Very interesting reading the obstacles faced by the black market drug trade and how they're overcoming them. It seems like the producer layer is most susceptible to penetration as it is essentially identical to most gangs. It's entirely glossed over here but procuring the product seems like a difficult problem for an anonymized distributor: How do you make sure the product gets to your support layers?
As interesting as it all is, it's also very concerning for Law Enforcement. While petty things like drugs don't really worry me much, the advances in the anonymized distributed networks like this do mean that things that previously required big budgets of national intelligence agencies become easier for common malcontents to use. The article essentially describes a quintessential terror cell structure, but with the added benefit of 0 direct interaction. The separation of layers has always existed with limits (IE you had to have some form of communication) but this potentially allows for goods and services to easily be passed from fully anonymized layers to others without every having any interaction at all.
I'm not seeing why this would particularly reduce violence. Some gang violence isn't about drug sales, but the same sort of territorial control that nation-states like to fight over too. And for the violence that is about drug sales, I'm not seeing why that wouldn't continue. Dead drops are just as local as corners are, and there's just as much incentive to fight over business as there was previously.
In the current system, you have to have dealers hanging out on the corners. To take territory, you shoot at the dealers and either kill them or scare them away.
In this system, you have drops. How does a rival gang know where they are? They'd have to buy the product to discover the drop and drops shouldn't be used multiple times. They could watch a user find one, but then that drop wouldn't be used again so they couldn't stake out and wait for their rival to refill it.
It's not clear to me how much gang violence is specifically driven by fights over corners, rather than other kinds of inter-gang fighting. But let's assume it's significant.
I think it's very unlikely a drug business can get to scale without reusing drops; the cost of scouting a good drop is significant, and the number is finite. Regardless, the value of a drop declines the farther it is from customers and from the dealers who supply the drop. So in practice, gangs will still have an incentive to claim turf and to harm other dealers using drops on their turf.
Even if that somehow doesn't happen, they'll still have the same strong competitive incentives. So they'll be very much inclined, as now, to discover rivals and take over their business through violence.
If gangs are claiming turf and excluding other dealers, then those aren't dead drops, which by definition are undetected drops by anonymous parties. It's an open question whether effective dead drops are even possible, but if they are, and come to be widely adopted for trade in contraband, then a significant portion of the source of territorial conflicts between criminal organizations vanishes.
At the moment that's how it works. If it's true that things are moving in to telegram and other encrypted chat platforms then it could change. It makes it simple enough for the average person to do.
Since you are primed on the question. You should read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. It's a near-future sci-fi book that tackles these sorts of questions.
As a bit of a "spoiler" his solution is a covenant with the citizens. The government will hack all of our computers, will own the IME equivalents of every machine, and in return they will only use this power to hunt down terrorists and mass murderers, people who are looking to leverage technology to build nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, etc.
Things like parallel construction would have to stop though. Or be considered an immediate dismissal.
That doesn't sound like near-future fiction. That sounds like 20 years ago but without the part that the government promises to only do this for "good" reasons.
But I disagree on a couple of points, truth is more important than pseudo "pragmatism". A problem with incorrect pragmatism is that we collectively talk each other away from the seemingly impossible... which may in fact turn out to be possible. The study of cryptography (both primitives and protocols and systems) can be viewed as the study of paradoxical possibility. Things that seem to be impossible until they turn out to be possible.
I mean, in the book, this is post terrorist cells using nuclear weapons and bio weapons, facilitated by technology like the OP, a solution was required. And this one could be non-dystopian, making it better than other solutions.
People from more or less politically stable countries like the US are very naive in not considering what can happen to the best of governments overnight.
People from Europe have this sort of... experience. Most of us know that trusting the government with our lives is not a good idea.
The US isn’t naive. In fact, it’s the opposite. It is a country that was so aware of the folly of government that it deliberately inhibited its own government by design. Because it knows damn well what happens when you relinquish control of yourself to another. That’s why the 2nd amendment is so fundamental.
The US doesn’t have to worry about things happening to the govt overnight, because the worry is built in. A successful model exits, it just needs to be followed...
Shall we wait until it is over before drawing conclusions? It's already gone downhill a lot further than I would have expected, the degree to which people are apparently willing to enable all this is f'ing scary.
> The article essentially describes a quintessential terror cell structure, but with the added benefit of 0 direct interaction.
Isn't "terror cell" a little over-the-top? It's just trade craft. The US does it. Russia and China do it. The various mafias (at least, modern ones) do it.
It's not over the top, it's what I was talking about.
Terror cells have had to operate with reduced resources since the dawn of terrorism. The terror cell structure is trying to keep things as isolated as possible, and I'm saying this structuring and proliferation of dead-drop tech will all boost the potential power of the terror cell.
I'm saying that what they've described is a structure analogous to what exists, just higher tech. The time to adoption of this by terror elements is going to be short.
>As interesting as it all is, it's also very concerning for Law Enforcement. While petty things like drugs don't really worry me much, the advances in the anonymized distributed networks like this do mean that things that previously required big budgets of national intelligence agencies become easier for common malcontents to use.
Last years state only tech is next years commercial tech. Once upon a time only the clergy were literate, now everyone can read and write whatever they want. Once upon a time the state could control the news. Now anyone with an internet connection can publish stuff. Once upon a time only major powers had tanks and artillery now every podunk warlord has them. Once upon a time only superpowers sent things into space. Now companies are doing it and making a profit. Once upon a time only the three letter agencies could bug a room. Now anyone can buy pinhole cameras for $5.
Trying to stand in the way of that is just stupid. You can't stop the long slow march of technological progress. At best you can quarantine off some small dystopia that you control.
There's nothing to be worry dangers of this network. I don't believe that our intelligence agencies haven't found a way break this anonymized distribution network. Its a well known fact that IA is indirectly sponsoring this network to get funds for their illicit operations. And I am pretty sure that they have planted backdoor in this network.
> As interesting as it all is, it's also very concerning for Law Enforcement ... things that previously required big budgets of national intelligence agencies become easier for common malcontents to use.
We'll probably see "white hat" distributed networks with pseudonymous reputation used for the provision of security and crime-prevention services, with no need for traditional Law Enforcement to get involved in any real way other than in a secondary, oversight role. After all, tools that "common malcontents" can use, can also be used by people working for the social good.
I think the right (though not necessarily the most likely) solution to the problems you allude to is more powerful local governments able to monitor the goods coming into/out-of their jurisdiction, a sort of return to the more decentralized political structure of the feudal era.
In this sort of arrangement, a jurisdiction's authorities could require shipments to be bonded, with forfeiture of the bond if it is found to contain a restricted substance. This would result in policing happening at the edges, by those providing the bonds, and likely relying on trust networks to assess the risk that a package originator is a terrorist.
Such a world would have a lot more trade friction than an idealized world govermment that centralized control of the movement of goods to prevent malevolent behaviour while allowing free trade of benign goods, at least in the earlier stages where localized solutions are not well-developed/efficient, but it would mean a far lower chance of a significant fraction of the world coming under the tyranny of a single malevolent government.
An all-powerful central govermment will always pose a far greater threat to the advancement of society than chaos IMHO.
As interesting as it all is, it's also very concerning for Law Enforcement. While petty things like drugs don't really worry me much, the advances in the anonymized distributed networks like this do mean that things that previously required big budgets of national intelligence agencies become easier for common malcontents to use. The article essentially describes a quintessential terror cell structure, but with the added benefit of 0 direct interaction. The separation of layers has always existed with limits (IE you had to have some form of communication) but this potentially allows for goods and services to easily be passed from fully anonymized layers to others without every having any interaction at all.