Re: [cdr] Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
- Original Message - From: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [cdr] Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform There are too many loopholes to close. I think that's the smartest thing any one of us has said on this topic. Joe
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 08:39 PM, Steve Schear wrote: At 04:51 PM 9/8/2003 -0700, Joseph Ashwood wrote: - Original Message - From: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] [anonymous funding of politicians] Comments? Simple attack: Bob talks to soon to be bought politician. Tomorrow you'll recieve a donation of $50k, you'll know where it came from. Next day, buyer makes 500 $100 donations (remember you can't link him to any transaction), 50k arrives through the mix. Politician knows where it came from, but no one can prove it. Not so fast. I said the mix would delay and randomize the arrival of payments. So, some of the contributions would arrive almost immediately others/many might take weeks to arrive. Why are you not addressing the more direct attack, the one I described yesterday? The contributions you receive for $87.93 came from our members. Unless the amounts are consolidated by a third party or dithered (so much for digital money being what it claims to be), this covert channel bypasses the nominal name-stripping. --Tim May According to the FBI, there's a new wrinkle in prostitution: suburban teenage girls are now selling their white asses at the mall to make money to spend at the mall. .. Now, you see, the joke here, of course, is on White America, which always felt superior to blacks, and showed that with their feet, moving out of urban areas. White flight, they called it. Whites feared blacks. They feared if they raised their kids around blacks, the blacks would turn their daughters and prostitutes. And now, through the miracle of MTV, damned if it didn't work out that way! --Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, HBO, 15 August 2003
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
At 09:28 AM 9/9/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote: On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 08:39 PM, Steve Schear wrote: At 04:51 PM 9/8/2003 -0700, Joseph Ashwood wrote: - Original Message - From: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] [anonymous funding of politicians] Comments? Simple attack: Bob talks to soon to be bought politician. Tomorrow you'll recieve a donation of $50k, you'll know where it came from. Next day, buyer makes 500 $100 donations (remember you can't link him to any transaction), 50k arrives through the mix. Politician knows where it came from, but no one can prove it. Not so fast. I said the mix would delay and randomize the arrival of payments. So, some of the contributions would arrive almost immediately others/many might take weeks to arrive. Why are you not addressing the more direct attack, the one I described yesterday? The contributions you receive for $87.93 came from our members. Unless the amounts are consolidated by a third party or dithered (so much for digital money being what it claims to be), this covert channel bypasses the nominal name-stripping. Sorry, I replied to this but apparently forgot to cc cypherpunks Limiting each individual contribution to fixed amounts (say $1, $5, $10, $20 and $100) should close that loophole. --Tim May According to the FBI, there's a new wrinkle in prostitution: suburban teenage girls are now selling their white asses at the mall to make money to spend at the mall. I guess I must not look like a potential client 'cause no young 'ho ever came up to me and solicited for a 'party'. steve A foolish Constitutional inconsistency is the hobgoblin of freedom, adored by judges and demagogue statesmen. - Steve Schear
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 11:47 AM, Steve Schear wrote: At 09:28 AM 9/9/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote: Why are you not addressing the more direct attack, the one I described yesterday? The contributions you receive for $87.93 came from our members. Unless the amounts are consolidated by a third party or dithered (so much for digital money being what it claims to be), this covert channel bypasses the nominal name-stripping. Sorry, I replied to this but apparently forgot to cc cypherpunks On this topic, I very strongly suggest to people that they not carry on conversations on both open lists and moderated lists. Also, I thought Perrypunks was a no politics, crypto only list? Debating how to do campaign finance reform is heavily political, and very light on cryptography, math, etc. Limiting each individual contribution to fixed amounts (say $1, $5, $10, $20 and $100) should close that loophole. There are too many loopholes to close. You also don't address the other point I raised, that if an untraceable campaign contribution system is in fact unlinkable to the donor, then Warren Buffett is able to donate $10 million, all in unlinkable contributions. (Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it sure does contradict the only small contributions intent of the various statist rules about campaigns.) So, why work on a system which is guaranteed to fail, by its nature? And guaranteed to fail for social reasons, when it is pointed out that inner city negroes rarely have access to PCs or digital money systems and that the system thus skews toward techies and those with computers? --Tim May --Tim May Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity. --Robert A. Heinlein
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 09:58 AM, ken wrote: Tim May wrote: In any case, campaign finance reform is essentially uninteresting and statist. Yes Tim, but as we happen to live in places where states make laws and employ men with guns to hurt us if we disobey those laws then we do have an interest (in the other sense) in who gets to run the organs of the state. If you live next to the zoo you may be uninterested in the design of the lion's cage but you sure as hell aren't disinterested in it. I wouldn't want to live near a death camp, either, but that doesn't mean I would think designing better gas chambers is a noble or interesting thing to do (well, maybe for ten million or so statists and inner city welfare mutants, but that's for another post). Designing systems to thwart free speech is not noble, and not very interesting. (Campaign finance laws are thwartings of free speech, clearly.) --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
Tim May wrote: In any case, campaign finance reform is essentially uninteresting and statist. Yes Tim, but as we happen to live in places where states make laws and employ men with guns to hurt us if we disobey those laws then we do have an interest (in the other sense) in who gets to run the organs of the state. If you live next to the zoo you may be uninterested in the design of the lion's cage but you sure as hell aren't disinterested in it.
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
At 06:31 PM 9/9/2003 +0200, Amir Herzberg wrote: Steve suggested (see below) that anonymous cash may be useful to hide the identities of contributors from the party/candidate they contribute to. I'm afraid this won't work: e-cash protocols are not trying to prevent a `covert channel` between the payer and payee, e.g. via the choice of random numbers or amounts. Furthermore even if the e-cash system had such a feature, it would be of little help, since (a) there will be plenty of other ways the payer can convince the payee that it made the contribution and (b) in reality, candidates will have to return the favors even without knowing for sure they got the money - kind of `risk management` - I'm not sure what we want is to allow big contributors to gain favors while not really making as big a contribution as they promised... I think that is exactly what we want. When multiple, creditable, contributors approach a candidate (who have different, perhaps opposing agendas) and tell them they have made substantial contributions to the campaign what will the candidate do when the bank account figures don't add up and it comes time for delivering on requests from these contributors? You know that once special interests understand that the candidates can't tell who contributed many attempt to cheat. The result could be to greatly reduce special interest campaign contributions and their power in government. It could make for an interesting study in game theory. steve A foolish Constitutional inconsistency is the hobgoblin of freedom, adored by judges and demagogue statesmen. - Steve Schear
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 10:11 AM, Steve Schear wrote: Everyone knows that money is the life blood of politics. The topic of campaign finance reform in the U.S. has been on and off the front burner of the major media, for decades. Although the ability of citizens and corporations to support the candidates and parties of their choice can be a positive political force, the ability of political contributors to buy access and influence legislation is probably the major source of governmental corruption. Despite some, apparently, honest efforts at limiting these legal payoffs there has been little real progress. The challenge is to encourage neutral campaign contributions. Perhaps technology could lend a hand. One of the features of Chaimian digital cash is unlinkability. Normally, this has been viewed from the perspective of the payer and payee not wishing to be linked to a transaction. But it also follows that that the payee can be prevented from learning the identity of the payee even if they wished. Since the final payee in politics is either the candidate or the party, this lack of knowledge could make it much more difficult for the money to be involved in influence peddling and quid pro quo back room deals. By combining a mandated digital cash system for contributions, a cap on the size of each individual contribution (perhaps as small as $100), randomized delays (perhaps up to a few weeks) in the posting of each transaction to the account of the counter party, it could create mix conditions which would thwart the ability of contributors to easily convince candidates and parties that they were the source of particular funds and therefore entitled to special treatment. Comments? All a contributor who wishes to be credited with having contributed has to do is encode his identity or that of his organization in the _amount_ of the contribution. This can be done out-of-band, even posted on a Website: Remember, gun owners! Show your support by contributing _exactly_ $91.37 to the candidates we recommend. The pile of contributions of $91.37 would be just as sure (actually, only about 99% sure, for obvious statistical reasons) an indication of what the campaign donations were about as having a name attached. (Sort of a higher-precision parallel to the practice of paying soldiers with $2 bills so that local merchants would really understand just how important the local military base was to their business.) And if the system is unlinkable, then of course the contributions need not be N contributions from N different people. They could be N contributions of 91.37 from one contributor, a contributor who sends the politician an out-of-band (e-mail) message telling him exactly what to expect. There are other ways to thwart this idea. And this use of digital cash got talked about a lot here several years ago. Having Big Brother run a mix where all such unlinkable contributions are pooled and then disbursed is an obvious fix (but then no need for digital cash...ordinary checks and money orders and cash accomplish the same thing, once Big Brother is the one holding and disbursing the cash). Also, it will never fly for just general social reasons. Not only would such a system also be usable for untraceable payoffs (a feature for our kind of people, but a problem for some others), but the complaint would be heard that the computer-illiterate would not have equal access, blah blah. Also, the issue with campaign reform has And needless to say, the entire concept of campaign reform is profoundly contrary to the Bill of Rights. Everyone involved in limiting political speech via campaign reform deserves to be tried and hanged. I'd really hate to see a digital cash company firebombed because of its involvement with the forces of darkness. In any case, campaign finance reform is essentially uninteresting and statist. --Tim May Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat. --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
On Monday 08 September 2003 14:34, Ian Grigg wrote: Steve Schear wrote: anonymous contributions to candidates How would you audit such a system? I'm not that up on political cash, but I would have expected that there would be a need to figure out where money was coming from, by some interested third party at least. Would you need to audit it? So long as the contributions can't be tied to a quid-pro-quo arrangement, let the candidates collect as much as they can. Also there would be a need to prove that the funds were getting there, otherwise, I'd be the first to jump in there and run the mix. Or, the mint. Yah, that's a bigger problem. I guess the first step is, establish a digital bank with at least the credibility and trustworthiness of an ordinary, audited and regulated bank. But without the auditing and regulation because, well, this is the internet age. grin -- Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that these people have these weapons at all! -- Rep. Henry Waxman
Digital cash and campaign finance reform
Everyone knows that money is the life blood of politics. The topic of campaign finance reform in the U.S. has been on and off the front burner of the major media, for decades. Although the ability of citizens and corporations to support the candidates and parties of their choice can be a positive political force, the ability of political contributors to buy access and influence legislation is probably the major source of governmental corruption. Despite some, apparently, honest efforts at limiting these legal payoffs there has been little real progress. The challenge is to encourage neutral campaign contributions. Perhaps technology could lend a hand. One of the features of Chaimian digital cash is unlinkability. Normally, this has been viewed from the perspective of the payer and payee not wishing to be linked to a transaction. But it also follows that that the payee can be prevented from learning the identity of the payee even if they wished. Since the final payee in politics is either the candidate or the party, this lack of knowledge could make it much more difficult for the money to be involved in influence peddling and quid pro quo back room deals. By combining a mandated digital cash system for contributions, a cap on the size of each individual contribution (perhaps as small as $100), randomized delays (perhaps up to a few weeks) in the posting of each transaction to the account of the counter party, it could create mix conditions which would thwart the ability of contributors to easily convince candidates and parties that they were the source of particular funds and therefore entitled to special treatment. Comments? steve A foolish Constitutional inconsistency is the hobgoblin of freedom, adored by judges and demagogue statesmen. - Steve Schear
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
Steve Schear wrote: By combining a mandated digital cash system for contributions, a cap on the size of each individual contribution (perhaps as small as $100), randomized delays (perhaps up to a few weeks) in the posting of each transaction to the account of the counter party, it could create mix conditions which would thwart the ability of contributors to easily convince candidates and parties that they were the source of particular funds and therefore entitled to special treatment. How would you audit such a system? I'm not that up on political cash, but I would have expected that there would be a need to figure out where money was coming from, by some interested third party at least. Also there would be a need to prove that the funds were getting there, otherwise, I'd be the first to jump in there and run the mix. Or, the mint. iang
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
Steve - The whole thing is a crock, and the problems aren't technical. None of the proposed users of the system have any desire to use it, except perhaps as a front for other activities, and the people who'd want them to make them use it are just meddlers. It's funny how any time you bring up the First Amendment in the context of tobacco advertising or internet pornography, they say Oh, no, it's not about that, it's about *political* speech, but if you bring it up in the context of actual political speech, well then, oh, no, the First Amendment is about not arresting ranters on soapboxes in the park, or letting people print newspapers as long as there's official identifying information about the printer, but it's *certainly* not about actually letting people fund *electoral* speech, because elections are *way* too important to let unapproved members of the *public* influence the outcomes The couple of papers that Michael Froomkin referenced are pretty much the canonical references to the approach you're talking about, but just because there are academics proposing it doesn't mean it isn't still a total crock. Now, if you're talking about *real* campaign finance reform, as in permitting people to engage in free speech even if it requires money to transmit that speech to their intended recipients, fully anonymous digital cash is useful for that, in the obvious ways, and payer-anonymous payee-disclosing digital cash has its uses as well, if you like to be able to trace the people you're paying, and anonymous and pseudonymous publishing are also obviously useful, and then of course there's Blacknet if you want the real info on candidates. You don't need 100% technical guarantees of anonymity for most political work; the public can usually guess that Paid for by Californians for Motherhood and Apple Pie is probably the prison guards' union, or the major opponent of the candidate that the negative TV ad was about, or whatever, but unless there's a lawsuit or actual investigative reporter, nobody's going to bother tracking them down. Unfortunately, softmoney.com got snapped up a few years ago; I'd been planning to set it up as a site for donating your two cents to John McCain, when he was ranting about banning it. paid for by Californians Against Bogus Campaign Financing Regulations, John Doe #238, Treasurer
Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform
At 04:51 PM 9/8/2003 -0700, Joseph Ashwood wrote: - Original Message - From: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] [anonymous funding of politicians] Comments? Simple attack: Bob talks to soon to be bought politician. Tomorrow you'll recieve a donation of $50k, you'll know where it came from. Next day, buyer makes 500 $100 donations (remember you can't link him to any transaction), 50k arrives through the mix. Politician knows where it came from, but no one can prove it. Not so fast. I said the mix would delay and randomize the arrival of payments. So, some of the contributions would arrive almost immediately others/many might take weeks to arrive. steve ...for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken
