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James Dalton Bell (born 1958) is an American crypto-anarchist who created the idea of arranging for anonymously-sponsored assassination payments via the Internet, which he called "assassination politics". Since the publication of the "Assassination Politics" essay, Bell was targeted and identified by the federal government of the United States as a "techno-terrorist". He was imprisoned on felony charges of tax evasion in 1997. In 2001, Wired called Bell "ne of the Internet's most famous essayists" and "the world's most notorious crypto-convict".

In April 1995, Bell authored the first part of a 10-part essay called "Assassination Politics", which described an elaborate assassination market in which anonymous benefactors could securely order hits of government officials or others who are violating citizens' rights. Following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, Bell was arrested and subsequently jailed for 11 months on felony charges of harassment and using fraudulent Social Security numbers.

After his April 2000 release, Bell publicly announced that he believed that there was extensive corruption associated with his 1997-2000 criminal case, and that he was going to research the facts and file a lawsuit. Bell filed this lawsuit in 2003. Bell was put under heavy surveillance and rearrested for harassment and stalking of federal agents, charged with intimidation and stalking and again imprisoned, this time for a decade-long sentence. Bell protested vociferously against the conduct of the trial, going so far as to file civil lawsuits against two judges, at least two prosecutors, his former probation officers and his defense attorneys, but ultimately to no avail. He was released in December 2009.

Background

Bell was born in Akron, Ohio and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a degree in chemistry. After graduation, he worked for Intel as an electrical engineer before founding his own computer storage device company, SemiDisk Systems. in 1982. He was arrested in 1989 for a charge prosecutors originally classified as illegally manufacturing methamphetamine, but prosecutors later amended the charge to excise accusations of manufacturing a drug; Bell pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of failing to report receiving a controlled chemical, for which he paid a fine of $2,500. When his company closed in 1992, Bell said he developed a "phobia" of financial and tax-related issues. He had been a Libertarian Party member and described his political beliefs as anarcho-libertarian. According to the government, he wrote press releases for a militia association, but Bell denies this, (his mother stated he was not a member of the group) and attended three meetings of the Multnomah County Common Law Court (possessing no judicial authority according to Federal government laws) in Portland, Oregon, which put government officials on trial in absentia and awarded judgements against them. Bell attended these meetings at least in order to find government 'plants' in that group. Bell subsequently became involved in a tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service, which ruled that he owed $30,000 to the federal government.

"Assassination Politics" essay

From 1995 through early 1996, Bell authored an essay entitled "Assassination Politics" in which he described the idea of using digital signatures through email to create an assassination market, "predicting" the deaths of IRS agents and other government employees. In effect, the idea would create an incentive for assassination of what Bell classified as corrupt government agents, offering a reward that could be claimed by someone willing to submit an entry predicting a given agent's death at a particular time. The person could then kill the agent at about that time, thus winning the pool money. The purpose was to intimidate the IRS agents and others into no longer enforcing tax rulings and tax and other laws. Bell published his idea in a 10-part essay titled "Assassination Politics" on the alt.anarchism USENET newsgroup.

Described by Wired as "an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government", the essay was nominated for a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design in 1998 as "an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability". While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that advocating violence against government officials is protected by the First Amendment, realistic threats can be punished, and "Assassination Politics" put Bell under the scrutiny of federal investigators in late 1996. The essay continued to attract interest from anarchist theorists long after its author's legal entanglements; libertarian economist Bob Murphy criticised the assassination politics scheme in a pair of articles titled "The Politics of Destruction" in 2002. Murphy claimed that assassination politics was both technically infeasible and ideologically undesirable – from an anarcho-capitalist perspective (crypto-anarchism being a form of anarcho-capitalism).

In 1997, the United States government's position was that Bell's AP idea was unthinkable, illegal, and too outrageous for anyone to seriously propose. But in 2003, that government proposed a system that was immediately seen by commentators as being remarkably similar to Bell's idea: According to The Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, "The programme, called the Futures Market Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP), was part of the Total Information Awareness Program and was coordinated by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)."

Investigation, prosecution and imprisonment

According to testimony by a federal agent, the federal government began infiltrating the Multnomah County Common Law Court via Steven Walsh, a government agent who attended the meetings under a false name and even began to lead the organization. According to court documents, Bell attended three meetings of the group nearly a year after Walsh's infiltration.

In February 1997, the Internal Revenue Service acted on Bell's debt, docking his wages and seizing his 10-year old automobile. Inside the car, investigators found bomb-making instructions, political literature and detailed information concerning cyanide and fertilizer, the latter of which was a key ingredient in the Oklahoma City bombing, a militia-linked attack perpetrated in 1995. At the time, lack of evidence that Bell intended to harm anyone prevented investigators from bringing charges, but when, four weeks later, he stinkbombed their Vancouver offices with a propanethiol-soaked welcome mat, the IRS resolved to act, stating publicly that Bell might escalate his actions.

IRS officers raided Bell's parents' home on April 1, 1997, and seized three semi-automatic rifles, a handgun, several computers containing indecipherable encrypted data, as well as dangerous chemicals including sodium cyanide and an alleged nerve-gas precursor (according to Bell's friends, he had previously claimed to have produced sarin of the type used in the 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway). He was subsequently arrested in May of that year, and in July pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of IRS agents and the use of a false Social Security number (officials alleged that he had used four such numbers since 1984 in order to conceal his assets; Bell said that he did not believe anyone had a right to know his real Social Security number).

During the trial, the government's lead investigator compared Bell with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and anarcho-primitivist bomber Theodore Kaczynski. As part of his plea bargain, Bell pled guilty in July 1997 to collecting the names and home addresses of IRS employees, and the home addresses of FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and police in Clark County, Washington; Bell also accepted responsibility for conducting the stinkbomb attack in the Vancouver IRS office and for the assassination market idea. He was convicted of the two low-level felonies and sentenced in December 1997 to eleven months in prison followed by three years of probation. As a condition of his sentence, Bell was compelled to pay, upon his release, $1,359 in restitution for the stinkbomb attack. He was also subjected to three years of supervised release, during which he was barred from accessing computers and from possessing chemicals.

In Bell's June 2003 lawsuit, Bell accused the federal government of extorting the 1997 plea agreement from him and stated that when Bell balked at that agreement in November 1997, in part due to the government's violation of the terms, government agents instructed fellow inmate Ryan Thomas Lund to assault Bell. The lawsuit alleged Lund did this at about 6:00PM on November 25, 1997, for the purpose of intimidating Bell, and to keep Bell away from his family and the news media. Later, in an ostensibly unrelated event, Lund filed a lawsuit stating that on December 14, 1997, two days after Bell's December 12, 1997 sentencing, Lund (who was in solitary confinement at the time due to his assault on Bell) had a "slip and fall" accident while alone in his cell, ostensibly due to a wet cell floor. Lund had also been promised a 27-month sentence for his illegal possession of firearms and methamphetamine, when the relevant federal law required a mandatory 10-year sentence. Bell alleged that the sentence reduction and lawsuit payoff were engineered to reward Lund for extorting Bell.

Bell further alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that a forged appeal case, 99-30210, was entered into the court record. He stated that "Ninth Circuit Court personnel ... began corruptly falsifying, forging, and improperly adding to and deleting from the Ninth Circuit Court documentary record ... with regard to appeal #99-30210." Bell's October 2004 amendment further alleges that, a handwritten note, "purportedly signed by Bell, but not in Bell's handwriting style", was forged to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He alleges that this notice of appeal was filed around June 20, 1999 (claim 505), and that, "... Ninth Circuit personnel agreed to and did continually add false records to that docket, and at various times they deleted some of those false records and substituted new false records, for the purposes of concealing the true events and for continuing to obstruct Bell’s access to justice and his constitutional rights." (Claim 510) In his lawsuit, Bell seeks to establish that over a dozen government employees were guilty of numerous felonies.

Release and conviction

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… 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.

Bell served his prison sentence at a federal medium-security prison in Phoenix, Arizona, from which he was released in April 2000. He was rearrested in June of the same year on the charge of violating several of his 36 probation conditions, and was returned in November to a federal detention center at SeaTac, Washington following a search of his home that Bell called a "disguised burglary".

Bell had conducted sousveillance against Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, using public databases and legally obtained CD-ROMs, "to let them know that surveillance can be done in both directions." Bell also compiled six months of evidence of what he alleged was illegal surveillance of him by a government agency. In the days leading up to his arrest he claimed that the agency had unlawfully installed a covert listening device in his home and a tracking device in his car, something the ATF admitted doing during the subsequent trial. The ATF stated it had planted a covert GPS system in Bell's car and tracked the movements of his Nissan Maxima in real time.

However, Bell alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that the government employees had actually planted an illegal GPS tracking device in his car months before the one ostensibly allowed by the October 2000 warrant, at least as early as Bell's April 2000 release from prison. The information from that prior device couldn't be used, however, because there was no warrant allowing it to be planted. Bell also alleged that federal government employees had also illegally planted a GPS tracking transmitter in a vehicle he drove in June 1998, one which the government never disclosed; Bell further stated that his defense lawyers colluded to keep Bell from being able to demand disclosure of all such secretly-planted devices.

The double standard here is simply incredible. They simply don't like the idea that Jim Bell can simply look through a few databases, find one of their people, and publish the name on the Internet. They hate that. They're trying to make it look like I've been intimidating them. They've been intimidating me. I wasn't all that happy before, but I'm hopping mad ... if you think this is going to stop me, baloney.

Bell pleaded not guilty to violating 18 USC 2281, a law prohibiting the intimidation of family members of federal agents and some forms of stalking. The charges specified that Bell had performed Internet background checks on federal agents he asserted were harassing him, and Bell defended his actions by saying he was using public records to defend against what he saw as harassment by government officials. Journalist Declan McCullagh wrote, " says, and a good number of observers agree, that the Feds are prosecuting him for doing what an investigative reporter does: Compiling information from publicly available databases, documenting what's happening, and so on. This case could set a precedent that affects the First Amendment privilege of journalists."

During the trial, the judge sealed the entire court file, forbade the defense from issuing subpoenas to witnesses, granted the prosecution significant latitude in making negative suggestions about Bell's character, and refused requests for a mistrial. Journalist McCullagh was subpoenaed by two Treasury Department agents to appear before the court, without being notified ahead of time as required by federal regulations regarding subpoenas involving the media. Following his conviction, Bell renewed his attempts at firing his court-appointed lawyer, appealing his case to the Supreme Court, and filing civil lawsuits against those he alleges were involved in an orchestrated conspiracy to deny him a fair trial and an unbiased, court-appointed defense counsel; his targets included two judges, at least two prosecutors, and his former probation officers and defense attorneys. After being moved from SeaTac, he served a portion of his ten year sentence in the same federal prison in Lompoc, California that once held convicted "cracker" Kevin Mitnick. He is reported to have been released on December 18, 2009.

Acolytes

Although Bell never attempted to put the assassination market concept into practice, a subscriber to the Cypherpunks mailing list, musician Carl Johnson, developed Dead Lucky, a non-functional mock "assassination bot" which aggregated fictitious contributions and simulated rewards of accurate dead pool predictions. The bot was just a bare implementation of the idea consisting of a web page and email client with no backend to actually use digital cash. Federal investigators issued a warrant for Johnson's arrest for posting three threatening messages in August 1998. Johnson was convicted for sending threatening email messages to federal judges and Bill Gates, with prosecutors asking for a seven-year prison sentence. In spite of government attempts to link Johnson's case to his, then-incarcerated Bell asserted that Johnson was not a close friend, but "more of a vague Internet acquaintance than anything else". On October 11, 2001, Thomas C. Wales, Assistant U.S. Attorney and a prosecutor in the case, was assassinated, succumbing to multiple gunshot wounds. The murder remains unsolved.

I'm here out in the open…I'm putting forth the basic James Bell dream, which is that people can put forth freedom on the Internet. This is a tool that was lying on the ground and I picked it up.

— Matt Taylor, quoted in Wired

Left-anarchist Matt Taylor, another cypherpunk and acolyte of Bell's, declared in May 2001 that he was advancing assassination politics by taunting Ohio and California police online. He began an initiative called Operation Soft Drill — a term which reporter Declan McCullagh wrote was created by Bell — with the stated intention of intimidating police and corporate polluters into respecting human rights. Taylor was arrested and jailed by Australian police a month later on charges of vandalizing a McDonald's restaurant.

See also

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• Anarcho-capitalist revolution
• Dead pool
• Futarchy
• Prediction market
• Propaganda of the deed
• Tontine

References

1. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-04-09). "Cypherpunk's Free Speech Defense". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
2. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2000-11-11). "Crypto-Convict Won't Recant". Wired. Retrieved 2007-11-07.
3. ^ Doherty, Brian (2001-12). "Counter-Surveillance". Reason. Retrieved 2010-02-01. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
4. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-12-01). "Gay Site Halts Death 'Advice'". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
5. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-04-06). "Assassinate this". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
6. James Bell (14 July 2003). "James Bell 2003 lawsuit". Retrieved 14 February 2010.
7. James Bell (14 July 2003). "James Bell 2003 lawsuit". Retrieved 14 February 2010.
8. ^ Kaplan, David E., "Terrorism's next wave", U.S. News Online, November 17, 1997 Cite error: The named reference "kaplan" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
9. William Englander (1984). "Review: Semidisk I". InfoWorld. Retrieved 31 January 2010.
10. McCullagh, Declan (2002-05-25). "Busy Year for Big Brother". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
11. ^ Branton, John. "'They're seeing demons in dark,' says Bell's mother". The Columbian, 1997-05-20. Accessed 2008-01-14
12. ^ "Judge Delays Bell's Sentencing", The Columbian, 1997-11-21, Section A
13. "USA v. James Dalton Bell - Day 4". Digital files from Court Reporter Julaine V. Ryen. 24 November 2001. Retrieved 21 February 2010.
14. Bell, James Dalton. 1996. "Assassination Politics." In Winn Schwartau ed., Information Warfare (2nd ed., pp.420–425. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
15. ^ Stamper, Chris (1999-04-20). "Guilty Verdict for Cypherpunk". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
16. Murphy, Bob (2002-07-11). "The Politics of Destruction". Anti-State.com. Retrieved 2008-01-13.
    Murphy, Bob (2002-08-22). "The Politics of Destruction". Anti-State.com. Retrieved 2008-01-13.
17. Vernor Vinge, James Frankel. True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (2001), Tor Books, p.44
18. Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Market (April 2004). "Cryptology, Digital Assassination and the Terrorism Futures Market". The Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses. Retrieved 21 February 2010.
19. ^ "USA v. James Dalton Bell - Day 1". Digital files from Court Reporter Julaine V. Ryen. 24 November 2001. Retrieved 21 February 2010.
20. "Activist Bell Faces Sentencing Friday", The Columbian, 1997-11-20, Section B.
21. Branton, John. "Feds accuse Bell of using fibers to shut down computers". The Columbian, 1997-05-20. Accessed 2008-01-14
22. ^ Painter Jr., John. "IRS Says Man From Tacoma Part of Plot ", The Oregonian, 1997-11-20, p. C02
23. McCullagh, Declan (2000-11-11). "IRS Raids Cypherpunk's House". Politics : Law. Wired. Retrieved 2007-11-07. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
24. ^ Associated Press, "Bell gets 11 months in prison, 3 years supervised release, fine", The Oregonian, 1997-12-12.
25. ^ Westfall, Bruce. "Federal Marshals Arrest James Bell", The Columbian.
26. (claims 87-103)
27. (claims 105-114)
28. James Bell (14 July 2003). "James Bell 2003 lawsuit". Retrieved 14 February 2010.
29. (claim 108)
30. (claim 107)
31. (claim 108)
32. James Bell (14 July 2003). "James Bell 2003 lawsuit". Retrieved 14 February 2010.
33. James Bell (14 July 2003). "James Bell 2003 lawsuit". Retrieved 28 February 2010.
34. James Bell (October 2004). "James Bell 2004 amendment" (PDF). Retrieved 2 march 2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
35. James Bell (October 2004). "James Bell 2004 amendment" (PDF). Retrieved 2 march 2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
36. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2000-11-21). "'Cyber-Terrorist' Jailed Again". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
37. Bell, Jim. "Motion to Sanction and Recuse Various Officers of the Court including Atty's Leen and London and The Court, Judge Tanner. United States District Court for the State of Washington at Tacoma.
38. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-04-06). "ATF Admits Tracking Jim Bell". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
39. (claim 123)
40. James Bell (14 July 2003). "James Bell 2003 lawsuit". Retrieved 14 February 2010.
41. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-03-30). "U.S. v. Bell subpoena". McCullagh.org. Retrieved 2010-02-01.
42. McCullagh, Declan (2001-04-03). "Jim Bell trial starts today in Tacoma, Washington". Politechbot. Retrieved 2010-02-01.
43. McCullagh, Declan (2001-04-05). "DOJ: Cypherpunk Threatened Feds". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
44. "Release Date on BOP Site", 2006-09-21.
45. Ludlow, Peter (2001). Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. Cambridge: MIT. ISBN 9780262621519.
46. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-10-16). "Politech: FC: "Assassination Politics" federal prosecutor assassinated". Politech. Insecure.org. Retrieved 2008-07-29.
47. "Asst. attorney for the Western District of Washington dies of gunshot wound". Daily Record. Dolan Media Newswires. 2001-10-24. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
48. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-05-15). "Online Cincy Cop Threats Probed". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
49. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2001-06-09). "Ashcroft's Hard Line on Hardcore". Wired. Retrieved 2008-01-14.

External links

• Jim Bell Files - archive of news articles, essays, and other information on Jim Bell and his essays
• Writings of Jim Bell - Jim Bell's latest writings as of 2010
• Assassination Politics - Direct link to Assassination Politics
• USA vs. James Dalton Bell - Daily Trial Transcripts

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