CDR: Re: Jim Bell

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:26 PM 11/27/00 -0800, Tim May wrote:
> Some jurors might be swayed by the language in AP and 
>by the (alleged) utterance:
>      "Say goodnight, Joshua."
>(Wasn't Joshua the computer in "War Games"?)

Joshua was Dr. Richard Falken's kid's name,
which Matthew Broderick's character guessed was
the password for his account on WOPR, the computer.
"Would you like to play a game?"

It was also the password for rfalken's free trial
account on the new MCImail service :-)

[I was at the NSA Crypto museum last weekend, and one machine
they had on display was a Connection Machine massively parallel processor.
The Connection Machine has a blinkenlights panel that was
inspired by and resembles WOPR's blinkenlights.]


>>On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 11:46:14PM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>>>  At 7:45 PM -0800 on 11/27/00, Tim May wrote:
>>>  > (I think any of us could be called as witnesses to refute a 
>>>  > state claim that he was deploying a real system!)
>>>
>>>  Which, unfortunately, and IIRC, he actually *pled* to, nonetheless.

>No, I don't recall any such plea. Inasmuch as AP is some years off 
>into the future, as even Bell would probably acknowledge (and may 
>have acknowledged, if one dredges up all of his posts and looks at 
>them carefully), I doubt he'd make a plea agreement that he had 
>deployed a working AP system.

Agreed - Bell may be frightfully clueless on some things,
but he was quite clear that his system depended on both
untraceable anonymous communications and anonymous digicash,
neither of which existed at that time nor yet today.
Remailers then and now were untraceable as long as nobody was
attacking them (because you can't divulge logs you didn't keep),
but weren't designed for the kind of attack than an
ongoing publicly announced assassination pool would produce.

Bell might have been doing wishful thinking about AP, but the 
activities he was directly involved in were misuse of
SS numbers (which he pled to), and that common-law court thing
that was harassing government officials (I don't think he
pled to anything on that or on the statute-of-limitations-earlier
stinkbombing of the IRS office.)  But he was ordered not to do
a lot of things which he might or might not have been
careful enough to avoid while keeping tabs on Gordon.

>> "When the feds searched Bell's home earlier this month, 
>> according to a one-page attachment to the search warrant, 
>> agents were looking for "items which refer to Assassination Politics.""

Yeah, right.  They lost their copy and can't find it on the net?
Must be tough to have the cops have a built-in excuse to search 
your house any time they want to go fishing, and I see they've
decided to accuse him of once buying (legal) chemicals for cooking meth.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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