RE: layered deception
On Tue, 1 May 2001, David Honig wrote: >Is it in fact a crime of fraud to advertise that you don't keep logs >when in fact you do? If someone winds up losing money (or suffering other damages) because of it, it is at least a tort. If you were planning some kind of money-making scam that hinged on the deception, I'm pretty sure it would be fraud as well. I wonder whether evidence from logfiles could be excluded in a court case on the grounds that the logfiles were collected under false pretenses? *That* would be a laugh riot... (I am not a lawyer, nor studying to become one - these are just my opinions.) Bear
Re: FT editorial: "When Theft is Justified"
On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Faustine wrote: >When theft is justified >The limited abuse of copyright is a spur to scholarship, innovation and >democracy >Published: April 25 2001 19:36GMT | Last Updated: April 25 2001 19:48GMT >Financial Times > > >http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3RFUPBZLC > The point the author does not make in so many words, and IMO should, is that fair use is not by any stretch of the imagination theft. Bear
Re: The Crypto State
Hey Tim. I've got a great idea. Let's ignore each other. Bear
Re: The Crypto State
On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: >Frankly, I doubt that you have read "The Communist Manifesto." For >multiple reasons, including its length and boringness. Boring I'll give it, but it's brief. >But mainly because I have decided you are likely a liar. You said you >"thanked me" for my Reading List, just about 4 days after it was >published here. I thanked you for pointing at something concrete, yes. It represented a change. >But I am willing to give you a chance: Just how many of the books on >my list had you either already read or did you locate and read in the >days between when my list was published and when you announced that >they were not very useful? Rand and Vinge; I had already read Hayek. >Read Schneier. >Schneier or any other of the N basic crypto texts. Diffie-Hellman, >for example. Blacknet, for another example. This is really basic, >basic stuff. Yes, it is. Stuff that does not get talked about here. For that reason, this list is near useless to anyone who actually wants to learn about cryptography. Scheier was where I started, but nobody wanted to talk about anything in there or develop any of thos ideas. I now have the springer-verlag CD with the book that is basically a table of contents for seventeen years of crypto conferences. That is also a big help, although it's frustrating to work with. A vast number of articles, yes. But no discussion. >Because you have shown a stubborn unwillingness to even learn the >basicsand yet you claim the reading list I put out was useless to >you, implying you had read and absorbed and evaluate those >books...which I doubt. Vinge and Rand, and Hayek too for that matter, had squat to do with cryptographic protocols. Vinge described a few cryptographic applications, but the underlying PROTOCOLS were abbreviated or missing. They were not what he was writing about. >Your questions mark you as profoundly ignorant of even the basics, Yes, damnit, I feel that I *am* ignorant of a lot of basics, because I read stuff, I think maybe I understand it and maybe I don't, and nobody will TALK about it! Nobody is willing to bounce ideas or discuss it in detail. Instead they want to take the damn stuff as read, forget how it works, and start invoking some fuzzy variation of it in some damn fantasy, the same way Bell did with the idea of digital cash -- it was pretty damn convincing until I looked close and realized he hadn't done his homework. How many of the lofty invocations of other cryptographic concepts here won't hold water because they've been invoked in the same fuzzy way by ignorant people or posers? I won't know until I take them apart myself, will I? But trying to get the details of them from this list so they _CAN_ be analyzed is like trying to nail jelly to a tree, because nobody's interested in the "implementation details." >and, more importantly, of being willing to spend some time reading >even the most basic, core texts. Asking about how keys are exchanged, >how things work without "trusted servers," etc., marks you as a >complete newbie. Those are examples of the questions I had when I came here. Not the questions I still have. I've found a few methods, out of Schneier mostly, no thanks to anyone here. I bet there's hundreds more methods than I've seen yet, and I want to know what they all are because they have different, and usefully different properties. I'm going to be working through the conference proceedings for years. >You claim you have been reading the list since Detweiler was active, >which means since about 1995-96. No, I didn't. I claimed I had read the list for about a semester (I was taking a networks class, I read a lot of semi-related stuff) during 1995 and I've been elsewhere since. I left for six years and came back. Bear
Re: The Crypto State
On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Ken Brown wrote: >Ray Dillinger wrote: > >> The only real difference is that the functions of government are >> distributed instead of being vested in particular people. > >Which is pretty near a definition of anarchy according to my anarchist >friends. Alright. Then, perhaps, I should clarify that I wasn't talking necessarily about a society in which all interactions are voluntary, which seems to be the goal of many anarchists. >You want maybe a recipe? An instruction book for helping the state >wither away? Try the Communist Manifesto, it's good. I've read it already. And no, I don't want a recipe for helping the state wither away or change form. That's a several-centuries process, and I haven't the attention span for it. What I wanted, when I showed up here looking, was evaluation of specific protocols for doing specific things. For example, how does an election protocol with cryptographic ballots work? How do Alice and Bob exchange keys? What are the ways in which different types of digital cash protect the identity of the buyer or seller, and how does each work? Are there ways to distribute "shares" of identity so that groups of people can participate in another protocol as though they were one person, and if so how does that work? What types of authentication can happen without trusted servers and how does each work? I've gotten maybe three scraps of help on such questions from this list, and they were minimal -- pointers to offlist and off-net resources. In order to get that, I've put up with a lot of sneers, condescencion, posing, and political rants with no underpinning of reality, which I personally find distasteful. >> What I've been able to do since is find that there are ways >> to solve a bunch of technical problems > >So tell us the ways. I have, a couple of times. A few months ago, when the american presidential election debacle was at its peak, I posted an election protocol to the list. I was disappointed that no substantive discussion of its technical merits or problems ensued. A few people even chided me for posting something substantive, or tried to pose as omniscient by saying it was too simple to merit their attention. I frankly don't give a flying damn about such chest-beating, but the absence of anyone willing or able to discuss it was a disappointment. An Election Protocol is not a path through history to crypto anarchy. It is a method of building one thing using cryptography. It is one solution of thousands possible, for one problem out of thousands or millions. My search is a search for useful stuff, not a search for ways to get rid of government employees. But even if you choose crypto anarchy as the object of your work, are you so obsessed with what you think it might look like that you disdain to consider the protocols which are the individual building blocks you'd have to use to build it? It is true that I despise governments, for inefficiencies and oppression; however, I've no reason to suspect that I would despise the Crypto State any less, on either score. Both involve coercion by effective monopolies on violence. It would have the same power to spend public money inefficiently and corruptly, and I see no reason to believe that it would do so any less. Also, it could have the same power to transgress against individuals, and I don't see a reason to believe that it would exercise it any less. >What "proof" can there be that implementation is possible? Implementation of particular protocols is what I intended to ask about. Hard Science - functioning protocols for particular tasks. Without the support of thousands of protocols, the political fantasies of which you accuse me are so much wishful thinking and hot air, less relevant than a fart. The question is not whether you can 'justify' crypto anarchy, or whether there's a way to get there, or even whether that's a worthwhile goal - the question is whether there's even anything to justify or get TO. Until I had seen several hundred individual protocols, there was nothing for me to discuss. >We can't even >prove that a non-trivial computer program is correct, never mind a >political program. Sodomize all political programs. They disgust me. I am interested in solving problems and building useful things. I am interested in government only insofar as it is useful or solves problems. Solving problems sometimes has political consequences, and I accept that. Governments, like the lemur-like creatures of the cretacious which are the ancestors of modern human, will adapt until they are no longer recognizable to us as governments. Perhaps one day they will have adapted sufficiently far that there are no government empl
Re: The anarchies my destination...
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: >And I really did not get started on this path toward "crypto anarchy" >because I was _seeking_ anarchy as some sort of utopian fantasy. In >fact, I had largely moved away from politics by the mid-70s, and was >not very political in the 1987-88 period when I figured out that the >technologies then emerging would make new forms of anarchy nearly >inevitable. I'll go as far as "workable". "Inevitable" is perhaps a bit strong. Certainly there are some statutes (mainly IP laws) that simply cannot stand in the presence of a crypto-enabled people, and there are some goods (information, entertainment, etc) on which monopolies, including the monopoly granted by copyright, cannot exist. However, this is not the same as saying that anarchy (in terms of a change in form of government) is inevitable. It simply says that there are some things government (of *any* kind) cannot do when people have access to cryptography. The inability to do those things is not sufficient to substantially undermine government power and authority. Bear
Re: The Crypto State
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: >Cf. crypto anarchy. >Cf. crypto anarchy. Uh, Tim? I've seen what you mean by "crypto anarchy", and this ain't it. I'm talking about a society with laws, order, and *orders*. A society where individual people can go to jail or go on trial or get drafted into a war against their will if the laws requiring that get passed. In nature, a crypto state is not necessarily any more "free" than a republic, or a democracy (you use the term "sheepocracy" to denote the tyranny of the majority problem), or even a centrally- planned socialist state. It *has* a government and the government has real power to do things to people that the people as individuals don't want. Sometimes stupid laws will be passed, and rigidly enforced. The only real difference is that the functions of government are distributed instead of being vested in particular people. The revolutionary and anarchist rhetoric here has masked the facts of the matter -- people have been talking about rebellion, bomb-throwing, and other acts of defiance and rage, but that's not where the path they're pointing at leads. In fact, acts of rebellion and rage are the single worst possible thing that could be done, and will actively prevent a crypto state from arising. Bell's "AP" paper may not have been where the seed came from originally, but aside from pointers at some science-fiction books with zero technical content and impossible economics and cultures, there has been no trace whatsoever of any other protocols for replacing government on this list. And even Bell's protocol presented in AP is unimplementable on technical grounds. I had formally analyze it and discover this for myself, because nobody here acknowledged that simple fact until I rubbed their damn noses in it. It's also lacking in any kind of controls, checks or balances, and provides disincentives to create infrastructure; A crypto state implemented with AP as one of the protocols would quickly devolve into a collection of armed camps with no infrastructure. I dug through archives for days looking for a glimmer of anything actually useful for establishing a working and useful government rather than simply tearing one down or hiding one's activities from it, and believe it or not Bell's paper came closest. What I've been able to do since is find that there are ways to solve a bunch of technical problems -- like paying for roads and beatcops and basic research and ecological preservation if desired, taking care of national defense, regulating bandwidth, and getting accurate information to the people in the presence of a bunch of spinmeisters trying to distort things. The hell of it is, you (and most of the other list members) have been absolutely no help. Whenever I've asked a question about whatever I was stuck on at the moment, you've done nothing more than sneer. The most helpful thread recently has been "the well-read cypherpunk", and just a hint, Tim? the books *you* recommended were no damn help. In fact, they were a waste of time. The only new ideas there were unworkable distractions at best, presented as though they might make sense but with impossible requirements both technically (missing information) and pragmatically (human nature goes a different direction and the whole thing explodes). And of the few ideas that don't suffer these problems, there's either no hint of how to actually implement nor any proof that an implementation is possible, or they're ideas I'd already had. Bear
RE: Making the Agora Vanish
On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Greg Broiles wrote: >Consider Jim Bell in light of your objections above - do you consider him >"controlled"? If so, then the control you speak of is hardly sufficient to >prevent forbidden activity. If not, then what makes you think that other, >more clueful people can be controlled? Jim Bell? Controlled? HA! Jim is going to live out his prison term, and then he's going to get out. I would just hate to be Jeff Gordon when that happens. Of course, Jeff was a witness in this case as well as being the plaintiff and chief investigator. So he may come full circle and go into the Witness Protection Program. New name, new place, new job, new face. But making someone like Bell as angry as he's got to be at Jeff Gordon right now - and leaving him alive - is totally nuts. You don't suppose they are arranging a little "accident" in prison for JeffG's peace of mind, do you? It will be interesting to watch. Bear
Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
(Re: CDR RE: snipped from headers.) On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Sunder wrote: >Ray Dillinger wrote: >> >> On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: >> >> And your possible motive for spreading the word about his reputation, >> which ties you to an illicit transaction, is what exactly? > >Wouldn't your own reputation be blinded by a nym anyway? Give me a few dozen writing samples from each of a hundred known people, and another writing sample a hundred words long from one of them under a pseudonym, and I can tell you to a 90% probability which of the hundred known people wrote it. If some persistent pseudonym has a record with hundreds or thousands of illicit transactions, the lions are going to be crawling cyberspace for *any* writing that matches its style closely enough to have been written by the same person. They'll get a short list. Then they'll start eliminating possibilities and when they're down to three or four they'll start getting wiretap orders. With the wiretap order, they can run a sting or a man-in-the-middle attack so they've got one solid charge. That will net them an arrest warrant if it works. But whether this works or not, they can still get a search warrant after they give it a shot. If the machine is not theft-secure (and face it, almost no machines are), the arrest warrant issues anyway and the owner of the pseudonym winds up in jail. And the lions didn't have to do any particularly clever cryptanalysis to get there. All they had to do was run a spreadsheet counting grammar, word choice, sentence length, and a few other parameters until they found a match. Bear
RE: Making the Agora Vanish
On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote: >that anonymous markets develop. But I think governments have the necessary >motivation and resources to keep them extremely marginalized. Enough so >that most people will never notice. I think he's right. The only possible way around this one would be to have a substantial fraction of *ALL* traffic encrypted. The day that Homer Husband and Harriet Housewife routinely exchange mail that is encrypted and undistinguishable from the mail that the players in your "anonymous markets" exchange, the anonymous markets will have a chance of going undetected. And you know what? Homer and Harriet ain't going there, 'cause key management and crypto software is still a pain in the tush and they still don't know anybody's listening. Bear
Re: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Sunder wrote: >Ray Dillinger wrote: >> >> On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: >> >> And your possible motive for spreading the word about his reputation, >> which ties you to an illicit transaction, is what exactly? > >Wouldn't your own reputation be blinded by a nym anyway? Nyms are not as hard as most of you seem to assume. Each instance of a nym's use is more data for traffic analysis, and writing styles contain "signature" usages that can identify particular writers with a high degree of probability. If the probability is ever deemed high enough that a search warrant can issue, and your nym is involved in all kinds of illicit deals which are verifiable through the reputation system, then you have a problem because the lions are likely to come take your favorite toys away, and may even put you through a "trial" like the one that just happened to Mr. Bell. Hmm. A worthwhile hack; I should develop a program that uses the known techniques of identifying a writer by his/her style, and then create "styles" to conform to for each nym. If I can fool my program, then there's at least a prayer of fooling other people's. Bear
Re: very effective communication
On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, John Young wrote: >BF quoted: > >>"Terrorists are the only true avant-garde artists because they're the >>only ones who are still capable of really surprising people." >>---Laurie Anderson > >When Robb London hurled the careerist word "terrorism" the left >bank of Jim-gawkers hissedly overwrit their cryptoed HDs, the >right bank of techno-Quanticoeds caressed their de-degaussers. > >Jeff Gordon said he cypherpunkishly PGPs, and employs avant-garde >tools to breach its sanctuary for daft believers. You mean B&E or >ratfinkerfucker, a fool tsked. Jeff thumbed a hole in n out. John? Are you being intentionally oblique about <[Redacted]> or is there a prescription you're not taking? Bear
Re: making the agora vanish
On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, David Honig wrote: >At 05:45 PM 4/15/01 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: >> >>what and when. But now you've got a third party in your deal, >>charging vigorish when one of your main hopes was to get away >>from the tax man charging vigorish. >> >> Bear > >Why do you assume that escrow agents interfere with the >flow of reputation and assets? > Because they can. If anybody can prevent a profitable transaction from happening, that person will charge money to allow it to happen. We can expect lower rates because the escrow and rep guys won't be a monopoly, of course. But it's the same basic business; it's a toll bridge. Bear
making the agora vanish
Okay, as some have pointed out, I've been a little too flip in assuming that people's nyms will "vanish" if they get into real trouble. It's true that nyms like "Pr0duct Cypher", which represent the authorship claim to years of code and writing, are not going to be abandoned over a $10 transaction, and if P. Cypher were to put that nym on the line for a deal, I wouldn't hesitate to accept it. The problem arises because the means of building reputation are so utterly ill-defined. Having read P. Cypher's list contributions and software, and having a public key to check his/her/their signatures against, suffices in an individual case. But commerce - large, heavy, routine commerce between relative strangers, which is the fundamental strength of our markets, requires there to be some standard format or method of presenting reputation capital that can be checked. The only thing I can think of is a set of endorsements verifying deals done already. But that is exactly the information that most of you say you don't want disclosed. Escrow agents and reputation agents definitely help -- they can overcome a lot of difficulties involving who gets paid what and when. But now you've got a third party in your deal, charging vigorish when one of your main hopes was to get away from the tax man charging vigorish. Bear
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: >At 02:06 PM 4/15/01 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: >>When you talk about a one-time transaction, it pretty much has to >>involve something whose value can be ascertained ON THE SPOT. >>otherwise, there is either a continuing relationship that can't >>be unilaterally broken (ie, they know where you live) or there is > >I think this is a bit short-sighted. > >Assume there is an anonymous seller who has established reputation capital >over time for small transactions on the order of pennies. I may be willing >to risk a ten-cent transaction (to purchase an illicit MP3 or somesuch) if >the perceived reward is sufficient. If I am successful and word spreads >that the seller is to be trusted, the amount people will be willing to risk >larger amounts will presumably increase. And your possible motive for spreading the word about his reputation, which ties you to an illicit transaction, is what exactly? Bear
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
Tim; One thing to consider is the role of "credit histories", or virtually any other identity-linked information, in a milieu where the people have access to the necessary techniques and programs to do those deals. You sell Alice a credit history on Bob; Bob takes a new identity; Alice is back to square one. Why would Alice buy credit histories? For that matter, why would anyone loan money in the first place? What credit histories could there possibly be? Bear
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: >At 11:30 AM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote: >> >>As presented, I think she's probably right. Nobody in conventional >>business is going to want to do a deal with someone when they can't >>create a legally enforceable contract. > >Widespread black markets, for drugs, betting, etc., suggest otherwise. > >There are many markets out there which do not rely on the official >court system to enforce contracts for. This is true, but look at the mechanisms for enforcing contracts that they *do* use. Most of them are not compatible with anonymity, and only a few are compatible with pseudonymity. Mafia Bosses don't buy information from someone when they don't know where that someone lives. It's the exact same enforceability of contracts problem that other parts of society uses lawyers to deal with. Legbreakers or cops, basically they have the same job with regard to contract enforcement. There has to be a hook where someone who does a ripoff can be punished, or else there is no deal. When you talk about a one-time transaction, it pretty much has to involve something whose value can be ascertained ON THE SPOT. otherwise, there is either a continuing relationship that can't be unilaterally broken (ie, they know where you live) or there is no deal. The value of information (other than entertainment value) is not generally ascertainable on the spot, because if you don't have at least some of the information, you can't check something that claims to be the information. Also, you often have to do a couple days work figuring out information formats and problems before you can even do your checking against it, particularly with financial data. >Besides Mafia markets, there are international trade systems which >typically don't invoke the laws of Fiji or Botswana or even the U.S. >to make them work. But which are generally not done anonymously. In these cases, there is no test of a protocol's ability to protect pseudonymity from a determined opponent, nor of the willingness to do business anonymously or pseudonymously. Moreover, the determined opponent is often watching, even if no enforcement is attempted. >In fact, most of our ordinary decisions and dealings are done >"anarchically," from deciding which restaurants to visit to the >buying of books and whatnot. So far I have seen no example of a non-contracted business agreement between people who are unable to identify each other, which extends beyond a single transaction. Basically one goes one way with his merchandise and the other goes the other way with her money, and it's over. There's no business relationship that's ongoing; if they ever meet again, it's just a coincidence. If the transaction is illegal, then any business relationship that may be formed is a liability to all participants; they never know when the lions are going to grab someone and when that happens, the lions usually find out everything that someone knows. Real business involves lasting relationships. You don't want to be owed money, or merchandise either, by someone who can just shed the pseudonym and disappear. >>And "reputation capital" >>that would counteract that point to some extent depends on maintaining >>a consistent traceable pseudonym as someone who does something illegal, >>for decades, without getting linked to it. > >As with Aimee, you haven't thought outside the box. > >You being a lawyer larvae, and Aimee being an official lawyer, is >this something that _comes_ from being a lawyer, or is this something >that causes a person to give up doing something real, like >programming or designing chips, to _become_ a lawyer? Tim, I don't know why you're calling me "Lawyer larvae". I'm not in Law school, nor have I ever been. What Aimee and I both seem to be pointing out here is that while it is *possible* for people to do business anonymously/pseudonymously, a whole new economy would have to grow up that way in order for it to become routine. You are really and truly talking about building from scratch with effectively no interface to the way business is currently done. I can respect that, but keep in mind that all the peripheral mechanisms of the way business is currently done will be trying to stomp the "aberration" out. In order to grow an anonymous economy, you'd need literally decades of time during which there were few conflicts with any part of the established infrastructure, and so that the emerging system could grow its own traditions and customs and routines. Within that separate space, you could do business as you describe. But during the whole building time, and until the new economy's traditions and
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Sat, 14 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: >>If >>there is not a value proposition for an information marketplace between the >>government and the private sector, there could be a value proposition within >>the private sector intelligence channels, moving closer to your "credit >>rating market" proposition. > >English, please. Or at least Ebonics. Her point, Tim, is that she doubts such a thing will ever be deployed widely or accepted, because she can't see a way for someone to make money at it. As presented, I think she's probably right. Nobody in conventional business is going to want to do a deal with someone when they can't create a legally enforceable contract. And "reputation capital" that would counteract that point to some extent depends on maintaining a consistent traceable pseudonym as someone who does something illegal, for decades, without getting linked to it. Bear
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Sat, 14 Apr 2001, Aimee Farr wrote: >That is an over-simplification, but yes. Intelligence is not headlines. To a >large extent, "what's happening" is not analyzed correctly, because the >intelligence community lacks sufficient expert analysis to cope with the >dataload. This capability is in the private sector. These information flows, >between the government sector and the private sector, are unmapped. This is not true any more. The automated analysis of trawled data has advanced considerably beyond keyword searching at this point; there are programs out there now specifically looking for much more subtle and complicated things, which were formerly the domain of intelligence analyists, and they are actually pretty damn good. The simple keyword searchers and keyphrase searchers you hear about with echelon are only the front line; they pass their data back to much more sophisticated AI programs that analyze content, and synthesize information gleaned from massive numbers of such missives. Every time a situation like the Aum Shenrikyo (spelled?) subway attack happens, if the automated analysis suite didn't point it out first, human analysts come in and check out the dataflows that ran before it and around it, and create a new auto-analysis program. And then later, when another group that has anything like the same rhetoric and seems to be going through the same logistical steps pops up, the auto-analysis finds it without human help. I do not speak of specific known programs here; but my primary background is in AI and expert systems, and I can state unequivocally that intelligence analysis funded most of the research in the field for a very long time, and that programs such as I described above are well within the current state of the art. It is unusual for them to be deployed very widely in private industry because in private industry there is a real problem of retaining personnel with the proper expertise to work on them. They tend to be delicate in their operation -- you go to make a minor change in the data or the rules or the schemas and the performance of all other parts of the system degrades unless you are extremely careful, well-trained, and, let's face it, consistently just plain smarter than normal people. But when they are in tune, and their vocabulary tables are up-to-date, they are highly accurate. The problem of keeping these systems in tune is what drives most practical AI research today; the systems are effective, but brittle and unable to cope with subtle changes and variations very well. "Fuzzy" approaches like ANN's and Genetic Algorithms are attempts to get past this problem by making self-adjusting systems, but the volumes of data required to get self-adjustment working using such approaches are a problem; you'd have to have data from hundreds of Aum Shenrikyo type attacks before your GA or ANN really had a good chance of picking out what parts of the dataflow were relevant. So here's my speculation: human analysts are probably called in only after something takes the automatic tools by surprise, or when there is an administrative need for specific analysis that the automatic tools do not provide. Bear
Re: The Theory of the corporation
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, John Sheehy wrote: >On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, V. Alex Brennen wrote: > > >These barriers have gotten worse throughout history. In the 18th Century one >could challenge a "protection provider" through direct action with muskets >and little else. Today one needs significantly more resources (advanced >weaponry -- RPGs, SAMs, etc) to effectively challenge a 'protection >provider' through direct action. It's not so much about weaponry, I don't think. It's about organization and communication. Muskets, in the hands of people who actually know where to point them and when, are still just as effective against mafia (et al) as they have always been. But it has become far more difficult to keep track of where to point them and when -- partly as a result of advances in surveillance and the availability of information about people that is beyond their physical control, threats against an individual can originate from far more quarters and in far more ways than ever before. These days I don't think of physical weapons as the appropriate tools of the revolutionary. And face it; the "barriers to entry" are sufficiently large that they cannot practically be overcome on that score. If you go pointing guns at government types, or even mere mafiosi, then sooner or later you will die. Because of the immediate response to weapons, the only resources you will take down first are those defined as expendable - police officers, treasury agents, low-level legbreakers, whatever. These are resources that the organization can replace instantly and painlessly, and which will not cause it any real pain. But these organizations have hierarchies. Because they are not fully distributed, there are resources within each organization that serve a role or function, or have privelege, that is not the same as that of other resources. If you pick things that are extremely hard to replace, and things in the absence of which the system will not function, then a very few moves can cripple the organization. Sometimes such moves can be made with a musket, if one has sufficient intel. But just as often a pen or a camera or a tape recorder will do. >Ideally, governments need to be decoupled from geographical territories, so >that an individual has a freedom to exercise their right to choose the best >government no matter where she is located. You are not speaking of government-as-we-know-it. You are speaking of something which you envision that may replace government. Bear
Re: The Theory of the corporation
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, James A. Donald wrote: >It is totally unfair to compare mafia type organizations to the government. Governments are just what happens when a mafia gains monopoly status in a given territory. The bureaucracy, inefficiency, incompetence, etc, is just a normal result of not having any competition. Happens to every business that gets to be a monopoly sooner or later. Bear
Re: semi-anon test from a throwaway account part deux
On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, David Honig wrote: >Of course, there will be cameras on the Olympic internet kiosks for sure. >That Orwellian football game face-scanning was only a warmup. I would be astonished if these were not logging keystrokes and complete recordings of screen video. I wouldn't be surprised if there were live COMINT people on site analyzing everything in real time for any potential threats. Maybe from another country if you have pesky laws about local COMINT people monitoring their own citizens, but they're going to be there and they're going to be working closely with local authorities. If you are anywhere near the Olympics, expect every telephone call to be listened to in real time and every internet connection to be monitored in real time. Bear Thinking about the "prank" value of connecting a Blum-Blum-Shub generator on some old 386 to a packet modem and setting it to broadcast occasionally from some obscure spot near the olympics to simulate encrypted traffic. But pretty sure that he would be charged with something if he did.
