Jim Bell
Encyclopedia
James Dalton Bell is an American crypto-anarchist
who created the idea of arranging for anonymously-sponsored assassination payments via the Internet, which he called "assassination politics
". Since the publication of the "Assassination Politics" essay, Bell was targeted by the federal government of the United States
. He was imprisoned on felony
charges of tax evasion in 1997. In 2001, Wired
called Bell of the Internet's most famous essayists" and "the world's most notorious crypto-convict".
In April 1995, Bell authored the first part of a 10-part essay called "Assassination Politics", which described an elaborate assassination market
in which anonymous benefactors could securely order hits of government officials or others who are violating citizens' rights. Following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service
, Bell was arrested and subsequently jailed for 11 months on felony
charges of harassment and using false Social Security number
s.
After his April 2000 release, Bell publicly announced that he believed that there was extensive Federal Government corruption associated with his 1997–2000 criminal case, and that he was going to research the facts and file a lawsuit. Bell filed this lawsuit in 2003. Bell was put under heavy surveillance and rearrested for harassment and stalking of federal agents, charged with intimidation and stalking and again imprisoned, this time for a decade-long sentence. Bell protested vociferously against the conduct of the trial, going so far as to file civil lawsuits against two judges, at least two prosecutors, his former probation officers and his defense attorneys, but ultimately to no avail. He was released in December 2009, only to be rearrested in July 2010 for violating his parole conditions. His parole violation hearing resulted in another sentence which won't see Bell released until 2012.
and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
where he earned a degree in chemistry
. After graduation, he worked for Intel
as an electrical engineer before founding his own computer storage device company, SemiDisk Systems in 1982. When his company closed in 1992, Bell said he developed a "phobia
" of financial and tax
-related issues. He had been a Libertarian Party
member and described his political beliefs as anarcho
-libertarian
. Bell attended three meetings of the Multnomah County Common Law Court (possessing no judicial authority according to Federal government laws) in Portland, Oregon
, which put government officials on trial in absentia
and awarded judgements against them. Bell attended these meetings in order to find government 'plants' in that group. Bell subsequently became involved in a tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service
, which stated that he owed $30,000 to the federal government.
, "predicting" the deaths of government employees. In effect, the idea would create an incentive
for assassination of corrupt government officials, offering a reward that could be claimed by someone willing to submit an entry predicting a given person's death at a particular time. If that person died at about that time, the correct bettor would win the pool money. Bell published his idea in a 10-part essay titled "Assassination Politics" on the alt.anarchism USENET
newsgroup.
Described by Wired
as "an unholy mix of encryption
, anonymity
, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government", the essay was nominated for a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design in 1998 as "an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability". Even though the U.S. Supreme Court
has ruled that advocating violence against government officials is protected by the First Amendment
, "Assassination Politics" put Bell under the scrutiny of federal investigators in 1995. The essay attracted interest from theorists long before and after its author's legal entanglements; libertarian
economist Bob Murphy
criticised the assassination politics scheme in a pair of articles titled "The Politics of Destruction" in 2002. Murphy claimed that assassination politics was both technically infeasible and ideologically undesirable – from an anarcho-capitalist
perspective (crypto-anarchism
being a form of anarcho-capitalism). Others, such as R. Sukumaran, argue that assassination markets as suggested by Bell are perhaps technically feasible, but because they are so revolutionary, they "threaten elites" and will be made illegal. However, Sukumaran argues that AP was revived within DARPA by Poindexter with FutureMAP, an attempt to "extrapolate the Iowa Presidential markets system to the prediction of terroristic events" under the "interest of national security."
In February 1997, the Internal Revenue Service
acted on Bell's debt, docking his wages and seizing his automobile. Inside the car, investigators found bomb-making instructions, political literature and detailed information concerning cyanide
and fertilizer
.
IRS officers raided Bell's home on April 1, 1997. He was subsequently arrested in May of that year, and in July pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of IRS agents and the use of a false Social Security
number (officials alleged that he had used four such numbers since 1984 in order to conceal his assets; Bell said that he did not believe anyone had a right to know his real Social Security number).
As part of his plea bargain
, Bell pled guilty in July 1997 to collecting the names and home addresses of IRS employees, and the home addresses of FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
agents and police in Clark County, Washington
; Bell also accepted responsibility for conducting a stinkbomb attack in the Vancouver IRS office. He was convicted of the two low-level felonies
and sentenced in December 1997 to eleven months in prison followed by three years of federal probation
. As a condition of his sentence, Bell was compelled to pay, upon his release, $1,359 in restitution
for the stinkbomb attack. He was also subjected to three years of supervised release, during which he was barred from accessing computers and from possessing chemicals.
In Bell's June 2003 lawsuit, Bell accused the federal government of extorting the 1997 plea agreement from him and stated that when Bell balked at that agreement in November 1997, in part due to the government's violation of the terms, government agents instructed fellow inmate Ryan Thomas Lund to assault Bell. The lawsuit alleged Lund did this at about 6:00PM on November 25, 1997, for the purpose of intimidating Bell, and to keep Bell away from his family and the news media. Later, in an ostensibly unrelated event, Lund filed a lawsuit stating that on December 14, 1997, two days after Bell's December 12, 1997 sentencing, Lund (who was in solitary confinement at the time due to his assault on Bell) had a "slip and fall" accident while alone in his cell, ostensibly due to a wet cell floor. Lund had also been promised a 27-month sentence for his illegal possession of firearms and methamphetamine, when the relevant federal law required a mandatory 10-year sentence. Bell alleged that the sentence reduction and lawsuit payoff were engineered to reward Lund for extorting Bell. Bell claimed that he was kept under "inhumane conditions for at least ten days".
Bell further alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that a forged appeal case, 99-30210, was entered into the court record. He stated that "Ninth Circuit Court personnel ... began corruptly falsifying, forging, and improperly adding to and deleting from the Ninth Circuit Court documentary record ... with regard to appeal #99-30210." Bell's October 2004 amendment further alleges that, a handwritten note, "purportedly signed by Bell, but not in Bell's handwriting style", was forged to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He alleges that this notice of appeal was filed around June 20, 1999 (claim 505), and that, "... Ninth Circuit personnel agreed to and did continually add false records to that docket, and at various times they deleted some of those false records and substituted new false records, for the purposes of concealing the true events and for continuing to obstruct Bell’s access to justice and his constitutional rights." (Claim 510) In his lawsuit, Bell seeks to establish that over a dozen government employees were guilty of numerous felonies.
, from which he was released in April 2000. He was rearrested in June of the same year on the charge of violating several of his 36 probation conditions, and was returned in November to a federal detention center
at SeaTac, Washington
following a search of his home that Bell called a "disguised burglary".
Bell had conducted sousveillance
against Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
agents, using public databases and legally obtained CD-ROMs, "to let them know that surveillance can be done in both directions." Bell also compiled six months of evidence of what he alleged was illegal surveillance of him by a government agency. In the days leading up to his arrest he claimed that the agency had unlawfully installed a covert listening device
in his home and a tracking device in his car, something the ATF admitted doing during the subsequent trial. The ATF stated it had planted a covert GPS system in Bell's car and tracked the movements of his Nissan Maxima
in real time.
However, Bell alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that the government employees had actually planted an illegal GPS tracking device in his car months before the one ostensibly allowed by the October 2000 warrant, at least as early as Bell's April 2000 release from prison. The information from that prior device couldn't be used, however, because there was no warrant allowing it to be planted. Bell also alleged that federal government employees had also illegally planted a GPS tracking transmitter in a vehicle he drove in June 1998, one which the government never disclosed; Bell further stated that his defense lawyers colluded to keep Bell from being able to demand disclosure of all such secretly-planted devices.
Bell pleaded not guilty to violating 18 USC 2281, a law prohibiting the intimidation of family members of federal agents and some forms of stalking
. The charges specified that Bell had performed Internet background checks on federal agents he asserted were harassing him, and Bell defended his actions by saying he was using public records to defend against what he saw as harassment by government officials. Journalist Declan McCullagh
wrote, "[Bell] says, and a good number of observers agree, that the Feds are prosecuting him for doing what an investigative reporter does: Compiling information from publicly available databases, documenting what's happening, and so on. This case could set a precedent that affects the First Amendment privilege of journalists."
During the trial, the judge sealed the entire court file, forbade the defense from issuing subpoena
s to witnesses, granted the prosecution significant latitude in making negative suggestions about Bell's character, and refused requests for a mistrial
. Journalist McCullagh was subpoenaed by two Treasury Department agents to appear before the court, without being notified ahead of time as required by federal regulations regarding subpoenas involving the media. Following his conviction, Bell renewed his attempts at firing his court-appointed lawyer
, appealing his case to the Supreme Court
, and filing civil lawsuits against those he alleges were involved in an orchestrated conspiracy to deny him a fair trial and an unbiased, court-appointed defense counsel; his targets included two judges, at least two prosecutors, and his former probation officers and defense attorneys. After being moved from SeaTac Detention Center, he served a portion of his ten-year sentence in the same federal prison in Lompoc, California
that once held convicted "hacker
" Kevin Mitnick
.
Crypto-anarchism
Crypto-anarchism expounds the use of strong public-key cryptography to bring about privacy and freedom. It was described by Vernor Vinge as a cyberspatial realization of anarchism. Crypto-anarchists aim to create cryptographic software that can be used to evade prosecution and harassment while...
who created the idea of arranging for anonymously-sponsored assassination payments via the Internet, which he called "assassination politics
Assassination market
An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately...
". Since the publication of the "Assassination Politics" essay, Bell was targeted by the federal government of the United States
Federal government of the United States
The federal government of the United States is the national government of the constitutional republic of fifty states that is the United States of America. The federal government comprises three distinct branches of government: a legislative, an executive and a judiciary. These branches and...
. He was imprisoned on felony
Felony
A felony is a serious crime in the common law countries. The term originates from English common law where felonies were originally crimes which involved the confiscation of a convicted person's land and goods; other crimes were called misdemeanors...
charges of tax evasion in 1997. In 2001, Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
called Bell of the Internet's most famous essayists" and "the world's most notorious crypto-convict".
In April 1995, Bell authored the first part of a 10-part essay called "Assassination Politics", which described an elaborate assassination market
Assassination market
An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately...
in which anonymous benefactors could securely order hits of government officials or others who are violating citizens' rights. Following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service
Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue...
, Bell was arrested and subsequently jailed for 11 months on felony
Felony
A felony is a serious crime in the common law countries. The term originates from English common law where felonies were originally crimes which involved the confiscation of a convicted person's land and goods; other crimes were called misdemeanors...
charges of harassment and using false Social Security number
Social Security number
In the United States, a Social Security number is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary residents under section 205 of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued to an individual by the Social Security Administration, an independent...
s.
After his April 2000 release, Bell publicly announced that he believed that there was extensive Federal Government corruption associated with his 1997–2000 criminal case, and that he was going to research the facts and file a lawsuit. Bell filed this lawsuit in 2003. Bell was put under heavy surveillance and rearrested for harassment and stalking of federal agents, charged with intimidation and stalking and again imprisoned, this time for a decade-long sentence. Bell protested vociferously against the conduct of the trial, going so far as to file civil lawsuits against two judges, at least two prosecutors, his former probation officers and his defense attorneys, but ultimately to no avail. He was released in December 2009, only to be rearrested in July 2010 for violating his parole conditions. His parole violation hearing resulted in another sentence which won't see Bell released until 2012.
Background
Bell was born in Akron, OhioAkron, Ohio
Akron , is the fifth largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Summit County. It is located in the Great Lakes region approximately south of Lake Erie along the Little Cuyahoga River. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 199,110. The Akron Metropolitan...
and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
where he earned a degree in chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
. After graduation, he worked for Intel
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...
as an electrical engineer before founding his own computer storage device company, SemiDisk Systems in 1982. When his company closed in 1992, Bell said he developed a "phobia
Phobia
A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational...
" of financial and tax
Tax
To tax is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law. Taxes are also imposed by many subnational entities...
-related issues. He had been a Libertarian Party
Libertarian Party (United States)
The Libertarian Party is the third largest and fastest growing political party in the United States. The political platform of the Libertarian Party reflects its brand of libertarianism, favoring minimally regulated, laissez-faire markets, strong civil liberties, minimally regulated migration...
member and described his political beliefs as anarcho
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
-libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
. Bell attended three meetings of the Multnomah County Common Law Court (possessing no judicial authority according to Federal government laws) in Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, which put government officials on trial in absentia
In absentia
In absentia is Latin for "in the absence". In legal use, it usually means a trial at which the defendant is not physically present. The phrase is not ordinarily a mere observation, but suggests recognition of violation to a defendant's right to be present in court proceedings in a criminal trial.In...
and awarded judgements against them. Bell attended these meetings in order to find government 'plants' in that group. Bell subsequently became involved in a tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service
Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue...
, which stated that he owed $30,000 to the federal government.
"Assassination Politics" essay
From 1995 through early 1996, Bell authored an essay entitled "Assassination Politics" in which he described the idea of using digital signatures through email to create an assassination marketAssassination market
An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately...
, "predicting" the deaths of government employees. In effect, the idea would create an incentive
Incentive
In economics and sociology, an incentive is any factor that enables or motivates a particular course of action, or counts as a reason for preferring one choice to the alternatives. It is an expectation that encourages people to behave in a certain way...
for assassination of corrupt government officials, offering a reward that could be claimed by someone willing to submit an entry predicting a given person's death at a particular time. If that person died at about that time, the correct bettor would win the pool money. Bell published his idea in a 10-part essay titled "Assassination Politics" on the alt.anarchism USENET
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
newsgroup.
Described by Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
as "an unholy mix of encryption
Encryption
In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...
, anonymity
Anonymity
Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual's personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.There are many reasons why a...
, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government", the essay was nominated for a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design in 1998 as "an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability". Even though the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
has ruled that advocating violence against government officials is protected by the First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
, "Assassination Politics" put Bell under the scrutiny of federal investigators in 1995. The essay attracted interest from theorists long before and after its author's legal entanglements; libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
economist Bob Murphy
Robert P. Murphy
Robert P. "Bob" Murphy is an Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist.-Education and personal life:Murphy completed his Bachelor of Arts in economics at Hillsdale College in 1998. He then moved back to his home state of New York to continue his studies at New York University. Murphy earned...
criticised the assassination politics scheme in a pair of articles titled "The Politics of Destruction" in 2002. Murphy claimed that assassination politics was both technically infeasible and ideologically undesirable – from an anarcho-capitalist
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
perspective (crypto-anarchism
Crypto-anarchism
Crypto-anarchism expounds the use of strong public-key cryptography to bring about privacy and freedom. It was described by Vernor Vinge as a cyberspatial realization of anarchism. Crypto-anarchists aim to create cryptographic software that can be used to evade prosecution and harassment while...
being a form of anarcho-capitalism). Others, such as R. Sukumaran, argue that assassination markets as suggested by Bell are perhaps technically feasible, but because they are so revolutionary, they "threaten elites" and will be made illegal. However, Sukumaran argues that AP was revived within DARPA by Poindexter with FutureMAP, an attempt to "extrapolate the Iowa Presidential markets system to the prediction of terroristic events" under the "interest of national security."
Investigation, prosecution and imprisonment
According to testimony by a federal agent, the federal government began infiltrating the Multnomah County Common Law Court via Steven Walsh, a government agent who attended the meetings under a false name and even began to lead the organization. According to court documents, Bell attended three meetings of the group nearly a year after Walsh's infiltration.In February 1997, the Internal Revenue Service
Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue...
acted on Bell's debt, docking his wages and seizing his automobile. Inside the car, investigators found bomb-making instructions, political literature and detailed information concerning cyanide
Cyanide
A cyanide is a chemical compound that contains the cyano group, -C≡N, which consists of a carbon atom triple-bonded to a nitrogen atom. Cyanides most commonly refer to salts of the anion CN−. Most cyanides are highly toxic....
and fertilizer
Fertilizer
Fertilizer is any organic or inorganic material of natural or synthetic origin that is added to a soil to supply one or more plant nutrients essential to the growth of plants. A recent assessment found that about 40 to 60% of crop yields are attributable to commercial fertilizer use...
.
IRS officers raided Bell's home on April 1, 1997. He was subsequently arrested in May of that year, and in July pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of IRS agents and the use of a false Social Security
Social Security (United States)
In the United States, Social Security refers to the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program.The original Social Security Act and the current version of the Act, as amended encompass several social welfare and social insurance programs...
number (officials alleged that he had used four such numbers since 1984 in order to conceal his assets; Bell said that he did not believe anyone had a right to know his real Social Security number).
As part of his plea bargain
Plea bargain
A plea bargain is an agreement in a criminal case whereby the prosecutor offers the defendant the opportunity to plead guilty, usually to a lesser charge or to the original criminal charge with a recommendation of a lighter than the maximum sentence.A plea bargain allows criminal defendants to...
, Bell pled guilty in July 1997 to collecting the names and home addresses of IRS employees, and the home addresses of FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is a federal law enforcement organization within the United States Department of Justice...
agents and police in Clark County, Washington
Clark County, Washington
Clark County is a county located in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon.Clark County was the first county of Washington, named after William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition...
; Bell also accepted responsibility for conducting a stinkbomb attack in the Vancouver IRS office. He was convicted of the two low-level felonies
Felony
A felony is a serious crime in the common law countries. The term originates from English common law where felonies were originally crimes which involved the confiscation of a convicted person's land and goods; other crimes were called misdemeanors...
and sentenced in December 1997 to eleven months in prison followed by three years of federal probation
Federal Probation
The Federal Probation Service or United States Probation Service is part of the Federal Judiciary and serves the United States district courts in all 94 judicial federal districts nationwide and constitutes the community corrections arm of the Federal Judiciary...
. As a condition of his sentence, Bell was compelled to pay, upon his release, $1,359 in restitution
Restitution
The law of restitution is the law of gains-based recovery. It is to be contrasted with the law of compensation, which is the law of loss-based recovery. Obligations to make restitution and obligations to pay compensation are each a type of legal response to events in the real world. When a court...
for the stinkbomb attack. He was also subjected to three years of supervised release, during which he was barred from accessing computers and from possessing chemicals.
In Bell's June 2003 lawsuit, Bell accused the federal government of extorting the 1997 plea agreement from him and stated that when Bell balked at that agreement in November 1997, in part due to the government's violation of the terms, government agents instructed fellow inmate Ryan Thomas Lund to assault Bell. The lawsuit alleged Lund did this at about 6:00PM on November 25, 1997, for the purpose of intimidating Bell, and to keep Bell away from his family and the news media. Later, in an ostensibly unrelated event, Lund filed a lawsuit stating that on December 14, 1997, two days after Bell's December 12, 1997 sentencing, Lund (who was in solitary confinement at the time due to his assault on Bell) had a "slip and fall" accident while alone in his cell, ostensibly due to a wet cell floor. Lund had also been promised a 27-month sentence for his illegal possession of firearms and methamphetamine, when the relevant federal law required a mandatory 10-year sentence. Bell alleged that the sentence reduction and lawsuit payoff were engineered to reward Lund for extorting Bell. Bell claimed that he was kept under "inhumane conditions for at least ten days".
Bell further alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that a forged appeal case, 99-30210, was entered into the court record. He stated that "Ninth Circuit Court personnel ... began corruptly falsifying, forging, and improperly adding to and deleting from the Ninth Circuit Court documentary record ... with regard to appeal #99-30210." Bell's October 2004 amendment further alleges that, a handwritten note, "purportedly signed by Bell, but not in Bell's handwriting style", was forged to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He alleges that this notice of appeal was filed around June 20, 1999 (claim 505), and that, "... Ninth Circuit personnel agreed to and did continually add false records to that docket, and at various times they deleted some of those false records and substituted new false records, for the purposes of concealing the true events and for continuing to obstruct Bell’s access to justice and his constitutional rights." (Claim 510) In his lawsuit, Bell seeks to establish that over a dozen government employees were guilty of numerous felonies.
Release and conviction
Bell served his prison sentence at a federal medium-security prison in Phoenix, ArizonaPhoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
, from which he was released in April 2000. He was rearrested in June of the same year on the charge of violating several of his 36 probation conditions, and was returned in November to a federal detention center
Federal Detention Center, SeaTac
Federal Detention Center, SeaTac is a prison operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It is located in SeaTac, Washington, near the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, south of downtown Seattle and north of Tacoma, west of the 200th Street exit at the Interstate 5...
at SeaTac, Washington
SeaTac, Washington
SeaTac is an American city in southern King County, Washington, and an outlying suburb of Seattle, Washington. Incorporated in February 1990, the City of SeaTac is ten square miles in area and has a population of 26,909 according to the 2010 census...
following a search of his home that Bell called a "disguised burglary".
Bell had conducted sousveillance
Sousveillance
Sousveillance refers to the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.Sousveillance has also been described as "inverse surveillance", i.e...
against Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is a federal law enforcement organization within the United States Department of Justice...
agents, using public databases and legally obtained CD-ROMs, "to let them know that surveillance can be done in both directions." Bell also compiled six months of evidence of what he alleged was illegal surveillance of him by a government agency. In the days leading up to his arrest he claimed that the agency had unlawfully installed a covert listening device
Covert listening device
A covert listening device, more commonly known as a bug or a wire, is usually a combination of a miniature radio transmitter with a microphone. The use of bugs, called bugging, is a common technique in surveillance, espionage and in police investigations.A bug does not have to be a device...
in his home and a tracking device in his car, something the ATF admitted doing during the subsequent trial. The ATF stated it had planted a covert GPS system in Bell's car and tracked the movements of his Nissan Maxima
Nissan Maxima
The first car to wear the Maxima name was introduced in 1981. It was essentially a Japanese-market Bluebird 910 with a longer nose. The car was offered as the 810 Deluxe or 810 Maxima that first year, and all 810s became Maximas for 1982...
in real time.
However, Bell alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that the government employees had actually planted an illegal GPS tracking device in his car months before the one ostensibly allowed by the October 2000 warrant, at least as early as Bell's April 2000 release from prison. The information from that prior device couldn't be used, however, because there was no warrant allowing it to be planted. Bell also alleged that federal government employees had also illegally planted a GPS tracking transmitter in a vehicle he drove in June 1998, one which the government never disclosed; Bell further stated that his defense lawyers colluded to keep Bell from being able to demand disclosure of all such secretly-planted devices.
Bell pleaded not guilty to violating 18 USC 2281, a law prohibiting the intimidation of family members of federal agents and some forms of stalking
Stalking
Stalking is a term commonly used to refer to unwanted and obsessive attention by an individual or group to another person. Stalking behaviors are related to harassment and intimidation and may include following the victim in person and/or monitoring them via the internet...
. The charges specified that Bell had performed Internet background checks on federal agents he asserted were harassing him, and Bell defended his actions by saying he was using public records to defend against what he saw as harassment by government officials. Journalist Declan McCullagh
Declan McCullagh
Declan McCullagh is an American journalist and columnist for CBSNews.com. He specializes in computer security and privacy issues. He is notable, among other things, for his early involvement with the media interpretation of U.S...
wrote, "[Bell] says, and a good number of observers agree, that the Feds are prosecuting him for doing what an investigative reporter does: Compiling information from publicly available databases, documenting what's happening, and so on. This case could set a precedent that affects the First Amendment privilege of journalists."
During the trial, the judge sealed the entire court file, forbade the defense from issuing subpoena
Subpoena
A subpoena is a writ by a government agency, most often a court, that has authority to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena:...
s to witnesses, granted the prosecution significant latitude in making negative suggestions about Bell's character, and refused requests for a mistrial
Trial (law)
In law, a trial is when parties to a dispute come together to present information in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court...
. Journalist McCullagh was subpoenaed by two Treasury Department agents to appear before the court, without being notified ahead of time as required by federal regulations regarding subpoenas involving the media. Following his conviction, Bell renewed his attempts at firing his court-appointed lawyer
Public defender
The term public defender is primarily used to refer to a criminal defense lawyer appointed to represent people charged with a crime but who cannot afford to hire an attorney in the United States and Brazil. The term is also applied to some ombudsman offices, for example in Jamaica, and is one way...
, appealing his case to the Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
, and filing civil lawsuits against those he alleges were involved in an orchestrated conspiracy to deny him a fair trial and an unbiased, court-appointed defense counsel; his targets included two judges, at least two prosecutors, and his former probation officers and defense attorneys. After being moved from SeaTac Detention Center, he served a portion of his ten-year sentence in the same federal prison in Lompoc, California
Lompoc, California
Lompoc is a city in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. The city was incorporated in 1888. The population was 42,434 at the 2010 census, up from 41,103 at the 2000 census....
that once held convicted "hacker
Black hat
A black hat is the villain or bad guy, especially in a western movie in which such a character would stereotypically wear a black hat in contrast to the hero's white hat, especially in black and white movies....
" Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick
Kevin David Mitnick is a computer security consultant, author, and hacker. In the late 20th century, he was convicted of various computer- and communications-related crimes. At the time of his arrest, he was the most-wanted computer criminal in the United States.-Personal life:Mitnick grew up in...
.
See also
- Anarcho-capitalist revolution
- Dead poolDead poolA dead pool, also known as a death pool, death watch, dead cert or ghoul pool, is a game of prediction which involves guessing when someone will die. Sometimes it is a bet where money is involved...
- FutarchyFutarchyFutarchy is a form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which elected officials define measures of national welfare and prediction markets are used to determine which policies will have the most positive effect....
- Prediction marketPrediction marketPrediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions...
- Propaganda of the deedPropaganda of the deedPropaganda of the deed is a concept that refers to specific political actions meant to be exemplary to others...
- TontineTontineA tontine is an investment scheme for raising capital, devised in the 17th century and relatively widespread in the 18th and 19th. It combines features of a group annuity and a lottery. Each subscriber pays an agreed sum into the fund, and thereafter receives an annuity. As members die, their...
External links
- Writings of Jim Bell – Jim Bell's latest writings as of 2010
- Assassination Politics – Direct link to Assassination Politics
- USA vs. James Dalton Bell – Daily Trial Transcripts