From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 22:26:20 -0800 (PST)
To: aga <aga@dhp.com>
Subject: Re: Rejection policy of the Cypherpunks mailing list
Message-ID: <199701290626.WAA20920@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


aga wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jan 1997, Dale Thorn wrote:
> > aga wrote:
> > > On Tue, 28 Jan 1997, Dale Thorn wrote:
> > > > Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
> > > > > Dale Thorn wrote:
> >
> > > > But seriously, I was just telling the folks over the weekend, if I
> > > > had my hand on the button, a lot of people would die very quickly.
> > > > As in The Day The Earth Stood Still, a single act of aggression would
> > > > suffice to be immediately terminated.
> 
> No trial, huh?

Good question.  The law we have right now already assumes that there
are situations where a criminal will not go peacefully, if at all.
In some countries (years ago?) such as England, bobbies were known
to not carry firearms for ordinary street duty.  Am I right?  But
here in the USA, that would be unthinkable.

So my proposal doesn't eliminate the responsibility portion of law
enforcement.  I'd say, if a target were eliminated thru negligence,
malfeasance, or other wrongdoing under "color of law" or whatever,
let the courts handle that as they do now.

My suggestion would give the law enforcers the ability to dispense
the first level of justice expeditiously, which they cannot accomplish
now due to all of the red tape and the corrupt legal system (lawyers
specialize in getting chronic offenders off, particularly "traffic"
offenses).  By transferring a major portion of the bureaucracy to
the pencil pushers, we can free up the street cops to do what they
do best, namely bust or eliminate criminals.

I dare say that the downside of this is much less pleasant than the
virtual anarchy (in the bad sense) we suffer now.  If the police get
out of control, A.P. will arrive just in time to plug a few of those
holes, so to speak.  Ideally, future robotics should be able to
provide something like Gort (sp?) to take the place of human officers,
given advances in the kind of pattern matching needed to deter
aggression and the like.  Those who don't make it past the robots,
well, the rest of us can learn to behave, and we'll be much better
off when we do.