Assassination Politics: Government, The Bell Tolls For Thee
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Oct 1, 2009 in Commentary • 16 commentsJames Dalton Bell expects to be released from federal prison on December 20th, 2009. Given past events, however, that release may be short-lived, or simply not occur at all.
The US government considers Bell a very dangerous man. So dangerous, in fact, that during his last trial (if it can even be called that) the entire court record was sealed, he was forbidden to subpoena witnesses, and he was forcibly “represented” by a lawyer chosen by the government, whom he was not allowed to fire.
What makes Bell so dangerous? He has an idea, and he’s written about that idea in detail and at length. His version of the idea is one that most would probably classify as “extreme,” but it’s the nature, not the extremity, of the idea which got government into a tizzy.
Bell’s calls his idea “assassination politics:” An anonymous prediction market in the deaths of political figures. In a prediction market, participants place bets on events, and collect if their predictions are correct (the players who aren’t correct lose their money).
Simply put, Bell’s idea is that anonymous, untraceable digital money will allow the enforcement of “good behavior” on politicians. A politician who pisses people off will find his or her name listed in the “assassination market.” Once enough money is in the pool under that politician’s name to make it worth the risk, someone will “bet” on when that politician is going to die, kill (or arrange the killing of) the politician at the time in question, and collect the pool money.
Actually, calling this Bell’s idea is stretching things. He didn’t invent digital money, nor did he invent the concept of an “assassination market.” He just wrote about the political implications of both. He’s now spent more than a decade in the court system and in various prisons for doing so.
Bell’s essay took emerging technological developments to their theoretical extreme, but government prosecutors couldn’t try him for “felony production of essays.” Instead, they patched together a crazy quilt of allegations, ranging from tax evasion to “stalking a federal employee” — some possibly true, some probably false, most unworthy of being called “crimes” even if true.
It would be easy to write off the Bell case as an outlier — a rare case of government overreaction — if not for the fact that in the decade following his initial prosecution, lots of other people have found themselves confronted by police, and some have even gone to jail, for implementing a non-extreme, but central, element of the package he put together. That element? Outing and identifying bad actors in government.
With the advent of small, portable digital cameras, “gotcha” moments have embarrassed “law enforcement” with public documentation of abuses on a regular basis. The response has been a general crackdown — not on bad cops, but on those who expose them. Bloggers, “real journalists” and regular citizens have been roughed up, and in some cases arrested on bogus “disorderly conduct” charges, for nothing more than taking pictures of public employees in action.
Post-9/11, the “global war on terror” has provided new excuses for suppressing the urge to take photos or video footage. In America “suspicious” behavior worthy of police attention now includes taking photographs of buildings, an activity once considered a common pastime. The United Kingdom’s 2008 “anti-terror” law effectively makes it illegal to photograph a police officer, a development no doubt looked upon with approval by American “law enforcement.”
The courts have generally upheld the power of a police officer to demand identification from a citizen, but the trend has gone in the other direction when it comes to the identities of police officers and other government employees. Police departments routinely withhold the identities of officers involved in shooting incidents. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona even subpoenaed and arrested two newspaper editors for publishing his home address. Also in Arizona, Phoenix police raided the home of a blogger who exposed bad cops, stealing his computers and records.
The connection between the increasingly secretive attitude of “law enforcement” and the writings of Jim Bell may seem tenuous, but it isn’t. Politicians desperately want you to not know, and to never learn, three things: That you don’t need them, that they do you more harm than good, and that there might be something you can do about it.
Just as the music industry is losing its ongoing fight with peer-to-peer file sharing tech, government is going to lose its fight with digital photography and videography. And with Jim Bell.
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
Anyone hearing about "Assassination Politics" here for the first time might want to read the original essay, as well as Robert Vroman's analysis.
There are many things wrong with Assassination Politics (AP) which aren't discussed here. And pigs would be attacking cameras and bloggers even if they had nothing to fear from AP.
AP can be applied to politicians and bureau-rats. But it can also be applied to anyone. Don't like some blogger? Start a pool to have him killed. Don't like hippies? Start a pool to have them killed. AP makes no attempt to offer market-type controls. It makes no attempt to establish that someone has done something that rises to the level of death penalty. It offers the defendant no opportunity to prepare a defense, to compel witnesses in the case against him to provide exculpatory testimony. Gee, all the things the government does in Jim Bell's case are things that AP does routinely with everyone it targets.
The case of Joey Dauben is one of many examples where the pigs target bloggers for publishing things the pigs don't want published. They also like to attack people who publish ideas (e.g., divestfromdeath.wordpress.com) with other types of investigations. Where evidence is lacking, they make things up. Of course, this desperation is an excellent thing, because it illustrates how close to the end the state really is.
The work on invisible money has been done. Digital bearer instruments already exist. Extensive anonymising technology exists. It seems to me, however, that there are far more interesting and useful things to do with invisible money (it comes and goes like the wind, invisible, invincible, invulnerable) than AP. The AP tool is crude. And like any tool can be used for good or evil. Rational persons would want extensive safeguards on AP before it was released into the wild.
JIm,
Yes, there are a number of things wrong with "assassination politics."
However, I think you may be missing my point.
My point is not that "assassination politics" would stop cops from attacking photographers and bloggers, or that there aren't other things wrong with it.
My point is that the establishment's fear and loathing of "assassination politics" and of Jim Bell springs from the same root as its fear of the driver with a camcorder, the bystander with a camera, the victim who dialed a friend on his cell phone and left the connection open right before he was attacked etc. It's a fear of technology which could be used, and of people who might use it, to dispute "authoritah."
Citizens abused by police can go the Feds and allege civil rights violations – however they must complain. The answer here is not anarchy, but a level of authority above that committing the abuse.
If your point is that the pigs lie, cheat, steal, murder, and then cover up for each other and that technologies of all kinds are challenging their ability to do so, then it is a fine point indeed.
There are new technologies that, for example, automatically upload pictures from digital cameras and camera phones to a remote web site. That way, when the evil, vicious, bloodthirsty, piratical, hate-mongering, child-raping butchers who work as pigs try to delete the evidence and otherwise obstruct justice, they can be convicted not only of their crimes against individuals, but also of obstructing justice. Personally, I think such tech is of far greater interest that Jim Bell’s misguided ravings from some years ago.
Police ought to fear people. Not the other way around. I don’t want much from the police, only that they quit their jobs. Given that they won’t, I expect many of them to die painfully when their victims rise up to destroy them.
Oh, gosh, Michael, what a lot of nonsense. As if the fed pigs weren’t just as abusive as the city pigs. And who is a level of authority above that of the fed pigs? From the guards themselves, by whom shall we be guarded? And the international pigs?
The UN peacekeepers rape little children in Africa. In the Congo they were found demanding sex for “food aid.” Sex with children. And you want us to believe in your authority above that committing the abuse? No one at the UN has done anything about these child rapers. No one at the UN has ever done anything to hold, say, Henry Kissinger liable for his many crimes. The man is wanted on warrants from several different countries.
What sort of fatuous idiocy do you espouse, Michael? The authorities are scum. Obama is covering up for the torturers. You are proud of a national government that detains people without ever accusing them of any crime and tortures hundreds of its captives to death, and you expect that nationalist socialist “government” to hold the pigs accountable? You are living in a dream world.
Don’t you get it? The pigs hate you. They love smashing a human face with a boot forever. As Orwell pointed out, the point of torture is not to get information, it is to deliver torture. From the mindless jocks and bullies who beat up the geeks in high school to the mindless pigs who beat up the protestors on the streets, it is all the same. There is no higher authority. There are no angels in the shape of kings to rule men with wisdom and virtue. There are only maniacs.
There’s another copy of the AP essays at Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/ap.htm
Mike Vanderboegh has been proposing a similar, though more direct, form of AP, though he doesn’t call it that. If they come after the Three Percenter’s guns, we will directly defend ourselves from the cops, and likely die doing it, but other Three Percenters will then take the war to the politicians and bureaucrats who started it, and to the media talking heads who support it. Just as Bill Clinton did in Serbia.
“My point is that the establishment’s fear and loathing of “assassination politics” and of Jim Bell springs from the same root as its fear of the driver with a camcorder”
Yes, because someone with a camcorder is just like someone trying to assassinate you.
“Outing and identifying bad actors in government.”
How could anyone possibly think that assassination politics would do just, or even mostly, this? (Oh, and it’s a bit rich to call killing someone “outing and identifying” them — “Oh, he’s the dead one over there.”)
In fact, assassination politics would entail “outing and identifying” people in government *whom someone doesn’t like*. Trying to legalize drugs? Some cocaine kingpin is bound to hit you. Want to end the war in Iraq? Halliburton could certainly afford a nice, big contract on you.
What utter stupidity. Prison is a good place for Bell.
Nick (or should I say Gene?),
One major function of a price in a market is to provide information.
An offer of a high price (as a pooled total) for getting the deed done in an assassination market conveys information concerning demand for the service. Obviously including additional statistics (such as how many bidders/bettors were involved in making the total offer) would tell us more about that demand, i.e. whether this is one person offering a lot of money or a lot of people offering a little money each.
If you think that “prison is a good place for” people who have ideas and write about them, you’re a sick fuck.
re: “Yes, because someone with a camcorder is just like someone trying to assassinate you.”
Tell it to the cops treating photography as a form of terrorism. You think they’re all just bad apples, perhaps somehow traumatized by a lens cover at an early age?
I don't think that the point and the power in Bell's idea is that it incites/encourages people to put money into assassination funds and kill people.
I think that it is rather more like Jonathan Swift's idea in "A Modest Proposal", in which he suggested that the solution to the irish famine was for people who could afford it to eat irish babies. If he had been alive today, written that today, ( rather than 200 years ago ), he would probably have been put in prison, not because of inciting people to eat babies, though the govt might pretend that it was for this reason, but because by doing so he exposed the fundamental logic underlying the english treatment of the irish, as a natural resource to be mined to its limits.
So Bell's idea is subversive, not because it incites murder but because it takes the govt's current and increasingly invasive, interventionist, controlling/authoritarian use of technology and money, ( both in the UK and the USA ) to its logical extreme; totally faceless elimination of people who are a problem.
That is why his idea is so dangerous. Not because it might provoke people into creating an assassination market, ( the classic conservative myth of video games encouraging violence; the classic fascist belief in action rather than intellect/ideas/critical thought ), because the people most in danger from the govt are the least likely to choose to kill others, but because it is a clever, brilliant caricature of what the establishment already does with information technology and money.
It is not what people might do because of his idea which worries the establishment, but what they might think/realise.
Hey there PlanetaryJim,
You said that “AP can be applied to politicians and bureau-rats. But it can also be applied to anyone. Don’t like some blogger? Start a pool to have him killed. Don’t like hippies? Start a pool to have them killed. AP makes no attempt to offer market-type controls.”
Being ENTIRELY market-based, AP (or as I prefer to call them, “Liberty Pools”) enables the direct expression of diffuse demand for the demise of some or other individual. Be it a police sniper, some drunk off-duty cop behaving like a fat jerk, or the goose who stopped the NFL player who was on his way to his dying mother’s bedside.
And sure, you might get a pool started for PersonA just because he irritates PersonB who knows where the pools are.
That is no different from accidentally falling afoul of a member of an organised crime gang; you might cut off some ‘made guy’ in traffic, and he organises for his chums to cut off your head.
You can’t abandon markets just because they might be abused: that’s like saying “Well, we can’t permit people to buy and sell stuff freely, because they might buy and sell bombs or child porn”.
There is already a very well-developed market for private assassination – to have an enemy knocked off costs couple of grand. Anyone who pays more than $5k is getting ripped off (in private ‘nobody’-type situations, the person who actually does the deed will be a druggie, who usually gets less than a grand; the rest is margin for the organiser).
Obviously there is greater risk if the target is one of the soi-disant political overlords or their spear-carriers; that’s why there will be a risk premium (and a need for a larger pool in order to ensure that the task is done by a professional… of which there are plenty).
So let’s just say that the primary point of LibertyPools is NOT the raising of funds; it is the pseudonymising of events.
It also helps indicate whether the offender is widely disliked, or whether he’s just irritated one bidder: this is achieved by tracking the number of individual bids.
Lastly but not leastly: the main benefit of LP is NOT the actual ‘offing’ of badly-behaved spear-carriers: it is the CHILLING EFFECT and the DEGRADATION OF OPERATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS of the apparatus of tyranny.
It raises the expected cost of being a tyrant. An that, my friend, is a GOOD thing.
The pools exist (outside of western countries for the moment) and they work.
Cheerio
GT
AP seems to be a hi-tech version of Ostracism, the Athenian practice of exiling people, not for committing crimes but for becoming too influential.
The govt is a poor guardian of the people’s freedoms and people need more direct methods of defending themselves from the state. While AP resorts to violence and will always be criminal, perhaps a way of removing officials by pooling of anonymous digital cash could be developed to finger and proceed against offending tyrants.
Of course, I mean proceed by lawful means.
Hello Geoffrey Transom,
“So let’s just say that the primary point of LibertyPools is NOT the raising of funds; it is the pseudonymising of events.
It also helps indicate whether the offender is widely disliked, or whether he’s just irritated one bidder: this is achieved by tracking the number of individual bids.”
I agreed with you up until that statement, to which my disagreement stems not from your opinion — to which I very much align with — but from the specifics of current cryptological and anonymity technologies. The problem being that if PersonA can anonymously bet in the AP, there is nothing stopping them from making several bets anonymously. So, to use the above example of Halliburton putting a price on a dissident of the war in Iraq (although that example was originally used in an utterly inane way, because, as you’ve pointed out, there’s nothing to prevent a free market from so-called abuse), Halliburton could just as easily, by way of the nature of true anonymity, put in one million bets at one dollar as they could one bet at a million dollars. My point is to call attention to an inherent flaw(?) in the Bell’s system, namely that there is an intrinsic inaccuracy to the information on the number of betters that the AP market provides.
I would not call myself an expert in cryptology or anonymity, but I have researched both to great enough lengths to have a good working knowledge and have given several lectures on the subjects. I do not know of any currently available solution to this problem. I believe it essentially burns down to the definition of anonymous; if you’re capable of being anonymous once, you’re capable of being anonymous a thousand times.
The only possible solution to this flaw which I can foresee would be the development and distribution of some type of hardware device, one for every person on the planet, no more, no less, which would be capable of casting incremental bets. If the devices were designed to be anonymous, say, to only operate through the Tor network, and there was absolutely no way to trace their signal back to the operator, it could be counted how many times each device had made a bet towards the death of a certain person with some degree of accuracy. However, the feasibility of producing roughly seven billion of such devices…well, if we had that level of financial backing and public support then we’d probably be living in an anarchist society already.