I think that a bit of worrying ("paranoia") is a healthy thing, and I encouraged Marta to post her concerns to the CI Members's Forum. Thinking about ("worrying about") and attempting to foresee how things can go wrong is the best way of reducing the likelihood that bad things will happen.

In the last few years we have taken a number of steps which I believe have increased the security of CI's corporate assets. One of those steps was forced upon us: the creation of a patient care trust fund as part of CI being regulated as a cemetery. The Master Cemetery Trust Fund now contains about $300,000 in assets intended for patient care. The Trustees of this fund are York Porter and John Besancon, neither of whom are Directors of CI, but both of whom are long-time Members who have earned the trust and respect of the Directors. Both the signatures of York and John are required to move assets in the Fund.

The other big step we have taken in financial control is to move the nearly $900,000 in prepaid assets to the savings account of a separate bank. The account requires two signatures for withdrawal of assets. Three people have signing authority, one of whom is the President and another of whom is the Treasurer and the third of whom is Robert Ettinger. Almost all of this money is invested in T-Bills, because we believe that stewardship requires us to be able to return these assets rapidly if there should be a "run on the bank" of Members asking for their pre-paid assets back.

CI also has nearly another million dollars spread between three investment accounts: H & R Block, E-Trade (formerly Brown & Co) and Siebert. Much of the H & R Block money (about $300,000) is locked into annuities. Our Assistant Treasurer, Steve Luyckx, has recently decided to become our internal auditor. He has on-line access to all of our accounts and can act as a "watchdog" against any suspicious movements of large amounts of funds. This leaves our Comerica checking account, which basically the President and the Treasurer control. We try to keep no more than $100,000 in this account, and I try to keep no more than $20,000 in cash (at least half in the savings account) and the rest in T-Bills. The President is not supposed to spend more than $10,000 on any one item without approval of the Directors.

I believe that it is good to keep any one person from being able to access too many assets, but we have a President, a Treasurer and an Internal Auditor who have the ultimate authority and who watch each other. If we create more "watchdogs", who will watch the "watchdogs" and how can you guarantee that the watchdogs can be trusted?

Financial controls could be tighter, but there comes a point in which you create so many controls that you end up hamstrung and unable to take effective action when required. This is called bureaucracy. It has its place, but life is not always predictable and good judgment and an ability to move resources in response to contingencies are important for an organization to be effective.

As it stands, the people who are most entrusted with assets: President, Treasurer and Internal Auditor, are people who have been selected by the Directors as being committed cryonicists who are trustworthy. The Directors are selected by the Voting Members, one-third of the Directors elected every year. The Voting Members are also committed cryonicists who have contracts and funding in place for cryopreservation.
If they are Option Two, they must have been Members for at least 3 years to become Voting Members:
http://www.cryonics.org/By_Laws.html#_IIIB_

The biggest danger is that the Members make poor choices in electing Directors and the Directors make poor choices in selecting Officers. Democracy is not protection against crooked politicians. On the other hand, I think it would be very difficult for a con-man who was seeking to get access to CI assets to become President or Treasurer. It would require a monumental job of "acting" to fool everyone for many years that the candidates are committed cryonicists. I think there is little danger of "con men" being make President or Treasurer. It is a greater danger that popular people with poor judgment are selected.

We have been moving away from decision-making authority at meetings because so many of our Members and Directors live at such great distances, rather than near Michigan (which had previously been the case). Decision-making authority has been placed in the Directors and in proxies mailed to Members. Marta's scenario of a group of "con-men" attending a meeting for a take-over is not possible according to our By-Laws as outlined above. But Bob has pointed to a loophole that I had not noticed before:

http://www.cryonics.org/By_Laws.html#_VA_

The worst aspect of the above By-Law is that it allows changes to be both PROPOSED as well as PASSED by 2/3 of Voting Members attending a meeting. I think that this should be changed so that changes to corporate policy can only be made by a quorum of the Membership through mailed proxies.
Ben

Having read Marta's concerns first I was inclined to share her alarm, not being an expert on take-over scenarios, and was then somewhat reassured by Bob's rejoinder. However, there is a broader issue of institutional survival which must be addressed forthrightly. Marta notes that one source of threat is our capitalization, but this threat is two-sided. If we have too little in reserve, we will not be able to counter various threats, legal, environmental, and other (e.g. the cost of liquid nitrogen or other essential supplies skyrocketing, attacks by various religious or environmental interests, a looney sabatour as well depicted in the movie CONTACT, you name it).

On the other hand, if we have too much in reserve (as might be the case for ALCOR), then we become another kind of target for looting. We should recall that ALCOR, some time ago, decided to recruit an outsider to manage their affairs, a logical move for a growing organization that I might have approved of if I had been on their board. They survived but the quandary remains. CI relies heavily on the goodwill and personal commitment of a very small number of people at the center. Ben Best is a rock, and we are very lucky to have him, but he is, so far, mortal. How do we prepare for the future? I don't think it is one hundred years, a very long time in the corporate world. I think it is more like two or three hundred, years. Especially for those who are now preserved. I have no immediate answers but think we need to keep this concern very much in the forefront of our thinking as we move ahead.
Ron

Some members feel CI should devote more time and resources planning for the reanimation of cryonics patients.

Considerations of reanimation are a complete waste of time. It will be so far in the future that society will be completely different. It is absolutely pointless to debate what the legal structure might be like, how much wealth you can take with you, how much retraining you will need, etc. Those are issues that we will deal with after we come back. There is only one priority, which is to survive.

Please try to think about these issues like an immortal. If you owe a million dollars when you wake up and you have billions of years to pay it off, then you essentially owe nothing. Conversely, if you increase your chance of survival by 1%, and you live for billions of years, then you've just added a billion years to your life expectancy. Do you have any idea how much wealth you could generate in that time? Let's just say that you would be astronomically wealthy.

That's why it irritates the piss out of me when people start talking about using the resources of CI to plan for reanimation. They obviously haven't really thought it through.

Jordan (New CI Board Member)

I agree 100% with Sparks. The focus of attention and resources should be almost exclusively on the intact preservation of the brain and, where possible other organs. On the other hand, outsiders and some potential members will start out with questions about the revival process, and we all have a natural level of curiosity about these far future events, but for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century they are essentially irrelevant concerns. All we know for certain about the future is that both medicine and human culture and technology will make enormous and transformative advances over the next millennium.

Among these will certainly be the vast extension of the "normal" life span and an accompanying capacity to revive humans and animals previously defined as permanently dead. We do not know that we will be among these, but it is possible, perhaps only remotely possible, that CI and ALCOR patients of the present and past will be among the fortunate. We must trust these future revivor people to be there and to be responsible and caring for us, holding our best interests in mind in the context of their time and circumstance.

We must maintain a stable and growth-oriented organizational structure or structures which can preserve those now frozen as well as welcoming untold numbers of additional patients for an indefinite period. No small task. This requires a combination of staff competence, legal security, and fiscal soundness.

And we have to advance that state-of-the-art technology and preservation practice, increasing by increments the possibility that intact patients will be delivered to the unknown and temporally distant revival systems and organizations can take over. We should keep our eyes on the prize, as the saying goes.

Ron

This is from Robert Ettinger A story that first appeared in Analog of June 2005--Th Policeman's Daughter, by Wil McCarthy--uses the word "immorbid" instead of "immortal," meaning no natural death. Not bad. It is also available in an anthology, Science Fiction The Best of the Year 2006, ed. Rich Horton, Prime publishers. The story, incidentally, concerns a future where people travel by fax machine, and can also be multiplicated or backed up the same way, and of course fax machines can print out just about anything you want. The story involves legal and psychological complications of multiple instantiations scenarios.
Bob