[Note from Matthew Gaylor: Declan McCullagh is Wired News's Washington, DC Bureau Chief and is in Washington State testifying at the Jim Bell trial. Below is a message Declan sent to me concerning an invitation I sent to Freematt's Alerts and to a few other net mailing lists about the restart of Seattle cypherpunks meetings. The infiltration of political groups is nothing new going back as far as nations have had secret police forces. In the late 1980s and early 90s I served as a local Libertarian Party chairman in Ohio (Columbus). Several strange happenings made be suspicious of several people that were active in the party. Suspicious enough that it prompted me to file FOIA requests with the FBI. After the usual several year process I was declined info about spying on the Libertarian Party- But the FBI did confirm that by releasing the records they did have would have violated the privacy of a third party (The informant). And yes I think I know who it is and no I won't say because I can't be 100 percent sure. I have managed to unmask informants and out right agents, once at a machine gun shoot in Knob Creek, KY and once at another local civil rights organization. I'll be writing a more lengthy response to this.] At 9:28 PM -0400 4/3/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 21:28:29 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: Alan Olsen <alan@clueserver.org> Cc: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net Subject: Re: Seattle cypherpunks group Mail-Followup-To: Alan Olsen <alan@clueserver.org>, Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.2i X-News-Site: http://www.wired.com/ X-URL: http://www.mccullagh.org/ Sender: declan@cluebot.com
Why not ask IRS Agent Jeff Gordon to be your guest speaker? The Feds are certain to have someone in attendance.
During today's opening remarks by the prosecution (took almost an hour), we learned that the Feds had an agent who infiltrated Bell's common law court and was far more active than Bell, voting to convict Janet Reno in absentia etc. The same guy also appeared to infiltrate the Libertarian Party of Washington state. Cypherpunks and AP play a key role of the government's case, with Tim May and Eric Hughes being mentioned, and this is just Day One.
Don't mean to tease, more on this after I finish my writeup.
-Declan
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