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