From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 02:37:53 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Assassination Politics(tm) was V-chips, CC, and Motorcycle Helmets
Message-ID: <m0tvRfH-00091PC@pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:42 PM 3/8/96 -0800, Bill Frantz wrote:

>Since my name keeps getting dragged into this discussion, I will share with
>youall the conclusions I reached after my last set of exchanges with Jim
>Bell.
>
>(1) Assassination Politics (AP) will be most useful to a fired-up group of
>people who want to silence a single person.  Madeline Murray O'Hare comes
>to mind.  (She was a Texas atheist who challenged school prayer and won.)

I think that's a misleading conclusion.  While it may, arguably, be "most 
useful" useful to one kind of person or another, that doesn't mean that it 
won't be, cumulatively, vastly more useful to the rest of the population.  
To carry the gun analogy a bit further, somebody might argue that "a handfun 
will be most useful to a criminal in the commission of a robbery."  Aside 
from gloriously ignoring the self-defense issue, this interpretation falsely 
implies that the fact that SOME bad person might benefit from it justifies 
banning them.


>(2) Jim Bell and I disagree strongly on the market price for assassinations.

Is this relevant?  And I don't recall where the "disagreement" you describe 
exists:  I think there will be some people killed for $1000, some won't be 
killed for less than $100,000.

>(3) Jim Bell and I disagree on the number of deaths needed to deter someone
>who believes in what they do.  In our discussion, this question comes down
>to: are IRS employees more like corporate consultants or like soldiers.

It's far easier to "believe in what they do" when nobody is out there 
planning to kill them for doing it.


>(4) I think that if someone can be traced as profiting from a AP death,
>e.g. through winning a gamble on the date/time of death, that person's
>whereabouts at the time of death will be carefully investigated.

By whom will it be investigated?  And it's merely a matter of ensuring that 
the payments can be made anonymously; I would consider anyone who tried to 
do such traces to be an enemy, and I'm sure anyone who believed in the 
underlying idea would as well.

>(5) While killing someone whose name and residence are known is easy, and
>the killer is likely to get away with it, does that mean that killing
>someone who has been marked as having a price on her head is as easy?  I
>assume her friends and neighbors will protect her. 

Question:  Let's suppose your neighbor had a $20,000 price on his head.  
Even if, arguably, you didn't want to see him die, you also wouldn't want 
somebody to drive a car through his front wall, filled with 1000 pounds of 
ANFO, and blow his house up, along with doing tens of thousands of dollars 
of damage to your house as well.  I would say you would have somewhat of a 
motivation to ensure that when the killing eventually occurred, it occurred 
in a way that wouldn't negatively affect you.

> The TV cameras will be
>running 24 hours a day.  This will, at a minimum raise the price of
>assassinations.

That won't mean much if the "minimum price" went to $20,000.  This could 
easily be raised for many government employees.

Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com