Some Further News of Laissez Faire City

On a Lufthansa flight from Caracas, Venezuela to Frankfurt, Germany, I discovered there was still some sanity left in the world. I unrolled the cutlery wrapped in the dinner service napkin and found two forks and two knives. Real stainless steel forks, and real stainless steel knives. Everyone else had them also.

If anyone tries to rush the cockpit, I thought to myself, he'll end up with at least two eating utensils embedded in softer portions of his anatomy. I was thinking of the forks, not the knives. Forks make better weapons. When I was growing up in Texas, it was a rule of thumb that a sharp fork was a standoff against a pocket knife—much like the equivalent point value of a knight and a bishop in chess.

But life was different elsewhere, further north, in the land of norteamericanos locos, as they might say in Costa Rica, or—since I am writing this while overlooking the Persian Gulf—back in that great Fount of Terrorism, the U.S. There in the land of the locos they believe the way to stop hijackers is to disarm all the passengers. And they believe the way to drum up more air travel business is to make the lines longer, and to turn up the metal detectors to gonad-frying levels, and to execute security romps through each woman's underwear—rather than just the usual invasions they undertake with relish whenever a boarding passenger looks sexy—and to do their best to tangle up computer cables before cramming them back into the carry-on case.

And the loco way of stopping terrorism is to bomb innocent farmers and shepherds and hungry people, so they and their children and their children's children will just love you and will never have a reason to plant an explosive in your territorial space or send one of your children a letter filled with anthrax, or something unappreciative like that.

And the loco way of making the country safe from what are alleged to be foreign goofs flying airplanes into buildings is to trash the U.S. Constitution and turn the country into a fascist police state with increased surveillance of banking transactions and email and political activity, and to have more warrantless arrests and searches and seizures, and to give the odious, criminal FBI more police powers, and the CIA more military and assassination powers, and to create a new domestic Gestapo called the "Office of Homeland Security". All to the apparent cheers of the American people, according to the polls. (Just who are they polling these days?) And when the news media doesn't go along—well, they are next on the list to receive one of those little letters filled with anthrax, now, aren't they? That'll straighten them out while the locos censor web sites and news reports and set out to bomb a half dozen countries, and thus clean out military inventories and get the factories back into war production and make some money again, dammit.

And the loco way of creating airline security is to put the Federal Government in charge, so it can do for airports what it did for the U.S. border—namely let through the drugs and illegal immigrants, while harassing ordinary, law-abiding citizen travelers. The first thing that came into my mind when I heard of the proposal to nationalize airport security was, "Oh, a return to the good ol' days, when officially-approved drugs and arms were transported via ordinary commercial airline passenger flights."

I was sitting at an outside table at a restaurant in San Jose (Costa Rica, not California) when the waiter said to me, "Big trouble in the U.S., no?" It was shortly after noon on September 11. I had worked late, to about 7 a.m., and had gone to bed, and had just gotten up to have breakfast/lunch and to do some work I had brought along with me. After listening to him for a few minutes, I decided I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. Then someone I knew came out of the door, and he explained about the four planes.

I sat there stunned for a while, refusing to go inside the restaurant and watch TV. I tried to go back to my work. Then I sat there and cried for about thirty minutes. It is not my style to cry in public. I used to work a half-block from the World Trade Center, seeing it whenever I looked out of the window of 220 Broadway (or 222 Broadway—the same building has both addresses) and down the street past the Millennium Hotel, whose upstairs bar we sometimes frequented after work. I had been there at my desk at the investment bank Barclays de Zoete Wedd when the previous World Trade Center bombing had taken place. So now, in San Jose, I thought of the people I knew who might be dead; I thought nostalgically of an area that carried too many old memories, beginning in the days I was trying to start a financial software company; and I had a feeling the world had suddenly shifted out of kilter; and I cried.

But after about 30 minutes I dried my eyes and went inside, where people I knew were watching the emerging footage of planes flying into the twin towers, and announced in a loud voice that it didn't matter who was responsible, it was all going to be blamed on Osama Bin Ladin and we were going to bomb Afghanistan, and probably Medina and Mecca along with it. After all, the New York Times had earlier in the year treated us to the running saga of Osama Bin Ladin (creatively respelled as "Laden") being tried and convicted in absentia while he stayed holed up over there in his Afghanistan mountain retreat. So Manhattanites were all mentally primed to accept the propaganda barrage they were about to receive in the wake of the plane bombings.

And the barrage came. The media was frothing to bomb someone, bomb anyone, before there was any identified target. "Let's bomb, who we gonna bomb? Who's the Guilty One?" The innuendoes began immediately. If everyone on earth can be connected by bridging only six degrees of separation, then it appears that every terrorist and alleged terrorist can be connected by bridging only four degrees of separation. Joseph McCarthy never had it so good. "Someone once knew someone who visited a city where lived a man thought to be an associate of Osama Bin Ladin." And when the U.S., weeks later, finally produced its "evidence", it was such an embarrassing collection of innuendo and hearsay that the U.S. farmed it out to their U.K. lackey Tony Blair to present to the world. "You want U.S. support for your war against the IRA? You do as you are told." Blair bleated as expected and assured us that Bin Ladin was the guilty party. (He didn't, however, let us know that Bin Ladin had toured U.S. military bases under the CIA-assigned name "Tim Osman.") And he didn't say anything about taking over the heroin trade or running a pipeline through Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the rate of evidence manufacture was astounding. The FBI, who didn't have a clue that anything was going to happen prior to September 11—and therefore needed a bigger budget, and more police powers, and more days of paid vacation—suddenly traced many of the alleged hijackers to two flight schools in Venice, Florida (two flight schools which had all the curious trappings of a U.S. intelligence operation). All the flight school records were confiscated and placed on a government plane, which flew out of Florida with Jeb Bush aboard.

The second plane which hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and immolated itself in a ball of flame, somehow didn't manage to burn up the passport of one of the "hijackers" on board. The passport was found "miraculously" unscathed a few blocks away. (Of course it was unscathed: it was exposed to the elements for no time longer than it took the person planting the "evidence" to drop the passport and then "find" it again.) A hijacker sent a letter to his girlfriend in Germany, but he miraculously mis-addressed the envelope, so the goodbye letter in which he confessed all was returned to the U.S. to be shared with the American media-viewing public. Yes, her family didn't think he had written the letter, but you can't take the word of terrorist associates, now can you? Another hijacker miraculously left his luggage behind, along with a copy of the Koran and a bogus Arabic testament telling him to pray and meditate for the morning's great suicidal plane bang. And then, miracle of miracles, the same letter was found in the wreckage of the ill-fated Flight 93 that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside! This proves that all the "hijackers" were working together, now doesn't it? Osama Bin Laden said he had nothing to do with the World Trade Center bombing, but you can't take the word of a terrorist, now can you? Apparently Osama was content to take all the blame without taking any of the credit. But we know they're all in it together.

And what a litany of changing stories on Flight 93. First, eyewitnesses reported it was shot down by the U.S. Air Force. But, wait, no it wasn't shot down, it crashed for unknown reasons. But wait, no, it crashed after a group of American Heroes invaded the cockpit to take on the terrorist hijackers. After that, there would be no more talk of Flight 93 being shot down by the Air Force; after all, you can't deny America her cockpit-rushing Heroes, can you? And, in either case, the witnesses are conveniently all dead, aren't they?

But the dark alternatives emerged almost immediately. When I heard of the plane bombing, I myself immediately assumed a Middle Eastern connection. But it was an operation (four planes and two towers and the Pentagon) carried off with consummate skill and co-ordination. When did the U.S. covert agencies, with their billions in funding, ever pull off anything like this in another country? So it had to have been done by Israel, Syria, or Iraq—countries with the requisite technical skills—I thought. I figured that Saddam had the motive, with the decade-long continued U.S. bombing of his country. There was also the evidence from the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 of Iraqi (as well as massive FBI) involvement. No, I figured it was Iraq.

I've since changed my mind. The evidence increasingly points to an operation planned and run out of the U.S., using some, but not exclusively, foreign actors.

There were strange anomalies. Ace pilot Hani Hanjour was not skilled enough to get checked out on a Cessna 172, but somehow he crashed a plane into the Pentagon. He flew Flight 77, a Boeing 757, "with extraordinary skill." Indeed. Then the FBI released the names of, they said, the four Saudi pilots who flew the "hijacked" planes. But every one of these four "pilot hijackers" were still alive, and were subsequently contacted by phone by the London Telegraph. The whole thing smelled of an FBI attempt to pull a fast one and exploit the gullibility of the American public. Why? What were they trying to hide?

The evidence continued to accumulate that the planes, rather than being controlled by hijackers, had been flown by remote control. An ex-head of the Pakistani Intelligence Services said the events of September 11 were planned and carried out by renegade elements of the U.S. Air Force acting in connection with the Mossad. From a purely "Cui bono?" point of view, that explanation appears to have some merit. A publication named Top_View claims to have done an interview with a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who said elements of the U.S. government pretty much ran the whole September 11 show. Again, this is consistent with whatever was going on at the Venice, Florida airport, which has all the earmarks of a U.S. intelligence operation.

Whatever is happening behind the scenes, including possible intercine warfare among elements of the U.S. government, it is clear that the acts of terrorism have had one unambiguous result: an abrogation of what little remains of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. The U.S. is well on its way to becoming a fascist police state. The once proud bastion of Freedom is rapidly transforming itself into a cesspool of Tyranny and Terror.

Which brings us to Laissez Faire City, a sovereign city in cyberspace whose raison d'être is to promote individual freedom and dignity, and the capability to live and work outside the confining tyranny of the nation-state. As I wrote in a previous article, the Digital Monetary Trust (DMT) had on its own initiative in April 2001 undertaken to complete some undelivered software promises of Laissez Faire City. This included repairing and finishing a software product called MailVault, which is designed to allow anonymous, encrypted communication using pseudonyms. And it included building two as-not-yet-started products. One of these, ALTA, was intended to allow individuals to anonymously hold and transfer assets, while the other one, LESE, was intended to enable those same individuals to anonymously trade their assets in a secure, continuous-auction market environment.

These self-imposed tasks were completed on October 22, 2001. This date also signals a change in DMT's relationship to Laissez Faire City, which I will now explain.

We turned MailVault back over to Laissez Faire City. We had patched MailVault into a secure product, but declined the invitation to continue to maintain and develop it. Essentially it had been designed with an architecture that did not allow for a truly distributed system. (Roughly speaking, a distributed system is one that resides in many places at once. Among other things, a distributed system requires nearly all the functionality to reside in the back-end server(s)—the region where computers can autonomously talk to each other and co-ordinate their separate [hence distributed] activities and data. If you design too much functionality in the front-end, you can't make the system properly distributed.) While the programming done by Laissez Faire City was clearly a cut above the relatively primitive efforts at private ventures like Dodge City, to change the MailVault architecture would require rebuilding it from scratch, an endeavor that DMT had neither the time nor inclination to undertake. Anyway, MailVault (the new MailVault) has been returned to Laissez Faire City. It is now in operation. And it is Laissez Faire City's baby—or the baby of whatever private corporation it may be spun off to—to worry about maintaining and operating in the future.

ALTA and LESE were designed by DMT with only a few restrictions (annoying from a software point of view) imposed by their being owned by Laissez Faire City (MUNI-Corp, in particular). These were built completely integrated with, and in, the DMT system, but with some bridge tools for the CityClerk of MUNI-Corp.

The ALTA and LESE systems are now live on-line, and open for business. Laissez Faire City Founders are being sent an email giving them the URL to open new ALTA accounts. Others may obtain an ALTA (and hence also a LESE) account by purchasing an LFC Cybercorporation package from MUNI-Corp.

When we delivered the ALTA and LESE products, which we by agreement fully intended to manage, there arose some issues of control versus liability. These were ultimately amicably resolved by DMT's agreeing to purchase all rights to the ALTA and LESE products. We were happy to buy them. They are good products: we know, we built them. And we now have MUNI-Corp out of our hair.

After a short time, ALTA accounts—just like DMT accounts—will be available to everyone. Since DMT owns ALTA and LESE, we are changing some of the restrictions that suited the purposes of MUNI-Corp, but which don't in the same way suit the purposes of DMT. ALTA will simply become the web interface to the DMT system. (That is, ALTA uses the protocols of the World-Wide Web, and commercial browsers like Opera, MS Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. This contrasts with the DMT "browser" which is a dedicated piece of software which uses its own protocols and procedures, and is inherently more anonymous and secure. The DMT "browser" is undergoing beta testing, and will be available for download shortly.) Customers of ALTA are anonymous, even to the system, a state of affairs which protects us as well as the customer.

Similarly, because it now owns LESE, DMT will decide which assets are traded there. Initially there will be MUNI-Corp shares and warrants, and DMT warrants (200,000 such warrants were issued to MUNI-Corp as part of the purchase of ALTA and LESE). DMT also intends to very quickly open markets in the four DMT currencies (U.S. dollar, Pound Sterling, Euro, and Japanese Yen) as well as in physical gold.

So, yes, there are real forks and knives and some sanity still left in the world. And we are here to see that sanity remains.

J. Orlin Grabbe is the author of International Financial Markets, and is an internationally recognized derivatives expert. He has recently branched out into cryptology, banking security, and digital cash. His home page is located at http://www.xs4all.nl/~kalliste/ .