"Physical Reality"

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 12:23 PM 2/21/96 -0800, L. Detweiler wrote:

>Barlow brings up this topic in his recent "cyberspace declaration of
>independence" (which can clearly be criticized as out of touch with 
>physical reality but is nevertheless compelling). 

Various critics of cryptoanarchy from D. Denning to L. Detweiler to A.
Grove, to J. Kellstrom to the 1991 instance of P. Metzger have argued that
the continued existence of the physical attack medium renders this new form
of social disorganization DOA.

Boiled down to its essentials, this argument can be expressed by the lyrics
of the song "Bad Boys" as used as the theme song of the reality TV show
"Cops."  For those who no longer participate in the previous culture, they are:

Bad Boys, Bad Boys
Whatcha gonna do? 
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? 
Bad Boys, Bad Boys

repeat endlessly.

I would suggest instead that the critics of cryptoanarchy are out of touch
with "physical reality."

For the "Bad Boys" to come for you, a whole series of requirements must be
in place:

1)  There must be Bad Boys
2)  They must be able to travel
3)  There must be a reason for them to come "for you".  They need motivation
4)  There must be a you
5)  The Bad Boys must know where you are
6)  The Bad Boys must be able to travel to where you are
7)  The answer to the question "Whatcha gonna do?" must be "nothing" (This
would seem to be implied by the song.)
8)  They must have something to do to you when they "come for you" otherwise
the journey is a waste of time.

Let's examine each of these requirements to see how technological change has
affected them.

1)  There must be Bad Boys

There are fewer Bad Boys these days.  Not that Human Nature has improved all
that much but law enforcement employment (relative to population) is down.
The collapse of the SU and the Eastern European police states has
dramatically reduced the world population of government agents.  When 1/4 of
your population was in the enforcement business full- or part-time (as in
the DDR), the end of that system reduces the supply of "muscle."  Note that
during this Century of Blood, governments were murdering someone every 20
seconds or so (160 million in the last 100 years).  Reports indicate that
the death rate is lower these days.  Occasional minutes go by without any
murders by government.  

Additionally, even in places like the US where there would seem to be more
enforcement personnel employed than ever before, bureaucratic management has
worked to reduce worker productivity.  Since law enforcement is still
organized along Stalinist lines (state ownership and management,
hierarchical organization, pay unrelated to performance), not much actual
enforcement is undertaken.  A New York Times article on INS agents whose job
it is to find and arrest illegals within the US said that they were allowed
to grab about one perp a month.  The rest of the time was spent on
paperwork.  At the rate of 12 deportations a year per agent, it will be
quite a while before the backlog is cleared.  And, indeed, all the evidence
we have from studies of the "clearance" rates of crimes to the street price
of illegal pharmacuticals, to the "average time served per crime" suggest
that effective enforcement is down.

This is what we would expect since the law enforcement system has retained a
very traditional organizational model while the rest of society has become
much more efficient.  A massive increase in what we might call "regulatory
targets" combined with a decrease in the number and efficiency of the
regulators, means less regulation and effectively fewer Bad Boys.

2)  They must be able to travel

If the Bad Boys are to come for you, they have to be able to travel.  The
internationalization of the modern business and communications environment
has made this more difficult.  There are very few enforcement agencies that
have unlimited budgets of the sort that allowed Lt. Gerard to chase Dr.
Richard Kimball around the country for years on end.  Enforcement is largely
a matter of chance.  The Bad Boys come for some small part of the criminal
population and leave the rest alone until chance brings them within reach.

A multinational investigation and enforcement program costs the earth.  It
will only be undertaken in very significant cases.  Nation states are still
the basic unit of enforcement and so jurisdictional conflicts cause many
costs and delays.  Since it is part of human nature to be more concerned
with one's own "stuff" than with other's "stuff," foreign enforcement
agencies won't pursue cases with as much energy as domestic agencies might
be willing to.  

One way that people are more powerful than governments is that people (or
their corporations) can be citizens/residents of several nations much more
easily than a single nation can rule the citizens/residents of other nations.

Even within the United States, jurisdictional differences among the states
can be exploited by natural or artificial persons.  As regional trading
blocks like NAFTA and the European Free Trade Area spread, people will be
able to move around much more easily than government agencies.  Since there
are no sovereignty issues raised when people do business in multiple
jurisdictions, these distance and jurisdictional barriers will fall much
faster for private parties than for the government Bad Boys who want to come
after them.

<More Tomorrow>

DCF