[iwar] Interesting...
From: Fred Cohen
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Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 16:05:30 -0700 (PDT)
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From: Fred Cohen
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Subject: [iwar] Interesting...
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Crypto-Convict Won't Recant
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,35620,00.html
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."
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