You’re Doing it Right – Page 33

Decentralized Security

Centralized systems are traditionally fragile. Universal healthcare systems tend to have supply issues that lead to rationing. Highway systems managed by the state tend to be under construction for good portions of the year (at least here in Minnesota) with nothing obvious to show for it. And centralized security systems tend to be easily bypassed. While the world seems doomed to continue down the path to centralization at least some people are noticing the need for decentralization:

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”

Allowing the populace to arm themselves is one of the more effective solutions for decentralizing security. All of the “blood in the streets” and “shootouts at high noon” that were predicted by gun control advocates have never arisen. In fact no area that as loosed its prohibitions against carrying firearms has experienced an increase in violent crime. The logical conclusion is that removing those prohibitions isn’t dangerous for the overall population. It also creates a great deal of uncertainty for violent person because they cannot know for sure who is and isn’t armed.

Bruce Schneier often talks about whether or not plots can be developed around security systems. It’s very difficult for a violent person to build a plot around random bag checks because of their randomness. But it is easy to develop a plot around modern police protection. For starters, police response times aren’t instantaneous. If prohibitions against carrying firearms exist and a violent person’s goal is to kill people he knows that he will have several minutes until the police arrive. Several minutes is a lot of time when we’re talking about mass murder. In addition to having several minutes of free reign a violent person also has a decent idea of the tactics used by the police.

Both of these things go away when prohibitions against carrying firearms are lifted. Since a person with a firearm can be anywhere response times are not guaranteed to be in minutes. Likewise, most people who carry a firearm have no received any standardized training, so the tactics used will be less predictable.

It’s much more difficult to design a plot around an armed population than a centralized armed force. Centralization is one of the key things exploited by practitioners of fourth generation warfare, which is a tactic that relies on decentralized forces to attack centralized forces. The more centralized a system is the more fragile it becomes. In many countries the police have a virtual monopoly on force. Those countries have an extremely fragile security system that can be exploited by decentralized forces. It’s nice to see at least one member of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) acknowledge this fact and I hope others will over time.

Drone Delivery Service

I spend a lot of time complaining about the use of military drones. Like any technology, unmanned aerial vehicles can be used for good or evil. The United States government uses them to bomb brown children in sandy regions, which is downright evil. But a company in Australia is planning to use drones for something amazing:

Sick of relying on slow trucks and traditional delivery systems to get his company Zookal’s textbooks to people, Ahmed Haider decided on a fresh approach. Now, his Sydney, Australia-based company will deliver the textbooks via drones.

Today, Zookal, a textbook rental startup, is announcing that by using unmanned aerial vehicles to ferry textbooks to renters, it will cut delivery times from two to three days down to a matter of minutes, while shaving shipping costs down to a tenth of their normal prices.

Being able to make local deliveries with antonymous drones could decrease the time it takes to get packages, allow packages to be delivered on the customer’s schedule, and reduce the costs associated with delivering packages. As it currently stands you have to wait for the delivery truck to get to your home. If you have to sign for a package you have to be at your home when the delivery truck arrives, which is probably the biggest hassle when getting expensive items delivered. The delivery truck also consumes gas, a commodity that seems destined to continue rising in price. Battery powered drones could reduce energy costs if the battery was recharged by something akin to solar panels.

I hope this concept works out. Having packages delivered from local hubs straight to my door on my schedule would certainly improve my life (yes, I live in a first world country so my life is notable improved by seemingly trivial things).

What Anarchy Looks Like

People often mistaken anarchy with roaming gangs of Molotov cocktail throwing angst-filled teens. It’s a cute vision that statists can tell their children during bedtime stories to scare them into compliance but the reality of anarchy is quite different. Anarchy, when you boil everything down, is the opposition of hierarchy. We anarchists don’t like rulers. So what happens when people finally begin to ignore those who claim a right to rule? Acts of civil disobedience:

Park authorities have issued citations for 21 tourists and visitors who entered Grand Canyon National Park after the government shutdown started. And in response — and in the face of the furlough of other workers — the park has bolstered its security team to monitor the land around the clock.

[…]

Despite the shutdown and the closure of the park, Mr. Wright said law enforcement will patrol the site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Meanwhile, most park workers outside of the security and law enforcement section have been furloughed.

Isn’t it funny how the state has the money to pay thugs to issue citations during this “shutdown”? More to the point, these are the kinds of acts you can expect during a time when people finally begin opposing their rulers. Violence isn’t the inevitable outcome. Most people, after becoming dissatisfied with their rulers, simply go about their business as always. Usually the rulers bring armed thuggery into the equation because violence is all they know but, in general, most people act just as peaceful when they no longer acknowledge their rulers as when they do.

FBI Having Troubles Seizing Dread Pirate Roberts’ Bitcoin Stash

This story demonstrates one of the features I most like about Bitcoin:

In order to transfer Bitcoins out of a “wallet”, the name for the digital file which contains the encrypted information necessary to spend the currency, users need to know that wallet’s password or “private key”.

According to Forbes’ Kashmir Hill, that hurdle is causing the FBI difficulty.

“The FBI has not been able to get to Ulbricht’s personal Bitcoin yet,” wrote Hill. An FBI spokesperson said to Hill that the “$80m worth” that Ulbricht had “was held separately and is encrypted”. At current exchange rates, that represents slightly more than 5% of all bitcoins in circulation.

It looks like Bitcoin is pretty secure against state seizure. Mind you, that doesn’t do Mr. Ulbricht much good as he’s currently being held in a cage. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) inability to take Ulbricht’s supposed $80 million worth of Bitcoin is good news for other people facing state theft.

Think about countries such as Greece and Spain that are seizing personal fortunes and freezing assets in bank accounts. If you want to conceal your personal wealth from the state money grabbers converting it to Bitcoin seems like a pretty good option. Here in the United States things are worse. Your wealth can be stolen under civil forfeiture laws if a police officer simply suspects that wealth is tied to a drug-related crime. Under civil forfeiture laws the burden of proving any wealth isn’t tied to a drug crime is on the accused. Bitcoin may be an effective defense against civil forfeiture laws and a dying state’s last ditch attempt to raise money by stealing directly from the bank accounts of citizens.

Admittedly, Bitcoin fluctuations can be pretty wild. But everything has its risks. You risk losing wealth if Bitcoin’s exchange rate drops but you risk losing wealth if you keep cash on hand or in a bank account. I recommend divesting wealth. While divestment doesn’t protect all of your wealth it stands a good chance of losing everything if the one protection strategy you’ve chosen fails.

The Beauty of Rebellion

Seeing outright rebellion in the United States is a beautiful thing. The recent government “shutdown” has cause headaches for many vacation goers. The government decided that the best way to punish us for its inability to get along was to shutdown anything that may be used by the average American. As it turns out, the legitimacy of this decision isn’t being recognized by some of those very Americans:

It turns out families on vacation are enjoying America’s national parks even without the government’s blessing. Families are throwing orange cones aside at Mount Rushmore, ignoring barricades at Zion National Park and taking grinning selfies next to signs in the Badlands announcing the National Park Service facility is closed. Twitter and Instagram give testament to determined dads driving straight over traffic cones or throwing them aside to clear the way for the family vacations they’ve been planning long before a government shutdown was announced. Be safe, you pioneers, and give a shout-out to the park rangers, who are one genre of government worker we know must be truly missing their offices this week.

It’s nice to see people giving the state a giant middle finger. There are no legitimate reasons for the state to shutdown these parks. Vacation goers tend to enjoy them without the few services provided by state employees. Looking at Mount Rushmore, for example, requires no work whatsoever on the state’s behalf. Shutting down the monument was nothing more than a spiteful swipe at the American people. I think members of both parties believe that if they beat us long enough we’ll demand the other party cut their shit out and approve a bill.

Private Solutions to State Failures

“Without the government who will [fill in the blank]?” It’s a question anti-statists face frequently. People seem to lack the imagination necessary to come up with any ideas of who would build roads, teach children, or protect people in the absence of government (and I want to know who is building roads, teaching children, and protecting people in the presence of government). As we find more governments collapsing we are getting an opportunity to see who can provide the services that were formerly monopolized by the governments. One many has developed a potential alternative to the state’s first responder services:

What if you could report emergencies anywhere, have faster response times, and strengthen local communities, all without spending thousands of dollars or involving bureaucrats?

We are seeing sluggish emergency response times in many big cities around the United States, and in parts of Detroit and Chicago you’d be lucky if someone came at all, even hours later. This is the problem with having a one-size-fits-all monopoly on emergency services. Sure, the system works pretty well, but when it has problems it can be a matter of life and death. And those problems don’t cause any firm to lose profits when they drop the ball. Tax money still fills the agency’s coffers, rewarding incompetence. (In economics we call this a soft budget constraint.)

Cody Drummond at Peacekeeper is rethinking defense and emergency response with a new app he is developing. His focus? Bring it local and use something you already carry to alert those around you to a problem. In those critical first moments during a crisis, you can alert those closest to you and get the help you need faster.

This system has the potential of replacing lengthy police response times (if they respond at all) with quick response from members of your community. It could also save lives if medical emergencies can be attended to quickly by any medical personnel in your community, as opposed to waiting for an ambulance to arrive from a far away hospital. What makes solutions like this even more appealing is that they don’t stop working just because the government has shutdown. One of the biggest problems with allowing governments to monopolize services is that those services cease being available in the event of a budget cut or shutdown.

Will Mr. Drummond’s solution work? Only time will tell. But we know that state controlled police don’t work (unless you want your dog euthanized) so an alternative must be found. Even if Mr. Drummond’s solution doesn’t work out I will tip my hat to him for trying.

The Peer-to-Peer Economy

Technology has allows us, as a society, to move further away from centralization. Now that we are able to communicate with anybody in the world, perform pseudonymous transactions, and ship products we can more easily avoid the crushing state and its regulatory bodies. This is an excellent article that discusses how activists have begun to remove themselves from the system and create their own communities:

The Occupy Movement recently celebrated its second anniversary with very little fanfare leaving many to wonder where all the activists went. It seems they, and many anti-establishment activists, are vacating the system rather than occupying it.

Progressives may call it the “sharing economy” while Libertarians may refer to it as Agorism – a “society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging in a manner with aspects of peaceful revolution.”

Whatever it’s called, together, they’re opting out of the current socioeconomic matrix and creating a new alternative economy where trading occurs peer-to-peer and increasingly without government-issued currency.

It’s a space where mutual trade occurs without burdensome taxes, regulations, or licenses. Simply put, it’s an underground black market enabled by the Internet and regulated by social feedback mechanisms — and it’s growing exponentially.

As I progress down the path of anti-statism it has become more apparent to me that eliminating the state isn’t a winning strategy. Instead we need to create “underground” communities that exist within the state. If we want to win against the state we must make a community that people prefer over the one controlled by the state. When enough people move into the “underground” communities the state with die without the need for civil war.

Rampant Lawlessness

Ladies and gentlemen, things are far worse than we expected. With the shutdown of the government it appears that peoples’ respect for law and order has disappeared entirely. After paying park employees to barricade monuments in Washington some veterans became displeased and decided to, get this, bypass the barriers and visit one of the monuments anyways:

WASHINGTON — Wheelchair-bound elderly veterans pushed aside barricades to tour the World War II Memorial Tuesday morning, in defiance of the government shutdown which closed all of the memorials in the nation’s capital.

The four bus loads of veterans — visiting from Mississippi as part of a once-in-a-lifetime Honor Flight tour — ignored National Park Police instructions not to enter the site as lawmakers and tourists cheered them on.

“We didn’t come this far not to get in,” one veteran proclaimed.

Oh the humanity! Didn’t they get the memo? The government is shutdown and that means the monuments, which require to manpower to staff, are closed.

Seriously though, good on these men. This entire shutdown fiasco is insane. The government has actually invested a great deal of resources into shuttering parks and monuments just to make a pointless case about how much we need the government. In addition to paying employees to shutdown mostly unmanned parks and monuments the government has also paid system administrators to take down content from automated websites and replace them with noticed informing people that the website will be unavailable for the duration of the shutdown. More people should follow the example of those World War II veterans and tell the government where to shove its barricades.

Semiautomatic 3D Printed Handgun

I guess my prediction came true. The year hasn’t even closed yet and we now have designs for a semiautomatic 3D printed handgun. As with most 3D printed firearms so far it’s an ugly thing but one that uses several easily acquired firearm components:

***UPDATE: Files available on Defcad.com and Fosscad Twitter!***
I have designed a .22 LR Semiautomatic firearm. Unlike former designs such as the Shuty, this design uses almost all plastic parts (All non-plastic parts currently except the FCG cannot physically be plastic or a semiautomatic will not function) and uses weights to bring the bolt to a correct weight. You will need the following parts:
*3D Printer with ABS capability
*AR-15 FCG
*AR-15 Buffer Spring
*Ruger 10/22 Mag Spring
*AR-15 Firing Pin
*1x8mm metal insert (Case extraction)
*.44 bullets to weigh down bolt (More info in the .readme)

It’s very interesting to see how quickly 3D printed firearms are advancing. The rate of advancement really shows how powerful cooperation between a group of people from around the world can be. Thanks to 3D printer technology we are beginning to see a world where prohibitions on physical goods are infeasible. I believe it’s also important to note that these prohibitions aren’t being killed by political activism but by direct action. People from around the world who believe in freedom of information created designs for physical objects that can be replicated by anybody with a 3D printer, which are becoming cheaper and more capable every day.

Nobody Likes Fascists

What happens when a group of neo-Nazis decide to take over a North Dakota town? Well, not surprisingly, the resistence shows up:

In an update to the story we ran yesterday on the town of Leith, North Dakota being taken over by Neo-Nazi racists, Michael Pugliese tells us from the ground that “Lakota, Dakota, Anishinabe, Apache, African, Irish, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and other anti-racist individuals stood together to fight against the attempted nazi takeover of Leith, North Dakota.”

The bottom line is nobody likes a fascist. Even fascists don’t like fascists, which is why their history is peppered with events like the Night of the Long Knives. So it should surprise any group that is openly declaring itself fascist to meet resistance in everything it does. By announcing their intention to take over Leith, North Dakota those white supremacists basically set themselves up to meet resistance form every anti-fascist (which is almost everybody) in the area.