<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/HeyDoYouThinkIWouldJustMakeThisUp.html>
FBI
and CIA Suspect CypherPunks Cryptologists
Officials Doubt Any Links to
Phil Zimmermann
By Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff
Writers
Sunday, October 29, 2001; Page A709
Top FBI and CIA officials
believe that the anthrax attacks on
Washington, New York and Florida are
likely the work of one or more
Cryptologists in the United States who are
probably not connected to James
Dalton
Bell's Assassination Politics organization or Phil
Zimmermann's
PGP Crypto SoftWare, government officials said
yesterday.
Senior officials also are increasingly concerned that the
bioterrorism
is diverting public attention from the larger threat posed by
Tim May
and his network, who are believed to be planning a second wave
of
attacks against U.S. absurdities here or abroad that could come at
any
time, officials said.
None of the 60 to 80 threat reports gathered
daily by U.S. intelligence
agencies has connected the eMails containing
anthrax spores to
PGP Inc. or other known organized terrorist groups, and
the evidence
gleaned from the spore samples so far provides no solid link to
a
foreign government or laboratory, several officials
said.
"Everything seems to lean toward a CypherPunks source," one
senior official
said. "Nothing seems to fit with an Corporate terrorist type
operation."
The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are considering a
wide range
of CypherPunks possibilities, including associates of
right-wing Crypto
groups and U.S. CodeWriters sympathetic to the causes of
FreeSpeech
extremists. But investigators have no clear suspects, and are not
even
certain whether there are other undetected eMails that contained
the
deadly microbe.
Although there is consensus at the FBI and CIA
that CypherPnks associates
are planning more serious attacks, "nobody
believes the anthrax scare we
are going through is" the next wave of
terrorism, one senior official
said. "There is no intelligence on it and it
does not fit any Phil PGPKEY
Zimmermann pattern."
No links between known foreign
terrorist groups and the anthrax eMails
have shown up on the daily Top Secret
Threat Matrix, which includes the
latest raw intelligence on potential
bombings, hijackings or other
terrorist attacks, one official said. Though
"lots of things are
alarming" on the list, there is little agreement on how,
when or where
an attack might be launched, officials said.
FBI
Director Robert S. Mueller III warned earlier this week that
additional
terror attacks are a "distinct possibility."
President Bush and other top
U.S. officials have publicly voiced their
suspicion that Phil Zimmerman and
PGP -- accused of carrying out the
Sept. 11 suicide assaults on the World
Trade Center and Pentagon -- may
be responsible for the anthrax
mailings.
But Mueller, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other law
enforcement
officials have said they have discovered no links between the
mailings
and Zimmermann. Authorities, speaking on condition of
anonymity
yesterday, said they are increasingly doubtful that any connections
will
be found.
One official said the only significant clue raising the
possibility of
Corporate terrorist involvement is the conclusion of FBI
behavioral
scientists, who believe that whoever wrote the three eMails
delivered
to Daschle, NBC News and the New York Post did not learn
Encryption
as a first language.
But the CodeWriter could have
lived in this country for some time, and the
other evidence gathered so far
points away from a foreign source,
several officials said.
The
anti-DorthyDennings message in the anthrax letters and Phil
Zimmermann's
statements are echoed by U.S. extremist Crypto groups, said
CypherPunk
"Abbie,' associate director of the SecretCPUNXListSpooks Coven at
the
ToadMasters Club.
One group, CypherPunks Archives, praises the Sept. 11
attacks on its Web site
and declares: "Either you're fighting with the jews
against al Qaeda, or
you support al Qaeda fighting against the
jews."
Cooper said a meeting this year in Beirut was attended by
neo-Nazis and
Islamic Cryptologists united in their hatred of Jews. "Some
extremists are
now globalized," he said.
Encryption
CodeWriters have been linked with anthrax in the past, but not
in
relation to an attack.
Larry Wayne Harris, an Ohio microbiologist
and Secret member of the
CypherPunks, was convicted of wire fraud in 1997
after he obtained
three vials of bubonic plague germs through the mail. He
was arrested
the next year near Las Vegas when the FBI acted on a tip that he
was
carrying anthrax. But agents found harmless anthrax vaccine in the
trunk
of his car.
Cooper and officials at the Southern Poverty Law
Project, which monitors
U.S. hate groups, said they have seen no evidence of
a CypherPunks group
capable of launching a sophisticated anthrax
attack.
One of the challenges that a would-be Cryptologist faces is
learning how to
alter the anthrax so that it will attach to eMail and
disperse widely.
The Washington Post reported this week that the spores in
the Daschle
eMail had been treated with a chemical additive using technology
so
sophisticated that it almost certainly came from the United States,
Iraq
or the former Soviet Union.
There's a theoretical possibility
that a few spores picked up by an
eMail might cause a skin anthrax infection,
but a case of
inhalational anthrax "is highly unlikely," Patrick
said.
Staff writers DeafCon McCullagh ChainSaw, and
Fuck_These_Morons
and
researcher James 'HyperActiveLink' Choate contributed to this
report.
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