
Assassination Politics (1997) - kilroy123
http://cryptome.org/ap.htm
======
cryptome
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:

[http://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/](http://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/)

Subscribe to cpunks:
[https://cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks](https://cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks)

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](https://twitter.com/pro2rat)

Neither are interested in remaining anonymous.

~~~
anthonyb
Not just AP, but nuking people you don't like, too:
[https://twitter.com/pro2rat/status/389410900832038912](https://twitter.com/pro2rat/status/389410900832038912)

~~~
triplesec
This is the biggest issue with AP. Where down the line you stop, in
assassinating leaders? With what criteria?

------
rdl
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.

~~~
angersock
_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?

~~~
rdl
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.

------
fiatmoney
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.

~~~
csense
I wasn't familiar with this, but Wikipedia knows of this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell)

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.

~~~
fennecfoxen
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...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he-
feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/) )

------
aidenn0
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.

~~~
anthonyb
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.

~~~
msandford
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.

~~~
anthonyb
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.

~~~
msandford
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).

~~~
anthonyb
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.

~~~
randallsquared
> I'm not sure why people with a libertarian bent have to keep bringing guns
> into arguments.

Because if someone chooses to not obey, they will eventually face a gun which
they did not bring.

~~~
krapp
Surely the libertarian model amounts to something more productive than "the
state will shoot you if you aren't ready to shoot them first?"

~~~
msandford
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.

~~~
anthonyb
_> you have no recourse ... you have to know that there's no negotiation_

Bullshit.

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/civil-d...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/civil-
disobedience-sanchez-gordillo)

~~~
msandford
If you perform civil disobedience you can and probably will get arrested. It
happens all the time.

Choosing to break an unjust law doesn't mean that a judge will understand the
injustice of it and let you go free, nor is there any assurance that jury
would acquit you. That's what I mean when I say "there's no negotiation"

Once a police officers decides to arrest you all negotiations have ceased and
they may do whatever the law tells them to, or whatever the law lets them get
away with, or perhaps a bit more.

------
dmix
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):

[http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Kills-Secrets-
EmpowerWhistlebl...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Kills-Secrets-
EmpowerWhistleblowers-ebook/dp/B007HUD7LU/)

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](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":

[http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-
Nozick/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-
Nozick/dp/0465097200/)

> 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.

~~~
msandford
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.

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
msandford
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.

~~~
meepmorp
> 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?

~~~
hga
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.

Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_ devotes a chapter to this:
[http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Edition-
Perennial...](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Edition-
Perennial/dp/0060935502)

~~~
strlen
This was a very enlightening chapter in Modern Times. I truly enjoyed
Johnson's work, despite his clear (if transparent) bias towards British
colonialism.

In general, private armies, political assassinations, and other forms of
political violence seldom lead to good outcomes: other examples would be
Lebanon during and prior to the civil and (not to Godwin this) Weimar Germany
with government-funded but ruthless and private and political Freikorps, as
well as KPD/SPD/NSDAP/etc... paramilitary organizations. Finally, if a
government enacts and enforces laws and decrees contrary to the constitution
and human rights in general (i.e., it is no longer a constitutional state),
introduction of political gives government forces both an excuse and the means
to start acting fully extra-judicially.

I'll note that I'm saying this as a individual with classical
liberal/libertarian political leanings and as a strong supporter of a right to
bear arms. My view is shared with by David Friedman, an anarcho-capitalist (a
view that I don't subscribe to, but respect):
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/in_case_of_revo....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/in_case_of_revo.html)

------
sanjuro
I'm actually attempting to start such a market.

Here's a link:
[http://assmkedzgorodn7o.onion/](http://assmkedzgorodn7o.onion/) If you don't
have Tor installed you can also access the site by adding .to:
[http://assmkedzgorodn7o.onion.to/](http://assmkedzgorodn7o.onion.to/)

~~~
techdragon
You sir are literally going to become a case study in how to/not to do this
sort of thing.

I have zero advice for you. Im sure you will be front page news soon enough.

------
andyzweb
another cryptome/internet classic

