Denver Post Online threats target Denver investigators - Anarchist says e-mails harmless; feds disagree By Jim Hughes - Denver Post Staff Writer Monday, July 07, 2003 - An anarchist using the online moniker “Professor Rat” has threatened the lives of two federal terrorism investigators in Denver, advocating that they “need killing.” The threats name an FBI agent assigned to the local multiagency Joint Terrorism Task Force and the government’s lead prosecutor of terrorism cases in Colorado. Although those who travel in the same online circles as Professor Rat say his provocations are not to be taken seriously, officials say they are concerned about the threats, which were sent to an e-mail listserv and posted on the Internet in April. “The recipients of the threats have no way to discern their validity,” said Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office. "They cause fear and they disrupt lives, and it’s for that reason that they’re taken very seriously. “It’s more than the individual targets. It’s the families and those associated with them,” he said. That is the purpose of the postings, an Australian man who admits to using the Professor Rat name and to posting these kinds of threats saidin a telephone interview and a series of e-mails: To scare people out of working for the government. He refused to admit to any specific threat, to avoid prosecution, he said. He already is charged with making similar threats against police in Australia, according to the Victoria Police in Melbourne. Saying that his real name was Matt Taylor and that he was 48 years old, Professor Rat said he promotes a theory called Assassination Politics that emerged at the periphery of cyberanarchist circles in 1997. The concept is that of an online lottery in which people bet on a date that public figures will die. The implication is that the lottery “winner” likely helped arrange the death. Winnings would be paid in untraceable digital cash, which does not yet exist. The development of digital money, and encryption software restricting government’s ability to monitor Internet activity, are common goals among the online anarchists and libertarians known as “cypherpunks.” The ultimate purpose of Assassination Politics is to deter people from working for government agencies, corporate media outlets or institutions “beholden to the violence of the state,” Taylor said. Professor Rat also has threatened a University of Ottawa law professor, a columnist for The Boston Globe and a Cincinnati police officer. Many of those threats were posted to a listserv called Cypherpunks. The e-mail distribution network allows libertarians and anarchists interested in the tension between government oversight and individual liberty on the Internet to discuss those issues via e-mails that when sent to the listserv are distributed to all members. Dorschner would not say whether there was an investigation into Professor Rat, calling the matter an issue of “internal security.” The columnist for The Boston Globe, whose sin, in the eyes of Professor Rat, was to criticize civil libertarians for objecting to the Patriot Act of 2001, said he did not take the threat at all seriously. He learned of the threat only last week, when told of it by The Denver Post, he said. The Post is withholding the names of the subjects of posts by Professor Rat to avoid promoting any specific threats. “The way I see it, this kind of talk is pretty cheap on the Internet,” the columnist said. “This is something I would consider casual hate speech. This person didn’t send me an e-mail saying 'I’m going to kill you.”’ But officials in Denver see nothing casual about the statements, Dorschner said. In an interview, Taylor taunted the Denver officials named in the April 8 statement. “They’re welcome to come and get me extradited,” he said. “Here I am. Come and get me.” The Cypherpunks listserv is also where Jim Bell, an MIT-trained chemist and Washington anarchist who now is in prison for interstate stalking of federal agents, unveiled his Assassination Politics. He was convicted in 2001. Federal prosecutors in Seattle that year also won a conviction against Carl Johnson, a Canadian man accused of threatening federal judges and Microsoft founder Bill Gates by e-mail. Later in 2001, Thomas Wales, a federal prosecutor in Seattle, was shot to death. Though his death was noted on the Cypherpunks listserv, no connection to Assassination Politics has ever been made. The case remains unsolved. John Hartingh, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Seattle, declined to comment on Wales’ death. Taylor said his threats are intended solely as a rhetorical deterrent. “No one has to die,” he said. “All that has to happen is for people to accept the system.” If anyone Taylor threatened ever was assassinated, “I would totally reassess my involvement in it,” he said. “It would totally change the whole situation. Basically, I’m a nonviolent person.” The posts made by Professor Rat fall under a relatively new category of crime known as “cyberstalking,” said Jim Doyle, a retired New York City police sergeant who now works as a cybercrimes consultant for a Connecticut company called Internet Crimes. The statements made by Professor Rat constitute prosecutable offenses, he said. “The bottom line is what the victim feels,” he said. “Is the victim threatened? Is the victim alarmed? Hey, that’s a crime.” Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles and a First Amendment specialist, said the threats were probably criminal, given Taylor’s description of the purpose of Assassination Politics. But “in order to (prosecute), you have to get your hands on the guy,” he said. Most current Cypherpunks subscribers have set up their e-mail in-boxes to block any messages coming from Taylor, said Declan McCullagh, a reporter for the high-tech website CNET.com. He has subscribed to Cypherpunks for 10 years, he said. Taylor exists on the “radical fringe” of online anarchists, McCullagh said. “He’s routinely ignored and ‘kill-filed’ by just about everyone on the list. I’d be surprised if more than a small handful of people are reading his postings, let alone taking him seriously.” Taylor acknowledged that he does not not have much support in anarchist circles. “Most anarchists see what I’m doing as counterproductive. … I’m not exactly at the center of anarchism by promoting Assassination Politics, that’s for sure.”