FC: Crypto-convict won't recant: Jim Bell gets out of prison today

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35620,00.html

   Crypto-Convict Won't Recant
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   3:00 a.m. Apr. 14, 2000 PDT

   Before Jim Bell went to prison, he suspected that most government
   officials were corrupt. Three years behind bars later, the
   self-proclaimed Internet anarchist is sure of it.

   After Bell, a cypherpunk who the United States government dubbed a
   techno-terrorist, is released Friday at 10 a.m. PDT, he plans to exact
   revenge on the system that imprisoned him.

   "If they continue to work for the government, they deserve it. My
   suggestion to these people is to quit now and hope for mercy," the
   41-year-old Washington state native said in a telephone interview this
   week from the medium-security federal penitentiary in Phoenix. Bell
   pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 1997.

   The retribution he has in mind? Well, it's decidedly not simple
   thuggery or wild-eyed ranting.

   Before he was arrested, the MIT graduate even gave his scheme a catchy
   title: "Assassination Politics."

   It's an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring
   about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government. The
   system, which Bell spent years talking up online, uses digital cash
   and anonymity to predict and confirm assassinations.

   Darkly brooding during his stints in solitary confinement, Bell has
   honed his idea to a knife-sharp edge, and seems to have shed any
   remaining scruples in the process.

   "I once believed it's too bad that there are a lot of people who work
   for government who are hard-working and honest people who will get hit
   (by Assassination Politics) and it's a shame," he says. "Well, I don't
   believe that any more. They are all either crooks or they tolerate
   crooks or they are aware of crooks among their numbers."

   That kind of fervid rhetoric comes close to crossing the line, says
   one former prosecutor. "It's an oblique threat," says Mark Rasch, now
   a lawyer at Science Applications International Corporation. "Depending
   on how immediate the threat is or how immediate the incitement is, it
   could violate federal law."

   [...]

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