FC: Jim Bell, homeland defense, and the national security state

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Wed Aug 15 2001 - 22:34:19 PDT

  • Next message: Declan McCullagh: "FC: AP reportedly doesn't like quoting one sentence from articles"

    [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 <totoat_private> 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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