I think it's over

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 5:45 PM -0400 on 4/16/99, Martin Minow wrote:

> (Prosecution rests, Defense asks for directed verdict of "not guilty,"
> Judge says, "Good idea, let's all go for a beer.")

Given all the facts that have come out on this list recently -- including
how CJ's prank "bomb" was built, which was quite a revelation to me,
frankly; thank you, Greg -- I'll go out on a fairly skinny limb here and
say that something like the above is what I think is going to happen.


Even if acquital isn't *that* easy, it seems certain to me that acquital,
or something equivalent, will be the ultimate judicial result of all this.

This whole thing is beginning to look a lot to me like the equivalent of
trying someone under the old sedition (or sodomy? :-)) laws, including all
the ancillary strum and drang that such an enforcement attempt would cause
today.


Truly anonymous digital cash may change the situation, of course.
Especially if someone ever develops the ability to put up an anonymously
*hosted* website. But, for now, you still have to park the server in a
known jurisdiction, and there's never going to be a jurisdiction-shopping
"regulatory arbitrage", or "race to the bottom" in the market for murder,
much less political assassination.

To vamp a bit on my last post, money will probably be the next "ultimate
output" of the internet. Yet, even if we get cash -- and soon, I'm betting,
though primarily for economic and not privacy reasons -- anonymous hosting
of a kind capable of supporting the Jim Bell's assassination market is a
significant limiting factor on this kind of political, um, science fiction.
That will probably continue to be the case for the indefinite future.

We still need to know where to send the packets, after all, and while I may
be wrong, somebody from ZKS will know better, I'm not sure if any of the
onion routing protocols, and their ilk, work that way for servers. At least
not from my reading of Syberson/Stubblebine/Goldschlag, for instance, in
the Financial Cryptography 1997 proceedings. Mobile IP may help, certainly,
and tunneling S/WANs may complicate things, but TCP/IP is still, for the
most part, a book-entry/audit-trail kind of environment, or we wouldn't
need routing tables.


So, measured in ergs, most physics still happens in meatspace. Sticks and
stones may break my bones, but bits will never hurt me, as most of us --
and hopefully now the judge, too -- know already. His questioning Gilmore
about crypto issues seems to point to this, though it may be wishful
thinking on my part.

CJ's performance art certainly got him an audience this time, though, and
Duncan's right. Even Jim Bell himself shouldn't have taken a plea.


Cheers,
RAH




-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'