-Caveat Lector- from: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,593,00.html <A HREF="http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,593,00.html">TIME Digital - September 9, 1998: The Arre </A> ----- The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber Part I of a Series FROM WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1998 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NETLY NEWS For two years a pair of anonymous Net crackpots have been posting angry tirades to a cryptography discussion list, in the form of 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 Tucson, 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. The way federal agents tell it, Johnson spent much of the past two years railing against the police, the feds, Bill Gates and just about anyone else who crossed his path. His favorite online soapbox was the Internet mailing list called cypherpunks, a kind of intellectual mosh pit that was originally devoted to encryption and anonymity, but which has over the years become far more wide-ranging. Many contributors to the cypherpunk list favor pseudonyms, and the government has linked Johnson with two widely used ones: Toto and TruthMonger. To call their posts odd would be to pass up a perfect opportunity to use the word "deranged." For two years Toto and TruthMonger mocked, flamed and entertained the rest of the cypherpunks with screeds headed "Nutly News" -- a reference to this publication -- and incoherent essays with titles such as "Space Aliens Hide My Drugs." A sample: "The blatantly subliminal messages being ceaselessly spammed into the Author's MeatSpace environment, via the TV cable originating at an underground Reptilian Nazi resort and spa deep beneath LizardMoor Labs and Gold Retrievers." This guy would make even Robert Anton Wilson seem paranoid. It was never clear why Toto spent so much time typing so many bytes of blather. It was never even clear how many people wrote under the Toto and TruthMonger pseuds. Perhaps he (or they) enjoyed the banter. Maybe he (or they) found it cathartic. "I advise people who are afflicted with such medical conditions as Tourette syndrome and [obsessive compulsive disorder] to use anonymous remailers" to shield their identity, Toto wrote in August 1997. Friends say that Johnson also has Tourette's syndrome, and that he concocted a cocktail of Prozac and three other drugs to keep his symptoms in check. It wasn't until Toto started talking about bombs and death that the feds decided to take action -- or, perhaps, found the excuse they were waiting for. IRS agent Jeffrey Gordon began monitoring the discussion group in early 1997 while investigating another cypherpunk named Jim Bell for tax crimes. Bell had published an essay called "Assassination Politics" that described how disgruntled citizens could participate in the bounty-driven murder of "government slimeballs." He outlined a scheme of anonymous betting pools and digital cash that he claimed would be a workable way to overthrow the federal government. The plan was simple and, Bell claimed, legal. In it, anyone interested in seeing a "government miscreant" dead (IRS officials were oft-mentioned targets) would contribute anonymously to a betting pool. The more people who bet, the bigger the pot, and the greater incentive for someone to turn assassin. The person, presumably the killer, who correctly guessed the victim's time of death would win the pool of digital cash. The IRS was not amused. When a team of agents raided Bell's home and seized his computers in April 1997, they checked to see who he'd been e-mailing. One frequent correspondent was -- you guessed it -- Toto. "During the investigation of Bell I noted that Bell had exchanged both private and public e-mail messages with an unidentified person using the name 'Toto,'" Gordon writes in an eight-page complaint against Johnson dated August 5, 1998. Toto himself echoed this point on the cypherpunks list, writing that "Jim Bell was taken down a few hours after I had sent him a copy of [an essay] chapter describing 'Assassination Politics,' and asking his opinion on certain things." For his part, Bell says he doesn't remember chatting with either Johnson or Toto, though he was clearly tickled at the idea that his case had sparked this latest controversy. "I do recall the name Toto as a regular poster on cypherpunks," he said last Thursday in a phone call from the Sea-Tac federal detention center. "I wish I could read the Internet to keep up with all the news." Bell pleaded guilty to trying to impede IRS officials and to using false Social Security numbers to hide assets. He was sentenced to 11 months in prison (including time served), was released, and was re-arrested in June 1998 on charges of violating his relatively strict probation conditions. Not long after Bell's initial arrest in May 1997, an anonymous message appeared in cypherpunks promising retribution. It claimed to be the output of an Assassination Politics software robot (or bot) "operated in response to the illegal and unconstitutional imprisonment of an American citizen." It set a price of $1,500 for the death of Gordon, $2,610 for the federal magistrate judge who signed a search warrant for Bell, and various amounts for other IRS agents. The cypherpunks dismissed it as an obvious spoof, and an inelegant one at that. But not Agent Gordon, who kept watching. In December 1997 another anonymous message showed up, called "Encrypted InterNet DEATH THREAT!!!" It was a rambling, Toto-esque warning addressed to Bell's appeals court judges and other federal officials. ("I will share the same 'DEATH THREAT!!!' with Judges Fletch, Nelson and Bright that I have shared with the President and a host of Congressional and Senatorial representatives... Am I going to whack you out? Maybe...") The message included a challenge. "Feel free to have the Federales break down my door and imprison me for pointing out the obvious. After all, I fit the profile of a domestic terrorist -- I quote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I speak out against increasingly big government," it said. "This alone ought to be enough for some aggressive young LEA and/or federal prosecutor to earn themself some brownie-points, since I am a sorry enough son-of-a-bitch that they would not have much trouble convicting me in front of a jury of 'their' peers." The message was digitally signed with Pretty Good Privacy software, and according to the IRS, it would soon be matched to Johnson's personal PGP key. In the next installment: Unexploded bombs turn up north of the border when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is investigating a web prototype of the "Assassination Politics Bot." -- DECLAN MCCULLAGH ===== ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber Part II of a Series FROM WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1998 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NETLY NEWS For two years a pair of anonymous Net crackpots have been posting angry tirades to a cryptography discussion list, in the form of a takeoff on Netly called "The Nutly News." Now the IRS says that a digital signature connects them to a bomb discovered last June in a Canadian courthouse. While the FBI was building its case against Toto south of the border, he was also raising eyebrows among the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "He was the subject of an investigation related to a web page," says RCMP Cpl. Steve Foster. The web page, registered under the user name "carljohn," featured a clever demo of how an automated Assassination Politics Bot might work -- "for entertainment purposes only." The site has since been shut down, but it was housed at the Canadian Internet provider Sympatico -- the same one from which Toto had posted his harangues to the cypherpunks list. For entertainment purposes or not, even hypothetical talk of assassinating government officials is enough to catch the attention of the Mounties. Cpl. Foster says he started to investigate Johnson for violations of sections 319-2 and 320 of the Canadian criminal code, which punish anyone who "wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group" -- the group in question here apparently being the Canadian government itself. The crime carries a sentence of up to two years in prison. When Johnson crossed the Canadian border this spring, the RCMP was on his trail. "I advised Customs he had a laptop with him... Canadian customs got it," says Foster. The RCMP also raided a home in the remote hamlet of Bienfait, Sasketchewan, where Johnson grew up and where he sometimes stayed. To prove that Johnson was Toto (and, sometimes, TruthMonger), Foster compared logs of telephone calls from Johnson's Bienfait residence to the times when Toto's Sympatico account was used on March 25, 1998. The times reportedly matched. Foster says he also searched Johnson's computer "for the contents of the web page." He found something that would eventually prove invaluable to his colleagues at the IRS: a computer file containing a PGP private key ring. Agent Gordon seems not to have known about Johnson's Canadian problems until the RCMP seized Johnson's computers and Toto made the fatal mistake of complaining about them to his friends on cypherpunks. "Toto's computers were seized today by RCMP and Canadian Customs," says a post from April 1998. Gordon then apparently phoned the RCMP and began a series of conversations with Foster, who was more than happy to hand over Johnson's PGP key ring. Bingo. "Only the person possessing the secret key found on Johnson's computer could have generated the 'death threat' message," Gordon wrote in his complaint. (True enough, if Johnson was the only person with a copy of that PGP key ring. It's unlikely, but he could have given copies to his friends.) In other words, Gordon now believed he had airtight proof that the anonymous message -- including what he claims is a death threat against the President -- was linked to Johnson. But since Gordon didn't get the PGP key until July, the RCMP still wasn't ready to arrest Johnson, and Johnson wasn't barred from returning to Bienfait this spring to visit with friends and relatives. During his stay, he allegedly drove to the courthouse of the nearby town of Estevan, a mere eight miles north of the North Dakota border. Johnson fancies himself something of an amateur legal scholar, and he did some research in the basement of the courthouse, local sources say. Johnson was well-known in Estevan. Nobody really thought much of it at the time. That changed in mid-afternoon on June 3, 1998, when police found a bomb in the basement of the courthouse. The local cops think Johnson planted it; they say they found out about it when a youth whom he enlisted as part of the scheme saw the bomb, got spooked, fled with part of the device, and called the Canadian equivalent of 911. The would-be accomplice �- some reports say he looked only 12 or 13 -- was supposed to drop off a copy of the June 3 newspaper next to the bomb in order to give Johnson an alibi, says Estevan police sergeant Del Block. Johnson had returned to the U.S. a few days before and was hoping that the presence of a June 3 newspaper at the crime scene would prove he couldn't be the culprit, Block says. "This fellow realized it was more serious and called the police." Would a real criminal mastermind trust a 12-year-old with a key portion of his alibi? Not a sane one. Which may be precisely the point: On closer inspection, the device that Canadian authorities had variously dubbed a "fire bomb" or an "incendiary explosive device" was hardly a Unabomber-style masterpiece. It consisted of a few bottles of gasoline set up like Molotov cocktails, a half dozen shotgun shells, and some wooden matches wedged into a laptop case, says Norm Park, a reporter for the weekly Estevan Mercury newspaper, who says he examined the device when police removed it; the RCMP found another one in the air conditioning units in the basement of the courthouse. But there was no way to set it off. "There was no major triggering device," says Park. "The RCMP couldn't quite figure out what he would use." In the next installment: The feds track Johnson to Arizona, where he crashes a hacker convention and where the IRS finally runs him to ground. -- DECLAN MCCULLAGH Thu., Sept. 10, 1998 ===== ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber Part III of a Series FROM TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1998 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NETLY NEWS Carl Johnson, itinerant Netizen and soon-to-be mental patient, has been linked to the pseudonymous "Toto" -- who has been posting angry tirades to a cryptography discussion list -- and to a bomb discovered last June in a Canadian courthouse. In this installment, he heads south to Nevada and a Vegas hacker convention. On June 8, a few days after the Canadians discovered the bomblet in the courthouse basement, an anonymous message appeared in my inbox, encrypted to my PGP key. The decoded text: "Declan, You might want to notify the RCMP that there are bombs in two public buildings 11 kilometers from Mongeritaville, home of the Bienfait Nutly News. Then again, you might not..." Was it Toto trying to tip me off, or was someone else trying to mess with my mind? I don't think I'd ever communicated with Toto directly, so why would he contact me? Besides, five days before, the Estevan police had fired off a press release ("an incendiary device was found in the Estevan Court House"), so the attempted bombing was public knowledge. Around the same time, Carl Johnson showed up at the Tucson, Ariz., home of a longtime friend, Linda Reed. Soon Toto's inimitable form of online performance art started popping up on the cypherpunks list again, this time from Reed's account at Pima College, where she was an adjunct professor of computer science. Toto's first message not only mentioned nuking Washington, D.C. (in passing, to be fair), but also spoke of "MenInTheShadows unable to find the second VirtualNuclear Device claimed to have been planted in a public building." Imagine how that struck the feds, who notably lack a sense of humor when the discussion turns to nuclear strikes on the nation's capital. "They were knocking on my door a couple weeks later," Reed says. Agent Jeremy Sheridan interviewed Johnson on July 31. "Johnson admitted that he often wrote on the Internet and among the names he used were Toto, C.J. Parker, and TruthMonger," the government's complaint claims. Johnson allegedly admitted to Sheridan that he wrote the so-called death threat and that he had psychological problems. "They talked to him before I came home one night," Reed says. "They said, 'Why are you using that other person's account? Get your own account so you don't take anyone else to jail with you.'" Reed says she was "called into the Secret Service office the next day," where Sheridan quizzed her about Johnson. They told her they wanted to understand exactly how his mind worked. Reed says she lost her part-time teaching job thanks to her friend's more incendiary posts. "Apparently someone had sent a letter to the vice chancellor -- someone in Turkey whom C.J. had criticized for his torture techniques," she says. When we contacted him, Sheridan declined to comment. But Toto was as loquacious as ever, firing off e-mail not just to cypherpunks but also in connection with DefCon, a hacker convention taking place that weekend in Las Vegas. Soon he was on the road again -- this time heading for Nevada. One person he reportedly said he wanted to meet at DefCon was a Chicago-area security consultant who spoke with us only on the condition that he remain anonymous. He got spooked by Toto's darkly rambling e-mail entitled "Buttfuck Me Jesus, Through The Bedposts Of Life." "I immediately sent something off to the administrator of the Pima account," the consultant says. "Next thing you know I get a phone call from the Tucson Secret Service asking what's my connection with this person... I would have Maced the fucker right there." DefCon has always been less a convention than a no-holds-barred party for hackers, crackers and generally underage geeks. Evening entertainment customarily involves tunneling into the hotel's security system, seizing control of the telephones and generally building toward a barely controlled riot -- until the hotel cops put an end to the fun. Even here, Toto stood out. "To be perfectly honest, he's crazy," says cypherpunk Marc Briceno, who spoke at the convention on August 2. "He approached me after I gave my speech on smart cards and gave me an envelope," Briceno says. Inside it was a disk wrapped in a printout, he says, which described how to manufacture a diskette bomb. Briceno eventually threw it away. In the next installment: Carl Johnson is arrested and antagonizes the feds even more -- if that's possible. -- DECLAN MCCULLAGH Wed., Sept. 16, 1998 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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