Jim Bell update

[Declan McCullagh]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44567,00.html
Jim Bell may have been convicted of intimidating an IRS agent, but the 
world's most notorious crypto-convict remains undaunted. Bell sent Wired 
News a copy of his latest legal filings, which include a renewed attempt to 
fire his court-appointed attorney and a request for an appeal of his 
conviction to the Supreme Court. Bell is the anarcho-cypherpunk whose 
political propagandizing and authorship of the "Assassination Politics" 
essay drew the unwelcome attention of the feds and led to his conviction in 
April on two of five counts of stalking government agents. He couldn't 
persuade the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn his ruling, so now 
Bell's taking his fight to the nation's highest court. A legal filing in 
U.S. District Court and the appeals court that Bell wrote from federal 
prison says that U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner "was essentially incapable 
of conducting any sort of complete, proper, 'by the book' hearing, from the 
looks of things." During the trial, Tanner denied all of Bell's requests 
for witnesses that Bell said would have illuminated unlawful surveillance 
on the part of government officials.