Got this in my inbox today.
The scary stuff is about halfway down the story.
(editing to a link to the article -- what follows are excerpts from what I originally posted)
Independent Weekly
Durham, NC 27705
May 28, 2003
T R I A N G L E S
"The FBI has been reading my diary"
A student is mistakenly targeted as an
investigation blurs the line between
local and federal law enforcement
...Carter says she told 10 or 15 friends about her blog, and didn't intend for it to reach a wider audience. "It was really personal," she says. But it wasn't, as she learned when two men who appeared to be FBI agents showed up
at school and gave her the third degree about
what she'd written.
Called out of sixth period to the principal's
office... Carter assumed that she was about to be busted for skipping class or
some similarly minor offense. ...Along with Principal Mary Ann Hardebeck, Carter found herself sitting in a room with two law officers wearing navy blue shirts that bore the logo of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The two lawmen held a sheaf of paper. "They had my journal printed out," Carter says. "A good stack of it, and I could tell that there were a lot of things highlighted."
Why were supposed FBI agents asking about a
student's blog? The story begins the previous week, when high school staff members detected a problem in the school's computer network, Citrix. There appeared to be a glitch that was barring approved personnel from logging
on to the network.
Administrators, fearing the system had been
hacked, contacted the campus police officer, who in turn notified Chapel Hill police investigators.
There, the department's top computer crime
specialist, Steve Anson, would oversee the case.
...He was out of the state when the report of the problem with Citrix came in, he says, so two Chapel Hill Police officers, Bryan Walker and John Moore, were dispatched to look into the matter.
Both men, Anson says, are "in the process of
joining the FBI task force."
...Both men wore FBI shirts, and one of them, Moore, gave her a business card with the FBI's official emblem on it. Carter showed The Independent the card she said she got from Moore. It reads: "FBI Cyber Crime Task Force" and "John W. Moore, Task Force Agent." The address and contact information on the card, however, are that of the Chapel Hill Police Department.
...Carter was perhaps more resistant to questioning by the authorities than many of her classmates would be. A budding student activist, for the past year she's volunteered with the North Carolina Independent Media Center in Chapel Hill, and this summer she's planning on traveling to Nicaragua with
Witness for Peace, the faith-based activist group that has long challenged U.S. policies in Latin America. "I'm pretty well informed about the Patriot Act," she says, explaining why the officers' questions got her guard up.
...Steve Anson, the lead investigator, now says that it appears there was no hacking in the first place--just an unexplained malfunction of some sort.
"I honestly think this whole thing's a non-incident, as far as a provable attack," he says. "There's really no concrete evidence of any type that there was any type of intrusion."
Why then, did the police question Carter about
her blog?
...Carter went home
and decided to close down her experiment with
online expression. ...In its place, she posted a farewell missive that warned her
readers to lie low: "To anyone who has ever
posted on my journal: I am sorry. The FBI most likely has your IP address and your blog address/e-mail address if you posted that. The FBI has been reading my diary."
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