Assassination Politics is Jim Bell's technique for bringing about the demise of all governments. It consists of a rather simple technique: Create a betting pool where people can bet anonymously on the time of death for a particular individual, using encryption and digital cash. The person betting correctly is presumably the assassin that killed the individual.

The technique seems to be workable, though the effects on society would be scary, to say the least. More information on the technique is available in Jim Bell's writeup at http://jya.com/ap.htm (Everything will not let me link offsite :-(

Details on the actual protocol:

1. The person placing the bet create a public/private keypair (see public key cryptography) puk (public key), prk (private key). This is a unique keypair used only this once.
2. He further creates a secret key s, and encrypts his guess at the date of death along with the puk with s.
3. He bundles the encrypted package with enough digital cash to pay for his bet, encrypts it with the public key of the bookie, and sends it off using some anonymous method (e.g, using anonymous remailers - or possibly a floppy dropped in an envelope).
4. The bookie decrypts the bundle, and takes the digital cash, adding it to the betting pool (after having taken his cut.)
5. If his bet comes true, he sends s to the bookie, again using some anonymous means.
6. The bookie decrypts the bet, sees that it is correct, gets puk from the bet, encrypts digital cash equal to the money in the betting pool using puk, and publishes the result (using some public, untracable channel - e.g, by posting to Usenet.)
7. The person that placed the bet (or somebody he has given prk to) retrieve the result, use prk to decrypt it, and get the digital cash.

Notice that the bookie neither knows who placed the bets nor, until the bet is fulfilled, what the bets are. Thus, there is no knowledge that the bookie can leak that make it possible to catch the assassin.

An observant reader that is versed in digital cash will notice that it is not possible to send out simple digital cash based on cut and choose protocols. This is solvable by using some non-interactive version of digital cash, for instance Stefan Brands' Choiceless Digital Cash (writeup coming). The better would include enough unsigned coins of different denominations to be able to cover any conceivable amount of money from the betting pool in his encrypted bundle; the bookie would pay the bank to have the appropriate subset of these signed before placing them in the result.

The extremist and utterly sociopathic edge of the Cypherpunk movement. This is cryptography and statistics, applied to bounty hunting.

No self-respecting ultra-libertarian cryptoanarchist Cypherpunk¹ wants anything to do with the people who were eventually convicted because of ''Assassination Politics'' (AP), or the other publications of Jim Bell, but they were all posters to the Cypherpunks List, and continue to call themselves Cypherpunks.

Jim Bell himself is an intelligent, ultra-libertarian and highly paranoid graduate of MIT. The details of the protocol he invented are covered in the above writeup, but in a nutshell the idea was ''an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate annihilation of all forms of government''³. The scheme used an untraceable digital currency to put prices on the heads of government officials. The more unpopular the official, the more people contribute to the pool, and the more likely it becomes that someone will go for the money.

Naturally, the federal government took a very dim view of this. The IRS in particular took it rather personally, especially after Bell attacked an IRS building with stink bombs. A subsequent search on his home in Washington turned up chemical precursors to Sarin. Bell was sent to jail for three years.

The investigation into AP continued, and lead to the conviction of cypherpunk Carl Johnson in 1999 for threatening federal officials, and Bill Gates.

" 'You can fuck some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you are going to end up in a body bag or a pine box before you manage to fuck all of the people all of the time.' Am *I* going to whack you out? Maybe..."

- anonymous posting to the Cypherpunks list

Messages such as these were posted anonymously through remailers, but then digitally signed with PGP. This was really, really dumb, because the key that signed these messages was traced back to Carl Johnson himself.

Released in April 2000 after three years in jail, Jim Bell was promptly raided by the IRS again in November, when it became apparent that he was compiling the names and home addresses of US government IRS and BATF employees.

''I'm not going to kill them off, [...] other people are going to do that. I'm going to promote a system.''

- Jim Bell, in an interview with Declan McCullagh for Wired

The proof necessary to charge Bell was found², and charged he was, with four counts of interstate stalking.

The trial itself was somewhat farcical. Jim Bell fired his court-appointed lawyer halfway through the trial, having accused him of malpractice, corruption and death threats, and proceeded to conduct his own defence. This is never a good sign. He then subpoenaed a journalist that was attempting to cover the trial, and attempted to subpoena the very people that he was accused of stalking. Bell suspected them (correctly, it would seem) of illegally putting him under surveillance.

The judge accepted a guilty plea on two of the four counts from Bell's (fired) lawyer, sentenced Bell to ten years in jail, and gave him a $10,000 fine. He also ordered him to attend a mental health program, to stay away from any computers and the Internet, and to help the IRS make him pay his taxes.

Footnotes:
1: They exist, honest.
2: The inventory resulting from the search warrant: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/bell0004.jpg
3: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35620,00.html

Sources, apart from memory (really, how could you forget something this whack)?
http://cryptome.org
http://www.wired.com/
http://www.cluebot.com/search.pl?topic=ap-politics