Jim Bell - "Assassination Politics" Essay

"Assassination Politics" Essay

From 1995 through early 1996, Bell authored an essay entitled "Assassination Politics" in which he described the idea of using digital signatures through email to create an assassination market, "predicting" the deaths of government employees. In effect, the arrangement would create an incentive for people to assassinate corrupt government officials, offering a reward that could be claimed by someone willing to submit an entry predicting a given person's death at a particular time. If that person died at about that time, the correct bettor would win the pool money. Bell published his idea in a 10-part essay titled "Assassination Politics" on the alt.anarchism USENET newsgroup.

Described by Wired as "an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government", the essay was nominated for a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design in 1998 as "an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability". Although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that advocating violence against government officials is, in the absence of an "incitement to imminent lawless action", protected by the First Amendment, the publication of "Assassination Politics" put Bell under the scrutiny of federal investigators in 1995. The essay attracted interest from theorists long before and after its author's legal entanglements; libertarian economist Bob Murphy criticised the assassination politics scheme in a pair of articles titled "The Politics of Destruction" in 2002. Murphy claimed that assassination politics was both technically infeasible and ideologically undesirable – from an anarcho-capitalist perspective (crypto-anarchism being a form of anarcho-capitalism). Others, such as R. Sukumaran, argue that assassination markets as suggested by Bell are perhaps technically feasible, but because they are so revolutionary, they "threaten elites" and will be made illegal. However, Sukumaran argues that AP was revived within DARPA by Poindexter with FutureMAP, an attempt to "extrapolate the Iowa Presidential markets system to the prediction of terroristic events" under the "interest of national security."