[I ran into Deborah at Usenix Security (she and John Young are
speaking Thursday morning, schedule at usenix.org) and that reminded
me that I never sent her article on the Jim Bell trial to
Politech. Deborah was in the courtroom for the first week of Jim's
trial. Bell originally was going to be sentenced July 6, but I believe
that's been postponed to August 24. I encourage local politechnicals
to stop by Judge Tanner's courtroom in Tacoma, Washington that day. My
articles on the trial:
http://www.cluebot.com/search.pl?topic=ap-politics --Declan]
**********
http://www.cartome.org/homeland.htm
"So, say goodnight to Joshua ..."
Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell
Deborah Natsios
Cartome
8 June 2001
"On the stand, Joshuas distraught mother captivated the sympathetic
jury, buttressing the attempt to forge emotional links between home,
homeland and defense which would become the absorbing narrative of the
Jim Bell prosecution."
Homeland
A sparsely attended trial which unfolded in Tacomas US district
courthouse the first week of April 2001 hardly seemed an event that
might open a small but revealing view onto the shifting national
security apparatus. But to outside observers following the criminal
prosecution of Washington State resident Jim Bell, accused of stalking
and intimidating local agents of the IRS, Treasury Department and
BATF, the defendant was a symptomatic target, and the governments
stated case against him only a fragment of a more complex campaign
linked to the evolving landscape of national and homeland defense.
In the governments estimation, Bell had placed its Pacific Northwest
agents "in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury"1. But
for some trial-watchers, the case against James Dalton Bell, 43, was
underpinned by a constellation of factors that made him more than the
disaffected neighbor projecting antigovernment bile. Bell had invited
the governments fullest prosecutorial zeal because his technical
skills placed him in more ambiguous terrain, that of untested gray
zones within emerging national defense landscapes, which, by calling
into question the impregnability of the national border, have been
taking national security tactics incountry in unprecedented ways,
deploying new rules of engagement to challenge national security
threats within the US domestic interior.
Jim Bell was a man of letters, an electronics engineer and essayist
who had authored a ten-part political tract with the combative title
Assassination Politics 2, which while lacking in expository
sophistication was widely available and debated online, a 1996
disquisition which harnessed new technologies in the service of
radical political change by laying out an Internet-based mechanism
that used encryption and digital cash to arrange anonymous contract
killings of corrupt government agents. Notwithstanding the First
Amendment, Bells audacious refusal to renounce Assassination Politics
would become a key factor in the US governments case against him.
The governments campaign to rein in AP's insubordinate author
reflected a fundamental realignment in the wake of the bombing of
Oklahoma City's Federal Building and the Unabombers 17-year terror
campaign, which saw a new domestic paradigm supplementing the classic
model of the offshore national security threat and the enemy Other
presumed to be operating beyond the sanctity of US borders and
culture. For all the defensive paraphernalia available to the US
overseas warfighter, the national boundarys mystique as a deterrent
frontier and metaphor had been eroded by shifting power dynamics that
were replacing the Cold Wars clear bipolar demarcations.
AP was the kind of rogue pamphleteers digital handbill that confirmed
that the new enemy of the state might be among us, indeed, might be
one of us, a homeboy gone bad, a citizen versed in homegrown genres of
dissident literature, a local student or author of radical texts such
as the Turner Diaries 3, dog-eared by Tim McVeigh, or Ted Kaczynskis
anti-technology screed, The Industrial Society and its Future. 4
The authorities' focus on Assassination Politics and its electronic
mode of mass dissemination was evidence that information has been
designated the hot new threat regime in contemporary battlespace, not
least of which in infowar scenarios circumscribed by Homeland Defense,
the national security policy being launched as a coordinated domestic
response to the perceived growing threat of direct attack against the
US mainland, including cyber threats that target the nations critical
information infrastructures.
Homeland Defense (HD) gives information equal billing with other
hard-core weapon systems biological, chemical, nuclear, and
radiological elements of the elite "changing spectrum of threat
regimes" targeted by coordinating committees like the Defense Science
Board Task Force on Intelligence Needs for Homeland Defense 5, whose
notices are among others citing HD that are appearing with increasing
frequency in our dour ledger of national record, the Federal Register.
Homeland Defense is a slyly nuanced term with peculiar associations.
The nationalist turn of phrase homeland seems a coyly anachronistic
representation of a superpower who, after all, jangles the keys to the
worlds premier war machine. The locution manages to collapse the
geopolitics of lebensraum onto the realpolitik of the suburban gated
community, in a style both disingenuously naïve and jingoistic at the
same time, appealing to an era when government posters issued strident
calls-to-arms, like the WWII classic: "Warning! Our Homes Are in
Danger Now!" 6 . The vintage war bond poster's fundraising success is
being matched by HD's rhetorical gambit, which is swelling the war
chest dedicated to neutralizing the homelands insidious enemies.
War Coast
The new domestic threat subverts military cartographys WWII-era
diagram for hemisphere defense, which was predicated on an impregnable
coastal perimeter and continental geography assumed to be unassailably
buffered between oceanic expanse. Even in peacetime, the inviolable
border shielded the nation-states psychic and political state of mind,
consolidating the publics common faith in reassuring myths of national
cohesion, continuity and destiny.
During WWII, no segment of the venerable mainland perimeter sustained
aggression as distinctive as did that erstwhile colonial hinterland,
the rugged Pacific Northwest Coast, where the breaching of open dunes
and volcanic outcrops struck a blow at the aura surrounding
hemispheric impregnability. Sixty years later, the Northwest frontiers
unique wartime experience provides a cautionary backdrop for the Bell
case, which in its own way is helping define new limits of
infowarfares diffuse network of incountry boundaries.
During the 40s, the Northwests strategic physiography was charted in
defense cartographys classic topographic maps, but today, GIS
(Geographic Information Systems) softwares have introduced the
omniscient database landscape, whose digital maps are constructed of
myriad layers linked to databases that catalogue each and every
exploitable feature of the economies of nature and culture. As the
Bell case would demonstrate, new definitions of public, private and
restricted space are emerging out of clashes over access to such
spatial information infrastructures.
In 1942, the Northwests impervious coast was shattered when a Japanese
submarine lurking in cold Pacific waters off Washington State shelled
the Civil War era gun battery at Fort Stevens on the mouth of the
Columbia River, accomplishing little more than to disturb downriver
habitats of cormorants, shearwaters, storm petrels and gulls -- but
shocking nonetheless, the only instance of a foreign enemy firing on a
mainland military installation since the War of 1812. The same year,
further south on the Oregon coast, forests of spruce, pine, hemlock
and cedar were firebombed by float planes launched from Japans I-25
sub, igniting trees near Port Orford and Mt. Emily.
The incidents produced no fatalities, but another domestic casualty
had already succumbed to the campaign to shore up the coastal bulwark.
In early 1942, Executive Order 9066 7 authorized the wartime
incarceration of more than 120,000 West Coast residents, individuals
of Japanese ancestry, over half of them children, citizens and aliens
alike 79,000 of them native-born removed from thriving communities
including those of Oregon and Washington. At the time, few protests
met the widespread rescinding of constitutional rights, the ACLU and
Quakers being notably vocal exceptions. Only in recent decades have
the mass internments been officially condemned, and the internees
trauma and material losses acknowledged.
Ethnic cleansing tactics deployed to cauterize the coastal perimeter
did not seal the border to all hostile infiltrations. In fall of 1944,
thousands of 35-ft.diameter balloons engineered from mulberry paper
and persimmon glue were launched into the jetstream above Japan, from
where the unmanned spheres drifted eastward, migrating in dense flocks
high above the Pacific Ocean with clustered payloads dangling below.
Some eventually reached the crashing surf and black basalt headlands
that marked the jagged Northwest coastline, where the paper flotillas
penetrated misty airspace above the canopy of old growth forests and
disappeared into lush green fragrances of cypress, juniper, redwood
and yew.
Of the balloons that continued drifting inland, one would eventually
touch ground 100 miles east of the coast, in a forest of lodgepole
pine and white fir near the Oregon town of Bly, where the metallic
payload settled onto the forest floors cushion of moss and pine
needles and hibernated over the raw winter season. The following
spring, the glittering cache, nestled among new ferns like
semiprecious mineral treasure, would be discovered by five children
out on a Sunday picnic in the company of a ministers pregnant wife,
who attempted to haul the mysterious object out from its forest
seclusion, disturbing dormant mechanisms long enough to detonate a
deadly explosion of incendiary and antipersonnel devices.
That is how, in May 1945, on Oregons Gearhart Mountain, Elsie Mitchell
and her five young wards came to earn the unhappy distinction of being
the mainlands only known fatalities at the hands of enemy action
during WWII, victims of the failure of coastal defenses to repel
unanticipated stealth technology -- Japans Fu-Go balloon bombs.
The death of noncombatants at Bly and widespread suppression of
constitutional rights up and down the Pacific Coast provide a
compelling context for current events scripting new chapters in the
Northwests history of national defense. A half century ago, race was
designated an efficient signifier of incountry enmity, helping
establish the strategic calculus distinctions between Us and Them.
Todays mainland campaigns confront new ambiguities, including the
banality of an undistinguished physiognomy -- the highly effective
camouflage of stealth citizens McVeigh and Kaczynski.
Cypherpunks
The ambiguities of the domestic menace have provoked indiscriminant
counteroffensives. The largesse displayed by Executive Order 9066 when
it cast a too-wide net in 1942 also brought opprobrium to the FBI in
the late 90s when Carnivore 8 was let loose, the attack bot whose
zealous eavesdropping on private e-mails intercepted a multitude of
innocent communications in hopes of criminalizing a few. Carnivore
became a notorious covert sniffer, but authorities have also engaged
in overt sniffing of the malodorous information flow, including the
recent invasive monitoring of the Cypherpunks 9 online mailing list by
the IRS during the course of the Jim Bell investigations.
Tens of thousands of discussants are using distributed e-mail to
construct complex, discourse-based online culture, and among them, the
Cypherpunks public forum has distinguished itself since its launching
in 1992, with a prodigiously freewheeling style of politicized
argumentation by turns inflammatory, playful, brilliant and
sophomoric. The highly skilled technologists who are list subscribers
have evolved a robust forensic mode well suited to anarchic and
libertarian philosophies that underpin often-substantive debates on
cutting-edge issues relating to the science, practice and politics of
cryptography, privacy, anonymity, and reduced government.
Beginning in 1997, Cypherpunks and its electronic text trail were
subjected to a confrontational open stakeout by an agent of the
Internal Revenue Service, Jeff Gordon, a veteran inspector in the
Seattle office's security detail, who by early 2001 was still engaged
in conspicuous monitoring of e-mails that might be excised and crafted
into exhibits for ongoing criminal investigations relating to the
alleged stalking of Pacific Northwest agents of the IRS, Bureau of
Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), and Treasury Department.
The alleged stalker in the case was a Cypherpunks subscriber,
Washington State resident James Dalton Bell, Assassination Politics'
apostate author. And Bells alleged stalking victim was none other than
the eponymous Special Agent Jeff Gordon himself, who was openly
surveilling the public mailing list and acting as chief investigator
on his own behalf. The investigators voyeurism drew fire from list
members, who showered him with their unique brand of inflammatory
condemnation until, in a flame to end all flame wars, Gordon
successfully used selected excerpts from Bells online postings to help
land a stalking conviction at the defendants trial in April 2001
events which, despite the First Amendment's sanctuary, would have a
chilling effect on the forums debates, which would become cautiously
self-censorious.
It was not the first time Special Agent Gordon had gone after the
Cypherpunks. In fact, Jim Bell had just been released from jail in
April 2000 after Gordon had put him away in 1997 10 on similar charges
of obstructing and intimidating the IRS, a conviction that landed the
defendant an 11 month sentence in local SeaTac Federal Detention
Center, with 10 months added after he violated terms of his probation.
Bells adversarial relationship with the IRS appeared to be ongoing,
grounded in grievances as yet unresolved.
A second Cypherpunks subscriber, Carl Johnson, 52, aka "Toto" (Tension
of the Opposites), a computer-savvy musician and peripatetic lyricist
of an unlikely genre best described as country-and-western porn, had
also been targeted by the diligent Agent Gordon when the songwriters
online creative output expanded to include antigovernment lyrics. 11
Its not clear whether Jeff Gordon had ever listened to Totos
confessional tunes "On this bed Ive made Ill sleep alone" or "Cryin on
the shoulders of the road", but he proved an unsympathetic music
critic when it came to essays posted by <toto_at_sk.sympatico.ca> to the
Cypherpunks, which, in the governments view exceeded First Amendment
protections the US Supreme Court had offered to advocates of violence.
The prosecution proved equally tone-deaf, enlisting psychiatry and not
musicology to classify dissent deemed cacophonous, in court papers
that reported Johnson had been diagnosed in the past with a variety of
clinical disorders, including: "Schizophrenia, Tourette's Syndrome,
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Personality Disorder (not otherwise
specified), Adult Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Substance
Abuse, Tic Disorder, and Intermittent Alcohol Abuse" 12 .
By the time Toto was convicted in April 1999 of disseminating three
threatening e-mail messages via the Cypherpunks list, the assembly
line machinery for adjudicating the Cypherpunks menace was well in
place in Washington States Western District, with Inspector Jeff
Gordon and Assistant US Attorney Robb London increasingly familiar
collaborators at the prosecution table, where Bell would be welcomed
back for a second run-in with the justice system in 2001. Jim Bell
would not be the sole Cypherpunk present in the courtroom on that
occasion. Journalist Declan McCullagh 13 of Wired News and archivist
John Young 14 of Cryptome.org, two Cypherpunk subscribers who had
communicated with the defendant, were served subpoenas by the
government and compelled to appear at trial.
Notwithstanding the 2001 trials stated focus on Jim Bell, the
governments broader interest in the Cypherpunks was unmistakable.
After all, some readers of Assassination Politics had recognized it to
be derivative of scenarios first articulated by other members of the
list. Moreover, the Cypherpunks were ardent supporters of technologies
that law enforcement had fought to suppress, like strong encryption
and online anonymity that protected civil liberties, which authorities
instead argued facilitated criminal enterprise in areas like drug
trade and child pornography. The prosecution took advantage of an
unchallenged opportunity to alarm the jury about the hazards of
vigorous online speech, citing the Cypherpunks from voir dire all the
way to conviction, and all but indicting them in absentia as a virtual
conspiratorial cabal.
The offensive against Bell and the Cypherpunks may have been pursued
in Pacific Northwest district court, but it was getting its
ideological bearings from the kinds of national grade infowargames
being scripted by Homeland Defenses avid strategists and tacticians,
in which the First Amendment is emerging as a leading casualty of
collateral damage, a looming constitutional conflict troubling
journalists, scholars, librarians and authors as well as freedom of
information activists.
At the 2001 trial, District Judge Jack E. Tanner denied defense
efforts to introduce First Amendment dimensions of the political
essayists case, despite the prosecutions prominent condemnation of
Assassination Politics, rejecting the notion that Bells actions
relating to the IRS were constitutive of political speech.15
The US courts may well end up the last refuge for constitutional
ambiguities surrounding informations status in the new threat
landscape, as has been the case with the Digitial Millennium Copyright
Act of 1998 16, where aggressive efforts to diminish fair use
standards by tightening restrictions on digital intellectual property
display disturbing infowar sensibilities of their own. Government
support of the militarization of commercial digital IP restrictions
bears a disturbing relation to its concurrent demonization of
politically volatile digital content.
Poster Boy
Jim Bell appeared to satisfy two of Homeland Defenses core threat
regimes information and, as it would turn out, chemical and as such
had much to recommend himself as a poster boy for the Treasury
Departments retaliation against ideological opponents as well as their
no less important institutional battle for attention, turf and
resources.
Bell was not only an inflammatory author, rhetorician, and participant
in online cultures populated by radical technologists. He was also an
MIT educated chemist who had displayed the disruptive potential of his
scientific expertise. In March 1997, Bell had launched a putrid
stinkbomb of propanethiol at the carpet in front of a local IRS
office, more an act of childish mischief than chemical warfare, to be
sure, but a stunt which in conjunction with obstruction offenses
relating to misuse of his social security number and purported tax
evasion, was enough to help get him put away for his first jail term.
Twenty armed agents from two agencies had raided on the Bell home on
April 1 and 3, 1997, seizing three semiautomatic assault rifles and a
handgun. According to court papers, they also discovered "a variety of
dangerous and deadly chemicals, including cyanide, acids, and
Diisopropyl Fluorophosphate" 17. A witness described two workers in
white overalls under supervision of EPA officials one sporting a
visible holstered pistol loading chemicals onto a private
environmental service companys truck, a disposal effort which landed
the Bell Residence a spot in the EPAs archive of Washington State
Superfund sites 18.
At Bells 2001 trial, the prosecutions prize was even more sensational:
evidence he had bragged of having produced the precursors to deadly
Sarin nerve gas, whose proven WMD (weapons of mass destruction)
attributes were demonstrated in March 1995 by the Aum Shinrikyo cult
in their attack on the Tokyo subway. The defendants MIT pedigree was a
source of consternation, and it was demonized during proceedings as if
to underscore the inherent dangers of elite scientific education.
After all, according to the trials unspoken subtext, Ted Kaczynskis
prestigious Harvard mathematics training must have contributed to his
cunning, helping him elude authorities for almost two decades.
By all appearances, Jim Bell relished his status as a provocateur,
overtly taunting authorities and encouraging media attention
surrounding his case, condemning local journalists who failed to cover
the proceedings as boycotters, holding court with the few national
journalists present at the 2001 trial, which included a producer from
60 Minutes. In November 1997, following his first conviction, Bell had
been prominently featured in a US News and World Report cover story on
"The Next Unabomber"19 , and his case was being debated online and
monitored by news sites with international readership such as Wired
News and Cryptome, as well as the police beat of The Columbian and The
Oregonian, his hometown papers the first three, media outlets whose
journalists were subpoenaed by the government. (Curiously absent from
the government's witness list was Jessica Stern, former NSA analyst
and anti- terrorism researcher who had interviewed Bell at length).
Bell seemed determined to escalate the stakes of his case, whether for
ideological reasons or because he found the attention irresistible or
both.
But for all his bravura posturing, Jim Bells relationship to the
violence advocated in Assassination Politics differed from McVeighs
link to Turner Diaries or Kaczynskis to The Industrial Society and its
Future in one significant regard. By all accounts, Bell had never
demonstrated a propensity towards violence or been known to actually
cause anyone any physical harm. Furthermore, he and others pointed out
that AP's controversial killing machine was not yet technologically
feasible, if ever it would be.
The prosecutions task would be to convince the jury from Washingtons
Western District that the essayists crime resided in his intent -- an
immanence, a potentiality, a latency, a possibility of threat to the
community by a "cyberterrorist wannabe" that overrided his civil
liberties. As had been the case with Cypherpunk Carl Johnson,
psychiatry would be enlisted to undermine political dissent. Bells
mental competence was a pretrial issue, a point underscored during
closing arguments by his public defender, Robert Leen, whom the judge
had prohibited Bell from dismissing. In the prosecutions eyes, the
jurys condemnation of the defendant would be a judicious act of
proactive deterrence, safeguarding the future integrity of Northwest
homes and homeland not unlike claims the government had made some
sixty years earlier when the mainland's Japanese-American population
was summarily stripped of its constitutional rights.
"So, Say Goodnight to Joshua..."
In the trials undertow of meanings, one phrase culled from the
Cypherpunks list and presented as a government exhibit would take on
emblematic significance. "So, say goodnight to Joshua..." 20 , a
fragment of an e-mail in which Bell named a child he thought to be a
young son of Jeff Gordons, was wielded by the prosecution as sign of a
more profound menace. In a national security environment that
privileged information as a munitions, the internets distributed
network had inherent threat capabilities. The Joshua e-mail was an
example of Internet speech symbolically invading a childs most
vulnerable bedtime ritual, demonstrating how devious technology could
assault the fundamental security of home.
On the stand, Joshuas distraught mother captivated the sympathetic
jury, buttressing the attempt to forge emotional links between home,
homeland and defense which would become the absorbing narrative of the
Jim Bell prosecution. The nationalist rhetoric that gave vintage war
posters their persuasive power, "Warning! Our Homes Are in Danger
Now!", seemed to have renewed potential in back yards all across the
contemporary Pacific Northwest, where the government appeared to be
making progress reconnoitering new battlescapes for the prospective
homeland war.
Tacoma
On a mild spring morning the first week of April 2001, just before the
weekend of Tacomas celebrated Junior Daffodil Parade, 14 jurors and a
handful of out-of-state observers inside the Western District federal
courthouse listened as the prosecutor began enumerating threats
allegedly made against US Government agents.
Earlier that morning, jurors were initiated into their upcoming public
service with scenographic flair as they entered the Pacific Avenue
entrance of the District courthouse through its newly restored foyer,
historic Union Station, completed in 1911 as western terminus for the
Northern Pacific Railroad, a monumental domed space in Romanesque
revival style flooded with natural light whose symbolism unambiguously
deferred to the regional ethos. The wheels of justice would now be
turning at a site where transcontinental locomotives were once the
driving force mobilizing Northwest urbanization and the development of
its abundant resources of ore, wheat, timber and fish.
To the southeast, snowcapped Mount Rainier soared above the cloudline
into Washingtons brilliant sunshine, heroic testimony that seemed to
argue on behalf of a robust defense of the nations icons and
patrimony. At 14,400 ft., Rainier dominated the Cascade Mountain
Range, the eastern margin of the Federal Court systems Western
District, which drew its jury pool from coastal counties nestled
between the volcanic range and the Pacific Oceans frigid surf.
The Cascade skyline was recapitulated in the domed and barrel-vaulted
roofs of Tacomas revitalized urban center, a virtuous architectural
tableaux of red brick structures located east of Puget Sounds
Commencement Bay, which linked the halls of justice with a cluster of
old railroad warehouse buildings across Pacific Avenue, newly
retrofitted as a local campus of the state university. The urban
composition embraced three ambitious museums under various phases of
construction, including the recently completed Washington State
History Museum which was physically attached to the courthouse
complex, an architectural connection which unabashedly fostered ideals
of reciprocity and transparency between justice and state history.
It was not yet clear whether architectures civic optimism could be
extended to the justice being negotiated inside District Judge Jack E.
Tanners sanctum in Courtroom E, one of the only spaces seeing action
that week in a new courthouse whose deserted main hallways and
spotless, vacant restrooms projected a distinct feeling of
underutilization. Inside Courtroom E, Assistant US attorney Robb
London was doing his best to pack the courthouses unoccupied witness
boxes and complement its award-winning architectural design, making
his appearance in smartly slim cuts of suit and sporting a chic shaved
pate, taking stock of his jury through fashionably serious eyewear as
he began an earnest account of how Jim Bells criminality had provoked
the governments armed raid on Corregidor that previous fall.
The Corregidor woven into the prosecution narrative was far from the
fortified limestone island at the entrance of Manila Bay, site of the
WWII battle of that name. Instead, it was a peaceful residential
street tucked within domestic borders of the Pacific Northwest, in the
sleepy suburban heights of Vancouver, Washington 21, a city of 144,000
situated on the north bank of the Columbia River about 90 miles inland
from the coast, directly across the river from Portland, Oregon and
the bustling runways of Portland International Airport.
On 6 November 2000, a chilly Monday morning with fall temperatures
hovering in the low 40s, government agents from multiple agencies
began the work week by descending on Vancouvers Corregidor, launching
an armed raid against No. 7214 under a search warrant that authorized
the seizure of any evidence its occupant had obstructed, threatened,
and intimidated or interfered with federal agents, and proceeded to
remove some 38 items, including computers, floppy disks, CD-ROMs,
e-mail addresses, hardcopy documents, maps and photographs.22
No. 7214 was a modest, one-story blue and white wood-frame home that,
like its neighbors, sat on a small, tidily landscaped lot in
Vancouvers McLoughlin Heights district, a vestige of WWII era housing
built with FHA loans to accommodate the huge influx of laborers who
had poured into the area to work in the Kaiser shipyards manufacturing
Liberty ships, tank landing craft and escort carriers the baby
flattops that would help achieve victory in the Pacific.
The practice of naming local roads in tribute to landmark battles
seemed right for a defense workers neighborhood, in this instance
memorializing the grim surrender of the Pacific stronghold to the
Japanese in 1942, but also celebrating its subsequent retaking in 1945
clearly, with the collaboration of patriotic defense workers back
home. The strategic reversal would make good on General Douglas
MacArthurs defiant declaration: "I shall return!", and the battle of
Corregidor, along with the campaign for Bataan and the Death March
that followed, would become etched in the nations moral landscape as
well as some of its neighborhood streets. When the placename
'Corregidor' was cited during the Bell trial's extended narrative and
testimony, it leveraged deeply rooted memories of the past enemy
threat, helping to legitimate No. 7214 as a deserving target of the
governments most vigorous exertions.
Shipyards like Vancouvers Kaiser and aeronautical plants like Seattles
Boeing formed the bulwark of Northwest defense industry
infrastructure, bedrock foundation for high-tech companies that would
follow in postwar years "clean" electronics and computer software
firms like Intel and Microsoft that would supplant the regions
declining natural-resource based economy, increasingly being curbed by
environmental restrictions.
As a recent graduate of one of the countrys elite technology research
institutions, Jim Bell would have enjoyed all the benefits of an
impressive postwar legacy. Though not a Vancouver native, he had come
to the area in 1980 to work for Intel a move that coincided with the
spectacular eruption at nearby Mount St. Helens, he recalled with
bemusement and wonder while on the stand. Bell was an MIT graduate
armed with a chemistry degree and exceptional electronics skills,
technology he said had fascinated him from the time he was a child and
had learned to dismantle and reassemble computers. The Intel culture
Bell was initiated into had been established by another chemist,
legendary co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who as a young scientist enjoyed
a few years of incomparable access to the Cold War ethos, as Inspector
of Nuclear Explosions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
(LLNL), before embarking on his successful entrepreneurial venture in
the private sector microprocessor field.
By 1982, Bell himself fell in with entrepreneurial tradition,
departing to launch his own small company, SemiDisk Systems 23 , which
by his account enjoyed some good years supplying external RAM disks to
clients around the world. According to Bells testimony, his ongoing
antagonism against the IRS began when shifts in the global market put
SemiDisk Systems out of business in 1992, a failure that left him
traumatized and unable to deal with financial matters, making him a
vulnerable target for what he considered to be the IRS overreaching
punitive actions, including their claim for $30,000 in back taxes.
Over the years, Bell had lived on the Heights above the Columbia River
with his now aging parents -- his father Sam, a retired veteran of the
Midwests rust belt who had worked in tire factories of Akron, Ohio
where Jim was born, and mother Lou, a homemaker who championed her
sons innocence, and once regretfully insisted she was to blame for his
current troubles, having raised her son and daughter to be independent
thinkers.
As had been the case with the Corregidor that overlooked Manila Bay,
Corregidor on the Heights enjoyed a spectacular prospect onto a
waterway which was a crucial resource in the regions history and
fortunes. Below the Heights flowed currents and navigation channels of
the majestic Columbia River, site of Lewis and Clarks final river
passage in 1805 on their momentous trek seeking a continuous water
route to the Pacific. The Columbia River basin, the nations fourth
largest, was once the worlds greatest source of salmon, providing an
astonishing bounty of chinook, coho, chum, sockeye and pink.
The ancient waterways impact also extended to matters of contemporary
jurisprudence, as the Bell family would discover during the most
current phase of Jims ongoing "troubles". The Columbia formed a
natural state boundary along much of Washington and Oregon, and as the
Seattle magistrate judge who signed the warrant for the November 6
search of their home was well aware, crossing the river from
Washington to Oregon during the commission of alleged misdeeds had
escalated local charges against Jim Bell into the serious domain of
federal interstate crime.
Jurisdictional boundaries that helped define criminality were just a
recent phase of the ongoing succession of power structures that had
tried to dominate the river. The indigenous Chinook and Clatsop
peoples who had tended seasonal salmon fisheries on the Columbia for
thousands of years had been diminished by disease imported by
Euro-American traders, early biological weapons of mass destruction
like smallpox, malaria, measles, influenza, dysentery, whooping cough,
typhus and typhoid, whose predominant disease vector was that
monopolistic juggernaut, the Hudsons Bay Company.
Fort Vancouver had been established as headquarters of the HBCs
lucrative Columbia Department fur trading operations in the early 19th
century, satisfying the European hat-making industrys demand for
fashionable beaver pelts with resources from an immense swath of
wilderness that stretched from Russian Alaska in the north, all the
way south to Mexico. With monopoly powers granted by British Royal
Charter, Fort Vancouver, under the leadership of Chief Factor Dr. John
McLoughlin, would have the imperial clout required to become a
dominant center of commercial, cultural, and political influence.
Just up the road from the Bell home on McLoughlin Heights'
appropriately commanding overlook, the timber palisade and bastion
that stood guard over Vancouvers military heyday had been
reconstructed and designated a national historic site. There, the
National Park Services apologetic history of HBC hegemony is tempered
with archeological collections and living history demonstrations that
make a case for the ethnic and cultural diversity of the original
population, extolling the self-sufficiency and rugged individualism of
the areas native trappers, indigenous women, French Canadian
voyageurs, and Métis of mixed heritage.
On the Tacoma witness stand, Jim Bell presented to his Western
District peers his own living history, which seemed consistent with
local themes of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency that had originated
with the voyageurs, and continued through the Northwests reformist
populist traditions and into the present with Bells own avowed
anarcho-libertarian politics, which advocated individual freedoms and
constitutionally-limited government.
Libertarian activism included arguments for curtailing IRS power,
sentiments echoed by Bell in testimony where he insisted he was no
stalker but an engaged citizen well within his legal rights to collect
evidence of a powerful tax agencys wrongdoings in the wake of his
high-tech companys demise. After his demands for a refund from the tax
agency had been rebuffed, Bell alerted the IRS he would be seeking
justice in Portlands "common-law court", which convicted government
personnel of crimes in absentia, and meted out sentences that
sometimes included death.
The defendant explained to the jury his 1998 conviction on obstruction
charges was the result of the tax agency's retaliation against his
investigations, and in 2001, current interstate stalking charges
confirmed the IRS unrelenting campaign against efforts by which he had
hoped to collect evidence to exonerate himself and prove the agency
had illegally plotted to coerce his 1998 guilty plea.
Doppelganger
If Bell had once been a successful entrepreneur, the soft, overgrown
individual in aviator glasses seated alone with counsel at the defense
table seemed to have lost his edge, filling a baby-blue jailhouse
shirt with shapeless contours of advancing middle-age girth, his
unkempt dark hair clinging to a postgraduate shag long after the
camaraderie of college days. No friends or family were present in
Courtroom E when the jury heard the five counts against the younger
resident of No. 7214. Sam and Lou Bell were kept from their sons side
after the couples names were placed on the government witness list,
though, as might be expected of the prosecutorial ploy, the parents
were never called to testify.
But if Jim Bells family was not present in Judge Tanners court, his
doppelganger was, in the form of his nemesis US Treasury Agent and
Investigator Jeff Gordon, who had conducted the open stakeout of the
Cypherpunks list, and who was looking for yet a second conviction
against his unrepentant target. The Jim Bell affair had been good to
Jeff Gordon. Just as IRS prestige and funding were on the decline
nationwide, Gordons career as a veteran investigator was gaining
momentum with his eager pursuit of the newsworthy defendant, having
received commendations and promotions for putting Bell away on the
1998 obstruction charge, when he succeeded in temporarily muzzling a
vocal adversary whose Assassination Politics had brazenly declared
open hunting season against his kind.
It was clear to the authorities that Bell remained uncowed following
his release from prison in April 2000, when he declared he would
continue his investigation of the tax agency, and Bell and Gordon
found themselves at it again, each the others target in a
role-reversing sport of hunter and hunted, a cat-and-mouse game in
which notwithstanding Bells voyageur bravado Treasury Agent Jeff
Gordon, with the majesty and resources of the US Government at his
disposal, seemed for the moment at least, to be enjoying the distinct
advantage of the latter-day Royal Charter.
Jeff Gordons stakeout of the Cypherpunks mail list and earlier
successes securing convictions against Bell and Carl Johnson had made
it clear he was no hapless victim, but had been operating within a
broader mandate to rein in troublesome online opponents. His
aggressive role continued during the Tacoma trial, a prominence that
was not without controversy when courtroom proceedings got under way
in April 2001.
On the witness stand, Gordon seemed eager to validate the charge of
his "reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury", as he
described his familys state of mind in the face of allegedly menacing
behaviors. Observers noted Gordon appeared apprehensive, as if
concerned he was outmatched by his highly intelligent target, distress
that seemed to crush the investigators peevish face and small inset
eyes, features already compromised by the weight of an
overly-ambitious mustache.
But the Treasury Agents brief assignment as victim was overshadowed by
his more expansive performance throughout the balance of the trial,
during which he was clearly an integral member of the prosecution
team, sitting at the US Attorney's side, conferring with him,
maintaining eye contact with jury members from the chair closest to
them, preparing government exhibits and running digital projections
off the prosecutions laptop.
Some legal scholars criticized Gordons involvement within the
prosecutorial apparatus, pointing that out that, while not illegal,
his convergent identities as victim, investigator and prosecutor
presented an unseemly conflict and the appearance of abuse of power.
"It creates the impression that the prosecution is motivated by a
personal grievance, rather than a search for the truth," Barry
Steinhardt, the ACLU's associate director, told Wired News. 24
Such conflicts of interest are a symptom of looming jurisdictional
problems facing Homeland Defenses domestic tactics. The risk is
evident in a report by a Washington think tank, the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), when it advocates
inclusion of local authorities like police, firefighters and federal
civilian officials as "new actors" in Homeland Defense scenarios
presumably to be granted quasi-military or paramilitary powers and
support apparatus -- training, equipment, technology and resources:
"It will take unprecedented efforts by military, federal civilian,
state, and local officials, as well as elements of the private sector,
to meet them [these threats]. Adding to the complexity, neither the
federal government nor the US military will usually be the lead actor
in meeting these threats. Today, the "first to fight" may well be a
police officer, a firefighter, or an information security technician.
New actors must become part of the national security equation".
"Homeland Defense: A Strategic Approach" Joseph J.Collins, Michael
Horowitz, December 2000, Homeland Defense Working Group, CSIS 25
Investigator Gordon appears to have been given wide berth for his
"first to fight" duties in pursuing a target who fell within HDs
working classification of information and chemical threat. Even before
Bells 1998 conviction, Gordon had stated to The Oregonian: "We chose
not to wait until he followed through on what we believe were plans to
assassinate government employees". 26
The conflation of quasi-military powers being granted "first to fight"
actors may challenge firewalls established by the Posse Commitatus Act
of 1878, which was designed to limit direct active use of federal
troops by civil law enforcement officers to enforce laws. Federal
troops had been called in to stamp out Northwest activism in the past,
as was the case in the 1890s, during labor unrest that accompanied
efforts to unionize the Idaho mining industry before collective
bargaining became federally protected. Data-mining is the technology
provoking today's debates about jurisdiction and conflict with the
Act, in incidents having to do with information assault, subject of
speculations of the likes of the Senate Judiciary Committee's
Subcommittee On Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information.
During the 1980s, drug trafficking was declared a national security
threat so that the Posse Commitatus Act could be amended accordingly.
Notwithstanding First Amendment guarantees, the same national security
case may someday be made against information trafficking in the form
of online dissemination of political essays like Assassination
Politics or the Cyperpunks irreverent debates -- a case against
information trafficking for which the Bell precedent may in fact be a
bell-wether.
Battlespace Suburbia
The Bell case made clear that the American suburb might well turn out
to be the ultimate psychological battlespace for Homeland Defense. If
the First Amendment offered a refuge to Assassination Politics
advocacy of violence, that privileged sanctuary could be exploded by a
provocative geography of spatialized acts. Tacoma jurors would learn
that authorities were determined to prove just such a geographic
threshold had been met with the help of precision geopositioning
technology, which was enlisted to demonstrate that in 2000, the
suburbs were ground zero of the Jim Bell threat.
Prior to his arrest, Bell had been placed under surveillance and a GPS
sensor surreptitiously attached to his car by the Bureau of Alcohol
Tobacco and Firearms. At trial, proof the defendant had driven from
Corregidor Road to what he assumed to be his targets homes was played
back in the form of an animated blip moving in real time across a
digital map of the area -- data whose reliability was presumably
assured when the GPS sensor was characterized as "military grade".
The vaunting of military grade hardware used to track a citizens drive
through exurban neighborhoods suggests that regional planning might
soon become a valuable asset of the working apparatus of incountry
defense. The GPS sensor had seamlessly converted Bells navigation
along local community byways into data points uplinked to an orbiting
satellite, then downlinked and processed by the equivalent of
battlefield visualization softwares that would draw little qualitative
distinction between the American suburb and a Balkan snipers lair.
Bell's suburban maneuvres were initiated with the purchase of motor
vehicle and voter registration databases, which were legally
available, in an attempt to uncover home addresses of those
"first-to-fight actors", Jeff Gordon and a second BATF agent. The
incursions continued with drives through neighboring communities in
search of the listed homes, with the taking photographs of likely
domiciles, and driving onto suspected private property.
Bells database searches implicitly recognized that suburban space had
been reconstructed in toto onto a new spatialized grid, the 'virtual
suburbia' of GIS's pervasive databanks containing multiple layers of
information that profiled and catalogued each and every distinguishing
feature of landscape, infrastructure and inhabitant. In the
information age, the homeowners delusions of freedom and autonomy were
corroded by privacy lost the result of encroachments on personal
information by government and commerce that even subverted the
ostensibly democratic premise of the voter registration database.
But data-gathering that would have been applauded as a feature of
sensible corporate marketing or municipal administration was diagnosed
as a criminal symptom when conducted by an individual who had
expressed exceptional political dissent. Jim Bells mix of politics and
information practices threatened the fundamental unit measure of
mortgaged individualism and ownership, the discreet single-family
house on a virtual lot that comprised the landscaped building block of
new Northwestern expansion. As with his "So, say goodnight to Joshua"
posting to the Cypherpunks list, he toyed with powerful emotions that
linked home and homeland, unleashing new technologies to lance the
mythology of suburban security -- just as the Bell home itself had
been raided -- compounding his transgression by flouting the tacit
immunity deal enjoyed by human shields: those government families
presumably protected from official acts of their "first-to-fight"
breadwinners. Where coastal headlands once delimited clear-cut margins
of the Northwests wartime vigilance, the suburbs widely distributed
internal network of diffuse landscapes and databank mirror-images were
being rediscovered as new tactical terrain.
Bells games exposed the suburbs historic ties to the US defense
machine, coming full circle with suburbia's full-blown emergence in
years following WWII along with the national highway system and other
critical postwar infrastructures. In the 1940s, faux suburban
landscapes fashioned of chicken-wire lawns and burlap houses had
helped camouflage the rooftops of Seattles Boeing Plant 2, where B-17
"Flying Fortress" bombers were manufactured. After the war, housing
programs had been a peaceable reward mechanism that successfully
helped demilitarize, absorb and regularize large numbers of veteran
returning home after years of dislocation and debilitating offshore
conflict. Military barracks and defense housing such as the Bell
familys McLoughlin Heights neighborhood would be the prototypes that
provided postwar subdivisions with efficient new military-based
technologies of planning, prefabrication, infrastructure and
communications.27 The Corregidors of Manila Bay and Vancouver were
linked by more than just memories and a shared placename.
Conclusion: The Holdout
On Tuesday, 10 April 2001, after four hours of deliberating interstate
stalking charges pending against James Dalton Bell, Tacomas Western
District jurors returned a verdict of guilty on two of five counts. In
court, the foreman announced that the jury had deadlocked on the
remaing three counts, 11 to 1. The identity of the sole holdout juror,
who had not been persuaded by three counts of the governments case and
whose dissent did not budge in the face of 11 peers -- was not
revealed.
During the course of the six-day trial, every time jurors had exited
the courtroom for breaks, lunch or at days end, the judge issued his
standard admonition that they refrain from discussing the case. Its
not clear whether judicial prohibitions would have also precluded
visits to the Washington State History Museum next door, a red brick
building attached to the Federal Courthouse Complex that paid homage
to the restored depots monumental design with its own dramatic 56-foot
high arches and vaulted roofs, completed in 1996 to designs of renown
late West Coast architect Charles Moore.
During planning phases for Tacomas new civic center, municipal leaders
signed-off on urban designers' optimistic proposals for the adjacency
between a working courthouse and the state historical societys
archival collections. But Judge Tanner may have thought twice about
letting jurors from the Western District's strategic coastal counties
wander through the museums compelling full-scale recreations and
interactive multimedia exhibits, which conveyed graphic accounts of
the states shame as well as its glory, including civil liberties
abuses perpetrated by the government against populations who in the
past had been declared threats to state or national security --
historiography that some Homeland Defense propagandist might have
chosen to censure as information threat.
In one film testimonial, a grandson described scars that marked his
elderly grandmothers body, traces of punishments inflicted in her
youth when she defied white teachers and spoke her encrypted tribal
tongue. Archival photographs from the 19th century document the solemn
gaze of indigenous children costumed in European garb -- Nisqually,
Puyallup, Swinomish and Yakima forcibly taken from extended clans and
relocated to boarding schools that were the government's tools for
suppression of native identity.
Another series of black and white photographs from the 1930s captures
a large group of cheerful elementary school children standing in front
of a local Japanese-American cultural center just a few years before
Issei and Nisei properties were confiscated without compensation, and
the children joined 13,400 other state residents deported to wartime
internment camps.
An exhibit about the Columbia River charted the extensive
hydroelectrification that powered the regions wartime defense
industries, preeminent among these, the Hanford Engineering Works in
the eastern part of the state, which had produced plutonium for the
Manhattan Project and Nagasaki bomb. Hanford Site was famous for its
contribution to the demolition of the imperial enemys city, but it
also rained illness and death on local workers and unsuspecting
downwinders 28, 29 who were no doubt startled to discover they too,
along with the offshore enemy, had been victims of radiological
weapons of mass destruction and that their government would continue
to deny demands for redress.
The Columbia basins far-reaching dam systems had diminished once
inexhaustible salmon supplies, but swift moving waters provided an
efficient dump for Hanfords plant processes for decades, a private
sewer for disposal of thermal discharges and fluid pathway of
radionuclide wastes including sodium-24, phosphorus-32, neptunium-239,
zinc-65, chromium-51, ruthenium-103, ruthenium-106, cerium-144,
cesium-137, and arsenic -- that would be be absorbed by non-migratory
fish species consumed by unwary locals, just as iodine-131 would
become embedded in their thyroid glands, and strontium-90 and
plutonium-239 deposited in ailing bones.
In one of the museum's cathedral-height exhibition spaces, a giant
wall sized relief-mural of the state tracked the Columbia basins vast
scope, including the downstream spot where, before cleanup measures
were legislated, currents saturated with condemned toxins flowed past
McLoughlin Heights and Vancouver. Projected onto the maps monumental
scale, the Bell residence and its three inhabitants would have
appeared as mere specks, and the chemicals confiscated from No.7214 --
negligible drops along the Columbias malignant pathway, its
government-sponsored chemical and radiological effluvium.
During the course of the trial, District Judge Tanner had refused each
of Jim Bells subpoenas for defense witnesses, and the defendant alone
appeared on the stand to testify in his own behalf. It is not known
whether, in the interim, any of Bell's 12 peers had wandered next door
to take in the State History Museums collections, or if the lone
holdout juror had ever contemplated the curators displays. Installed
as just another exhibit in the museum's cautionary continuum, the
governments case against the essayist and new enemy-of-the-state would
have been informed by the unexpected testimony of historys many
witnesses.
On 10 April 2001, Jim Bell was confined to SeaTac Federal Detention
Center, awaiting sentencing scheduled for 6 July. He faces a prison
term ranging from six to ten years.
© 2001 Deborah Natsios
_________________________________________________________________
Endnotes:
9 June 2001
10 June 2001, Addenda, renumbered
11 June 2001, Add., renumber
1 http://cryptome.org/jdb111700.htm
2 http://jya.com/ap.htm
3 http://www.cnn.com/US/9704/28/okc/
4
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manif
esto.text.htm
5
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/14mar20010800/frwebgate.access
.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2001_register&docid=01-8397-filed
6 http://www.nara.gov/exhall/powers/homes.html
7 http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/eo9066.html
8 http://cryptome.org/carnivore-rev.htm
9 http://cypherpunks.venona.com/
10 http://jya.com/jimbell7.htm
11 http://jya.com/cejfiles.htm
12 http://jya.com/cej060899.htm
13 http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42735,00.html
14 http://cryptome.org/jdb-subpoena.htm
15 http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42951,00.html
16 http://cryptome.org/dmca/dmca-index.htm
17 http://cryptome.org/jdb111700.htm
18 http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/arcsites/reg10/a1001985.htm
19 http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/971117/17weap.htm
20
http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.2000.10.23-2000.10.29/msg00106
.html
21 http://www.ci.vancouver.wa.us/
22 Branton, John, "Agents Raid Home of Government Critic Again", The
Columbian, Thursday, November 9, 2000, Page C1.
23 http://www.rdrop.com/%7Ejimw/WCCF8/SemiDisk_booth.jpg (thanks to
Declan McCullagh)
24 http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42962,00.html
25 http://www.csis.org/homeland/reports/hdstrategicappro.pdf
26 http://www.infowar.com/CLASS_3/class3_010698a.html-ssi
27 Easterling, Keller Organization Space (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1999) Part 3., p. 186-7
28 http://www.downwinders.com
29 http://www.hanford.gov/
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