Jim Bell

James Dalton Bell (born 1958) is an American crypto-anarchist who created the idea of arranging for anonymously sponsored assassination payments via the Internet, which he called "assassination politics".

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.

In April 1995, Bell authored the first part of a 10-part essay called "Assassination Politics", which described an assassination market in which anonymous benefactors could securely order the killings of government officials or others who are violating citizens' rights.

Following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Bell was arrested and subsequently jailed for 11 months on felony charges of harassment and using false Social Security numbers.

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 market, "predicting" the deaths of "violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees".

Bell also speculated that some people could use these net-based markets quite openly without encryption (Part 10 of the essay).

So there were two ways theorized to operate the scheme, one complex and secure and the other more open and potentially insecure.

In effect, the arrangement would create an incentive for people to assassinate 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.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that advocating violence against government officials is, in the absence of an "incitement to imminent lawless action", protected by the First Amendment, the publication of "Assassination Politics" put Bell under the scrutiny of federal investigators in 1995.

The Cypherpunks list archives include many references to, what became known as ' AP' and ' APster ' from 1996 onwards.

The names "assassination politics" and "Jim Bell" also cropped up in the US government's pursuit and prosecution of Carl Johnson (The CJ Files).

He was imprisoned on felony charges of tax evasion in 1997.

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 perspective for improving governmental accountability".

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.

In 2001, Wired called Bell "[o]ne of the Internet's most famous essayists" and "the world's most notorious crypto-convict".

In 2001, an Australian anarchist claimed to be acting on the 'Part 10' part of "Assassination Politics".

This was covered by Declan McCullagh in Wired's story titled "Online Cincy Cop Threats Probed".

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."

Mike Huben has argued that were Assassination Politics ever to be accepted then governments would merely operate secretly (critiques of libertarianism).

Almost all commentary so far has focused on the first nine parts of the essay and there is little on part 10.

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 who even began to lead the organization.

Bell filed this lawsuit in 2003.

Bell was put under heavy surveillance and rearrested for harassment and stalking of federal agents.

He was charged with intimidation and stalking and was convicted 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.

Later, in 2003, The Denver Post published a similar story titled "Online threats target Denver investigators – Anarchist says e-mails harmless; feds disagree".

This story was written by Jim Hughes.

He was released in December 2009, only to be rearrested in July 2010 for violating his supervised release conditions.

Bell's parole violation hearing resulted in another sentence, and Bell was released on March 12, 2012.

Bell was born in Akron, Ohio and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a degree in chemistry.