The Weapon of Mass Disclosure.
Information leaks, such as the Iraq War Logs and Collateral Murder, the Afghan War Diaries, the Biden Laptop and many others have served the people in exposing the machinations and corruption of people in power. And then there are those things we know exist but have not yet been allowed to see:
COVID-19 Origins and Wuhan Lab Leak: Evidence or internal communications confirming or denying the theory of a lab leak in Wuhan, including documents from the WHO, Chinese government, or U.S. intelligence. We already know Fauci funded Gain of Function research, but someone else knew.
9/11 Commission Classified Data: Classified sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, revealing additional details about foreign government involvement, intelligence failures, or cover-ups.
Corporate Influence on Legislation: Documents showing how major corporations influence legislation through lobbying, campaign contributions, or behind-the-scenes deals. We know Monsanto somehow got the RFK administration to back down on its warnings.
Surveillance and Privacy Violations: We know government surveillance programs collect data on American citizens without proper oversight or consent. But we have no details about their plans and what other illegal projects they have been working on. Although people have used warrant canaries to evade the gag orders in National Security Letters from NSA, it’s an imperfect measure to warn the public.
January 6th Internal Communications: We know there were 184 FBI agents mixed into the crowd. It is suspected some of them were inciting violence.
Internal communications from government agencies, law enforcement, or political figures regarding the planning, execution, and aftermath of the Capitol riot would be very interesting, especially to those entrapped in the scheme.
Epstein’s list: We know the FBI has been in possession of Jeffrey Epstein’s list including names of his powerful associates and clients for almost 10 years, providing insights into his ties to intelligence agencies and the pedophile politicians he most likely blackmailed. The FBI has so far defied congress in revealing the reasons for redactions made to the releases in defiance of acts passed by congress.
Pfizer Vaccine Trial Data: The full dataset from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trials, offering a comprehensive understanding of the vaccine’s efficacy, side effects, and long-term impacts, the stuff they wanted sealed for the next 75 years.
There are so many things hidden from the public.
It’s the secrecy pillar of domination. It extends from simple secrets to the concept of the sacred, helping to define group membership, allegiance and provides a foundation to conspiracy.
It springs from the tendency of people to define themselves apart from others, to find common traits, to exclude others from participation for something they don’t know rather than just something they don’t have or don’t do.
In itself, it’s not particularly problematic, there are many reasons it’s useful in society. It’s been used in rituals marking a transition into adulthood. But once in the hands of psychopaths, it becomes a weapon. Suddenly the reasons for abuse can be hidden from view and justice can become a special privilege. We see this today as the list of classified information grows ever larger in the name of National Security with no real prospect of containing its growth.
But there is hope. It wasn’t my first realization but it’s a stepping stone.
I gave one justification for the Dead Man Switch in an earlier article: the fact that inevitably in a group of conspirators there is always a marginal participant, for whom the work to keep a secret becomes heavier with time or circumstance. If this doesn’t seem to rise to the level of motivation sufficient to trigger the release, upon their death, of secrets that implicate others, perhaps adding a monetary motivation could convince you and them.
Inspired by Jim Bell’s theoretical use of a prediction market to incentivize assassination, it makes sense to ask whether decentralized prediction markets can be used to incentivize a leak.
I’m pretty sure they can.
Let’s say you would like the full set of Pfizer mRNA vaccine trail data released, before the end of the year, when some hypothetical FDA renewal is supposed to happen.
You create a Prediction Market that claims the data will not be released before the end of the year.
You place a large bet on the positive outcome (that the data is not released by the end of the year), thousands of dollars worth of crypto.
Others possibly add to the bet, creating a very large payoff for the opposite outcome - which is if the data gets leaked.
Some scientist or FDA employee, with the ability to influence the outcome because they have access to the data takes the opposite bet, perhaps just $1.
The scientist leaks the data. The bet placed by the leaker is now worth much more, totaling all the bets that were made on the other side.
That’s the main idea. Current prediction markets are not really anonymous. Most of them perform some kind of curation and because verification of the outcome isn’t simple, none of this is a viable scenario today.
But even assuming that the privacy, market curation and outcome verification are handled, there are still economic problems with the setup. For example, there is nothing stopping someone from betting $2 on the negative outcome along with the ‘leaker’. You can immediately see how some opportunistic gambler could just snipe at such markets, and collect massive gains for very little work. This of course destroys the incentive for the would be leaker, since there is no assurance that they will collect on the entirety of the bet by influencing the outcome, since at any point, even on the last day, they might have to split the reward with an anonymous freeloader.
If they are not taking the risk on moral grounds alone, the promise of a reward has to be solid.
Could it be done in a better, more robust way ? Of course. The mechanics of the prediction market could be changed for this special kind of case so it can reward only those who can prove they were the source of the leak. For example, the bets on the negative side could be accompanied with a commitment (the hash of the files for instance), so that upon resolution of the prediction market , the same person could anonymously submit the leaked files in a dead drop such as Haven, allowing many parties, including the prediction market resolution process, to verify the hash is valid and only their bet should be counted.
Look, I know this is high level design that has many problems, such as for instance fake leaks that provide the correct hash, so the content has to be verified somehow, but I hope you can see this is a new thing.
My point here is that this is something blockchain technology has made possible.
It would be an unprecedented way to sabotage the pillar of secrecy.
