Don't kill anything that isn't an FBI agent

[professor rat]

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.