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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".

Background

Bell attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a degree in chemistry and lived in Vancouver, Washington until his arrest and imprisonment by the United States federal government. Bell, an electronic engineer was arrested in 1989 for illegally manufacturing methamphetamine, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of failing to report receiving a controlled chemical. Bell later involved himself with a common law court in Portland which put government officials on trial in absentia and awarded judgements. Bell became involved in a tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service who adjudged that he owed $30,000 to the federal government.

Assassination Politics

In 1996, Bell authored "Assassination Politics" in which he developed the idea of using digital signatures on electronic mail to create a dead pool game, "predicting" the deaths of IRS agents and other government employees. In effect, the idea would create an incentive for assassination of these agents, creating a "prize" that could be "won" 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 ten-part essay titles "Assassination Politics" on the alt.anarchism USENET newsgroup; the essay later garnered a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design in 1998 as "an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability".

Investigation, prosecution and imprisonment

The IRS raided Bell's parents home on April Fool's Day, 1997 and seized three semi-automatic assault rifles, a handgun, several computers containing indecipherable encrypted data, as well as dangerous chemicals including sodium cyanide and an alleged nerve-gas precursor (Bell had previously boasted of producing 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. As part of his plea bargain, Bell admitted 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; Bell also accepted responsibility for conducting a stinkbomb attack in the Vancouver IRS office and for the assassination market scheme. During the trial, the government's lead investigator compared Bell with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and anarcho-primitivist bomber Theodore Kaczynski. He was convicted of the two low-level felonies and sentenced to eleven months in prison followed by three years of probation. He served his prison sentence at a federal medium-security prison in Phoenix, Arizona.

Release and further arrests

Upon his release on April 15, 1998, Bell was ordered to pay $1,359 in restitution for the stinkbomb attack and subjected to three years of supervised release. The conditions of his probation included barring Bell from accessing computers and from possessing chemicals. He was rearrested shortly after his release on the charge of violating several of these conditions and was returned to a federal detention center at SeaTac, Washington. Although Bell never attempted to put the assassination market scheme into practice, another subscriber to the Cypherpunks mailing list, Carl Edward Johnson developed "Dead Lucky", an "assassination bot" which promised to reward accurate dead pool predictions with untraceable and untaxable cash. Federal investigators issued a warrant for Johnson's arrest in August 1998.

References

1. ^ Painter Jr., John. " IRS says suspect discussed sabotage". The Oregonian, 1997-05-20, Metro Section P-1.
2. ^ Westfall, Bruce. "Federal Marshals Arrest James Bell", The Columbian, 1998-06-23.
3. ^ McCullagh, Declan (2000-11-11). "Crypto-Convict Won't Recant". Politics : Law. Wired. Retrieved 2007-11-07. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
4. ^ Kaplan, David E., "Terrorism's next wave", U.S. News Online, November 17, 1997
5. ^ "Judge Delays Bell's Sentencing", The Columbian, 1997-11-21, Section A
6. Bell, James Dalton. 1996. "Assassination Politics." In Winn Schwartau ed., Information Warfare (2nd ed., pp.420–425. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
7. "Activist Bell Faces Sentencing Friday", The Columbian, 1997-11-20, Section B.
8. ^ Painter Jr., John. "IRS Says Man From Tacoma Part of Plot ", The Oregonian, 1997-11-20, p. C02
9. McCullagh, Declan (2000-11-11). "IRS Raids Cypherpunk's House" (news report). Politics : Law. Wired. Retrieved 2007-11-07. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
10. Associated Press, "Bell gets 11 months in prison, 3 years supervised release, fine", The Oregonian, 1997-12-12.
11. Ludlow, Peter (2001). Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. Cambridge: MIT. ISBN 9780262621519.

External links

• Assassination politics series of articles from Anti-State.com, including essays by Robert P. Murphy
• Jim Bell Files - archive of news articles, essays, and other information on Jim Bell and his essays

• 1958 births
• American criminals
• Anarchism theorists
• Crypto-anarchists
• Cypherpunks
• Living people