Democratic Assassination

>  Instead of putting child pornographers in prison we will put
>cryptographers and remailer operators in prison. Instead of
>confiscating the assets of drug czars will confiscate the assets
>of people who have a kid who smokes a joint once a week. Instead
>of censoring legislation which limits our freedom and privacy
>we will censor literature which proposes democratic assassination
>of those who oppress us.

Whoa there bud! I have a nagging feeling that democratic assassination is a
large can of worms than we realize.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a society that is built upon
the notion that those people who do and say unpopular things deserve death.
Yet that is exactly what a system of "democratic" assassinations would do,
enable a large group of people to intimidate and subvert a smaller group of
people.

So, for the sake of argument, let this system of anonymous democratic
assassination come to pass...then what? Utopia? Maybe....

But let's say that someone comes along later, proposing a way of living
that is radically different from the norm. Exhibiting a nasty
characteristic that has been inherent in the human races for eons....even
before the rise of large sprawling governments....the majority of people
decide that they don't like this troublemaker....through the process of
democratic assassination...this person is now dead. Forget even the shade
of a possibility that this person may have been right...that his way of
living ***may*** have been better than the norm. Right and wrong don't
matter. Popularity and the "mood of the crowd" do...this person said
somethig unpopular, and is dead because of it.

Freedom of speech?

Let's say that a group of people suddenly become unpopular. Perhaps times
are tough and the majority need a scapegoat. Maybe this group of people
have been long oppressed and are finally fighting back. Through a system of
democratized assassination....their leaders are dead....with no one willing
to take their place (out of fear)....maybe a few other random people are
killed just to really get these people quaking in their boots.

Or let's take it one step further. If democratic assassination is good, why
not democratic genocide. Let the people take a vote, and if the scale tips
the right way, an entire group of people need killed.

Is this good?

Let's take a step further. Going back to my first example, let's say that
someone comes along proposing a new way to live, and many people take to it
and follow this person. Unfortunately, this person has just happened to
make a few powerful enemies. Through a system of "democratic"
assassination, this person is now dead...and there is no way to catch
his/her killers.

Is this even democratic?

Even if digital cash, anonymous remailers and strong encryption could
enable us to set up a democratic system of assassination (which it
couldn't)...I still wouldn't want to live in a society where killing is
democratized...I do not want to live in a society where people can
abitrarily take a vote on whether I should live or die....

Just because a majority of people like an idea, does that make the idea any
more right or any less wrong?

I (and I would wager you) do not want to live in a society where it is
dangerous...even life threatening to be unpopular, and to go against the
flow. I know that I hold fast to ideas and beliefs which are hardly
considered popular....the only reason I'm not socially scorned, right now,
is because I'm very diplomatic about them....

You wrote a lot about "The Machine," as if it was some real, intelligent,
calculating conscience. It is not. While I do not doubt that "The Machine"
exists, it is not something that is tangible....it is a system...a way of
doing things...a set of entrenched powers...it is not a person.

"The Machine" won't be defeated by killing. Its weakness is far more
subtle..and takes a lot longer to exploit....but that's another story...for
another listserv.

That IRS guy that you want to kill? Sure, he might work for "The Machine,"
but killing him won't solve anything. Hating him won't solve anything. It
might be a short term fix, but there will be others. And perhaps, if you
stop and look at that IRS guy whom you hate so much...you might find that
	1) He has parents, maybe even a wife and children, all of whom love him
	2) He gets tired and night, and has to use the bathroom
	3) He gets happy, sad, lonely, depressed,

	He's another human being....just like yourself...indeed, the only
	difference between himself and yourself is how he makes a living.

And maybe...just maybe...he is just as big a victim of "The Machine" as you
are.

Of course, I'm not accusing anyone of wanting to kill anyone...or hating
anyone. I'm just throw this out because it is food for thought.

You write so much about "The Machine" causing division and hatred between
people.

Perhaps "The Machine" has manipulated you more than you realize.

Justice rarely comes out of hatred.

Regards,
Pilgrim

Regards,
Pilgrim

> There is something fundamentally wrong with a society that is built upon
> the notion that those people who do and say unpopular things deserve death.

Not necessarily. No-one here would begin to suggest that AP *should* be 
used for censorship purposes, to say that AP is a censorship tool is a 
misunderstanding based on that old enemy material determinism. A gun can 
be a censorship tool, a knife can be a censorship tool, hell just about 
any blunt instrument can be a censorship tool too. I believe that those 
who censor, tax, imprison unlawfully and persecute deserve death. Of 
course some people may see this differently, I refer in particular to 
Peter Trei who has said on several occasions he objects to execution in 
nearly all circumstances (I say nearly all because I don`t know his 
position on assasination when it is the only way to remove a dictator or 
similar), I can understand his objection, and although I often talk of 
the uses of AP and executing government criminals I do see problems with 
the total irrevocability of the death penalty, it`s just that I see the 
burden of proof in cases such as polticians and police etc. as being so 
totally overwhelming as to preclude even a small doubt, let alone 
"reasonable doubt", whatever you define that as being, YMMV.

> Yet that is exactly what a system of "democratic" assassinations would do,
> enable a large group of people to intimidate and subvert a smaller group of
> people.

Of course, but once again I refer you to my example of other weapons, 
guns can be used by a large group of people to subvert a smaller group.
AP is essentially, just as are any other more direct form of anonymous 
contract killings, another weapon, its moral worth is defined by the way 
in which it is used, not by the system itself.

> So, for the sake of argument, let this system of anonymous democratic
> assassination come to pass...then what? Utopia? Maybe....

No, but maybe anarchy, maybe stable minarchist government, the whole 
system is too dynamic and too difficult to predict. AP could equally lead 
to chaos, however, the fact that the current murder rate in, for example, 
the US is high but not out of control. The reason I personally think that 
AP or anonymous contract killings will not lead to chaos is based on the 
fact that it is not currently impossible to commit the perfect crime 
without digital assasination markets. If I want to kill my next door 
neighbour I can find a way to do so and make the chance of being caught 
diminishingly small, Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
When it comes to killing say a polotician, this becomes much more 
difficult, my chances of poisoning the presidents coffee is not that good 
to say the least! AP allows the killing of public officials and can help 
to make the source of the asssasination payments untraceable (I say can 
help because although digital assasination markets can be made perfectly 
secure in terms of being untraceable, this does little good if I go out, 
drink a bottle of whisky, and tell a total stranger I am having the prime 
minister killed ;-)) Using AP (or similar systems) to kill my next door 
neighbout is inneficient and makes little sense.

> But let's say that someone comes along later, proposing a way of living
> that is radically different from the norm. Exhibiting a nasty
> characteristic that has been inherent in the human races for eons....even
> before the rise of large sprawling governments....the majority of people
> decide that they don't like this troublemaker....through the process of
> democratic assassination...this person is now dead. Forget even the shade
> of a possibility that this person may have been right...that his way of
> living ***may*** have been better than the norm. Right and wrong don't
> matter. Popularity and the "mood of the crowd" do...this person said
> somethig unpopular, and is dead because of it.
> 
> Freedom of speech?

Don`t confuse the system (which has no ethical structure to it in itself, 
it is simply a tool) with the way in which it is used. You would not say 
that a hammer is "an evil censorship tool" because I can bludgeon people 
to death with it if they say something I do not like. The scale of the 
usefulness of a system makes no difference to this.

> Let's say that a group of people suddenly become unpopular. Perhaps times
> are tough and the majority need a scapegoat. Maybe this group of people
> have been long oppressed and are finally fighting back. Through a system of
> democratized assassination....their leaders are dead....with no one willing
> to take their place (out of fear)....maybe a few other random people are
> killed just to really get these people quaking in their boots.

Read the paragraph above and substitute "the government" for "a group of 
people". This is the primary use of assasination markets, you are clearly 
however referring to the assasination of an innocuous group of people, 
say a religious order. Once again, take the paragraph above and at each 
instance of "democratized assasination" read "guns", the system is merely 
a tool, make value judgements on the people who use it incorrectly, not 
the system itself.

> Even if digital cash, anonymous remailers and strong encryption could
> enable us to set up a democratic system of assassination (which it
> couldn't)...

Expand on this please, if you believe anonymous digital assasination 
markets are not possible from a technical point of view please explain why...

> I still wouldn't want to live in a society where killing is
> democratized...I do not want to live in a society where people can
> abitrarily take a vote on whether I should live or die....

You do live in such a society, if the government decides to fuck you over 
and manages somehow to make a muder charge stick 12 randomly selected 
people can decide whether you live or die. If you say something unpopular 
you can be assasinated. 

> Just because a majority of people like an idea, does that make the idea any
> more right or any less wrong?

No, of course not, this is why democracy is an essentially flawed system. 
Indeed when I speak of minarchist state systems I see no need for 
democracy in such a system, there would be so little need for government 
that it would be sufficient to have commercial style recruitment to 
whatever remained of congress etc.

> I (and I would wager you) do not want to live in a society where it is
> dangerous...even life threatening to be unpopular, and to go against the
> flow. I know that I hold fast to ideas and beliefs which are hardly
> considered popular....the only reason I'm not socially scorned, right now,
> is because I'm very diplomatic about them....

My point exactly, you currently live in a society where holding unpopular 
views is dangerous, even life threatening. 

> 	1) He has parents, maybe even a wife and children, all of whom love him

See execution. If for example a "terrorist" blows up a building 
containing only innocent people, killing hundreds. He deserves to die, of 
course from a hedonist point of view the sorrow suffered by his wife, 
children, parents etc. would be overwhelmingly great compared with the 
combined small cold comfort felt out of revenge by the relatives of the 
initial victims, leading one to believe this would be an unjustified 
killing, I don`t hold with this.

> 	He's another human being....just like yourself...indeed, the only
> 	difference between himself and yourself is how he makes a living.

NO!, in that case we can possibly assume that TM believes in killing 
writers, or artists etc. Not so, working for the government (in an active 
capacity, as Jim said in his AP essay he would not consider the crimes of 
say a forest service grunt to be comparable with those of a police 
officer or similar) is not just a way of earning a wage, it involves 
accepting immoral laws and enforcing them, it involves persecuting people 
the government of the day happens not the like. It is not just a way of 
earning a living, see "ve vere just obeying orders"...

> And maybe...just maybe...he is just as big a victim of "The Machine" as you
> are.

This is a difficult point to even contemplate as having any basis in 
reality. Do you know any police officer (lets make that more specific 
and say DEA inspector) who is a victim? Do you know of any possibility, 
no matter how remote, that someone delegated the task of beating 
confessions out of suspects is a "victim" himself?

> Perhaps "The Machine" has manipulated you more than you realize.
> 
> Justice rarely comes out of hatred.

I agree, it is rarely productive to hate your enemy, but it is often a 
natural reaction...

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

>> There is something fundamentally wrong with a society that is built upon
>> the notion that those people who do and say unpopular things deserve death.
>
>Not necessarily. No-one here would begin to suggest that AP *should* be
>used for censorship purposes, to say that AP is a censorship tool is a
>misunderstanding based on that old enemy material determinism. A gun can
[...lots more other stuff that revolve around this point...]

This is true. Just because AP exists, doesn't immediately imply that it can
become a tool for censorship. It was, after all, intended to be used as a
tool to get rid of 'bad' people.

But the human beings are funny, in a way....and inordinately
creative....how many tools has technology given us, that human beings use
to kill each other. You can blame it on government if you wish, but human
beings have been killing each other long before large sprawling governments
existed.

We are very good at taking tools and using them for evil purposes...to kill
and maim one another.

So, as you have said, does this mean that we should eliminate all tools,
just because they should be used for evil purposes? As you have mentioned,
this is an insane notion. It can't be done, and ought not to be done. If it
were, I wouldn't be able to mow my lawn later on this afternoon :-)

So we should keep hammers, and axes, and cars, etc, regardless of the fact
that they could be used for evil purposes. So, what is so different about
AP?

Technology is a wonderous thing. It lets us do things more quickly, more
conveniently. I like my computer. It helps me to do things much faster, and
more accurately, than I could do them myself.

So there is something that greatly disturbs me when we merge the speed and
efficiency of technology with something as horrific as death. Indeed it has
already been done...(lemme digress for a little while)...I remember all of
the press conferences that were held during the Gulf War, when the United
States military was showing off its flashy high tech toys, which allowed
our fighters to blow things up from a very safe distance. We saved a lot of
"the good guy's" lives that way...our troops didn't encounter much blood at
all. But perhaps war ought not to be so clean....perhaps war should be
brutal and messy and bloody and costly...not because blood and guts and
horror and terror are good things, but because war is, in and of itself, a
horrific thing...and this technology blinds us to that fact....in an
attempt to make war "clean" with technology, we have only blinded
ourselves...and thus war becomes a little too easy for my own liking.

(...almost done digressing...)

Though I am not a rabid fan of Star Trek, I recall one episode that seems
to illustrate my point. The scene was set in some star system, with these
two worlds that had been at war for ages. However, these two planets had
become so 'evolved' that they used technology to greatly tidy up the mess
of war. The war was fought entirely in a computer simulation, and those
people who were killed were notified of that fact, upon which they walked
to the nearest disintegration chamber and were disintegrated. No blood. No
guts. No horror. Very 'civil'. Thus the war never really ended, because it
turned out to be 'not so bad,' regardless of the fact that scores of people
were still dying. The human toll was immense, though everyone involved was
completely blinded to that fact.

The episode ends with the Enterprise inadvertantly 'foiling' the system,
forcing the people of both worlds to face the horror of war square in the
face.

(...I'm done digressing now...)

I think there are great similarities between high-tech war and AP. Both are
very 'tidy' ways to kill people, at great distances from unseen locations,
without having to deal with the negative reprocussions of the act. They
both make killing a little too clean. They both make it easy for us to
dehumanize our targets, so that what we're killing is not really another
human being, but some object....some nuisance that must be destroyed.

If I kill someone with a hammer, or a gun, there is a certain level of
commitment that I have to make. I have to deal with the dehumanization. I
have to deal risk being caught. **I** have to do it.

Personally, I find it would find it hard to dehumanize someone when I put a
gun to their head and read the look of terror in their face. I would find
it hard to commit the act, knowing that there is a manifold number of ways
that I could be caught. Furthermore, I know I could not deal with the
responsibility of killing someone afterwards.

But AP is a nice neat solution to this. It makes killing very tidy, and
minimizes my own responsibility. I can use it to easily fool myself into
thinking that I'm really not resposible for killing a human
being....rather...I simply got rid of a nuisance...a source of pain....I
can think of it more akin to squashing a bug on a wall, rather than ending
someone's life.

Killing people is horrific and should remain that way..lest killing becomes
a little too easy...and once killing people becomes as easy as buying a
newspaper, who knows people will do with it. AP is way too easy for my
liking.


>> Even if digital cash, anonymous remailers and strong encryption could
>> enable us to set up a democratic system of assassination (which it
>> couldn't)...
>
>Expand on this please, if you believe anonymous digital assasination
>markets are not possible from a technical point of view please explain why...

My point was not that anonymous digital assasination was not possible...but
rather, the notion of such a mechanism being democratic is incorrect. If it
were democratic, there would be some sort of referendum...some sort of vote
being taken...and if enough people vote no, then it wouldn't take place.

This mechanism is not democratic, in the sense that, in order for a killing
to take place...one doesn't need a majority...one only needs enough
resources. If a couple of billionaires decide to knock off a young
entrepenuir (sp), they can do it very easily, and don't need to ask
anyone's permission.

In my mind, the notion of this mechanism being democratic was the only
****REMOTELY**** redeeming characteristic about this whole thing...and my
argument is that this system isn't even democratic. To make it work, one
doesn't need enough people and enough consenting opinions, simply enough
resources. While the two are sometimes related, they aren't always.

>
>> I still wouldn't want to live in a society where killing is
>> democratized...I do not want to live in a society where people can
>> abitrarily take a vote on whether I should live or die....
>
>You do live in such a society, if the government decides to fuck you over
>and manages somehow to make a muder charge stick 12 randomly selected
>people can decide whether you live or die. If you say something unpopular
>you can be assasinated.

This is a nasty truth.....so do I want this power expanded?

Scenario:
I'm very active in Christian outreach and evangelism. I move into a small
town of 20000 people and start a ministry there. I have success there, and
therefore greatly upset a fair portion of the town.

Now, the chances of a man in black from Washington DC to knock me off are
relatively small, compared to the chances of a couple of bigshots around
town arranging my murder using AP. This goes back to the point about AP
making killing a touch too easy.

If the government has the power to easily assassinate me for being
unpopular, this is a bad thing....but it doesn't lead me to conclude that
more people should have this kind of power....because I fear that rather
than this becoming a tool to fight oppression....it will simply become a
tool to kill people we don't like...politicians or janitors.

>
>> And maybe...just maybe...he is just as big a victim of "The Machine" as you
>> are.
>
>This is a difficult point to even contemplate as having any basis in
>reality. Do you know any police officer (lets make that more specific
>and say DEA inspector) who is a victim? Do you know of any possibility,
>no matter how remote, that someone delegated the task of beating
>confessions out of suspects is a "victim" himself?

It's a long story, and I can't go into it much without probably angering
many people on this listserv....but the roots of this idea begin in some
fundamental beliefs about people that I, being a committed Christian, carry
with me. If you care to get the full sermon, lemme know and I'll send you a
personal email.


>> Justice rarely comes out of hatred.
>
>I agree, it is rarely productive to hate your enemy, but it is often a
>natural reaction...

I agree, it is a natural reaction. I'm as guilty of it as the next
guy...though it's being worked out of me...SLOWLY :-D

Take Care,
Pilgrim

> This is true. Just because AP exists, doesn't immediately imply that it can
> become a tool for censorship. It was, after all, intended to be used as a
> tool to get rid of 'bad' people.
> 
> We are very good at taking tools and using them for evil purposes...to kill
> and maim one another.

True, but I don`t believe in judging crime at a collective level, just as 
free will is an individual characteristic and not specifically of a 
group, so criminality is defined at an individual level.

I have to agree that if AP were to come about, and indeed when fully 
anonymous digital assasination markets do become a reality, innocent 
people will be killed. So? I further agree that a society without 
assasination markets is safer, more peaceful etc. So? Assasination 
markets will allow the untraceable killings of hundreds of evil people 
who cannot be removed easily in any other way.
Speaking entirely hypothetically: If assasination bots were implemented, 
and I ran one, I would choose to keep a list of poloticians, DEA cops, 
censors etc. and only allow contracts on them, of course, there is 
nothing to stop anyone else running a server that accepted bets on 
anyone. I would just choose not to allow my equipment to be used for 
hiring assasins to kill innocent people. 

> So there is something that greatly disturbs me when we merge the speed and
> efficiency of technology with something as horrific as death. Indeed it has
> already been done...(lemme digress for a little while)...I remember all of
> the press conferences that were held during the Gulf War, when the United
> States military was showing off its flashy high tech toys, which allowed
> our fighters to blow things up from a very safe distance. We saved a lot of
> "the good guy's" lives that way...our troops didn't encounter much blood at
> all. But perhaps war ought not to be so clean....perhaps war should be
> brutal and messy and bloody and costly...not because blood and guts and
> horror and terror are good things, but because war is, in and of itself, a
> horrific thing...and this technology blinds us to that fact....

I agree, making war clinical and distancing ourselves from the bloody 
reality on the other side is not a good thing (tm). But, I draw your 
attention to the fact that we cannot generalise this principle to 
assasination. Normally assasination is cold and clinical for the person 
hiring the assasin anyway, and secondly, those who will kill an innocent 
person are probably too fucked up to be affected by the sight of 
suffering or death.
Also, brutal and costly wars have not affected us in the past, take WWI, 
Brusilov led an offensive that resulted in massive loss of life for 
minimal gain of territory, the many attacks of Field Marshal Sir Douglas 
Haig (A well known British tactician who always succeeded in killing as 
many of his own men as possible) particularly the first day of the Somme, 
where the British suffered 20000 dead, and gained only about 7km in 5 
months of fighting. The total dead in WWI were around 6 million, with 
around 18 million wounded.
The result of this terrible and brutal war? Anyone without the benefit of 
hindsight would call it a deterrent, a war to end all wars. But no, of 
course then there is WWII to consider. Barely 20 years later another war, 
some estimes putting the total dead at around 45 million (more 
conservatively around 37 million), the majority of these deaths were 
civilian. 
You might then say, has WWII not acted as a deterrent, we shall see, WWII 
was costly in terms of public opinion to the government in Britain 
because of the high number of civilian deaths actually occuring in 
Britain through bombings, this may act as a deterrent for government to 
venture into war lightly.


> in an
> attempt to make war "clean" with technology, we have only blinded
> ourselves...and thus war becomes a little too easy for my own liking.

I do agree, and intuitively it seems that massive loss of life and 
breaking of eggs would seem to act as a deterrent, but I don`t think it 
is quite so straightforward as all that. 

> I think there are great similarities between high-tech war and AP. Both are
> very 'tidy' ways to kill people, at great distances from unseen locations,
> without having to deal with the negative reprocussions of the act. They
> both make killing a little too clean. They both make it easy for us to
> dehumanize our targets, so that what we're killing is not really another
> human being, but some object....some nuisance that must be destroyed.

True enough, I personally do see government officials and police etc. as 
merely a nuicance to be destroyed, but I agree that dehumaizing the 
victims of a killing is not a good thing in many circumstances.

> If I kill someone with a hammer, or a gun, there is a certain level of
> commitment that I have to make. I have to deal with the dehumanization. I
> have to deal risk being caught. **I** have to do it.

Hmm, but I would say that if you are going to kill an innocent person you 
are probably not of a disposition or of a level of moral development 
where the sight of their head smashed in would deeply affect you, except 
on a temporary "freaked out" level.

> Personally, I find it would find it hard to dehumanize someone when I put a
> gun to their head and read the look of terror in their face. I would find
> it hard to commit the act, knowing that there is a manifold number of ways
> that I could be caught. Furthermore, I know I could not deal with the
> responsibility of killing someone afterwards.

Depends who you are talking about, morality based on the fear of 
punishment is first level ethical development, I will ignore this and 
just deal with the other issues.
If I were to not care about being caught, and the person I was killing 
was clearly guilty of crime (ie. a DEA agent) the look of terror in their 
face might instinctively and on a reactionary level affect me, but I 
think I could get over that by simply concentrating on the task in hand 
(dehumanising again), the responsibility of killing someone after the 
fact is no greater than that of considering your actions before, if you 
have decided in good conscience that there is conclusive proof of their 
guilt, and you are acting in self defence (and let us assume that you 
have judged accurately and are not just seeing what you want to see) then 
you can, assuming you are logical, put the act down to self defence or to 
punishment of whatever your preferred reason of the week, however, I 
presume you are not entirely logical, nor am I, and I can only say that 
emotional jabs at your conscience after the fact would just be something 
to be ignored or reasoned away.

> But AP is a nice neat solution to this. It makes killing very tidy, and
> minimizes my own responsibility. I can use it to easily fool myself into
> thinking that I'm really not resposible for killing a human

Yes, I personally do not see it this way, I think I would feel just as 
great a moral duty to justify my actions in killing someone using AP as I 
would using a gun, but a lot of people might use it to get away from the 
reality of their actions.

> Killing people is horrific and should remain that way..lest killing becomes
> a little too easy...and once killing people becomes as easy as buying a
> newspaper, who knows people will do with it. AP is way too easy for my
> liking.

Again, one cannot judge the tool itself, it has no intrinsic moral value. 
The way it is used defines it`s overall worth, this is why I believe on 
the whole AP cannot really be judged, except to say it allows removal of 
heads of state which has to be a good thing.

> My point was not that anonymous digital assasination was not possible...but
> rather, the notion of such a mechanism being democratic is incorrect. If it
> were democratic, there would be some sort of referendum...some sort of vote
> being taken...and if enough people vote no, then it wouldn't take place.

This appeals to me even less than digital contract assasinations because 
it is the law of the mob, the democratic genocide of whole groups of 
people could occur under this system, hardly an anarchic notion.

> In my mind, the notion of this mechanism being democratic was the only
> ****REMOTELY**** redeeming characteristic about this whole thing...and my
> argument is that this system isn't even democratic. To make it work, one
> doesn't need enough people and enough consenting opinions, simply enough
> resources. While the two are sometimes related, they aren't always.

I don`t think so, I agree that making the system democratic would prevent 
completely frivolous killings like someone next door neighbour or a shop 
assistant that short changed someone, but it would also lead to genocide. 
Groups of people are always looking for scapegoats, and if, as you say 
above, DAP (democratic assasination polotics) could be used to dehumanise 
genocide it would be the new MK2 gas chamber.

> >You do live in such a society, if the government decides to fuck you over
> >and manages somehow to make a muder charge stick 12 randomly selected
> >people can decide whether you live or die. If you say something unpopular
> >you can be assasinated.
> 
> This is a nasty truth.....so do I want this power expanded?

I don`t see AP as a democratic system, see my objections to this above, 
I have nearly always been more in favour of a more direct TCM type 
contract assasinations market system (I often use the term AP generically 
to sum up all assasination systems because it is easier to type quickly) 
because although it allows frivolous killings it:

A. Discourages them by making the financial penalty reasonably high as 
opposed to a couple of dollars.

B. Prevents mass genocide through democratic means.

> Now, the chances of a man in black from Washington DC to knock me off are
> relatively small, compared to the chances of a couple of bigshots around
> town arranging my murder using AP. This goes back to the point about AP
> making killing a touch too easy.

Yes, I am not trying to justify the existance of an AP type system from a 
utilitarian point of view, although I think you can justify it from a 
negative utilitarian point of view by looking at the suffering ended by 
the removal of governments, merely to point out its good features and 
remind people that it is just a tool, true, a very powerful one, and this 
leads us back to the old "personal ownership of nuclear weapons" argument, 
which I won`t go into here.

> If the government has the power to easily assassinate me for being
> unpopular, this is a bad thing....but it doesn't lead me to conclude that
> more people should have this kind of power....because I fear that rather
> than this becoming a tool to fight oppression....it will simply become a
> tool to kill people we don't like...politicians or janitors.

I too have the same fears and concerns about assasination being 
democratised in a traditional Bell style (BTW, does anyone know if Jim 
is out yet, and what is occuring with his case?, I haven`t heard 
anything for a couple of weeks) AP system and this is why in this respect 
I favour TCM type anonymous assasination contracts.

> >This is a difficult point to even contemplate as having any basis in
> >reality. Do you know any police officer (lets make that more specific
> >and say DEA inspector) who is a victim? Do you know of any possibility,
> >no matter how remote, that someone delegated the task of beating
> >confessions out of suspects is a "victim" himself?
> 
> It's a long story, and I can't go into it much without probably angering
> many people on this listserv....but the roots of this idea begin in some
> fundamental beliefs about people that I, being a committed Christian, carry
> with me. If you care to get the full sermon, lemme know and I'll send you a
> personal email.

I won`t go ask for the full sermon as I think we agree on a number of 
points and it would be a pity to get into a flame war over this (and I 
can assure you that any discussion with me, as a devout atheist, over 
religiously derived beliefs would end in a flame war).


        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"