On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, lodewijk andr? de la porte wrote: > I'd even take it a step further, remove > all cybercrime laws. Crazy? Maybe. But I'd really love the Internet to turn > back to the wild west it once was. Sure people will get robbed and it'll > act as a catalyst to horrible people. But it'll always enable everyone at > least as much as the horrible people. Subsequently the people can safeguard > the others. We could, by necessity, create *actually secure* systems.
The problem with this scenario is that it very quickly degenerates into rule-by-spammers-and-the-Russian-Mafia. As Henry Spencer put it in a classic usenet posting from July 2000, # When there is no law and an abundance of armed # individuals, the fast gun is king, especially if he's a psychopath who # can't imagine his own death. That means you do what he tells you, swallow # his insults, and step off into the mud when he wants to use the sidewalk. # # Actually, no, I have to retract that. The real king is the gang lord, # because when there is no social structure to provide safety, people do not # exist as polite independent individuals in an environment of mutual # respect -- they *make* a social structure to provide safety. The trouble # is, when they're driven to do that, trivia like freedom, due process of # law, etc. tend to get second priority. The gang lord (ranch owner, mine # boss, whatever) can do whatever he wants, and his lieutenants and gunmen # have almost as much freedom, but his lesser retainers are almost slaves, # and anyone he dislikes is likely to end up dead. For example, if he's a # free-range rancher, independent sheep farmers who try to fence in the open # range tend to end up dead in a ditch for the crime of putting up fences on # their own land. (This happened quite a bit in western frontier America.) To return to something vaguely relevent to this mailing list, substitute "use good crypto" or "try to run a RBL listing major spammers" for "fence in the open range" in that last passage. :) Larry Niven's short story "Cloak of Anarchy" (http://www.larryniven.net/stories/cloak_of_anarchy.shtml) also seems relevant here. -- -- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jth...@astro.indiana-zebra.edu> Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
