FC: More on FBI wants San Francisco IMC's logs, reported anthrax threat

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Thanks to Politech members, I've learned a bit more about this 
investigation. It appears that FBI agent Chuck Esposito, badge #16801, in 
the Oakland field office did phone an IMC volunteer in the San Francisco 
area. Esposito reportedly said that it was at the behest of the Seattle FBI 
office (which has had run-ins with the IMC in the past) and they provided 
him with the SF-area volunteer's phone number.

Esposito claims that this is in response to an anthrax threat -- but the 
Arizona IMC site is the one involved, not Seattle or San Francisco. The FBI 
wants web logs with IP addresses, which the SF IMC says it does not keep. 
Esposito also wanted contact information for the Arizona IMC. Apparently 
the SF IMC's Internet provider, transbay.net, claims not to have been 
contacted by the FBI.

The Arizona IMC is here:
http://arizona.indymedia.org/

A quick search of the site turned up little that could be an anthrax threat 
of any kind. The closest I found was this, dated Oct. 20:

http://arizona.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=1802
> Rumor has it that al-Queda operatives are planning bioterrorist assualts, 
> maybe with small pox, possibly anthrax, at Starbucks locations across the 
> nation on the first business day after Thanksgiving! Tell everybody you 
> can to stay away from their local Starbucks on this day!

If that kind of rumor is all there is for the FBI to go on, perhaps that's 
why they don't appear to be taking this IMC investigation very seriously. 
Background is here:

"FBI allegedly wants San Francisco IMC's web logs?"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02745.html

One Politech member writes in:
> Actually Declan, this doesn't sound odd at all to me.  We get
> "unofficial" requests like this several times a month on a busy
> month.  Basically (as they have [over time] explained to us), these are
> calls where they "have to go through the motions", even though they don't
> really want to.  For instance, the last one was some defacement of one of
> our customers, and the customer was screaming and bitching loudly enough
> into _someone's_ ear to force them to at least say they "investigated the
> case, but came up empty". As always, you may use this, but without 
> attribution.

-Declan




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