TACOMA, Washington -- Jim Bell took the witness stand in federal court on Friday to argue he was attempting to document illegal behavior, not stalk government agents.
Bell described his electronic research last year -- which the Justice Department says led federal agents to fear for their safety -- as entirely lawful and said he never intended to hurt or threaten anyone.
The 43-year-old chemist and entrepreneur freely admitted he bought motor vehicle databases and did Internet searches on the names of Treasury Department agents as part of his effort to uncover illegal surveillance by the U.S. government. Bell is charged with five federal counts of interstate stalking, and the jury trial began last Tuesday.
A key part of the government's case against Bell is a political essay he wrote titled "Assassination Politics," a thought experiment which advocates a method to slaughter miscreant federal officials using anonymous remailers, digital cash, and the Internet.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robb London said that since Bell has refused to renounce his beliefs incorporated into that essay, he should be viewed as a menace to society. London said Bell's research into personal information about agents was an "obsessive campaign by an individual to harass them."
"Mr. Bell was posting things publicly on the Internet," London said. "You can't go out there and do this stuff and think there's no chance your victims will find out."
This case raises the question of what actions are protected by the First Amendment's guarantees of free expression and what crosses the line and becomes illegal harassment.
Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- which includes Washington state -- ruled that a website sporting the home addresses of doctors who performed abortions and exhortations against them was protected by the First Amendment.
In the opinion, Judge Alex Kozinski wrote that "political speech may not be punished just because it makes it more likely that someone will be harmed at some unknown time in the future by an unrelated third party."
Bell's defense attorney, Robert Leen, has likened his client to an investigative journalist hoping to expose government wrongdoing. Bell said he believed at the time that Treasury Department agents rewarded a fellow inmate with a reduced sentence in exchange for him assaulting Bell.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner appeared to consider that view, then reject it. Tanner asked whether the mere authorship of an essay was "sufficient to put people on the alert?"
London, the prosecutor, replied that the difference is that Bell "coupled it with a reference to a particular individual."
The government argues that far from being only a passive essayist, Bell intended to terrify agents and last October posted a message to the cypherpunks list that said "Say Goodnight to Joshua." Joshua is the name of the son of Jeff Gordon, who happens to have the same name as the IRS agent who conducted repeated investigations of Bell.
Bell told Wired News last November that he was researching information about Gordon. "I am thinking very strongly of picketing (IRS Agent) Jeff Gordon's house. I don't intend to violate any laws when I do that. It's conceivable that they won't appreciate my picketing their house," Bell said.
Because Bell repeatedly said he would not violate the law, his attorney hopes to use those statements and other evidence to erect a First Amendment defense. Leen said he plans to ask Judge Tanner to tell the jury that because the First Amendment protects advocacy of violent acts, they can find Bell to be not guilty as charged.
In 1982, the Supreme Court decided a case called NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. that dealt with a boycott by the NAACP against white-owned businesses in Mississippi. NAACP activists wearing black hats stood outside stores and wrote down names of customers, which were then read aloud and published in newspapers.
The Supreme Court parsed this closely, saying that the NAACP may have created a fear of violent retaliation but had not directly "authorized, ratified, or directly threatened acts of violence."
Bell testified that he was an MIT graduate born in Akron, Ohio, who worked at Intel after college, then founded his own company called SemiDisk Systems in 1982 to sell external RAM disks for PCs.
After SemiDisk Systems closed in 1992, Bell said he developed a "phobia" of the IRS and taxes and anything relating to those topics. "I found it very difficult to deal with large-scale financial matters," he said.
That led to an IRS investigation of Bell that culminated in a plea bargain agreement he signed in 1998 for, among other things, use of false or fraudulent Social Security numbers.
Bell's explanation? He doesn't believe in SSNs "as a general means of identification" and used numbers like 123-45-678 when filling out non-essential forms. When he had to fill out official documents at his next job, he misremembered: "I used my SSN so infrequently that I got it wrong. Two digits were reversed."
Bell also said that -- contrary to the government's claims -- Assassination Politics could not be implemented for decades.
He said he has been a member of the Libertarian Party and indicated his political beliefs were anarcho-libertarian, saying: "I don't advocate chaos. I don't think there should be a lack of order. I think there should be a lack of orders."
Bell will take the witness stand again on Monday. The trial is expected to last only until mid-week, since Tanner has quashed all of Bell's subpoenas for defense witnesses.
