[Note from Matthew Gaylor: This is an article that appeared on J.J. Johnson's Web News Site Sierratimes. J.J. Johnson currently lives in Nevada and is married to the 1992 Libertarian Party VP candidate Nancy Lord Johnson, M.D. and attorney http://www.nancyjohnson.net/. Prior to that he lived in Columbus, OH (And a short stay in Atlanta) and was the media coordinator for the Unorganized Militia, a position he resigned from. He also co-founded the civil rights organization EPU http://www.epuohio.org/ . You can view a picture of JJ at http://www.sierratimes.com/welcomemat.htm Which is something to do, as he is not what you'd expect. I personally know both JJ and Nancy and have known JJ even before he became well known and before he developed more libertarian leanings. I can remember discussing the war on drugs with him a number of years ago, as he at the time favored the war on drugs. But anyone with a brain and exposed to the facts will come to the conclusion the WOD is a sham and harmful to American Liberty. According to Sierratimes the author's name of this article is being withheld for security reasons.] IRS Prosecutes Outspoken Dissident (Jim D. Bell Convicted on Two Counts) A Sierra Times Exclusive Report http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/apr/13/arst041301.htm SierraTimes 04.13.00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ James Dalton Bell may remind you of somebody you know. He's very bright, dresses and looks like a nerd and, most importantly, he dislikes the IRS. In that last respect, he is not in a minority. Where Jim Bell does fall into a minority is that instead of merely grumbling quietly, he decided to do something about it. And that's why he was just convicted in the Washington Federal District Court in Tacoma on Tuesday [4/10/2001]. Jim Bell has been a lifelong libertarian, ever since he was a teenager. Bell's view of government was that it was unnecessary. Is he an anarchist? Only, as he puts it, in the sense of "I believe in order; I do not believe in orders." He disparaged the huge hierarchies that have evolved in current bureaucracies, and believed that such hierarchies were unresponsive and dehumanizing. And, as Bell would personally learn, such a hierarchy creates two classes as outlined in George Orwell's Animal Farm: those who are part of the government hierarchy, and those who are not. Not Politics as Usual Jim Bell was disillusioned with the political system, as the majority of people were. Rather than wallow in discontent, in 1993 he started thinking of ways to change the system based on an article that he saw in Scientific American on blind signatures. (Blind signatures are a means of authenticating a document that do not reveal who the signer is, but verify that the signature is valid.) Bell started thinking about how cryptography and betting pools could be used to limit abuses by government officials. Over the next three years, Bell worked up his ideas into an essay that he jokingly entitled "Assassination Politics" . "Assassination Politics" or AP outlined a plan whereby people could use anonymous digital cash to bet on when a public official might die. The person who came closest to the time of death would be able to anonymously collect the money in the pool. Obviously, someone with inside knowledge about the official's death would be the most likely to collect, though that clearly wasn't guaranteed by the design. Bell originally believed that AP would be used to deal with "bad guys" like Saddam Hussein. He saw an assassination betting pool as superior to the results that the US obtained in Desert Storm: over 100,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, killed in bombing; another 250,000 civilian deaths from starvation and disease attributable to embargoes on medicine or destruction of sanitation systems. Most important, Saddam Hussein was still in power as firmly as ever. Bell saw AP as a way to deal with the problem without dragging many innocent civilians into a conflict, and forcing taxpayers to underwrite an 80 billion dollar "police action." Bell first published a draft of AP on Fidonet in 1995. Some months later, he published it to the internet. He kept improving the design of AP based on the discussion, some of it quite emotional, that his essay generated. Think Globally, Act Locally Bell, who lived in Vancouver, Washington-across the Columbia River from Portland, introduced his essay to a number of political groups there. The specific groups mentioned in his trial were the Multnomah County Common Law Court (CLC) and the Clark County Libertarian Party meetings. Bell frequently took diskettes of his essay and handed them out at meetings, hoping to engage people in discussions of his ideas. And it was during at least one of these meetings that he unwittingly ran into trouble. Bell also had other ideas about how to constrain government abuse besides AP. In the CLC meetings, he suggested that participants gather the names and home addresses of IRS agents and post them on the internet. He called this activity "Operation Locate IRS." Bell believed that if the home addresses of IRS agents were known, they would be considerably less likely to engage in the sort of abuses that have been well-documented in numerous forums. Not surprisingly, the IRS was not amused. One agent in particular, Jeff Gordon, started investigating Bell's writings and postings on the internet and concluded that Bell was a distinct danger to IRS agents. Gordon, a Special Agent for the Inspector General for Tax Administration, had the job responsibility of providing security to IRS agents and their families. He believed that Operation Locate IRS was a serious threat to the safety of IRS agents, and that it would inhibit the ability of the IRS to go about business as usual. Gordon sent an undercover agent wearing a wire to meetings of the CLC. Over a period of about four months, the agent ran into Bell only three times at the Common Law Court meetings, while the agent went to a couple of dozen meetings. The agent tried to get Bell to commit an illegal act-selling him a "pirate radio" FM transmitter, but Bell refused to do so, saying that it was illegal and that he wouldn't do it. Bell was not naïve about the presence of an agent at the Common Law Court. Before attending the Court for the first time-which he went to merely out of curiosity and "because it was at a pizza joint and he could never turn down a pizza"-Bell fashioned a field strength meter, which would alert him with a vibration when he came close to a transmitter. The device detected such a transmitter during the session at the Common Law Court. The agent-again wearing a wire--also visited Bell at a meeting of the Clark County Libertarian Party. (In the trial, Gordon denied that the IRS was trying to spy on constitutionally-protected political activities.) The Prankster Although the undercover agent was unable to entrap Bell into doing anything illegal, Bell gave the IRS the excuse that they needed to arrest him. During March, 1997, Bell dispersed mercaptan in an entry way to the IRS offices in downtown Portland. Mercaptan is harmless but very smelly. It is the additive that is put in otherwise odorless natural gas that gives the gas its distinctive odor. Mercaptan, a sulfur compound, is related to the chemical that makes rotten eggs or skunks smell bad, but is less corrosive and less toxic. Bell meant it as a clever prank, but again the IRS was not amused-especially since they had to close down the office for several days and neutralize the odor. IRS agents arrested him at his home on April 1, 1997, and charged him with obstructing the enforcement of IRS laws. Bell was also charged with using false Social Security numbers: an error, Bell claims, based on a simple mistaken transposition of two digits on a tax form. (One could wonder what the IRS does to dyslexics.) Most importantly, Bell's computers were seized at the time of arrest. The importance of this became more apparent in the recent trial. Bell went on trial in the fall of 1997. Bell's essay and political beliefs figured prominently in that trial, and in a plea bargain, he received over 30 months. In the plea bargain, he agreed to tell federal agents everything he knew about the chemicals he was working with, and to give the government his PGP keys and passphrase. IRS computer forensics specialists had been unable to read much of Bell's email, and the keys gave them a means to decrypt and read all email. The Plot Sickens Bell served approximately eleven months of the original sentence (including the time he was held before the trial and sentencing), then was released on probation. During his release, he resumed work on AP and Operation Locate IRS. Within a matter of days, his probation was revoked, and he was sent back to prison to serve out the remainder of the sentence. Bell was released in April, 2000. He soon became a presence on the cypherpunks mailing list. In various emails, Bell talked about the investigation that he had undertaken to find out who was behind people whom he believed had intimidated him into accepting an unfavorable plea agreement. Bell was specifically interested in one Ryan Thomas Lund, who had been convicted on charges of possessing methampetamines and illegal possession of a firearm. Bell said that Lund had assaulted him in prison before Bell's final sentencing hearing, telling Bell that "he had better accept the plea bargain terms or else." When Bell was released from prison in 2000, he obtained the criminal prosecution record of Lund from the Tacoma court. Listed in the case file as the agent in charge of the search of Lund's home at the time of his arrest was ATF agent Mike McNall. Bell believed, based on the fact that Lund, a multiple offender, who had received a much lighter sentence than what could be reasonably expected under federal sentencing guidelines, was acting as an informant for the ATF. Bell had seen several other indicators that Lund was an informant; this was confirmed by Lund's file. Bell surmised that McNall might know if Lund was an informant, and was keenly interested in finding out if the government had made a deal with Lund to intimidate Bell into accepting the government's offer. Bell said that he didn't want to contact McNall at his office in the Portland Federal Building because McNall was unlikely to speak candidly in that setting, but believed that he could get McNall to be more forthcoming if he was away from the office. To that end, Bell researched property records and the Oregon DMV databases for McNall's address. Bell also researched the databases for Gordon's home address as well. While "McNall" is an uncommon name in Oregon, Bell found numerous "Jeffrey Gordon" listings in the databases. Bell's reason for finding Gordon was different from that for finding McNall: Gordon had been very active in prosecuting the 1997 case, and Bell wanted to picket Gordon's home as a form of political protest. Bell set out to methodically investigate all of the possible addresses where ATF agent McNall and IRS agent Gordon might live. He found a former home of McNall's; and visited the home of an unrelated Jeffrey Gordon. Bell posted the results of his research to the cypherpunks list. Bell made a critically foolish mistake when he went to visit one of the Jeffrey Gordons. The Gordons were not at home, and Bell, by his own admission during the recent trial, took mail from their mailbox. He opened the mail, looked at the contents, then threw the mail away. He did not disclose this action until he was on the stand; even his attorney was caught by surprise. It was this particular mistake that bolstered the government's contention that Bell was not acting as an investigator, and it seriously impacted the jury's perception of Bell. In early November, 2000, federal agents executed a warrant to search Bell's home. They seized Bell's papers, three more computers (only one of which appeared to be used by Bell), and other items. While Bell and his parents were detained inside, an agent attached a GPS-enabled tracking device to Bell's car. The IRS tied in the signal from the tracking device to a computer system which had been programmed to alert Gordon when Bell left the area near his house. Agents were then able to watch Bell's movements as he visited a couple of addresses over the next 11 days. The addresses that Bell visited were not those of federal agents; however, Gordon stated in testimony that "Bell was getting close" to discovering the true address of at least one agent. Bell was arrested on November 17, 2000, and remained in prison until his trial. Déjà Vu Most of the events mentioned above were culled from the testimony at the trial. During the trial, the government prosecutor put on numerous witnesses who testified not only to Bell's meatspace activities, but concentrated particular focus on Bell's political beliefs. Most of the government witnesses were federal agents of one stripe or another, and most frequently brought up Bell's Assassination Politics essay. The government did not have a strong case based only on Bell's activities in 2000. There was very little evidence of intent to "injure or harass" as required by the federal statute that Bell was being charged under. Bell had failed to find any agents' homes, nor had he taken any clear steps to be a threat to such agents, such as arming himself or making direct threats. The existing evidence of intent is more likely to support Bell's insistence that he wanted to find out the truth. So the prosecution brought in evidence from Bell's activities in 1996 and 1997. Bell's attorney objected strenuously, pointing out that Bell had been tried and convicted on this evidence in 1997, and that the government was trying him twice. The prosecutor said that the evidence was necessary to prove Bell's intent. The 82-year-old judge, who at times appeared confused by the attorneys' legal arguments and who had at least once fallen asleep during the trial, allowed the introduction of the old evidence. The evidence clearly had an effect on the jury, which was obviously what the government prosecutor had been hoping for. Not only were Bell's old emails and his essay introduced into evidence; the prosecution introduced pictures of the firearms that Bell used to own prior to his arrest in 1997, which had not been in his possession since then. (They were in the possession of the IRS until October 31, 2000, when they were released to a friend of Bell's, who then stored them at the house of someone Bell didn't know. All evidence points to the fact that Bell never saw the firearms again after April 1, 1997.) The government also brought up the fact that Bell knew how to make such chemicals as Sarin, the chemical used by the Japanese cult Aum Shinriko in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The prosecution implied that Bell was a terrorist on the order of Aum Shinriko, insinuating that Bell would release Sarin gas. It took two objections by Bell's attorney before the Judge disallowed such mention. By that time, however, the suggestion had been firmly implanted in the jurors' minds. Coupled with the pictures of Bell's former guns, old emails discussing AP and Operation Locate IRS, and the text of Assassination Politics, the prosecution was able to convince the jury that they were in the presence of a Really Scary Guy. Many of the emails came from Bell's computers that the IRS had seized in 1997 and still had in their possession; only now the IRS also had Bell's PGP passphrase and keys and could introduce previously encrypted email into evidence. Some Animals are More Equal than Others Bell, in his defense, stated that he had signed the LP oath that he would not initiate violence. And there was absolutely no direct evidence that he had ever initiated violence against anyone. People that he had come in contact with in his 2000 investigation characterized him as polite, and did not see him as threat. And Bell had obviously taken no discernible steps that would equip him to initiate violence. So what the government was left with was prosecuting a thought crime: intent. Because Bell had used his freedom of political speech to write such items as "Assassination Politics" and disclose IRS agents' home addresses, he obviously had to have the intent to harass federal agents. And the harassment was loosely construed. Any attempt to find one, to disclose any personal information about an agent can be made to fit federal law against "intention to harass or injure" an agent. Several times during the trial, the prosecutor made it clear that such an investigation was inappropriate and illegal merely on the basis that the subjects of such investigation were federal agents. Numerous times he cited the special privilege that agents hold that ordinary citizens don't possess. Federal agents are, indeed, a breed apart and must be specially protected, he insisted. While they could surveil and investigate ordinary citizens, it was illegal for ordinary citizens to do the same to them. Did the jury even detect this Orwellian Animal Farm argument? Probably not. This jury was selected mostly from outlying areas of Washington state; anyone who appeared to be young, more than marginally internet-aware, or who had been involved in an unpleasant encounter with the IRS was excluded from the jury. But it was not lost on this reporter, or on the reporter from Wired News, or the correspondent from 60 Minutes. The Verdict The jury deliberated for about three hours on the five-count indictment. After two hours, they gave a hint of what issues they were considering when they sent a note to the judge asking for a definition of "intent." The judge ruled that no definition would be provided, and that the jury would have to determine the definition from the instructions he had given. At the end of three hours, the jury sent a note to the judge that they had voted unanimously for a verdict of guilty on two of the counts, but that they were hung 11-1 on the other three counts. Because the jury actually announced the verdict on the note, which was part of the court record, the judge had to dismiss the other counts. The government asked the judge to dismiss them without prejudice, so that the government could refile the counts at a later date. The judge agreed to do so. Next on the Menu Sentencing for Bell has been set for July 6. The prosecution has not only hinted that they may refile for the three counts that had to be dismissed, but that they might also prosecute Bell for mail theft, and for perjury on the Financial Affidavit that he filled out to get a court-appointed attorney. One thing is clear: the IRS is interested in putting Bell away for espousing the ideas in Assassination Politics. At least twice during the trial, in a manner reminiscent of Stalin-era Soviet courts, the prosecutor pointedly remarked that Bell has failed to recant his AP essay. The lesson is obvious: writing or saying anything that the IRS finds threatening will make a person a target to be dealt with by almost any means possible. Beyond the Bell Case Considerable speculation has been taking place on and off the cypherpunks mailing list about who the next target of the government will be. Bell's case is not unique; in 1998, C.J. "Toto" Parker was convicted for threatening a judge and IRS agents. Just the publication of information that could even vaguely be construed as "personal" is enough to be considered threatening. The law that made stalking federal agents a crime will continue to be used with increasing frequency. The law, enacted in 1996 and amended in 2000, has already been upheld in the Fourth and Eighth Federal District. Stalking itself is defined based on the slippery slope of intention, not on action, which brings up the specter of an increasing number of Stalinesque thought-crime trials in the future. Complain about IRS treatment, go to jail. Mention an IRS agent by name, go to jail. Joke about the IRS, go to jail. Welcome to the new millennium, comrade. Author's name withheld for security reasons. All inquiries about this report may be submitted to editor@Sierra Times.com Permission to reprint/republish granted, as long as you include the name of our site, the author, and our URL. www.SierraTimes.com All Sierra Times news reports, and all editorials are © 2001 SierraTimes.com (unless otherwise noted) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SierraTimes.com A Subsidiary of J.J. Johnson Enterprises, Inc. ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt@coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, 2175 Bayfield Drive, Columbus, OH 43229 (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************