Re: Democratic Assassination

[Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>]

> This is true. Just because AP exists, doesn't immediately imply that it can
> become a tool for censorship. It was, after all, intended to be used as a
> tool to get rid of 'bad' people.
> 
> We are very good at taking tools and using them for evil purposes...to kill
> and maim one another.

True, but I don`t believe in judging crime at a collective level, just as 
free will is an individual characteristic and not specifically of a 
group, so criminality is defined at an individual level.

I have to agree that if AP were to come about, and indeed when fully 
anonymous digital assasination markets do become a reality, innocent 
people will be killed. So? I further agree that a society without 
assasination markets is safer, more peaceful etc. So? Assasination 
markets will allow the untraceable killings of hundreds of evil people 
who cannot be removed easily in any other way.
Speaking entirely hypothetically: If assasination bots were implemented, 
and I ran one, I would choose to keep a list of poloticians, DEA cops, 
censors etc. and only allow contracts on them, of course, there is 
nothing to stop anyone else running a server that accepted bets on 
anyone. I would just choose not to allow my equipment to be used for 
hiring assasins to kill innocent people. 

> So there is something that greatly disturbs me when we merge the speed and
> efficiency of technology with something as horrific as death. Indeed it has
> already been done...(lemme digress for a little while)...I remember all of
> the press conferences that were held during the Gulf War, when the United
> States military was showing off its flashy high tech toys, which allowed
> our fighters to blow things up from a very safe distance. We saved a lot of
> "the good guy's" lives that way...our troops didn't encounter much blood at
> all. But perhaps war ought not to be so clean....perhaps war should be
> brutal and messy and bloody and costly...not because blood and guts and
> horror and terror are good things, but because war is, in and of itself, a
> horrific thing...and this technology blinds us to that fact....

I agree, making war clinical and distancing ourselves from the bloody 
reality on the other side is not a good thing (tm). But, I draw your 
attention to the fact that we cannot generalise this principle to 
assasination. Normally assasination is cold and clinical for the person 
hiring the assasin anyway, and secondly, those who will kill an innocent 
person are probably too fucked up to be affected by the sight of 
suffering or death.
Also, brutal and costly wars have not affected us in the past, take WWI, 
Brusilov led an offensive that resulted in massive loss of life for 
minimal gain of territory, the many attacks of Field Marshal Sir Douglas 
Haig (A well known British tactician who always succeeded in killing as 
many of his own men as possible) particularly the first day of the Somme, 
where the British suffered 20000 dead, and gained only about 7km in 5 
months of fighting. The total dead in WWI were around 6 million, with 
around 18 million wounded.
The result of this terrible and brutal war? Anyone without the benefit of 
hindsight would call it a deterrent, a war to end all wars. But no, of 
course then there is WWII to consider. Barely 20 years later another war, 
some estimes putting the total dead at around 45 million (more 
conservatively around 37 million), the majority of these deaths were 
civilian. 
You might then say, has WWII not acted as a deterrent, we shall see, WWII 
was costly in terms of public opinion to the government in Britain 
because of the high number of civilian deaths actually occuring in 
Britain through bombings, this may act as a deterrent for government to 
venture into war lightly.


> in an
> attempt to make war "clean" with technology, we have only blinded
> ourselves...and thus war becomes a little too easy for my own liking.

I do agree, and intuitively it seems that massive loss of life and 
breaking of eggs would seem to act as a deterrent, but I don`t think it 
is quite so straightforward as all that. 

> I think there are great similarities between high-tech war and AP. Both are
> very 'tidy' ways to kill people, at great distances from unseen locations,
> without having to deal with the negative reprocussions of the act. They
> both make killing a little too clean. They both make it easy for us to
> dehumanize our targets, so that what we're killing is not really another
> human being, but some object....some nuisance that must be destroyed.

True enough, I personally do see government officials and police etc. as 
merely a nuicance to be destroyed, but I agree that dehumaizing the 
victims of a killing is not a good thing in many circumstances.

> If I kill someone with a hammer, or a gun, there is a certain level of
> commitment that I have to make. I have to deal with the dehumanization. I
> have to deal risk being caught. **I** have to do it.

Hmm, but I would say that if you are going to kill an innocent person you 
are probably not of a disposition or of a level of moral development 
where the sight of their head smashed in would deeply affect you, except 
on a temporary "freaked out" level.

> Personally, I find it would find it hard to dehumanize someone when I put a
> gun to their head and read the look of terror in their face. I would find
> it hard to commit the act, knowing that there is a manifold number of ways
> that I could be caught. Furthermore, I know I could not deal with the
> responsibility of killing someone afterwards.

Depends who you are talking about, morality based on the fear of 
punishment is first level ethical development, I will ignore this and 
just deal with the other issues.
If I were to not care about being caught, and the person I was killing 
was clearly guilty of crime (ie. a DEA agent) the look of terror in their 
face might instinctively and on a reactionary level affect me, but I 
think I could get over that by simply concentrating on the task in hand 
(dehumanising again), the responsibility of killing someone after the 
fact is no greater than that of considering your actions before, if you 
have decided in good conscience that there is conclusive proof of their 
guilt, and you are acting in self defence (and let us assume that you 
have judged accurately and are not just seeing what you want to see) then 
you can, assuming you are logical, put the act down to self defence or to 
punishment of whatever your preferred reason of the week, however, I 
presume you are not entirely logical, nor am I, and I can only say that 
emotional jabs at your conscience after the fact would just be something 
to be ignored or reasoned away.

> But AP is a nice neat solution to this. It makes killing very tidy, and
> minimizes my own responsibility. I can use it to easily fool myself into
> thinking that I'm really not resposible for killing a human

Yes, I personally do not see it this way, I think I would feel just as 
great a moral duty to justify my actions in killing someone using AP as I 
would using a gun, but a lot of people might use it to get away from the 
reality of their actions.

> Killing people is horrific and should remain that way..lest killing becomes
> a little too easy...and once killing people becomes as easy as buying a
> newspaper, who knows people will do with it. AP is way too easy for my
> liking.

Again, one cannot judge the tool itself, it has no intrinsic moral value. 
The way it is used defines it`s overall worth, this is why I believe on 
the whole AP cannot really be judged, except to say it allows removal of 
heads of state which has to be a good thing.

> My point was not that anonymous digital assasination was not possible...but
> rather, the notion of such a mechanism being democratic is incorrect. If it
> were democratic, there would be some sort of referendum...some sort of vote
> being taken...and if enough people vote no, then it wouldn't take place.

This appeals to me even less than digital contract assasinations because 
it is the law of the mob, the democratic genocide of whole groups of 
people could occur under this system, hardly an anarchic notion.

> In my mind, the notion of this mechanism being democratic was the only
> ****REMOTELY**** redeeming characteristic about this whole thing...and my
> argument is that this system isn't even democratic. To make it work, one
> doesn't need enough people and enough consenting opinions, simply enough
> resources. While the two are sometimes related, they aren't always.

I don`t think so, I agree that making the system democratic would prevent 
completely frivolous killings like someone next door neighbour or a shop 
assistant that short changed someone, but it would also lead to genocide. 
Groups of people are always looking for scapegoats, and if, as you say 
above, DAP (democratic assasination polotics) could be used to dehumanise 
genocide it would be the new MK2 gas chamber.

> >You do live in such a society, if the government decides to fuck you over
> >and manages somehow to make a muder charge stick 12 randomly selected
> >people can decide whether you live or die. If you say something unpopular
> >you can be assasinated.
> 
> This is a nasty truth.....so do I want this power expanded?

I don`t see AP as a democratic system, see my objections to this above, 
I have nearly always been more in favour of a more direct TCM type 
contract assasinations market system (I often use the term AP generically 
to sum up all assasination systems because it is easier to type quickly) 
because although it allows frivolous killings it:

A. Discourages them by making the financial penalty reasonably high as 
opposed to a couple of dollars.

B. Prevents mass genocide through democratic means.

> Now, the chances of a man in black from Washington DC to knock me off are
> relatively small, compared to the chances of a couple of bigshots around
> town arranging my murder using AP. This goes back to the point about AP
> making killing a touch too easy.

Yes, I am not trying to justify the existance of an AP type system from a 
utilitarian point of view, although I think you can justify it from a 
negative utilitarian point of view by looking at the suffering ended by 
the removal of governments, merely to point out its good features and 
remind people that it is just a tool, true, a very powerful one, and this 
leads us back to the old "personal ownership of nuclear weapons" argument, 
which I won`t go into here.

> If the government has the power to easily assassinate me for being
> unpopular, this is a bad thing....but it doesn't lead me to conclude that
> more people should have this kind of power....because I fear that rather
> than this becoming a tool to fight oppression....it will simply become a
> tool to kill people we don't like...politicians or janitors.

I too have the same fears and concerns about assasination being 
democratised in a traditional Bell style (BTW, does anyone know if Jim 
is out yet, and what is occuring with his case?, I haven`t heard 
anything for a couple of weeks) AP system and this is why in this respect 
I favour TCM type anonymous assasination contracts.

> >This is a difficult point to even contemplate as having any basis in
> >reality. Do you know any police officer (lets make that more specific
> >and say DEA inspector) who is a victim? Do you know of any possibility,
> >no matter how remote, that someone delegated the task of beating
> >confessions out of suspects is a "victim" himself?
> 
> It's a long story, and I can't go into it much without probably angering
> many people on this listserv....but the roots of this idea begin in some
> fundamental beliefs about people that I, being a committed Christian, carry
> with me. If you care to get the full sermon, lemme know and I'll send you a
> personal email.

I won`t go ask for the full sermon as I think we agree on a number of 
points and it would be a pity to get into a flame war over this (and I 
can assure you that any discussion with me, as a devout atheist, over 
religiously derived beliefs would end in a flame war).


        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"