Re: Cyberspatial governments?

At 11:39 AM 8/30/94 EDT, Jason W Solinsky wrote:

>You were
>writing about the problems of anonymous entities and suggested that
>you would have difficulty dealing with such entities because there is
>no way for you to know when a company you are dealing with undergoes a
>substantial change. But look at the physical realm. What is it that makes
>companies disclose changes in their upper management? Why do they announce
>major deals publicly? Why do they discuss strategy in their quarterly
>filings? They might well be motivated to disclose positive things without
>SEC regulations, but negative events show up because a government is
forcing them to make those disclosures.

An advanced telecommunications environment offers a number of ways to
protect yourself against the problems involved in dealing with anonymous
entities in a situation in which there is no monopoly Government. 

(Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper
case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a
lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate
government or engine government.)

When one's PBX finds that one's call is not going through via a particular
long distance carrier, it automatically switches to another one.  It is easy
to imagine one's intelligent agents testing various sorts of transaction
completions and switching vendors when one fails.  Professional checkers can
supply information on vendor status for a fee.  After all, we don't care if
a company we are dealing with changes if its service is unaffected.  

Eric Hughes is working on another approach, an Open Books protocol which
will let companies post anonymous but checkable sets of accounts which can
be accessed by anyone on the nets, can't be easily spoofed but give no
private info to anyone else.  Sort of Zero Knowledge Proof Bookkeeping.
(Could we call this triple-entry bookkeeping?)

It is important to note in any case that the use of third-party escrow as a
substitute for Government regulation was a feature of the Northern European
semi-anarchies of Iceland and Ireland that have informed modern libertarian
thought.  I doubt that my old Poli Sci prof Don Balmer would consider an
escrow company to be the equivalent of the Government of the United States.

DCF

"Though he may be poor
He will never be a slave"

Duncan writes:

| (Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper
| case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a
| lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate
| government or engine government.)

	As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge,
monolithic enemy.  It is a multitude of huge enemies.  If you think of
it as a single entity, you will often miss the subtelties in its
actions.  If you don't understand why your enemy is doing what they
are doing, you will have trouble opposing it.

	If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as
the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation
comes from bureaucratic turf wars.  Seeing 'Government' as your great
enemy is a damaging misnomer.

	I'm not arguing *for* government here, I'm simply pointing out
that seeing government as a monolith is like seeing any large entity
as a monolith.  Its really made up of small parts that interact in
strange & unpredicatble ways.

Adam

As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge,
   monolithic enemy.  It is a multitude of huge enemies.  

This was my best joke during my crypto presentation at HOPE a couple
of weeks ago.  I was describing threat models for remailer networks.

1. Recipient -- any indirection works 

2. Sysadmins, and then I added, "or anyone else with root access".
That got a big laugh.

3. Operators of the remailer nodes

4. Gov't -- law enforcement

5. Gov't -- national security

It was during my explanation on why the FBI doesn't really get access
to National Technical Means, e.g. NSA SIGINT, that I got the BIG laugh.

Eric

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Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> writes:

> Duncan writes:

> | (Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper
> | case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a
> | lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate
> | government or engine government.)

> 	As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge,
> monolithic enemy.  It is a multitude of huge enemies.  If you think of
> it as a single entity, you will often miss the subtelties in its
> actions.  If you don't understand why your enemy is doing what they
> are doing, you will have trouble opposing it.

Right on.  And as Eric pointed out on May 14, ``Misallocation of
attention leads one down false trails.  Who has the excess brainpower
for that waste?''

> 	If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as
> the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation
> comes from bureaucratic turf wars.

But their power comes from their clients --- the hundred million of
our ``friends and neighbors'' who plot and scheme to wield these
agencies on their behalf.

The agencies are just, well, agents.  Remove them and their principals
will immediately erect new ones in their place.  Who are their
principals?  They are legion: Every person who solicits their services
or even just gratuitously accepts their services.

> Seeing 'Government' as your great enemy is a damaging misnomer.

There's nothing wrong with Duncan's proposal to distinguish
``Government'' from ``government'', just so it's understood that
``Government'' includes most of the population.

> 	I'm not arguing *for* government here, I'm simply pointing out
> that seeing government as a monolith is like seeing any large entity
> as a monolith.  Its really made up of small parts that interact in
> strange & unpredicatble ways.

Yes.  We cannot afford to misperceive it if we hope to successfully
defend ourselves against it.

	John E. Kreznar		| Relations among people to be by
	jkreznar@ininx.com	| mutual consent, or not at all.

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>	If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as
>the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation
>comes from bureaucratic turf wars.  Seeing 'Government' as your great
>enemy is a damaging misnomer.

Indeed, many government policies can be understood only from this
perspective. Clipper is a perfect example. Key escrow exists only
because the NSA doesn't want to risk blame if some terrorist or drug
dealer were to use an unescrowed NSA-produced algorithm.

The fact that a terrorist or drug dealer can easily go elsewhere and
obtain other strong or stronger algorithms without key escrow is
irrelevant. The NSA simply doesn't care as long as *they* can't be
blamed for whatever happens. Classic CYA, nothing more.

A similar analysis applies to the export control regulations regarding
cryptography.

Phil

> Indeed, many government policies can be understood only from this
> perspective. Clipper is a perfect example. Key escrow exists only
> because the NSA doesn't want to risk blame if some terrorist or drug
> dealer were to use an unescrowed NSA-produced algorithm.

If this is indeed the case, Matt Blaze's results should be
particularly devastating to them.

						- Bill