Jim Bell article excerpt (Was: Letter on Jim Bell)

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

I wrote this last summer:

[...]

Then Assassination Politics sent the IRS into a
tizzy. Jeffrey Gordon, an inspector in the IRS'
Internal Security Division, widened the
investigation immediately. He detailed in an
10-page affidavit how he traced Bell's use of
allegedly fraudulent Social Security Numbers, how
he learned that Bell had been arrested in 1989
for "manufacturing a controlled substance," how
he found out that Bell possessed the home
addresses of a handful of IRS agents. Gordon's
conclusion? Bell planned "to overthrow the
government." The IRS investigator said in his
affidavit that Bell's "essay details an illegal
scheme by Bell which involves plans to
assassinate IRS and other government officials...
I believe that Bell has begun taking steps to
carry out his Assassination Politics plan."

But for all Gordon's bluster in court documents,
he had no proof that Bell broke the law. He
didn't even have enough evidence to arrest the
prolific essayist -- at least not yet.

After the April 1 raid, Gordon and a team of IRS
agents worked to assemble a case against Bell.
They pored through the hard drives of the three
computers they seized. They scrutinized documents
from Bell's house. They interrogated his friends.
They listened to tape recordings of the
"Multnomah County Common Law Court." They scoured
the Net for mentions of Assassination Politics.
Six weeks later they felt their case was
complete.

---

IRS agents arrested Bell on May 16 and charged
him with obstructing government employees and
using false Social Security numbers. Now, this is
hardly attempting "to overthrow the government."
But government agents insist Bell is far more
dangerous than the charges suggest. (The judge
seemed to agree: at the time of this writing,
Bell is being held without bail.)

The latest IRS documents filed with the court
label Bell a terrorist. They claim he talked
about sabotaging the computers in Portland,
Oregon's 911 center, contaminating a local water
supply with a botulism toxin, extracting a poison
called Ricin from castor beans, and manufacturing
Sarin nerve gas. He allegedly bought and tested
some of the chemicals. "Bell has taken overt
steps to implement his overall plan by devising,
obtaining, and testing the materials needed to
carry out attacks against the United States,
including chemicals, nerve agents, destructive
carbon fibers, firearms, and explosives," the
complaint says.

But what really got the IRS in a stink was what
happened a month after they seized Bell's car.
The complaint says: "On March 16, 1997, a Sunday,
an IRS employee noted a strong odor in the
Federal building. On March 17, 1997, several IRS
employees had to be placed on leave due to the
odor, and another employee reported other ill
effects. The odor was traced to a mat and
carpeting... just outside the IRS office
entrance." The chemical proved to be "mercaptan,"
with which Bell's friends say he doused
an adversary's law office in the early 1980s.

Yet if Bell was a crypto-terrorist, he was a
singularly idle one. This is a problem with the
IRS' accusations: if true, they prove too much.
If Bell was bent on toppling the government, and
his exploits date back from the early 1980s, why
are they such laughably juvenile and ineffectual
ones? Stink-bombing offices isn't a Federal
felony, nor should it be.

"I would've thought this would be 'malicious
mischief,' at most," Tim May, one of the founders
of the cypherpunks, writes. "People who've done
far, far, far worse are left unprosecuted in
every major jurisdiction in this country. The
meat thrown to the media -- the usual AP stuff,
mixed in with 'radical libertarian' descriptions
-- is just to make the case more
media-interesting... It sure looks like they're
trying to throw a bunch of charges against the
wall and hope that some of them stick -- or scare
Bell into pleading to a lesser charge."

Since his arrest, the denizens of the cypherpunks
list, where Bell introduced and refined his
ideas, have become generally sympathetic. Gone is
the snarling derision, the attacks on his ideas
as too extreme. Now a sense of solidarity has
emerged. One 'punk wrote: "I have decided that I
cannot in good conscience allow Jim Bell's
persecution for exercising his basic human right
to free speech to pass by without taking personal
action to support him."

---

When I talked to Bell a few days before his
arrest, he spoke calmly and with little rancor
about the pending investigation. I couldn't tell
how he felt after being raided and interrogated
by his arch-enemy, the IRS. But imagine
continuously railing on the Net against
jackbooted thugs, then having real ones bash down
your front door.

Bell was most interested in talking up
Assassination Politics and predicting how it
would eventually blossom. He had just published
an op-ed in a local newspaper saying "the whole
corrupt system" could be stopped. "Whatever my
idea is, it's not silly. There are a lot of
adjectives you can use, but not silly," he told
me. "I feel that the mere fact of having such a
debate will cause people to realize that they no
longer have to tolerate the governments they
previously had to tolerate. At that point I think
politicians will slink away like they did in
eastern Europe in 1989. They'll have lost the
war."

He told me why he became convinced that the
government needed to be lopped off at the knees.
Bell's epiphany came after he ordered a chemical
from a supply firm and was arrested when he
failed to follow EPA regulations. "That
radicalized me," he said. "That pissed me off. I
figured I'd get back at them by taking down their
entire system. That's how I'd do it."'

Moral issues aside, one of the problems plaguing
Bell's scheme is that it's not limited to
eliminating "government thugs who violate your
rights," as he likes to describe it. If it
existed, anyone with some spare change could wipe
out a nosy neighbor or even an irritating grocery
store clerk. After I pointed this out to Bell on
the phone, he fired email back a few days later
saying, "Assuming a functioning Assassination
Politics system, nothing stops you from
contributing to my death." He suggested that
maybe assassins would develop scruples: "You'd
be able to purchase deaths of unworthy people,
but it might be only at a dramatically higher
price. Doable but not particularly economical."

[...]

-Declan