruling class or to
the working class, whether trees have legal standing, and whether gold
should be the basis of money. Blah blah, we've all heard this stuff
before.

But with the "ground truth" of strong crypto to keep us honest, to
keep us focussed, these political debates take on a new piquancy and a
new importance. Our debates about banking, national borders, extortion
markets, tax evasion, electronic democracies, and so on, have been
fairly useful.

So, Black Unicorn, where else will you find another group that has this mix
of folks, this combination of crypto expertise and political acumen?


> Personally I find the discussion of centralist issues in general important.
> It's the tie in to cryptography and the lack of a comprehensive list
> position on the political nexus with the technical that worries me.

A comprehensive list position? My views (which I call "crypto
anarchy") are well-known. Many others seem to agree with some or all
of the main points. Others don't. 

But how can 700+ folks on this list be expected to reach a consensus?

Furthermore, we have no voting, no leadership--except the "leadership
of the soapbox." No central lobbying office such as EFF, CPSR, and
other political action groups have. No funding. No treasury. No
nothing. Thus, it's unlikely we'll ever be like the EFF, issuing
position papers, lobbying Congress, sending out spokesmen to talk to
groups, and so on. We're more of an anarchy, appropriately enough.

And yet we serve a useful function, as borne out by the citations in
the press, the inclusion on mailing lists of CPSR, EFF, etc. It seems
to work pretty well.

--Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Timothy C. May writes:
> 
> Black Unicorn writes:
> Unfortunately, there are few other forums for this kind of discussion.
> The Extropians list used to have this kind of discussion, though it
> was mixed in with all kinds of other stuff--and I hear that list
> currently has 80 subscribers (Harry or Ray can tell us the facts),
> which is about 12% of what Cypherpunks has, so the discussion universe
> may be too small for comfort.

   Actually, we still have 340+ subscribers, but only 80 or so paid
subscribers. I have delayed switching on the auto-deletion of
people who haven't paid up because Tanya is still receiving checks
and hasn't fully updated the list software database yet. If I did turn it on
now, a lot of people who have sent their money in might get accidently
deleted 'cause their account hasn't been updated yet.

   I prefer smaller lists anyway. The people who have paid are
obviously more intererested in Extropianism than the free riders.
This means that a) most of the subscribers are now participants/interested and
not lurkers b) higher signal-to-noise

   Cypherpunks has a mucher larger distribition, but what percentage
contributes to discussions? (this is not an attaack on cpunks) However,
if 50% of cpunks were coding, a lot more would get done.

   Incidently Tim, since you left, the list volume has dropped off
a lot. About 1/3 to 1/4 of its previous volume (about 3-10 messages a day
vs 30-50)

> A few other groups and mailing lists exist, also, but the problem is
> that they're all "competing in the same memetic space." Most of the
> groups are low-volume, so the discussions rarely take off.

   One of the reason the extropians list persists is that its memetric
space has a high number of dimentions. Cryptography, politics, lifeextension,
economics, math, space, physics, philosophy etc. If people are bored with
math one week, they discuss philosophy the next.

> So, Black Unicorn, where else will you find another group that has this mix
> of folks, this combination of crypto expertise and political acumen?

  Dare I mention it? ;-)

-Ray

-- Ray Cromwell        |    Engineering is the implementation of science;   --
-- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu  |       politics is the implementation of faith.     --

On Sun, 17 Apr 1994, Timothy C. May wrote:

> Robin Hanson's "AltInst" list exists to discuss "alternative
> institutions." "Libernet" is for the hard-core libertarians, though
> most people I know can no longer stand to be on it.

What is the subscription address for AltInst?

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