---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 05:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh
To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/0,2326,201980909-14593,00.html
TIME Digital Daily
September 9, 1998
The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber
By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
[Part I of a Series For two years a pair of anonymous Net crackpots
have been posting angry tirades to a cryptography discussion list
under a takeoff of Netly called "Nutly News." Now the FBI and Royal
Canadian Mounted Police say that a digital signature connects them to
a bomb discovered last June in a Canadian courthouse.]
It was about 5 p.m. on August 18. Carl Johnson, 49, was beating the
heat inside the Rialto Theater in what passes for downtown Tuscon,
Ariz. That morning a friend had tipped off Johnson that the police
were trying to find him, but for now he had something else on his
mind: his music. The itinerant musician and writer had spent the last
month furiously scribbling lyrics, friends say, and he wanted a loan
from someone he knew who worked at the theater. It was for some
recording work, Johnson explained. This was going be his third album,
after "My Way or the Highway" and "Please! Stop Me Before I Sing
Again."
But when Johnson left the Rialto, his musical career was cut short by
two federal agents from the IRS's internal security division. They
arrested him on charges of Internet threats against federal judges and
police. The Canadians wanted Johnson, too, on charges of planting a
bomb in a Saskatchewan courthouse.
