Assassination Politics

Mon Sep 26 15:34:04 PDT 2022

https://www.karmak.org/archive/2003/01/assassination.htm
Assassination Politics & Jim Bell

To view Assassination Politics

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Crypto-Convict Won't Recant

>From Wired Online

by Declan McCullagh

3:00 a.m. Apr. 14, 2000 PDT

Before Jim Bell went to prison, he suspected that most government
officials were corrupt. Three years behind bars later, the
self-proclaimed Internet anarchist is sure of it.

After Bell, a cypherpunk who the United States government dubbed a
techno-terrorist, is released Friday at 10 a.m. PDT, he plans to exact
revenge on the system that imprisoned him.

"If they continue to work for the government, they deserve it. My
suggestion to these people is to quit now and hope for mercy," the
41-year-old Washington state native said in a telephone interview this
week from the medium-security federal penitentiary in Phoenix. Bell
pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 1997.

The retribution he has in mind? Well, it's decidedly not simple
thuggery or wild-eyed ranting.

Before he was arrested, the MIT graduate even gave his scheme a catchy
title: "Assassination Politics."

It's an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring
about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government. The
system, which Bell spent years talking up online, uses digital cash
and anonymity to predict and confirm assassinations.

Darkly brooding during his stints in solitary confinement, Bell has
honed his idea to a knife-sharp edge, and seems to have shed any
remaining scruples in the process.

"I once believed it's too bad that there are a lot of people who work
for government who are hard-working and honest people who will get hit
(by Assassination Politics) and it's a shame," he says. "Well, I don't
believe that any more. They are all either crooks or they tolerate
crooks or they are aware of crooks among their numbers."

That kind of fervid rhetoric comes close to crossing the line, says
one former prosecutor. "It's an oblique threat," says Mark Rasch, now
a lawyer at Science Applications International Corporation. "Depending
on how immediate the threat is or how immediate the incitement is, it
could violate federal law."

And Assassination Politics? If Bell tries to set it up, will he end up
back in Club Fed? "Now you're getting closer to the line that says, 'I
will pay you to kill a federal agent.' Even though it's indirect, it
has the same effect," Rasch says.

U.S. law punishes "any threat to injure the person of another" with a
five-year prison sentence.

Robb London, the assistant United States Attorney for the Western
District of Washington, did not immediately return phone calls.

It's easy enough to dismiss Assassination Politics as a loony idea
invented by a Theodore Kaczynski wannabe and about as likely to occur
as Dan Quayle winning a presidential primary.

But then why are the feds so worried? Call it sheer self-interest, but
the original charges against Bell highlighted the scheme: The IRS
accused him of "soliciting others to join in a scheme known as
'Assassination Politics' whereby those who killed IRS employees would
be rewarded."

IRS inspector Jeff Gordon, who now regularly monitors the cypherpunks
mailing list, took it personally, at one point likening Bell to
convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Both, Gordon said in
1997, were making "plans to assassinate government employees."

Gordon found a second suspect a year later, when he came across an "AP
robot" website that claimed to implement Bell's idea and pay winners
in e-cash. "'Bot' is a slang term for an automated computer program. I
also know that 'e$' and 'eCa$h' are slang terms for electronic or
digital cash, which was a major component of Bell's Assassination
Politics proposal," the IRS agent said in an affidavit.

The investigation eventually led to the conviction of fellow
cypherpunk Carl Johnson in April 1999 for threatening federal
officials.

Both cases have become something of a cause celebre among cypherpunks
who are critical of government overreaching; the list, after all,
became popular during the heyday of the intrusive White House-backed
Clipper Chip.

Architect John Young in 1998 nominated Bell for a Chrysler design
award for creating an "Information Design for Governmental
Accountability."

The Laissez Faire City Times has published a copy of Bell's AP essay,
calling it "a thought experiment on one of the consequences of the
digital society."

Not everyone was quite so complimentary. U.S. News and World Report
featured Bell as part of a cover story on terrorism.

The story said that when agents raided his home, they found "volatile
solvents, explosives ingredients, sodium cyanide, nitric acid, and
disopropyl fluorophosphate -- one of several ingredients that, if
properly mixed, form nerve gas -- all in a residential neighborhood."

Bell seems eager to take advantage of his notoriety. He's planning a
kind of crypto-convict U.S. tour that will take him through Seattle,
New York, Washington, and to his MIT class reunion in Boston in early
June.

Bell repeatedly claims that he won't break the law himself. "I'm not
going to kill them off," he said. "Other people are going to do that.
I'm going to promote a system.

"There are at least a couple of books I have to write, expounding on
the AP concept to explain it to the masses," he says. "I have to
update it to reflect that five years have passed and things look
dramatically better for the overall concept.

"Five years ago, people were saying, 'Wouldn't the government just
shut the Internet down if people used it for something like that?' Now
people realize that isn't possible," Bell says.

For an admitted anti-government activist -- his plea bargain said he
owned chemicals that could be used to produce Sarin gas and once
stink-bombed the carpet outside an IRS office -- Bell is a remarkably
affable one, and has been eager to proselytize even to intelligence
community types.

Jessica Stern, a senior fellow at Harvard University and a former
National Security Council aide, has taken a particular interest in the
case.

"As a terrorism expert, I think he's a very important example of this
new phenomenon of the virtual network. It really poses problems for
the government, and he knows that. He's thrilled about it," says
Stern, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who has spent long hours
interviewing Bell.

"He's really an irritant. He's teasing them, he's defying them. He's
trying to get them to overreact. That is what we often see with
terrorists. One of their aims is to destabilize regimes, but also to
get governments to overreact so they lose credibility with the
public," she says.

That's entirely plausible, and it makes for some fascinating
speculation about what might happen when Bell's a free man. It's clear
that the feds are monitoring those who sympathize with Bell: Fellow
cypherpunk Tim May saw his address and Social Security Number appear
in court documents after questioning the IRS' prosecution.

Might the IRS or the Secret Service, which aided an investigation in a
related case, try to keep track of Bell? He certainly thinks so, and
tells anyone who will listen that the feds have been illegally spying
on him.

According to a court docket, Bell raised this point repeatedly during
an August 1998 sentencing hearing for a probation violation -- to the
point that even his attorney told Judge Franklin D. Burgess that a
mental health evaluation might be appropriate. The judge agreed.

During a recent phone conversation, Bell added that he thought he had
been denied "good conduct" time that would have allowed him to be
released weeks earlier.

And when he is released? Bell plans to do the same thing anyone with a
hot tech idea would do: Launch a website.

"I may end up starting a dot-com company to promote the idea of an
AP-type system," he says. "I think the public wants to be able to buy
freedom and liberty over the Internet."

Assassination Politics

Part 1
http://www.konformist.com/2000/assassination/assassination01.txt
Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10