Ohio police are investigating alleged threats posted to the website of a journalists' collective, directed against Steven Roach, the policeman whose shooting of an unarmed black man led to riots. "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. An anarchist using the online moniker "Professor Rat" has threatened the lives of two federal terrorism investigators in Denver, advocating that they "need killing." 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 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. 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. . . "
