Netly News on Nutly News (resend)

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 05:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber




http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/0,2326,201980909-14593,00.html

TIME Digital Daily
September 9, 1998 

   The Arrest of the Nutly Bomber 
   By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
   
   [Part I of a Series For two years a pair of anonymous Net crackpots
   have been posting angry tirades to a cryptography discussion list
   under 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 Tuscon,
   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.