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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

Lol. So many flaws... but nobody knew in 1997...

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.

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I don't think that's true, that it's fear of imprisonment etc. Such things definitely matter, but I think the reason for the lack of political assassinations is the same as why we don't get horrible viruses that spread like wildfire and kill Ebola (which I believe to be that bioscience professors aren't usually very evil).

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 think political assassination teens to make little sense most of the time. There is a sort of gentleperson's agreement to not do it, is someone breaks that then no one feels safe and leaders will be assassinating other leaders left and right. At least I think that is the great.

> 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.

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.

I think it's fear of a power negative media reaction-- that the murder would lead to success for the political position that the murderer attempted to strike at.

Deterrents only work if they're enforceable. Will you be able to catch someone if they use a drone to take out a target?

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.

> 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.

But will that be sufficient to stop a technology like off the shelf drones?

I have a feeling that we're about to find out.

Depends on how much rights those in power want to strip away in the name of "safety".

It's not so simple.

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.

Thought: The day-to-day situation in Mexico, for a number of decades, give a sinister data-point for the rate at which someone is willing to murder rather ordinary citizens.

Indeed. I'd add that quite a lot of the US mass shootings seem to be "political" in character, in that their perpetrator leaves some kind of manifesto or messageboard postings explaining their motive, but the victims are either random or attending the same school as the perpetrator. There's (fortunately) nobody with an organized program of political violence.

It definitely makes a lot of assumptions that I don't think hold true in practice. As you say, many world leaders would even want to have one another killed (as individuals with both motive and a lot of power to make it happen) and yet it doesn't happen very often. The practicalities of actually _using_ the digital cash, should you win, in a way that wouldn't point the finger at you are also not so simple.

It's an interesting thought experiment though. Would probably make for a cool novel!

Yeah, there's no way this would lead to minimal government, the exact opposite would happen.

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