Why BlackNet *IS* a Data Haven

Jim McCoy and Larry Dettweiler have, in their own ways, raised objections
to my characterization of BlackNet (and that class of mechanisms) as a
distributed, untraceable, robust "data haven."

Without splitting too many semantic hairs about the precise definition of
"data haven," let me examine some ways in which BlackNet behaves
identically to a conventional data haven.

Imagine a piece of data has been outlawed in some jurisdiction. For
simplicity, imagine this to be a book, a text. Let's give it a name, "The
Necronomicon." This "Necronomicon" is contraband, illegal, forbidden,
banned, on The Index in many countries, including the Vatican and the
United States.

(This is just an example. Replace "Necronomicon" with "child porn" for a
more realistic, if distasteful to many, example.)

The classical, Sterling-style "data haven" would have it that this piece of
data, this book, is stored and is available (perhaps for a price) in a
physical site. Maybe Anguilla (thought this is appearing less and less
likely), maybe "The Raft," maybe an orbiting DeathStar, maybe a weather
balloon drifting in the jet stream...

The classical data haven is closely identified with "place." To many
people, they naturally assume "data haven" = a haven for data, a "harbor"
(same IE root as haven) = a physical place.

But is "place" important?

Consider someone in the United States who wants a copy of the Necronomicon.
He can't get it locally, as it is banned. He can try dialing-in or
connecting to a country where it is not banned, but this introduces risks
(as with those who download child porn, arrrange to have it shipped to
them, etc.).

(And the physical jurisdictions which carrry the Necronomicon, or child
porn, or Church of Scientology secrets, etc., will likely be under pressure
to limit or deny access.)

Cryptography offers another way, as it does in so many other areas.

A person in the U.S. seeking the Necronomicon posts a message to BlackNet
(or any similar forum, using the same methods) asking for a copy of it, or
offering to pay for it. (Whether the information is free or for a fee is
not central to the idea.) This request is, of course, untraceable.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a copy of this banned material on his
or her private machines may see this request and respond, either giving the
material away, or negotiating a fee. (As I said before, the absence of a
robust digital cash system, bidirectionally untraceable, is a known
limitation of all such systems.)

Thus, it is as if there is a "virtual data haven" (tm), or a "virtual
library," for banned/controversial/etc. materials.

Anyone may "check out" materials by submitting requests (and perhaps paying
a fee). The source of the materials is, of course, unknown. The receiver of
the materials if, of course, unknown.

I call this at least as functional as a "physical data haven," where
someone might physically travel to Anguilla, say, to buy a copy of the
Necronomicon...

...and a whole lot more convenient.

This is, then, my vision of a "distributed, robust, untraceable data haven."

It's a data haven.

And it exists, or at least there are exemplars of it. It's lacking robust
digital money, to keep the transactions untraceable, but it's here.

The Church of Scientology documents essentially exist at this virtual data
haven site. Think about it.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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True, for controversial political and artistic materials whose
authors/distributors have an interest in disseminating.

However, with neither a government to enforce contracts nor an identifiable
location/identity that can be used for the private enforcement of, ahem,
contracts, the barrier to entry for anonymous markets in real commercial
products seems rather high. How are buyers and sellers to trust each other?
How do you build reputation capital from zero? Once you have reputation,
transaction costs should be pretty low, but building it?

If what you're selling is a physical product, you're ultimately going to
have a location. If what you're selling is information, how do you
demonstrate the worth and trustworthiness of your data without distributing
it? And once you have distributed it, what's to stop a "counterfeiter" from
redistributing it, stealing your profits before you have had a chance to
establish your reputation capital as the preferred source?

I don't see anonymous digital cash as the tightest bottleneck. Distributed
trust in an anonymous marketplace seems more difficult.

- -rich

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1st: apologies to Jim Bell for misquoting him. I think I meant
Jim Mccoy.

>Without splitting too many semantic hairs about the precise definition of
>"data haven," let me examine some ways in which BlackNet behaves
>identically to a conventional data haven.

naw, let's split some semantic hairs. <g>

I am willing to agree in principle that blacknet is *similar* to
a data haven, as I wrote in my response. 
it involves similar ideas. however, in your *original*
Blacknet announcement it was explicitly portrayed to be essentially
an *intelligence*service*.  I agree that you could have modified
this announcement to pretend that you are also providing
"data haven" type services, but you didn't focus on this angle,
and I object to you going back and claiming you had some priority on this
idea via Blacknet (at least that's what you seem to be doing)
when you really did not. of course you have been
discussing data haven ideas for about as long as anybody here, and
may even have some degree of precedence in inventing aspects of the
idea, but I don't think it's fully legitimate to suggest that
your blacknet gedanken promoted the concept of a data haven,
or even contained it.

you neglect key points that I and others are raising.
raw data is not the same as intelligence-- it is far different.
with raw data you want a mechanism that has the reliability/fidelity
and access time of a hard drive, essentially. you want something
that doesn't alter or reformulate data-- something the Blacknet announcement
never promised at all, and in fact it was clearly implying that
the service would be involved in sorting out what data to sell to
whom and presumably repackaging it, so to speak. 

sending requests
to blacknet, "can you please send me a copy of [x]" does not
fit my idea of a hard drive type request. a data haven and
a blacknet intelligence operation share some *similarities* but
in principle there would be some vastly different
implementation issues for one or the other.

again, *in*theory* you could use blacknet for a data haven type
arrangement. a company that provided both would make a lot of
sense as far as consolodating similar functions. however to
claim that you were promoting the idea of a data haven with
the initial announcement of blacknet, that's just not correct
imho. I'd call that Blacknet II: the Sequel which you recently
cooked up.

>I call this at least as functional as a "physical data haven," where
>someone might physically travel to Anguilla, say, to buy a copy of the
>Necronomicon...

again, your original blacknet service made no guarantee whatsoever about
providing data back to someone who sent it in, in unaltered form, something
that would be key to a data haven. in fact it implied that the people
who sent in the data wouldn't be interested in getting it back--they
would only want the cash for its informational value to other buyers. you do
however point out that data havens in which material sent in by some people
and retrieved by others would tend to be another application. (when I 
think of data haven I think of person [x] submitting material in secret,
and then person [x] downloading it or making it available to others
based on his own decision. blacknet was explicitly making the decision
of availability on its own)

in fact this is a very important attribute you are glossing over
with your rather slippery exposition. let's say I submit some
secret data to Blacknet, and I want a guarantee they are not going to
sell it to other people, even if it is encrypted by me.  (otherwise they
might sell it to someone who wants to break it.)  the original 
blacknet announcement involved the antithesis of this confidentiality
arrangement-- it explicitly suggested that you would use the service
only to sell data that others might want. presumably they would have
no use for an encrypted file they could not decrypt and might just
throw it away.  

again, the original announcement made *no*guarantee* that Blacknet
would even save your data. they could throw it away. that is your
idea of a data haven? if it said, "we will also guarantee we will
reliably store your data for a fee which you can retrieve"-- just
that sentence and I would agree with you that the original blacknet
was also a data haven. but lacking that, I disagree. notice that this
is quite different than the original announcement, which implied
that only the people who wanted to buy the data would submit fees
to the service, not those who submit the information (who would
in fact be paid by blacknet for the semantic content value)

>It's a data haven.

it is, after you revise it as you are doing in your recent essays.
again your original announcement did not approach the data haven
angle you are now emphasizing whatsoever and in some ways as I 
enumerate was in direct conflict with it.