From: William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 07:57:51 +0800
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: (eternity) autonomous agents
In-Reply-To: <v03102804b0e1a0b6d21b@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.95.980113152218.18878E-100000@kizmiaz.dis.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:

> At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
> 
> >Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country
> >willing on hosting data havens.
> 
> Oh yeah?
> 
> It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks
> list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list
> about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his
> assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling
> Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would
> not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings.

If memory serves me right it was because Vince bounced off the Taxbomber
site because it offered second passports, camouflage passports, and other
products that was considered a fraud, Which to me sounds odd since there
is some other company selling most everthing and then some from an .ai
domain which Vince's company has the monopoly on handing out .ai domains

http://www.ultramec.com.ai
 
> (Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this
> correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather
> doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or
> "Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff
> any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely
> have.)

You also have to wonder how far in the future it will be before the
special forces of some banana republic drops in on Vince to blow-up
his operation for as he advertises publishing censored information 
on ones ex-president on the Internet, or for that matter I have
yet to see abortion information coming from his servers. 

What has happened in Anguilla proves that there will be a need for 
different flavors of datahavens, Different degrees libility that
datahaven owners will want to store information on their servers.  
I would love to open a XXX WWW site in Anguilla pulling in the 
industry average of $5-10K a month and not pay any taxes there, 
But it won't happen in Anguilla with the present adminstration!

> >And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking
> >for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling
> >rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just
> >give you one just to be rid of future liability.
> 
> Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in
> neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to
> the underside of these oil rigs?
>
> Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright.

Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run
from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?  
 
> When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn,
> bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the
> Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded
> and seized, or simply sunk.
>
> As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in
> meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.
> 
> --Tim May

I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted
datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or
hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL.  All the harder to supress that
information.


William Knowles
erehwon@dis.org 

==
The information standard is more draconian than the gold
standard, because the government has lost control of the
marketplace.  --  Walter Wriston 
==
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/