To:  Declan McCullagh

September 18, 2020

Declan,

I would say that there has been a lot of history between us over the last 20+ years, but the reality is that there has not been nearly ENOUGH "history" between us,  The meaning of that will shortly become quite clear to the people reading this message on the current Cypherpunks  (CP) list.  You were a prominent person writing on the CP  list in the mid-late 1990's, and aware of those events.  You were certainly aware of the history of my Assassination Politics (AP) essay on that list:  You will have had independent memories of those events, which unfortunately most of the current CP list subscribers probably don't:   So, you don't have to entirely rely on the records that might exist on that history. You have the ability to identify discrepancies in any asserted history of those events.  Put simply, you can help identify forgeries.

To cut to the most-immediate issue here, I was recently discussing events with a couple of journalists, Brian Merchant and Will Stephenson, who are proposing to fact-check an article for the magazine, Harper's.  They said it was on 'dark-web assassination markets', yet I have not yet even seen a text of this proposed article.  So, obviously, I don't know if it's just a 'hit-job'.  Or even if it is not that, an article that intentionally avoids mentioning my story involving the Federal Government's misconduct regarding me and the AP essay.

To help inform them of the history behind the AP essay, and of course the CP list, and how it was treated by (among others, the Federal Government) I decided to look into a seeminly-tiny issue that I, myself, had long (20+ years) wondered above:  When, exactly, did my AP essay appear, and especially when it appeared in comparison to the time the Feds had someone (Daniel J. Saban, perhaps owner of remodeling firm Sundown Development Construction) buy the house next to mine (theirs was 7302 Corregidor, Vancouver Washington 98664).  

Such I suspected the Feds of doing, suspected at least as early as 1997, and I had confirmed it to my satisfaction by May 2000:  I found that the local property tax records shows that 7302 Corregidor had been sold as of March 1, 1995.  The seller, John Hauer, was a local Vancouver science teacher, and he presumably was offered a Federal job with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in West Richland Washington.   Being a teacher, it was very unlikely that he would accept a job elsewhere and effectively break the contract he had with the local school that employed him.  Hauer was lured away to allow a Fed agent (Saban) to use that property as a spying operation, much as they did to Robert Hanssen, FBI spy.

Put simply, how much a rush were they in, in doing that?   See my 2003 lawsuit, James Dalton Bell, et al v. United States, et al   
and its October 2004 Amendment,  http://cryptome.org/jdb/jdb-v-usa-oct2004.pdf  to see most of the underlying details.  

To recap, I recalled thinking of the idea, the one that would later be written into the AP essay, in early January 1995.  At that time, it occurred to me that the residents of 49 states would be better off if a specific United States Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, somehow woke up one day dead. But the problem is that no single such resident would want this outcome sufficiently much to do the task himself, or at least hire somebody to do that,  Yet, I realized that if you could somehow totalize the "wants" of millions of people in this regard, you could conceivably offer this combined amount to somebody to accomplish what millions of people would have thought was a worthy deed.  I expected that they WOULD have done so, except that they  would have thought their entire lives that such a mechanism was impossible,

I realized that it would be best if these amounts of money could be collected anonymously, so only the donors know who they are.  Similarly, I understood that this amount should best be offered anonymously, so that only the person who deserves the award knows who he is. Thus, I simultaneously employed the concepts that would later be labelled "crowdfunding" and "crowdsourcing".  Although, I don't claim to have invented either concept:  See the funding for the base of the Statue of LIberty, and the "March of Dimes" charity, and also the research for the Oxford English Dictionary during about 1870-1930.  

I had read the August 1993 issue of Scientific American, and the article by David Chaum, cryptographer, that article describing not merely an experimental form of digital cash, but also form of cryptographic anonymity:  These ideas, I believed and still believe, could be employed to accept money donations anonymously, accept what I called "predictions" about future outcomes, determine which predictor was correct, and subsequently make an anonymous payment to that predictor,   But not only that, to do so in a way which will prove, without any doubt, to all donors and everyone else in the world, that the person who made the correct prediction (whoever he is)  is actually being rewarded with the collected reward.  Nobody could 'cheat'. Everyone would know that if he fulfilled his role in the arrangement, his own rights would be protected.  These were concepts that would eventually be studied in the Ethereum syste, and especially the Augur program, Yet, nobody would actually have to know the identity of the predictor, except for himself.

After a few weeks of intense consideration of this idea, mostly looking for possible flaws, I wrote Part 1 of what would eventually be the 10 parts of Assassination Politics.  At the time, I was not aware of the existence of the Cypherpunks email list, although I must have been aware of the bare concept of an 'death market', the concept that the founders of Cypherpunks had extensively discussed in the early 1990's.  Presumably, I had had a discussion with somebody, probably on the FIDOnet network to which I subscribed (?), on this subject.  I was aware of a mailing list called 'Digitaliberty', which I think was founded by businessman Bill Frezza in December 1994, that promoted the concept of achieving freedom through technology.  Excellent idea.  Unfortunately, the AP essay was a bit too...well advanced for his tastes.  

Well, about a week ago, I decided to figure out a basic timeline regarding my release of the AP essay.  I knew there was some sort of Cypherpunks Archive, maybe I had accessed it very briefly a few years ago.  So, I did a Google-search for 'cypherpunks archive'. and found one:  https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/blog/2018/07/05/the-cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives-must-be-preserved.html   

And, then I found a list of various years' archives:  https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/    

And then, the 1995 archive itself:      https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/archive/1995/     

I was mystified by the seeming absence of the data for March, April, and June 1995.  But in fact, the data is almost completely absent from February 14, 1995 through much of July, 1995.  

That looked somewhat like an accidental data omission.  So, I tried looking at these individual months, and I discovered an astonishing thing:  With the exception of a very tiny number of messages in the months of November and December 1995 referring to AP, I could find nothing of these following text strings elsewhere:

"jim bell", "jimbell@pacifier.com", "AP", " AP "," Assassination Politics".  There were a few exceptions to this seeming rule, and they were effectively even weirder:   " ap " was present about 15 times, most of which occurred in the context of referring to "Associated Press", and in one case "killer ap" (yes, one 'p').

This archive alerts us to:  http://cypherpunks.venona.com/raw/  

I searched the 1995 for 'bell', and I got some references to Bell [telephone, or ATT, etc), there were a few postings by Cypherpunk Charles Bell (no relation, apparently), a reference to the "bell curve", "Blue Bell PA", Bellcore, Bell Atlantic, MaBellNet, Bell Labs, "opening bell" (senate), "regional Bell operating companies", "every rebellious human", "Pacific Bell", and finally, the 48'th "Bell" was "Pacific Bell".   Curiously, the date of that message was Thursday, January 19, 1995.  

Then I was informed by Chrome browser that there were not merely 48 "bell"s, but in fact at least 453.  

Unfortunately the system is so slow, I don't have the patience to proceed,    But at least so far, it does not appear that there are any references reflecting me, except a tiny number in November and December 1995.  If somebody else searches, he should do it beginning in July and going, perhaps, to October.  Do you see any?

And, a study of the 1996 archive file, the number of "jimbell@pacifier.com" is large, so far at least 2,688.  While I cannot exclude the possibility that some messages were tampered with in the 1996 archive file too, it certainly didn't fit the 1995 pattern.

As of this point, except for a couple of trolls who temporarily challenged my conclusion, but who seem to have gone quiet, it appears that the current CP subscribers agree with me that the 1995 file has been severely tampered with.  

WHY THAT KIND OF TAMPERING WITH THE ARCHIVE FILE?

    I've said elsewhere that they were obviously not trying to erase the memory of the world as to the existence of the AP idea.  But what they have done is extensively forged the history of the AP idea.  I believe I know why.  

If you do a text search  for ' "assassination politics" "1995" ', this means that you will find only documents which contain both data strings.  While google reports about 2,010 results, it's likely that at least hundreds of sites report the AP essay as having been written as early as 1995.  If my messages concerning AP in the CP archive were entirely erased in 1995, that would be quite inconsisent with virtually every source reporting that the idea was first published and discussed in that year.  Leaving a handful of 1995 messages seemingly avoids this problem.  

You apparently weren't mentioned, either as an originator, a target, or a subject in the CP list 1992, 1993, 1994, nor before December 1995.  However, given the massive forgery that the 1995 archive was given, it isn't clear when you showed up:  Was it shortly after my AP essay was posted, approximately mid-February, 1995, or as late as it currently appears, December 17, 1995.  Or somewhere in between?