rumba's Journal: Assassination Politics and FutureMAP

I was talking to a friend about FutureMAP and the chance that such a system would lead to the manipulation of world events by the investors. He mentioned that it reminded him of Jim Bell's Assassination Politics. "Egads, you're right."

What is Assassination Politics? According to an article in wired by Declan McCullagh, "It's an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government. The system, which Bell spent years talking up online, uses digital cash and anonymity to predict and confirm assassinations."

In his paper introducing Assassination Politics, Jim Bell, libertarian tax evader and techophile, asked these worthy questions:

      1. How can we translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life?

      2. How can we keep the government from banning encryption, digital cash, and other systems that will improve our freedom?

He came up with a system that allowed for an anonymous distributed network of political players who would be awarded digital cash prizes based on correctly predicting the "the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees."

Benefit of such a system is you have all these random watchdogs around ready to clean up government. Of course, any threat to U.S. politcal figures is clearly terrorism, as far as USA-PATRIOT is concerned.

Jim Bell pled guilty to tax evasion in 1997. He was also found guilty of stalking an IRS agent and sentenced to 2 consecutive 5-year terms at SeaTac prison. Choice quote from a trial in 2001 "I'm taking the Fifth Amendment, which even innocent people are entitled to do."

Bell didn't stop with U.S. political offenders. He also claimed it could be used as a sort of army of the future, a libertarian force to take out enemies, replacing the armed forces. Think smart mobs with heavy weapons. "One of the attractive potential implications of such a system would be that we might not even need a military to protect the country. Any threatening or abusive foreign leader would be subject to the same contribution/assassination/reward system, and it would operate just as effectively over borders as it does domestically." --Bell

So doesn't this all sound like the recent DARPA flap that is bringing down Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program? The FutureMAP (Futures Markets Applied to Prediction) Program "would have allowed investors to profit by correctly predicting terrorist attacks, assassinations and overthrows of regimes." So it's not a huge step to guess that insider trading would be akin to investors pooling resources to insure a hit on a foreign leader.

The Democratic reaction is pretty hilarious: Sen. Ron Wyden, from Oregon, said, "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque." Sen. Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota, called it "stupid."

Any true market economy is going to behave anarchically. Makes you wonder if there is not already some private version of this funded by Zaibatsus and the superwealthy around the globe. Ideas like this may be a glimpse to how power itself will be traded. Politicians will watch their names on the big board. If they see a spike in trading, they have to beat it to Tahiti, where they will be hunted down by tourists in Humvees. Of course, we all know it will probably be used to take out community leaders that stand in the way of development. "Granny, the investors want your head."

This is the key reason why democracy and capitalism cannot coexist. Capitalism will always trump democracy. The markets replace the voting booths. Greed has no physical bounds. It owns the playing board, and loads the dice. It has the power to reduce anything conceivable to the level of "how much will someone pay for it?" Libertarians are fond of the saying, "Vote with your money." Why not kill with your money? Sounds great, how much will 20 bucks get me?