I first read about
"Assassination Markets" in this brilliant book, that delves into the old
90s cypherpunks mailing list (members which included Julian Assange and
most likely the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi):
I still haven't read this full article, mostly just a summary, so here are my rough thoughts:
It
seems like something straight out of an idealistic anarcho-capitalist
society, but it seems to be dangerously crossing the line out of
"non-aggression" and from skimming the article, seems full of flaws. For
example:
> Satisfying as it might be to declare war on asinine
pop singers, Bell has a more civic-minded suggestion: Let's kill all
the car thieves. He reasons that a very small number of career criminals
are responsible for nearly all car thefts. If one million car owners in
a given metropolitan area contributed just four dollars a year, it
would create $10,000 a day in "prize money" for the "predictor" of any
car thief's death.
Is preventing property theft really worth
killing a bunch of petty criminals? I highly doubt it. This tough-love
approach to preventing crime (especially to this extreme) has been a
complete failure in the USA (see their full prison system or the war on
drugs).
I'm all for preventative self-defense, but most of this
enforcement bulldozes over root causes of issues (socio-economic, mental
illness, etc). The goal should be compensating victims (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice) and long-term solutions, not creating some esoteric possibility of safety/morality via threat of violence.
Not
only that, and just google "wrongful convictions" or "wrongful
convictions death penalty". Accuracy of information needs strong
information systems and due process (maybe the article discusses this?)
but just having target lists + bets is wildly insufficient.
There
has also been a lot of literature against private law enforcement
(counter to many anarcho ideologies) such as by Novick in his book
"Anarchy, State, and Utopia":
>
TLDR: Protective agencies (judges/police) would be competing against
each other. That competitive nature combined with their intended role of
protecting us (and themselves) would lead to "an endless series of acts
of retaliation and exactation of compensations". Also he demonstrates
why the nature of both of the businesses would already create natural
monopolies in each local jurisdiction.
So
even though I personally lean towards libertarian/decentralized ideas,
public courts/judges is likely still the best solution and anonymous
assassination marketplaces sounds dangerously flawed.
The idea of the
assassination marketplace as I see it is to provide some means to
balance the power of politicians. There's a powerful asymmetry at work
in politics. Prosecutors can knowingly wrongly convict people and face
no consequences. The President can authorize a temporary (or perhaps
not temporary) war possibly resulting in thousand of deaths and the
worst outcome he faces for it is not getting a second term.
Given
that voting people out of office is not a powerful enough disincentive
to cause them to behave morally I welcome new thoughts on providing
better incentives. I'm not saying that Assassination Markets are
necessarily good but there's an interesting idea there: how to provide
the mass of people recourse to politicians in a manner other than
voting.
Why a marketplace, though?
One can already organize resistance against a regime one considers
harmful enough to merit violent resistance, via militant groups. They
can be right-wing groups like the militia movement or Greece's Golden
Dawn, or left-wing groups like the Black Panthers or Germany's Red Army
Faction. They do at various times assassinate prosecutors or
politicians.
An assassination market
seems to change the barrier to entry: rather than personal commitment,
it's money. Is that likely to produce better decisions, when it comes to
extralegal assassinations? I don't see a strong a priori reason
to believe that "people wanted dead by people who have money" is likely
to be a good signal. That just seems like a formalization of the classic
mob hit: if you've got enough cash, you can get anyone offed.
Yeah all valid points.
That's one of the unintended consequences of the system: someone with
enough money can short-circuit the "voting" process to get anyone
killed.
Let me reiterate: There's a very interesting nugget in there.
Namely one (possibly of many) ways for ordinary citizens to provide
less asymmetric incentives to politicians and bureaucrats.
I'm
really interested in alternative methods of achieving similar goals.
Rather than death, could we perhaps institute a petition-based vote of
no confidence that could be binding? I'm not sure how that would work
but it would be a way to kick someone out of office or position sooner
than a term limit and which would also be tremendously damaging to their
reputation; something which seems rather important to politicians.
Maybe you've got other ideas?
EDIT: To answer your question
specifically the goal of a marketplace is similar to voting but one
which isn't necessarily scheduled the way voting is. For example the
guy after Obama could win by a 90% landslide, then immediately launch an
all-out war against Iran, Syria and say Jordan. That might quickly
turn the tide from 90% in favor to 80% against, but we'd have to wait at
least 2 years to vote out a lot of people in the House, and four full
years to vote the new President out, and a total of six years to get rid
of people in the Senate.
Given that
it's not terribly easy to make a living in the US and that many people
have jobs, kids, elderly parents, etc. to prevent a sizable fraction of
those opposed to various things from making a serious public statement
like a march on Washington, lowering the barrier to entry MIGHT get us
better outcomes.
Recall elections are one way
that's sometimes used to handle the "electee turns around and goes
nuts" problem: if enough people petition, an early election is held, so
people get another chance to vote on whether they want to keep the
representative. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_gubernatorial_recall...
A
downside of that is that it can intensify populism, since you are
essentially always campaigning, never governing. One person wins, but
instead of getting a few years to try their agenda, the opposite party
is every day looking for openings to get them booted out of office
early. An in-between idea is just the classic impeachment. It can remove
someone from office early, but is supposed to be used only for serious
breaches of trust or lawlessness, not mere political disagreement. If
Obama totally went nuts, Congress could remove him from office, if they
weren't also on board.
Overall I
think I'm more worried about constant campaigning (and the amplification
of political advertising and PACs that entails), so these various
measures strike me as more worrying than the problems they try to solve.
Also an excellent point.
I'm a libertarian and I'm thoroughly fed up with both parties; neither
hold true to their supposed core ideology when faced with the choice to
do the right thing or to accrete more power. As such I'm really
interested in ways to scare the shit out of politicians in the hope that
they'll think LONG and HARD about whether what's being proposed is
RIGHT or EXPEDIENT. As such the whole notion has a certain appeal, it's
a way to try and curb particularly egregious abuses of power.
For
example you might see $50mm worth of bounties on a lot of higher-ups at
the NSA for letting this spying-on-innocent-as-well-as-guilty Americans
business go on for so long. Those programs might then get shut down, or
at the very least those people might retire to very private places
immediately.
Possibilities for abuse?
Absolutely. Are those abuses worse than what the folks in power are
currently doing to us? That all depends on your viewpoint. I'm
honestly not sure where I stand on that one because it's really tough to
figure out the exact magnitude of the unintended consequences of any
change in policy.
>For example you might
see $50mm worth of bounties on a lot of higher-ups at the NSA for
letting this spying-on-innocent-as-well-as-guilty Americans business go
on for so long. Those programs might then get shut down, or at the very
least those people might retire to very private places immediately.
Or you'll get bounties put out on postal workers because the Post Office is secretly reading everyone's mail.
I
would submit that out of the pool of people willing to participate in
an assassination-for-hire marketplace, few are likely to be reasonable
in what they would consider a killing offense.
The Post Office example
isn't very good because most mail carriers don't serve more than a few
thousand people (maybe a lot less in the 'burbs) so it would be very
hard to get enough money together to make it worthwhile to kill any one
individual. But the greater point, that people could act irrationally
and cause entirely innocent people to be killed is still a possibility
and tough to refute.
But such a system only has
the purpose of having people killed for money. There wouldn't be any
other ideas discussed, except maybe haggling over whether to use a gun
or a knife or maybe anthrax if the price is right.
An assassination program like this more or less defies the concept of 'ideas based on merit.'
Oh, but the effects would be
wide-ranging: if an idea has enough of a likelihood of angering people
past some threshold (either lots of people, or a few rich ones), then it
will only be reasonable to air that idea under strong pseudonymity.
Participating in this marketplace would be somewhat like voting, except it would have a tangible effect.
If you're talking about a marketplace of ideas and collective action, fine. I'm all for communication without oppression.
But
a marketplace for violence is just as bad or even worse than the
implicit violence of the state in my opinion. While I believe that
sometimes violence might be necessary to oppose tyranny, I don't know
that I trust the 'justness' of a system which presumes anyone employed
by the state should find themselves subject to that kind of threat.
Eventually (inevitably) it would wind up being used as a tool for
political and ethnic genocide. Or petty crime.
> For example the guy
after Obama could win by a 90% landslide, then immediately launch an
all-out war against Iran, Syria and say Jordan
Or, to turn that around
the other way, something happens just after the election which causes
80-90% of the electorate to support an attack on Iran, Syria, and
Jordan. The president after Obama, after some consideration and
discussion with people in her/his cabinet decides to not attack.
With
the threat of death over his/her head, might the president decide to
make a decision, not based on deliberation and careful consideration,
but just as a way to pander to the public lest s/he get killed. Is that a
desirable outcome?
Anyone who finds the concept
potentially appealing really needs to read up on pre-WWII Japanese
politics, where a culture of political assassination, plus a major flaw
in their constitutions, couldn't form a government without the Army and
Navy's assent/membership, pretty much made the following ugliness
inevitable. You really, really don't want to let such a culture develop.
An excellent point. I've
always assumed that most people don't want to expend dollars and lives
on wars but that doesn't necessarily hold true.
Personally I'm more interested in the nugget of insight than necessarily the exact methods he outlines.
For
all the million little ways that the government involves itself in our
daily lives there is huge asymmetry and thus plenty of opportunity for
injustice.
For the really big things there is also huge asymmetry.
If something is a really big deal and even 10% of the US population
went to Washington to protest you'd probably see a swift reaction.
That's a really good thing and it's one of the reasons that many systems
of representative government do work.
The question in my mind is:
What is the price for big freedoms in terms of little freedoms, and is
this a good bargain? Personally I'd like to have my big freedoms AND my
little ones too. So any kind of thought along those lines is
interesting even if it's not ultimately good.
The
thing I took away from the article most is that there probably are ways
to give the people more freedom on the little things without
necessarily compromising on the big ones. Not necessarily via
Assassination Markets, but SOMEHOW.
Volunteer for their
campaigns and provide them with detailed technical and experiential
insight into legislation. The reason that lobbyists are so powerful is
that they can offer politicians what they need to keep their jobs do
their jobs:
- Information on legislation that they don't have the time to gather
because a person cannot be a lawyer, an engineer of many types, a scientist of many types, a businessman in many industries, and a military officer.
- Money so that they can pay for people to knock on doors and
build their website and do all the gruntwork of managing a staff.
And yes, the people writing legal code should be lawyers or at least highly knowledgable in the law.
What's frighting to me, is someone could attempt to build an "Assassination Market" with: tor, bitcoins, and a single website.
But
I'm skeptical this would really work. Just look the 25 million dollar
bounty on Osama bin laden, which no one tried claimed. (That's just
reporting him) Maybe, it would work if you didn't go through a
government to try to claim your reward, but I'm still skeptical.
Still,
I think if a "bounty" was out for someone on a tor website, that would
make for some huge headlines. Plus spook the person enough to get their
attention.
I wouldn't mess around with
this if I were you. It may have taken the FBI a while to bring down the
Silk Road, but with this kind of thing, you'll have the CIA and NSA
after you.
I got "invited" to federal
court over this (I ran the mailing list archive at MIT which USG used as
evidence). I was outside the US at the time, working on anon ecash in
the Caribbean, so it was a request, not a demand. I met Jennifer
Granick as a result, and learned the "if you can possibly avoid it,
never ever set foot inside federal court" rule, which has subsequently
served me quite well.
Jim Bell probably tops weev as an unsympathetic defendant.
I met Jennifer Granick as
a result, and learned the "if you can possibly avoid it, never ever set
foot inside federal court" rule, which has subsequently served me quite
well.
Would you be able to elaborate on that any further?
I was outside the USA, and
it was just a request with no legal weight. I stayed on a tiny island
in the Caribbean for the duration of the trial. (It wasn't a big deal
to FBI, either -- I answered their questions through counsel, and the
whole thing was essentially a formality. Jim Bell was posting to a
public list for which I maintained public archives, so I had no legal or
moral duty to him or anyone else.
I was 18 or 19, and almost went
because it would have been a free trip to DC and potentially
interesting, but the correctly raised concern is that I could have been
ordered to remain available if I had been there. Not worth the risk,
especially since I wasn't particularly helpful to anyone (I would have
been fine with helping IRS CID when a guy was posting personal threats
on people publicly)
I actually tried
to explain to both sides that my archiver wasn't assured to be
canonical; it was just a regular list subscriber, with a simple to
discover email address, and no inbound filtering (since cp list
addresses were distributed and constantly changing), so anyone could
post random messages to it. Even worse, sending a forged message id
with new content would overwrite the original message.
The saga of Jim Bell after
the publication of that essay provides an excellent case study in why
people like "Satoshi" have an interest in remaining as anonymous as
possible.
There are many excellent reasons for remaining anonymous or pseudonymous, both online and offline.
That
being said, there's a vast difference between inventing a disruptive
technology and advocating (even in jest) the killing of government
officials.
I'm not taking the position that governments never
unjustly harass disruptive technologists. Nor am I taking the position
that the treatment of this particular jesting assassination advocate was
fair or proportionate. Nor am I taking the position that government
officials are incapable of crimes worthy of a death sentence [1] (think
of the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War 2).
I'm simply saying that the situations of Satoshi and Jim Bell aren't really comparable.
[1]
Although, even for people who really deserve it, I'd really rather not
have death sentences recommended and carried out by the totally lawless
process Mr. Bell jestingly advocated in a country I have to live in.
First of all, based on that
essay, it's entirely plausible to believe that Jim Bell is in fact
guilty of felony tax evasion (and possibly more).
However, it seems
kind of crappy that the government response to a controversial exercise
of first-amendment rights is to look really hard at you, dig up some
dirt, and get you sent to jail. (Or make some dirt -- or at least trump
up the charges if the dirt's not enough.)
(A
similar revenge case may have been brought against the CEO of Qwest,
for a more 4th-amendment/NSA angle; in this case the charges that may
have been trumped up were insider-trading charges, and certain evidence
about the government's motives was excluded from the trial by the judge.
Here's an article we've discussed in these fora before: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30... )
Part of the issue with Bell
is that it's not clear to anyone that it was really in jest, or even
just a hypothetical future proposal. He proposed an assassination
market, and was collecting home addresses of IRS and FBI officials, coincidentally.
Jim Bell is out of prison
after 10 years and remains defiant and is posting again on one of his
original fora, cypherpunks. The archives has Jim's recent posts:
Then
there is CJ, Carl Johnson, who was sent to prison for supporting Bell.
He is on Twitter among other places, also still promoting AP defiantly: https://twitter.com/pro2rat
If you and contribute funds
to pay an anonymous assassin, you've committed attempted murder. If the
anonymous assassin succeeds, you can be tried for murder even if they
never locate the assassin.
Interesting that the
libertarian solution to someone violating your rights seems to be to
violate their rights back in even more spectacular and violent fashion.
In a just world do you lose rights when you violate another's?
Most
people would accept that it's moral for someone who's threatened with a
gun by another to kill that other person, thus preserving their own
life.
Many would still accept as moral the same situation, but where the assailant has a knife.
Many
would again accept as moral everything the same, except instead of
someone intent to kill with a knife, an assailant who only intended to
rob.
Robbery is taking a thing against the wishes/desires/rights of another.
Some
might argue that the government collecting taxes is robbery by that
definition and thus they have the moral right to defend their property
with deadly force. The government certainly will use force to ensure
that it gets it's taxes. They won't shoot you but they will take away
your freedom and the only way they can do that is with force or the
threat of force.
At what point do you disagree with that line of thinking? Why? I'm not trolling you, genuinely curious.
In this case, there is no
overt threat - the government employee is not holding a gun to your
head, so you have no right to kill him.
Most people are not very even
handed when they feel that their rights have been violated, so it tends
to lead to escalation, and tribal/gang style violence, tit-for-tat.
It's
much better IMO for a society to deal with disputes by legal means, not
by stalking, harassing and killing each other, eg. if I shoot you in
self defence, then that's 1 person's worth of productivity lost to the
world, similarly if I harass you and threaten you at your home address
(0.5 x PP?).
And yes, if you
consistently violate other people's rights, or act with poor judgement,
then you should lose rights. For example, if you're in the US and
threaten people with a gun, you should lose the right to carry a gun, or
the right to not be searched.
So immediate threats aren't OK but eventual ones are? I guess I can see how a person might think that way.
What
if the US had a post-earning tax where the tax collector had to
physically come to your house and demand the money that the government
said you owed it. And he was armed. And he made the threat of violence
personally rather than through a large bureaucracy? Would that change
things? Why or why not? Again, not trolling but genuinely interested.
Agree
100% that people don't react well when they feel their rights are being
violated. The loss of agency and personal sovereignty is a really big
deal.
I'm with you on the loss of
rights examples you give up to a point. I'm totally on board with
situational loss of rights (I threaten you with a gun and you're in the
right to shoot me) but I'm less in favor of doing that systematically.
Mostly because of how safe things are these days (I think quite good)
versus the potential for abuse (I think quite high).
I'm not sure why people with
a libertarian bent have to keep bringing guns into arguments. The Rule
of Law is one of modern societies great inventions, as long as all
parties agree to abide by it. When they don't, organised opposition (eg.
protests) and negotiation are usually far better at instigating change
than randomly shooting back.
It's very
much an i-win-you-lose mindset, I don't think it's really based much in
reality and I'd rather not live anywhere near a society based on those
principles.
Because a gun is an
excellent example of force, coercion or violence. If someone points a
gun at you, you know exactly what it means.
The laws, the courts,
everything else is ultimately backed up by violence or the threat of
violence. If you are convicted of a crime and you say you don't want to
go to jail there are people whose job it is to MAKE you go to jail. If
you cooperate, the threat of violence doesn't turn into actual violence
but if you do not, it will materialize.
It's
probably the easiest way to cut out the myriad different ways that the
state will back up it's laws with actions and cut to the chase: you can
choose not to comply but you will pay dearly for it.
Yeah sure there's a million ways but ultimately if you don't do what you're supposed to, that threat is there.
I'm
not suggesting that false dichotomy, you are. What I am suggesting is
that the state exists in it's current form largely because it does hold
the monopoly on violence. The very definition of government is that
it's the entity with the monopoly on violence.
How
many steps removed does the guy toting the gun have to be in order for
the implicit threat of violence to be OK? Zero? Two? Eight? How does
the abstraction of that implicit threat make it any more palatable?
Yeah it's more about people
interacting in a voluntary manner. The first and probably last rule of
libertarian philosophy is that it's not OK to initiate aggression
against others. So two individuals entering into a contract is OK but
one person threatening another with violence is not.
The fact that the
state/government has a monopoly on violence means that your
interactions with them aren't necessarily voluntary. Many people don't
have a problem with paying for roads, or some semblance of a military,
or schools or whatnot.
But the very
nature of a state is that if you don't do what it tells you to, you have
no recourse. Someone might not put a gun to your head but you have to
know that there's no negotiation.
It's not really violence if it's the government you're killing, I guess...
Though
this might not be so much a libertarian solution as an example of the
degree to which libertarian ideals can be twisted to achieve the sort of
ends they claim to fight against.
"Killing the government" is a euphemism. He's talking about killing government employees who implement things you don't like.
What
you're ultimately talking about is terrorism - if you're a government
employee, don't do bad things* or we might "predict" your death. The
choice they're presenting seems to be either bad, violent actors in
government, or bad, violent lynch mobs.
*Where "bad things" might be anything from "invading Iraq" to "free healthcare".
And it's no small leap to
extend that to any government employee, to the party, to anyone who
votes for the party, to anyone whose politics you just don't agree
with...
It's not fair to call this
"the" libertarian solution just because this guy proposes it and calls
himself libertarian. I haven't seen Rothbard or Friedman advocating
wanton killing of government employees.
All forms of punishment
"violate their rights". Most libertarians are not pacifists, and most
people in general approve of some kind of consequences for criminals.
That is why this sort of
thing requires the sort of anonymity that modern cryptography can
provide. An anonymous payment sent via an anonymity system, from some
publicly accessible location, would be very hard to track.
