You tell me when you spot the terrorism in this case.

Four members of an anti-government movement, known as the Sovereign Movement, have been arrested after a three-year investigation by the Nevada Joint Terrorism Task Force on allegations of money laundering, tax evasion and possessing unregistered machine guns.

The four men were arrested Thursday in the Las Vegas area, said Greg Brower, U.S. Attorney for Nevada.

Samuel Davis, 54, of Council, Idaho; Shawn Rice, 46, of Seligman, Ariz.; Harold Call, 67, of Las Vegas; and Jan Lindsey, 66, of Henderson, were taken into custody, Brower said.

Davis and Rice are charged in a federal indictment with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and 30 counts of money laundering. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine on each count.

Call is charged in a federal indictment with two counts of possession and transfer of a machine gun and three counts of possession of an unregistered machine gun. If convicted, Call faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.

Undercover agents working for the FBI infiltrated the anti-government group, which often met at a Denny’s restaurant at Fremont Street and Boulder Highway, and for $750 purchased parts from Call to turn guns into machine guns, the search warrants said.

Call in one phone conversation said he phoned the IRS to see whether his account had been credited. He said that after asking a woman IRS four times for his account balance, Call learned the IRS had not credited his account. In the phone call with the undercover FBI agent, Call said, Every time I talk to the IRS, I just want to go kill somebody.

In addition to the STEN machine gun, the task force seized a mill and other equipment that allowed Call to transform weapons into machine guns and he demonstrated an AR-15 rifle he had converted to allow for fully automatic firing.

Lindsey is charged in a federal indictment with one count of evasion of payment of tax and four counts of tax evasion. If convicted, Lindsey faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.

The indictments were returned by a federal grand jury Tuesday and unsealed on Thursday. The defendants were to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Lawrence R. Leavitt on Friday.

From March 2008 through the date of the indictment, Davis and Rice allegedly laundered about $1.3 million for FBI undercover agents, court records show. Davis and Rice were told by the undercover agents that the monies were proceeds of a bank fraud scheme, specifically from the theft and forgery of stolen official bank checks.

Davis and Rice laundered the money through a nominee trust account controlled by Davis and through an account of a purported religious organization controlled by Rice. The men took about $74,000 and $22,000, respectively, in fees for their money laundering services before handing the rest of the funds to the undercover FBI agents.

Davis is allegedly a national leader of the anti-government movement, traveling nationwide to teach different theories and ideologies of the movement, court records said. Rice allegedly claims that he is a lawyer and Rabbi, and uses his law school education and businesses to promote his sovereign ideas and to gain credibility in the community.

Call allegedly possessed and transferred an auto sear or lightning link, a combination of firearm parts designed to convert a weapon from a single-shot manual one to automatic use, on Sept. 11, 2008, and Jan. 20, 2009, the court records said. Call allegedly possessed a STEN machine gun on Oct. 9, 2008, which was not registered to him in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.

Lindsey is a retired FBI agent. He and Call are leaders of the Nevada Lawmen Group for Public Awareness, a group that is associated with the sovereign movement.

Lindsey allegedly failed to timely file or pay federal income tax for the years 1999 through 2006, and committed various acts designed to hide his income and assets from the IRS, including filing false tax returns, making false statements to the IRS, placing funds and property in the names of nominees, using fake negotiable instruments to attempt to pay his taxes and filing false documents with the IRS and Clark County.

In a detailed search warrant unsealed Friday, authorities said Lindsey underwent and passed a background investigation in 2000 for his work conducting FBI background checks, but in 2005 he revealed he had not filed his income taxes. The FBI’s Security Division determined he was a security risk and did not grant him clearances.

The search warrant said Lindsey owes the IRS $333,397.78 for unpaid taxes from 1999 to 2002.

On May 7, 2008, Lindsey filed a false tax form for 2000 saying his wife earned $13,638.33 from Azurix and $7,249.77 from Enron, when IRS wage records show she earned $169,109 and $174,142, respectively, from the two companies.

Unsealed search warrant affidavits allege that Rice, Davis, Lindsey and Call are heavily involved in the Sovereign Movement, an extreme anti-government organization whose members attempt to disrupt and overthrow government and other forms of authority by using paper terrorist tactics [N.B.: paper terrorism is a melodramatic phrase for using a flurry of fraudulent legal filings in order to harass an intended target], intimidation, harassment and violence, court records said.

Members of the group believe they do not have to pay taxes and believe the federal government deceived Americans into obtaining Social Security cards, drivers’ licenses, car registrations and wedding licenses, among other official records. The group believes that if these contracts are revoked, persons are sovereign citizens.

Members of this group also believe that U.S. currency is invalid. They widely use fictitious financial instruments, such as fake money orders, personal checks and sight drafts, and participate in redemption schemes where the false financial documents are used to pay creditors.

The FBI-led Nevada Joint Terrorism Task Force includes the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Henderson Police Department, IRS Criminal Investigation, Metro Police, the Nevada Department of Public Safety and the North Las Vegas Police Department in addition to other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in Nevada, Council, Idaho, and Flagstaff and Seligman, Ariz.

— Mary Manning, Las Vegas Sun (2009-03-06): Anti-government group members arrested for money laundering

The Federalis would like you to know that the charges have nothing to do with persecuting the targets for their political beliefs. Yeah, I’ll bet. Which is exatly why an anti-terrorism task force spent three years using federal anti-terrorism laws to infiltrate activist groups, in order to produce a bunch of money laundering, tax evasion, and firearms possession charges, all of which have exactly nothing whatever to do with even a single threat of a terrorist attack. And I’m also sure that the timing of these arrests also had absolutely nothing at all to do with the fact that your deadline for filing your federal income tax return is coming up in just over a month. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage securities that you may be interested in buying.

• A couple of months ago, just before New Years’, [a Las Vegas Metro SWAT team rolled out to Emmanuel Dozier and Belinda Saavedra’s house in Seven Hills, at 9:30 at night (about four or fve hours after dark, around here, during the winter) in order to serve a search warrant. The cops blasted open the gate with a shotgun. They claim they announced themselves but nobody other than the police says that they heard anything other than a lot of noise. Saavedra has a three month old baby and a 13 year old daughter who were in the front of the house when this hard-to-see gang of armed strangers opened fire late at night and started forcing their way in. Saavedra called 911 as soon as she heard the gunfire; the recording of the call is now available online. Dozier got a handgun that he keeps for self-defense and fired back at the gang of strangers, apparently wounding three cops. After a stand-off, once the 911 dispatcher convinced Dozier that the men outside were in fact cops, he dropped the phone, went outside, and surrendered himself with his hands up. Here’s how he looked when he got to the police station:

  

  Then they searched the house. They found no cocaine anywhere. Dozier is being charged with attempted murder and possession of marijuana — even though an inventory of items seized doesn’t include the marijuana or paraphenalia the police claimed to have found with their search warrant. Apparently the search warrant was to gather evidence to bust Dozier on charges of being a low-level cocaine dealer. The cops claim an undercover had already made a few purchases from Dozier; allegedly they had a business relationship with him, but they couldn’t be bothered to meet up with him one more time in order to be able to make an arrest that didn’t involve storming his house late at night while children were present. They told the media that Dozier had no above-the-table job; actually, he had a regular job at the time as a sheet-metal worker. They have not made any claims that Belinda Saavedra committed any crimes whatsoever at any point, either related to the drugs or related to the shooting; but the did make sure to force her down and rough her up after she had surrendered (since she wouldn’t calm down or shut her mouth while they shot at her house, hollered at her, took away her baby and called her a dumbass for her trouble).

  Meanwhile, the D.A. has taken steps to take away her children and charged her with abuse and neglect — even though, remember, she is not accused of any independent crimes whatsoever. The explanation is that she is being charged with abuse and neglect because she doesn’t have a job outside the house. There’s no sign that being a stay-at-home mother (while her boyfriend holds down a job as a sheet metal worker and her mother works two jobs in order to help support her grandchildren) has caused either kid any hurt or want. But the prosecutor does inform us, in the complaint, that the 13 year old was traumatized when cops started a gunfight at her house. I wouldn’t be surprised, but whose fault is that?

  The cops refuse to answer any questions about the reasons for staging a late-night SWAT raid in this case or about the discrepancies between their public statements about the suspects and the documented facts that emerged later. Dana Gentry reports that Police refuse to answer but a Metro spokesman did tell me extreme measures are necessary to guard against some liberal judge throwing out the case. Metro are liars and child abusers who routinely use maximal force in situations where they could easily have gotten anything they needed to get by other means. They also spend tremendous amounts of time, and tremendous amounts of money that taxpayers are forced to turn over to them against our will, prosecuting people who — even if everything alleged against them is true — are doing nothing more than selling a valued product to a willing customer, and who never should have been threatened or hassled by the police in the first place.

• Las Vegas Metro made a road stop at about 4 in the morning on February 6. They suspected that the driver was drunk. He got out of the car and ran away on foot. Cops sent a helicopter to look for him and concluded (based on heat in the yard) that he was hiding out in a backyard in a nearby neighborhood. He wasn’t — turns out he was hiding in a different part of the neighborhood — but the family’s dog, a pit-bull named Coco, was. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the cops decided that catching a DUI suspect was so incredibly urgent, and respecting other people’s private property being, after all, no concern at all to Las Vegas Metro’s important work, they would send a gang of seven cops, first to barge into the next-door neighbor’s yard without asking, and then, again without asking anyone’s permission, to jump the wall into the backyard where they thought the suspect would be. The family dog came out and confronted this gang of strangers barging into her territory; she didn’t actually attack anybody, but, after all, she was only surrounded by seven fully-grown, professionally-trained, and heavily-armed police officers; her continued existence clearly posed a threat, so they shot the dog dead. The cops took responsibility by issuing an Oops, our bad to the bereaved family — along with a self-serving claim that the cops just had to shoot the dog in self-defense. (No, they didn’t. Self-defense is no longer an excuse when you put yourself in danger by invading somebody else’s private property.) Then, public servants that they are, they left Jose Fernandez and Yurisel de la Torre by themselves to cover the $200+ bill for cremating their dead dog.

  Metro are home invaders and dog killers who routinely exercise contempt for private property, instigate violent confrontations in order to deal with trivial crimes, shoot first and ask questions later, and then excuse their use of maximal force as the necessary means to completely unnecessary ends.

• While we’re here, I should also mention that the Nevada Crime Technology Advisory Board, representing Las Vegas Metro, the FBI, and several other law enforcement outfits from around Nevada, wants a new law passed that will allow police in Nevada to unilaterally seize the balances on prepaid debit cards without any kind of warrant — because, while they don’t have any evidence to present in any particular case, they reckon that somebody, somewhere using one of these things might turn out to be a bad guy selling drugs to willing customers — which is apparently enough of a reason to give these lying, child-abusing, dog-killing, home-invading, itchy-trigger-fingered irresponsible thugs a unilateral right to seize private citizens’ money, by arbitrary fiat, with no need for any kind of prior judicial review.

There’s a cliché around here, about how longtime locals compare the way things are now — for better or worse — with the way things used to be, back when the mob ran Vegas. The problem with this is that the mob never stopped running Vegas. The only thing that’s changed is the name of the families, and the color of the tailored suits.

I spent most of this morning reading through The American Prospect’s recent insert on the politics of mental illness. With only two exceptions, the articles generally range from dull political hack-work to unsettling exercises in missing the point to disturbing demands for massive, federally-driven centralization and escalation in the size, scope, power, and invasiveness of State-backed institutional psychiatry, its regimentation of everyday life, and its access to fresh captives to call patients. (The two exceptions were a first-person account by a woman who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, which is mainly about how you should be nice to people who have been labeled mentally ill and treat them like human beings worthy of your concern; and another article on treatment alternatives, which spends about half of the article talking about Clubhouse model centers, which were founded by former inmates of the psychoprison system, which are strictly voluntary, and which are organized around principles of participation and equality among the crazy owner-residents and their hired helpers.)

I was originally referred to the feature by an Utne online feature focusing on the articles that had most to do with the intersection between institutional psychiatry and the prison system; the point of that feature (and the articles it referenced) was to call for more diversion programs and mental health courts. If you’re not familiar with the concepts, the way a diversion program works is this: somebody, usually somebody poor, gets busted by the cops for doing something that endangered nobody, or at most endangered herself, like consensual drug use, or prostitution, or just acting kind of funny in public, but which other, usually more privileged, people in her society find distasteful, contemptible, or trashy. She is forcibly restrained and locked in a cage for this victimless crime. Some professional busybody, usually a shrink or a government social worker, is sent by to declare that the poor thing can’t help herself, and that, rather than being locked in a cage for even longer, she should have a judge order her into a program that will teach her what a worthless shit she has been all her life, and how she needs to submit to the help being forced on her by court order so that she can live a worthwhile and healthy life, where healthy is defined as holding a low-wage job in a legal capitalist workplace, paying a landlord regularly for an apartment which you keep reasonably neat and tidy, and generally living up to a lowered set of social expectations and not acting in ways which your neighbors find obnoxious. It is an overt tool of normalization through the use of force and the threat of even more violent measures against a captive victim-beneficiary (usually, the threat of throwing you back into a hellhole jail or prison; if you have children, this is often accompanied with the threat of abducting your children and putting them into the hellhole foster care system). This is then passed off as an act of liberal humanitarianism and wise statesmanship by self-congratulatory government legislators, judges and bureaucrats. These programs typically make use of special court systems in which defendants are stripped of normal procedural rights on the excuse of a non-adversarial process supposedly being carried out for the good of the defendant’s soul — like a mental health court, which is a special court of inquisition, in which defendants have no right to a trial by jury, no due process rights against self-incrimination, and in which it is expected that the defendant’s legal representative will be collaborating with the judge, with or without the knowledge of her client, to come up with invasive and controlling treatment regimens of captivity in institutions, submission to all kinds of invasive surveillance by doctors and government hirelings, and, more or less invariably, some form or another of forced drugging, with the threat of prison used as a back-up plan if the defendant refuses to comply. Once again, this reversion to the standards of jurisprudence popular in the early modern trials for heresy and witchcraft, usually inflicted only to control the behavior of non-violent offenders, i.e., as an act of aggression against those who have done nothing to invade anyone else’s rights, is passed off as both pragmatic cost-control and humanitarian concern for its victims.

Of course, it’s generally true that diversion programs and mental health courts and the like are in some ways notably better than what they replace — that is, the torture and confinement of harmless people in government jails and prisons. Being whacked on the head with a hammer is better than being shot in the head by a shotgun; but if someone came up to me and said I ought to kill you for what you’ve done, but, you know, I feel sorry for you, so I’m going to divert you into the hammer-whacking instead, I think the proper response is, Well, don’t do me any favors. The real solution is for the State to stop violently persecuting people who aren’t invading anyone else’s rights, and for shrinks and social workers and all the rest of the crew to confine themselves to offering help to those who are looking for help, rather than having a dangerous street gang grab people off the street for their own particular use.

But of course you won’t see that, or anything like that, unless, and until, the majority and the politico-therapeutic power elite no longer agree amongst themselves more or less unanimously on the propriety of treating anyone who can be labeled crazy as something less than a fellow individual human being, with her own thoughts, desires, goals, dreams, and reasons for doing the things that she does. But of course if you insist on respecting a crazy person’s inner life, or on taking her seriously as a human being with thoughts and reasons of her own, which, even if you disagree with those thoughts and reasons, can and ought to be understood and engaged with, rather than fixed, then you will be immediately shouted down by a hooting horde of self-appointed experts and advocates who will insist that you are romanticizing a serious illness, and who will make ridiculous pronouncements like this comment in response to an article written after David Foster Wallace killed himself:

It is nothing more than dangerous romanticism to think that we can logic our way out of mental illness.

As a culture, we need to start accepting that the gifts of the mentally ill — in this case, I’m told, his brilliance as a writer and thinker — often come with dangerous deficits.

But thinking and writing wasn’t enough to cure this man’s illness, just like a bottle of Wild Turkey wasn’t enough, either.

Don’t think you can make sense out of youngish man hanging himself. There is no sense in it. It is mental illness. Untreated mental illness, that had probably been overly glorified as profundity.

— Gina Pera, in re: David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)

The problem is that this is utter nonsense. We’re not talking about someone who, oops, managed to hang himself by accident. He had his own reasons for doing so, and everyone I know, either personally or through writing, who killed themselves or tried to kill themselves, had some fairly specific reasons for wanting to die. Often they are willing to tell you what those reasons are if you ask, or even if you did not ask. These are acts that are invariably part of a larger life story, and they are always done for perfectly explicable reasons that are plausibly connected with what somebody is going through in their life.

Those reasons, once explained, may be bad reasons; they may even be bizarre reasons. But it is completely irresponsible, and chillingly dehumanizing to the people whose lives you claim to care about, to talk as if those reasons just didn’t exist, even when it’s been explained to you what they were, or as if they can simply be waved off just so many meaningless chirps coming from a broken brain, rather than the results of a serious and impassioned process of reasoning and deliberation. Bad reasons need to be engaged with, not fixed, and the fact that you happen not to agree with them doesn’t make them any less real, or any less important in understanding why people do what they do, or any less vital to understanding the best way to help them if you really care about their lives.

One of the important points that Peter Breggin makes repeatedly in Toxic Psychiatry is the way in which official psychiatric ideology about mental illness literally dehumanizes people labeled crazy, and provides an excuse for laziness and aggressive disregard for the integrity of mental patients’ lives. The problem is almost never that what somebody being labeled crazy does or says cannot be understood; it’s that the rest of us fail, or actively refuse to understand it, and we rationalize our failure and blame it on the person herself:

Biological psychiatrists—nowadays most psychiatrists—are fond of saying You can’t talk to a disease. The communication of so-called schizophrenics makes no sense at all to these doctors who want to control symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, with drugs, electroshock, and incarceration.

The idea that these extremes of irrationality are due to a disease is inseparable from the survival of psychiatry as a profession. If schizophrenia is not a disease, psychiatry wold have little justification for using its more devastating treatments. Lobotomy, electroshock, and all of the more potent drugs, including neuroleptics and even lithium, were developed at the expense of locked-up people, most of whom were labeled schizophrenic. The search for biochemical and genetic causes keeps psychiatrists, as medical doctors, in the forefront of well-funded research in the field. The notion that patients have sick brains justifies psychiatry’s unique power to treat them against their will. It also bolsters psychiatry’s claim to the top of the mental health hierarchy. In short, if irrationality isn’t biological, then psychiatry loses much of its rationale for existence as a medical specialty.

— Peter Breggin (1991). Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 23. #

He stresses that this is true of so-called affective disorders just as it is true of so-called schizophrenia.

When we cannot readily identify with the depressed person’s plight, more often it is due to our own lack of understanding than to the obscurity of the causes.

— Peter Breggin (1991). Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 126.

And, once again, on schizophrenia:

On July 27, 1986, 60 Minutes produced a show entitled Schizophrenia. It was based on biopsychiatric theories, and one of their experts declared, We know it’s a brain disease now. It’s like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease. On the show, vignettes of patients were presented to impress the audience with the bizarre quality of their communications, and hence the absurdity of any psychological meaning or underpinning to their disease.

The first 60 Minutes patient, Brugo, bolsters his identity with spirituality, as well as religion, and declares that he’s not extinct: And I’m Croatian Hebrew, which is Adam and Eve’s kin. And I have been Croatian Hebrew for centuries and cent—upon centuries. And I’m a Homo-erectus man, and I’m also part Neanderthal, and I mean to keep that heritage, ‘cause I’m not extinct.

Packed into these few remarks is symbolism about his desperate need for personal value and dignity, his identification with religion and humanity, and perhaps his awareness of primitive impulses stirring inside himself, as well as his fear of personal extinction. Here is more than enough material to stimulate anyone’s desire to communicate with him.

The second patient, Jim, is dismissed by the interviewer because he is convinced he was shot to death when he was a baby. Yet his brief remarks seem like a metaphor for child sexual abuse by a male: I had my head blown off with a shotgun when I was two years old. And—and before that, things happened in my crib. I remember all these things and stuff, but I just remember, you know. I remember all this stuff.

A therapist with experience in listening to people immediately would wonder about what lies behind Jim’s direct hints about terrifying memories from early childhood, not to mention the symbolism of the crib in relation to his present trapped condition. More than one patient of mine has begun with just such anguished fragments of memory before discovering the agony of his or her abusive childhood and its relationship to current entrapments.

. . . The patients’ quotes were selected by 60 Minutes to demonstrate that so-called schizophrenia is a biochemical disease rather than a crisis of thinking, feeling and meaning. Yet people with real brain disease—such as Alzheimer’s, stroke, or a tumor—don’t talk symbolically like these people do.

Instead of metaphors laced with meaning, brain-damaged people typically display memory difficulties as the first sign that their mind isn’t working as well as it once did. They have trouble recalling recently learned things, like names, faces, telephone numbers, or lists. Later they may get confused and disoriented as they display what is called an organic brain syndrome. In fact—and this is very important—advanced degrees of brain disease render the individual unable to think in such abstract or metaphorical terms. The thought processes that get labeled schizophrenia require higher mental function and therefore a relatively intact brain. No matter how bizarre the ideas may seem, they necessitate symbolic and often abstract thinking. That’s why lobotomy works: the damage to the higher mental centers smashes the capacity to express existential pain and anguish. As we’ll find out, it’s also why the most potent psychiatric drugs and shock treatment have their effect.

How are we to approach people who get labeled schizophrenic? Do we think of them as troubled humans struggling in a self-defeating style with profound psychological and spiritual issues, usually involving their basic worth or identity? Or do we view them as if they are afflicted with physical diseases, like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease, in which their feelings, thoughts, anguishes, and aspirations play no role? Do we try to understand them, or do we try to physically fix them? . . . If we are beings rather than devices, then our most severe emotional and spiritual crises originate within ourselves, our families, and our society. Our crises can be understood as conflicts or confusion about our identities, values, and aspirations rather than as biological aberrations. And as self-determining human beings, we can work toward overcoming those feelings of helplessness generated by our past spiritual and social defeats.

By contrast, the typical modern psychiatrist—by disposition, training, and experience—is wholly unprepared to understand anyone’s psycho-spiritual crisis. With drugs and shock treatment, the psychiatrist instead attacks the subjective experience of the person and blunts or destroys the very capacity to be sensitive and aware. No wonder the treatment of mental patients often looks more like a war against them. It often is.

— Peter Breggin (1991). Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 23–26.

See also:

• GT 2008-08-05: Iatrogenesis
• GT 2008-06-24: Medicated madness
• GT 2008-05-05: Texas psychoprisons
• GT 2007-10-29: For her own good

Fellow counter-economists,

Let’s suppose that you want to send somebody an message that contains sensitive information which you want only the person getting the message to see — say an important password or an account number or a transaction that you’d rather keep on the down-low, for no particular reason worth mentioning.

The problem is that e-mail sent over the Internet is normally sent in plain text. Like anything else on the Internet, it passes through several different servers and routers on its way to its final destination. If one of these servers or routers is compromised by a snoop (your ISP, a malicious hacker, the Federalis, No Such Agency…) they can easily set up the computer to keep a copy of your e-mail for the snoop to read at his or her leisure. This is a how-to guide for one way to solve that problem: setting up and using encryption for your e-mail (specifically OpenPGP double-key encryption). In particular, I’ll show you how to set up encryption using GPG (the GNU Privacy Guard) for Gmail, in the Firefox web browser, on a computer running Windows XP or Vista.

The good news is that, while encryption used to be something of a nerd pastime and a hacker dark art, new tools have been developed which make encryption relatively easy to set up and painless to use even for casual computer users. Practically speaking, this is a very important development for anyone who occasionally needs a secure channel for sharing sensitive information. (For example, as a web developer I’ve already guided a few of my friends and business contacts through setting up GPG so that we can safely exchange user login credentials.) If you know where to go for thse tools, you no longer need technical expertise, or even a great deal of patience, to get up and running with an easy-to-use setup for double-key encryption of your personal e-mail. You just need a bit of guidance, and that’s what this is for.

I’ve chosen to walk you through the set-up for a very specific software environment because that helps keep things simple and concrete, and because this particular software environment is one that a lot of people — including a lot of my friends — happen to use. But if you don’t use exactly this software set-up, you can still get something from this how-to by changing out one or more of the steps.

A bit of background. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a system for double-key encryption. Double-key encryption works by generating a paired set of encryption keys. A message that’s encrypted using one key can only be decrypted using the other, but someone who has the one key can’t use it to generate the other key. The practical upshot is that you can use one key as a public key, which you give out to everyone, and the other as a private key, which you guard as a secret.

Any message that is encrypted using your private key can be decrypted and read by anyone with access to your public key (meaning, effectively, everybody), but — since only you have access to your private key — it guarantees that only someone with access to your private key (meaning, hopefully, only you) could have written the message. So it acts as a secure form of electronic signature, verifying that it was really you who sent the message.

Any message that is encrypted using your public key could have been generated by anyone with access to your public key (anyone). But it can only be decrypted and read by someone with access to your private key (only you).

And, similarly, if you’re communicating with someone else who uses PGP, and whose public key you have access to, you can (1) encrypt the message using your own private key, and then (2) encrypt it again using their public key — guaranteeing that only your intended recipient can read the message (since only they have access to their own private key), and that only you could have written the message (since only you have access to your private key).

Nowadays, most people who use the technology behind PGP actually use a program called GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) which is an open-source implementation of the same technology. For Windows users, there is a version of GPG called Gpg4Win.

GPG itself is a set of command-line utilities that will generate keys, manage a keyring, and encrypt any text that you pipe in to the program. You could in principle do any encryption you needed to do just by learning how to use these command-line tools, then cutting and pasting to and from text files. But it’ll be far less awkward to manage your keyring through WinPT, a graphical tool that comes with the Windows GPG package. WinPT will allow you to create your own key pair, to upload your public key to a key server so that your friends can find it, and to download your friends’ public keys so that you can encrypt your e-mails to them. Then, if you use Firefox, you can install an add-on that will integrate GPG with the Gmail interface; at the moment, I’d recommend FireGPG.

So here’s a step-by-step guide for getting up and running:

1. Install GPG and WinPT from http://www.gpg4win.org/

2. Launch WinPT from the Start Menu. A small icon of a key should appear in your system try. Meanwhile, you should now see a First Start dialog box:

   

   Choose Generate a GnuPG key pair and mash OK. You’ll be asked for a name and e-mail address; fill in the primary e-mail address that you’ll be using to send and receive encrypted e-mail. (If you have more than one e-mail address that you’ll want to use, don’t worry; we’ll come back to that later.)

You'll be asked to choose a passphrase for securing your private key. Choose one that's secure -- preferably both long and easy to remember without writing it down. You can include any characters that you can type, including spaces, numbers, punctuation, etc.

The passphrase is used as a cipher on your private key, to increase security, so that you can store it on your computer, or even on a shell account, without having to worry that someone who uses your computer for a few minutes, or has a shell account on the same machine, will be able to compromise your identity by copying the keyring file: only someone with *both* the keyring file and your passphrase will be able to use your private key. You'll need to be ready to enter this passphrase whenever you want to send a signed message, or to read an encrypted message sent to you.

After you've entered the passphrase a second time (to make sure there were no typos), WinPT will churn for a while as it generates a key pair for you.

Once WinPT announces that your key pair has been generated, it will suggest that you make a back-up of your keys on a CD-R, USB drive, or some other external storage, to guard against the day when your hard drive fails (as all hard drives eventually will).

You should probably take their advice: if you lose the local copy of your private key and don't have a back-up, there is no way whatsoever for you to recover it. If you're worried about saving a copy of your private key, remember that your private key is protected by your passphrase.

1. Now that you’ve created your key pair, it should appear on your keyring: double click on the key icon in your system tray to look at the Key Manager with your newly-minted key pair in it.

If you have more than one e-mail address that you'd like to associate with the same public key, you can associate secondary e-mail addresses with your key pair by right-clicking on your key pair and selecting Add --> User ID.... Then follow the instructions in the dialog box.

Next, you'll want to make it easy for your friends to access your public key, so that they can verify your signature and so that they can encrypt messages for your eyes only. (Remember, you can pass out a *public* key to absolutely anyone; that only allows them to *encrypt* messages *to you*; it doesn't allow anyone to *decrypt* the messages you're receiving.) To do this, right-click on your key pair and select <q>Send to Keyserver,</q> then click on each keyserver in the submenu.

1. Now you’ll want to import public keys for people who you might want to send encrypted e-mails to. To start grabbing public keys, click on the Keyserver menu entry. A dialog box should immediately pop up; enter your friend’s e-mail address and then mash Search. For testing purposes, you can grab my public key, for feedback@radgeek.com (minus quotes).

When a key (hopefully) pops up for the e-mail address you entered, highlight the key and pull it in to your keyring by hitting <q>Receive.</q>

If everything goes well, you should see the new public key imported into your keyring.

If you have any trouble getting your friends' public key from a key server, you can always just ask them to send you a copy by e-mail, copy the block of gibberish they send you onto the clipboard, and then Import the public key from within WinPT. Alternatively, if you can call up a copy of their public key in your web browser (through webmail or from your friend's web page), you can use FireGPG, the add-on I discuss below, to directly import the public key from your web browser.

1. Now, start up Firefox and go to http://getfiregpg.org. Then install the FireGPG add-on.

Once you've clicked through the dialog boxes, and successfully installed FireGPG, restart Firefox.

1. After you’ve restarted Firefox, go to Gmail and try composing a new message to me at feedback@radgeek.com. There should be some new buttons available for when you send the message.

Hit <q>Sign, encrypt and send.</q> You should be asked to select a public key from a list. You should select *two* public keys: one for the e-mail address you are sending the message to, and one for yourself. This will encrypt it so that only you and your intended recipient can read the message. (You want to select your own public key in addition to your recipient's so that you can read the saved copy at a later date if you want to; if you choose *only* your recipient's key, then not even you will be able to read the message.)

To select multiple addresses, hold down the <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> button as you click each one. Once you've selected the right public keys, mash <q>OK.</q>

Next, you'll be asked to select a private key to use in signing the message. This should be your own key. Highlight the key and mash <q>OK</q> again.

Then enter your passphrase if FireGPG asks for it.

If all goes as it should, your message should be encrypted so that only I can read it, and sent on to me; when I receive it, I should be able to decrypt it using my own private key, and thus verify that you've got a working GPG installation.

1. If I receive your e-mail and I’m able to import your public key from a keyserver, I can then send you an encrypted message so that you can verify things on your end. If you get a GPG-encrypted message, what you’ll generally see is a bunch of alphanumeric gibberish encased in a distinctive block.

FireGPG should recognize an encrypted message and automatically give you the option to <q>Decrypt this message.</q> Click through (and enter your passphrase if requested) to view the original message.

1. FireGPG offers a number of nice features for direct integration with Gmail, but you can also use it to encrypt, decrypt, sign, or verify text in any other webmail service or any other online form. For example, to sign and encrypt text outside of Gmail, ust select the text, right-click, and choose FireGPG —> Sign and encrypt from the pop-up menu.

FireGPG will ask you for the public key to encrypt with and the private key to sign with, as usual; when you’re done, the selected text should be replaced with an encrypted block that only your selected recipient(s) can read.

Before I go, I’d like to note a few things.

First, as with any computer how-to, your mileage may vary. In particular, as of press time, Gmail has recently introduced a new interface, and FireGPG seems to be doing an imperfect job of coping with it; if you have trouble using FireGPG under the new interface, try flipping over to the old interface (or vice versa), or restarting Firefox. If nothing works, contact me with as much information as possible about what you’re trying to do and what’s going wrong, and I’ll see what I can do to ferret out the problem or point you in the right direction.

Second, let’s be clear about what GPG will do for you and what it will not. GPG provides point-to-point encryption; it ensures that even if a snoop can intercept your e-mail en route, she or he can’t tell what’s in it. It does not conceal the fact that you’re writing to the person you’re writing to. It also does not conceal the fact that you’re writing something you chose to encrypt. If you’re worried about people snooping on what you say, you should keep in mind that they may be able to get a lot of information just by being able to identify who is talking to whom. (If y’all find this how-to helpful, let me know, and we can discuss some techniques for addressing these other issues.)

Finally, remember, no defense against snoops in the middle will do you any good if the intended recipient of the message chooses to turn the information over to a snoop. Technology can secure the line between so that you can say what you want to somebody that you trust, without the danger of a third party overhearing. But no technology substitutes for knowing who you can trust and what you can say to whom.

If you have any questions, contact me or drop me a line in the comments. Let me know how it works for you. Consider this my contribution, to the extent that it works out for you, to revolutionary agorist praxis. Enjoy your privacy!

See also:

• Configuring GPG (Mac OS X) explains how to get GPG up and running on Mac OS X, and explains integration with several OS X mail readers. If you use web mail, then you can use these instructions to get GPG running, and then follow my instructions to set up Firefox with FireGPG, which should be more or less the same on Windows or on a Mac.

• Beginners Guide for GnuPG in Ubuntu explains how to getGPG up and running under Ubuntu Linux (or any other flavor of Linux that supports apt-get). Again, you can use these instructions to set up GPG and then follow my instructions to set up Firefox with FireGPG, which should be more or less the same on Windows or on Linux.

• If you use a desktop e-mail reader rather than webmail, many popular programs have add-ons, plugins, or other ways to integrate GPG painlessly with the e-mail program. For example, I use Mozilla Thunderbird, and an excellent add-on called Enigmail. Similar tools exist for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.

Here are some samples excerpted from David Weigel’s interview with Bob Barr in the most recent issue of reason.

reason: Some of what you’re talking about, though, you supported in Congress. You voted for the Iraq war.

Bob Barr: The Iraq war was presented as something that was based on sound intelligence: a clear and present danger, an immediate threat targeting the United States by the Saddam Hussein regime. We now know [sic] that the intelligence was not there to support those arguments. Many of us, including myself, gave the administration the benefit of the doubt, presumed that this would be an operation that was well founded, well thought-out, well strategized, when in fact it wasn’t. There was no clear strategy, and we’ve paid a very, very heavy price for that.

. . .

reason: What about the PATRIOT Act?

Bob Barr: This was presented to us immediately after 9/11. I took what might be called sort of a leadership role in Congress in marshaling a lot of different groups in opposition both to the PATRIOT Act generally and to specific onerous provisions in it. Several factors caused me to sort of go against my gut reaction and vote for the PATRIOT Act.

The administration did in fact work with us and agree to several pre-vote changes to the PATRIOT Act that did mitigate some of the more problematic provisions in it. The administration also, from the attorney general on down, gave us personal assurances that the provisions in the PATRIOT Act, if they were passed and signed into law, would be used judiciously, hat they would not be used to push the envelope of executive power, that they would not be used in non-terrorism-related cases. They gave us assurances that they would work with us on those provisions that we were able to get sunsetted, work with us to modify those and to look at those very carefully when those provisions came up for reauthorization. The administration also gave us absolute assurances that it would work openly and thoroughly report to the Congress, and by extrapolation to the American people [sic!], on how it was using the provisions in the PATRIOT Act. In everyone of those areas, the administration has gone back on what it told us.

— Bob Barr Talks, interview with David Weigel in reason (November 2008), p. 29.

In other words, Bob Barr is either an incredible sucker or a willfully ignorant fool, who supported two of the most infamous acts of a miserable and disastrous Presidency, because he spent years blindly trusting in absurd claims and ridiculous promises made by salivating Republicans in the executing branch of the government, which most people outside of the government, including almost all libertarians, already knew to be lies. He trusted in administration flunkies’ assurances over the warnings of civil libertarians, even though the assurances were empty gestures that would not hold back power grabs even for a second as soon as anyone in the DOJ or DOD or DHS decided that a power-grab is what they wanted. And he trusted in the government spooks’ and government flunkies’ claims of intelligence even though these claims were obviously absurd, and widely exposed as such at the time by anti-war writers, because in spite of all that Bob Barr would rather give his colleagues, the government spooks and administration flunkies, the benefit of the doubt.

In other news, Movement of the Libertarian Left veteran and Southern California ALLy Wally Conger has recently posted an online edition of the MLL’s Issue Pamphlet #5, Our Enemy, the Party, originally published in 1980 and reissued by Sam Konkin in 1987.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-26: Goodbye’s too good a word, babe.
• GT 2008-01-25: Take the A-Train
• GT 2008-01-10: Come out, my people, come out….