Perspective: Online killer marketClick Here to Kill

The idea of an online assassination market was advanced long before it was possible to build one, and long before there was anything resembling the dark web. Susan Choi writes in Harper’s that in 1995, Jim Bell, an anarchist engineer who had studied at MIT and worked at Intel, began writing a serialized essay titled “Assassination Politics” which proposed a theoretical framework for encouraging and crowdsourcing the murder of public officials. “Inspired by a Scientific American article on the newfangled concept of encrypted ‘digital cash’—which did not yet exist in any meaningful way—Bell created one of the most sinister thought experiments of the early web,” Choi writes, adding:

The essay imagined a website or platform where users could anonymously nominate someone to be killed and pledge a dollar amount toward the bounty. They’d also be able to pay a small fee to make a “prediction”—an encrypted message that only the predictor and the site were privy to—as to when that person would be killed. Once the person was confirmed dead, the predictions would be decrypted and the pledged funds automatically transferred to the successful predictor. Implicit in the design was that the best way to predict when someone is going to die is to kill them yourself.

Choi notes that Bell, an ardent anarcho-libertarian, was one of the more extreme cypherpunks, a group of internet privacy and cryptography advocates who were all members of a mailing list in the early Nineties. “He believed that his system would bring power to heel and usher in a new anarchic order,” she writes, quoting him as saying:

If only 0.1 percent of the population, or one person in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead…. that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head…. Perfect anonymity, perfect secrecy, and perfect security…. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.

Choi writes that a threshold had been crossed: advances in encryption and cryptocurrency make Bell’s dark vision a reality: Journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed that on 12 March 2019, the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and successfully carried out by hired assassins.

Choi adds:

Assassination markets do not need to be foolproof, Jim Bell–style operations for users to turn to them. The fear is that as more out-of-work men hear that it is possible to make money contracting on the dark web, even shoddy, scammy, and slipshod marketplaces could help arrange killings.