I just spoke with Peter Avenia, a Federal public defender representing Jim Bell. He said that Bell did indeed plead guilty last Friday to two felony counts and sentencing is set for October. Apparently at least the thrust of this "IRS Inspection" press release is accurate. Avenia knew nothing about it, though. -Declan PS: I'm attaching an excerpt from my IU article in this month's issue. ************ (unedited) Internet Underground July 1997 Assassination Politics Jim Bell wants to overthrow the government. He'll have to get out of jail first. By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) [...] 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." --- Consider the case of Jake Baker, the University of Michigan student who was arrested after posting fantasies to Usenet about raping and killing a classmate. A Federal judge eventually threw out the charges, ruling Baker never intended to act and the tale was "only a rather savage and tasteless piece of fiction." The government argues Bell intends to act. Their court documents sketch a dark outline of a computer geek increasingly distressed by and disillusioned with society. He becomes rebellious, anarchistic. But being an anarchist isn't a crime; I've even dated one. Nor is it against the law to bash the IRS. Some Republican legislators make a career out of it. Even collecting the home numbers of Federal employees isn't a crime. What is against the law is when speech becomes action, when online bravado crosses the line and becomes direct threats -- or a vial of botulism, on its way to a nearby reservoir. Which is the real question: Did Bell step beyond mailing list posturing? Is he just fantasizing? Did he intend to take real-world steps to erase some Feds, or were his posts just megabytes of bone-chilling blather? The IRS says it has evidence of Bell's lethal intent but many netizens who know Bell believe he's only a harmless loon. The Supreme Court has ruled that speech can be suppressed only if it is intended, and is likely to produce, "imminent lawless action." Since Bell's manuscripts have drifted around the dusty corners of cyberspace for years -- to no discernible effect -- a prosecutor will be hard-pressed to argue they're dangerous. Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra Law School, says that Bell's writings are protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's legal test "is not going to be met where someone writes a speculative essay about what the world would be like if such a system were in place," he says. Bell now faces a Federal grand jury and a possible trial. "There are a lot of insinuations and innuendo in the complaint but not a whole lot of hard core criminal activity," says Peter Avenia, a Federal public defender representing Bell. "If you read the complaint and listen to the testimony at the hearing, the government's clearly concerned that Jim Bell may have been planning to do any number of things. But when it came down to showing any clear danger, the most they could come up with is that they think he might be involved in planning a stink bomb. It's difficult to untangle the fear and hype from what's going on." ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/