Assassination Politics (1997)
jya.com
jya.com
He seemed OK, in the few words we exchanged, and maybe a techie/radio hobbyist (IIRC, his car had many antennae on it).
At that time, in the 1980s, someone remarked that Bell had "had one good idea" (the SemiDisk persistent storage card).
Later on, it looks from Wikipedia like Bell had a lot of troubles.
The light joke about "one good idea" IMHO took on new, darker meaning, after some of the choices during the troubles, including the horrifying idea that's the topic of the post.
I suppose a good SF writer could've started with that idea, and explored an (IMHO likely) scenario of it playing out as a tool of the most corrupt and the most insane, and then the dystopia that results in.
I haven't read much of Bell's writings, so I don't know whether at some point he shifted to a cautionary "we should figure out how to prevent things like this, because they would be bad".
For one thing, life imprisonment (LiP) is a pretty big deterrent, and among the few willing to risk it, defense tech and the surveillance state are generally winning the arms race against individual actors and small groups ("terrorists"). Lots of people want to kill world leaders and yet assassination attempts (let alone successes!) are quite rare. This leaves the question of less-defended people, and there it's more mixed: it's much easier to do but 10^6-10^10 fewer people want to kill them which makes it a lot easier to catch the conspirators simply by tracking who had motive. Finally, everyday victims don't usually have haters with enough capital to motivate someone to risk LiP - again, making it easy to track down the perps by motive.
It's an interesting thought experiment though. Would probably make for a cool novel!
People who could easily murder politicians and others just don't want to. Perhaps they don't hate them all that much, perhaps they like democracy even though it puts people they dislike into high positions, perhaps they're opposed to murder.
We don't see mortar or drone attacks using image recognition (instead of radio control which could conceivably fail if basic precautions had been taken) on presidents and prime ministers in Europe even though such attacks would be trivial and the perpetrators would probably have a decent chance of getting away. It's because people don't hate them all that much and because the people who hate them a lot don't see such attacks as politically productive.
Presumably the reason unfriendly countries don't perform such attacks against those governments that oppose them is that it's not politically productive and would lead to a negative reaction instead of just removing the people the unfriendly country would like to be rid of.
I've wondered what makes unstable Americans conduct school shootings but not targeted assassinations?
Like, there is a part of the population that has no problem killing, and killing for shock value, but for whatever reason their targets are children and not politicians. The 1960s and 1970s were full of assassinations and plane hijackings by all kinds of people but they seem to have been replaced by the mass murder of children.
After watching what is going with the use of consumer drones in Ukraine I've come to the conclusion that we will soon see this in America. People will start to fight back against corrupt law enforcement sooner or later.
Imagine the world where people in a community brutalized by law enforcement crowd source drone strikes to take out particularly menacing law enforcement officers after they've been let off with paid vacation for the nth time.
The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street.
I don't think that's how this scenario would turn out. Policing would just move explicitly to counter insurgency operations. Laws would change as necessary to give authorities whatever tools they need to do it.
I have a feeling that we're about to find out.
If a parent vigilanted an incompetent cop in Uvalde and the political response was to enact the next patriot act people would lose their shit.
Politicians can't be so overt about this kind of thing because American society is sitting on a powderkeg and pile of guns.
Assassination Politics (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544251 - Oct 2013 (62 comments)
Assassination Politics (by Jim Bell) + Bitcoin = ? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500781 - April 2011 (8 comments)
Assassination Politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327329 - Oct 2008 (1 comment)
Assassination Politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119173 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)
This was the idiotic rambling of someone with a bit of technical skill and a complete and utter lack of understanding of people, politics, or society. This is something a 14 year old computer geek might come up with hanging out with his friends.
I think the answer is a large anonymous fund, a public good, which simply lists anybody who starts an AP server on a public blockchain on their own AP server.
I think the game theory is sound, which says nothing about either morality, reasonableness, or legality.
That's the same rhethoric behind Oklahoma city bombing for those at home.
It's the same sort of stochastic terrorists that end up in the QAnon hole these days.
I don't know why we pay their talking points any attention.
Nor do actual threats become any less threatening (if anything, the opposite).
So not paying any attention to the talking points, i.e. not reading TFA, wont have any effect.
Not to mention that the people "sane" enough head the advice and not read it, are the ones who wouldn't do anything shady even if they read it anyway...
"If any adult in the area around the cabin is observed with a weapon after the surrender announcement had been made, deadly force could and should be used to neutralize the individual."
There's an initial crime (sex with 12yr old for David Koresh, and selling illegal weaponry to white supremacist criminal orgs for Randy Weaver).
Then they don't engage the legal system normally by hiring a lawyer and fighting the charges -- they hide in a hole hoping to be forgotten about.
When the feds inevitably try to serve a warrant, in both cases they respond in a hostile manner and kill a LEO.
At this point you can basically be expected to be treated like a drug lord -- you're facing charges and responding to warrants by killing officers. So you get besieged like a drug lord.
The main difference for Ruby Ridge is that the government took a bunch of decisions (procedural mistakes, over-eager sniper and rules of engagement) that made them unsympathetic.
But even with this, it's a little absurd to come out and defend the Weavers for playing very stupid games and winning stupid prizes. You kill a law enforcement office in a hostile manner, don't expect to be treated with courtesy.
There's hundreds of cases where LEOs are recklessly killing innocents in manners that should get them lambasted, but Ruby Ridge ain't it.
>Then they don't engage the legal system normally by hiring a lawyer and fighting the charges -- they hide in a hole hoping to be forgotten about.
Weaver was acquitted on all charges, with the exception of a charge for failing to appear in court for the original charge that lead to the siege. And the rules of engagement still are and were murder.
Instead they keep trying to evade the legal system and inevitably get someone knocking at the door.
If your response to that knock on the door is to shoot, you get what's coming to you.
The other point is that this unsympathetic case is viewed in some special light when there's a ton of cases where the government is much much more clearly in the wrong.
The difference is that in those other cases it's generally a "them" (ethnic minorities, urban poor, etc.) whereas for libertarian weirdoes like Weaver they somehow get lumped in the HackerNews zeitgeist's "us".
They shot a kid in the back, and shot a woman holding a baby through a window.
This case is a barometer for whether or not a person likes the taste of boot leather.
Even a number of police agree. Here's a claim from one of the U.S Marshalls on site:
"Many of the people the USMS used as third party go-betweens on the Weaver case—Bill and Judy Grider, Alan Jeppeson, and Richard Butler—were assessed by the Marshals as more radical than the Weavers. When Deputy U.S. Marshal (DUSM) Dave Hunt asked Grider, "Why shouldn't I just go up there ... and talk to him?", Grider replied, "Let me put it to you this way. If I was sitting on my property and somebody with a gun comes to do me harm, then I'll probably shoot him."
Or how about the deputy assistant director of the FBI at the time, writing in a memo that:
"Something to Consider 1. Charge against Weaver is Bull S___. 2. No one saw Weaver do any shooting. 3. Vicki has no charges against her. 4. Weaver's defense. He ran down the hill to see what dog was barking at. Some guys in camys [camouflage] shot his dog. Started shooting at him. Killed his son. Harris did the shooting. He is in pretty strong legal position."
As one of the comments above states: Let the reader decide what constitutes a reasonable attempt to serve a warrant".
From the Ruby Ridge wiki:
"On August 21, 1992, six Marshals were sent to scout the area to determine suitable places away from the cabin to apprehend and arrest Weaver. The marshals, dressed in military camouflage, were equipped with night-vision goggles and M16 rifles. DUSMs Art Roderick, Larry Cooper, and William F. "Bill" Degan formed the reconnaissance team, while DUSMs David Hunt, Joseph Thomas, and Frank Norris formed an observation post (OP) team on the ridge north of the cabin.
At one point, Roderick threw two rocks at the Weaver cabin to test the dogs' reaction. The action provoked the dogs; Weaver's friend, Kevin Harris, and Weaver's 14-year-old son, Samuel ("Sammy"), emerged and followed the dog "Striker" to investigate. Harris and the younger Weaver said that they were hoping the dog had noticed a game animal as the cabin was out of meat. The recon team (Roderick, Cooper, and Degan) initially retreated through the woods in radio contact with the OP team, but later took up hidden defensive positions.
Later, the OP team and the Weavers claimed the dogs were alerted to the recon team in the woods after neighbors at the foot of the mountain started their pickup truck. The recon team retreated through the woods to a "Y" junction in the trails 500 yards (460 m) west of the cabin, out of sight of the cabin. Sammy and Harris followed Striker on foot through the woods while Randy, also on foot, took a separate logging trail; Vicki, Sara, Rachel, and baby Elisheba remained at the cabin. The OP team were anxious at first, but then relaxed. Randy encountered the Marshals at the "Y"; Roderick claimed to have yelled, "Back off! U.S. Marshal!" upon sighting Weaver, and Cooper said he had shouted, "Stop! U.S. Marshal!" By their account, Sammy and Striker came out of the woods about a minute later. When the Marshals' position was revealed by the dog "Striker", a yellow Labrador Retriever, DUSM Roderick shot the dog dead. Seeing this, Sammy Weaver reacted by shooting in the direction of Roderick. DUSM Cooper then shot towards Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris, who both sought cover. Harris, once finding cover behind a tree stump, then returned fire with one unaimed shot, which eventually killed DUSM William Francis "Bill" Degan. Sammy Weaver, now retreating up a hill was then shot in the back and killed by DUSM Cooper."
It will be left as an exercise to the reader to determine if the above constitutes an "attempt to serve a warrant".