Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 11:48:02 -0700 From: Dewaine_McBride@EXCITE.COM (Dewaine McBride) Subject: Cyberspace: The Hot New Threat Regime To: LIBERTARIANS@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
The reference to the Homeland Defense agency is interesting, sort of like defending, [what was it called?] the Fatherland?
"So, say goodnight to Joshua ..."
Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell
http://cartome.org/homeland.htm
Deborah Natsios Cartome
8 June 2001
"On the stand, Joshua';s distraught mother captivated the sympathetic jury, buttressing the attempt to forge emotional links between home, homeland and defense which would become the absorbing narrative of the Jim Bell prosecution."
Homeland
A sparsely attended trial which unfolded in Tacoma';s US district courthouse the first week of April 2001 hardly seemed an event that might open a small but revealing view onto the shifting national security apparatus. But to outside observers following the criminal prosecution of Washington State resident Jim Bell, accused of stalking and intimidating local agents of the IRS, Treasury Department and BATF, the defendant was a symptomatic target, and the government';s stated case against him only a fragment of a more complex campaign linked to the evolving landscape of national and homeland defense.
In the government';s estimation, Bell had placed its Pacific Northwest agents "in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury"1. But for some trial-watchers, the case against James Dalton Bell, 43, was underpinned by a constellation of factors that made him more than the disaffected neighbor projecting antigovernment bile. Bell had invited the government';s fullest prosecutorial zeal because his technical skills placed him in more ambiguous terrain, that of untested gray zones within emerging national defense landscapes, which, by calling into question the impregnability of the national border, have been taking national security tactics incountry in unprecedented ways, deploying new rules of engagement to challenge national security threats within the US domestic interior.
Jim Bell was a man of letters, an electronics engineer and essayist who had authored a ten-part political tract with the combative title Assassination Politics 2, which while lacking in expository sophistication was widely available and debated online, a 1996 disquisition which harnessed new technologies in the service of radical political chnge by laying out an Internet-based mechanism that used encryption and digital cash to arrange anonymous contract killings of corrupt government agents. Notwithstanding the First Amendment, Bell';s audacious refusal to renounce Assassination Politics would become a key factor in the US government';s case against him.
The government';s campaign to rein in AP's insubordinate author reflected a fundamental realignment in the wake of the bombing of Oklahoma City's Federal Building and the Unabomer';s 17-year terror campaign, which saw a new domestic paradigm supplementing the classic model of the offshore national security threat and the enemy Other presumed to be operating beyond the sanctity of US borders and culture. For all the defensive paraphernalia available to the US'; overseas warfighter, the national boundary';s mystique as a deterrent frontier and metaphor had been eroded by shifting power dynamics that were replacing the Cold War';s clear bipolar demarcations.
AP was the kind of rogue pamphleteer';s digital handbill that confirmed that the new enemy of the state might be among us, indeed, might be one of us, a homeboy gone bad, a citizen versed in homegrown genres of dissident literature, a local student or author of radical texts such as the Turner Diaries 3, dog-eared by Tim McVeigh, or Ted Kaczynski';s anti-technology screed, The Industrial Society and its Future. 4
The authorities' focus on Assassination Politics and its electronic mode of mass dissemination was evidence that 'information'; has been designated the hot new threat regime in contemporary battlespace, not least of which in infowar scenarios circumscribed by Homeland Defense, the national security policy being launched as a coordinated domestic response to the perceived growing threat of direct attack against the US mainland, including cyber threats that target the nation';s critical information infrastructures.
Homeland Defense (HD) gives 'information'; equal billng with other hard-core weapon systems biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological elements of the elite "changing spectrum of threat regimes" targeted by coordinating committees like the Defense Science Board Task Force on Intelligence Needs for Homeland Defense 5, whose notices are among others citing HD that are appearing with increasing frequency in our dour ledger of national record, the Federal Register.
Homeland Defense is a slyly nuanced term with peculiar associations. The naionalist turn of phrase 'homeland'; seems a coyly anachronistic representation of a superpower who, after all, jangles the keys to the world';s premier war machine. The locution manages to collapse the geopolitics of lebensraum onto the realpolitik of the suburban gated community, in a style both disingenuously nave and jingoistic at the same time, appealing to an era when government posters issued strident calls-to-arms, like the WWII classic: "Warning! Our Homes Are in Danger Now!" 6 . The vintage war ond poster's fundraising success is being matched by HD's rhetorical gambit, which is swelling the war chest dedicated to neutralizing the homeland';s insidious enemies.