Fishbowl (18 page)

21

THE EDGAR T
Lacey Federal Building in Denver was an eight-storey block constructed in 1981 that housed regional offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Social Security Administration and a number of other federal agencies. At 12.14 local time that Wednesday afternoon, a bomb exploded inside a van that had pulled into the delivery bay under the building, tearing through the cafeteria on the ground floor while demolishing the entire back of the building and severely damaging a number of other structures in the surrounding blocks.

As wounded and dazed survivors emerged through the smoke and shredded paper billowing out of the wreckage of the building, a sniper positioned on a rooftop with full view of the entrance plaza began to shoot. The records would later show that it was four minutes before the first emergency services arrived at the scene and a further seven minutes until, in the confusion, a policeman saw an ambulance officer go down in front of his eyes with an apparent gunshot wound to the chest and radioed that the Lacy building was still under attack.

By this time the plaza in front of the building was littered with the bodies of bomb survivors, firemen, ambulance personnel and police officers. It took another three minutes for the crew of a chopper that had been scrambled after the blast to locate the gunman, and another four minutes for a squad of police special forces to divert from the Lacey, run up the stairs of the building and get onto the rooftop, during which time the gunman continued
steadily firing at anyone in range. In the ensuing gun battle, one policeman died and another two were injured, before the gunman himself was finally shot dead.

The initial death toll from the bomb was 224, far exceeding the 168 deaths in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, with which it was immediately compared. In the cafeteria, which had been full for lunch at the time of the explosion, 118 died. The majority of the others perished in the upper floors and stairwells of the Lacey building as they collapsed in on each other, while five fatalities were recorded in surrounding buildings from the blizzard of flying glass that the bomb had unleashed. Outside, in his eighteen minutes of uninterrupted firing, the sniper had killed a further fifty-nine people and injured forty-seven. Over the coming days, the toll continued to rise as the most severely injured lost their battles for life.

In total, 309 men and women lost their lives in Denver that afternoon or in the days that followed.

The gunman was soon identified as Walter Hodgkin, a 32-year-old ex-Marine with three tours of duty as a sniper in Iraq, and a soon-discovered history of involvement in anti-government, pro-gun circles after leaving the military. It wasn't immediately clear whether the bombing was the work of Hodgkin alone – theoretically, he could have left the van in the delivery bay and then made his way to the top of the adjacent building before remotely detonating the explosive – or whether Hodgkin had an accomplice, possibly one who had acted as a suicide bomber. The size of the explosion left very little forensic material in the vicinity of the van, which had ignited a fireball in an adjacent truck that was delivering fuel oil at the time.

The question was solved a couple of days later when a memory stick turned up in the mail at the headquarters of the National Rifle Association with a video showing Walter Hodgkin and another ex-Marine, Andrew Buckett, talking about the attack they were planning to launch on the Lacey Building. In a clear and apparently self-conscious echo of Islamist suicide videos,
they sat in front of a flag – a stars and stripes, in this case – each clutching an M16 and with red, white and blue headbands around their foreheads.

For the first fifteen minutes of the video, Buckett railed semi-coherently about the iniquity of the anti-freedom, anti-human rights, anti-American socialist Washington government. Then Hodgkin took over, calmly declaring that he and Buckett were launching the United Taliban of America. They had seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that the only way to wear down a great colonizing power was through the dedicated, unanswerable attrition of the suicide martyr. There was no power greater, he said, than the socialistic communist government in Washington and no colonization more oppressive or predatory than its rule over the once-free states of the republic. Therefore, in Denver, they were going to unleash on the Washington government a suicide storm that, he claimed, would be joined by a legion of followers inspired by their example and grow in power and ferocity until it engulfed the socialist oppressors of Washington, just as the flames that those same oppressors had unleashed had engulfed the temple of the holy martyr David Koresh in Waco.

The NRA handed over the memory stick to the FBI, but not before someone had made a copy of the file. Snippets of the video began to leak. Soon the faces of Walter Hodgkin and Andrew Buckett, sitting in full combat gear and clutching their M16s in what appeared to be a cheap motel room with the stars and stripes on the wall behind them, had became familiar across the world. The FBI refused to confirm or deny that the video was genuine. It was only as their investigation wound down that they released the full footage.

But that would be weeks later. On the Wednesday afternoon of the bombing, none of that was known. In the office on top of the frozen yoghurt store on Ramona Street, the Fishbowl staff, now forty-one strong, gathered in knots of fours and fives around computer screens and watched the stream coming live out of Denver in horror and confusion. Across town on the Homeplace
campus, the press conference that had been scheduled to relaunch Worldspace, with no chance of receiving any airtime in the face of what had happened, was cancelled. All across the country, people were watching on television or computer or smartphone or any other device capable of showing the images from the Mile High City, slowly beginning to understand the scale of what had taken place. James Langan, who was a devout Christian but usually kept his faith strictly out of the office, went to a corner of the room and knelt in prayer. A number of people joined him, holding hands.

In the days afterwards, everyone at Fishbowl shared the shock of the nation, the disbelief, the numbness. They watched the president address the country that evening, his face solemn and grim, his voice choking at times as he spoke of the men and women who had died in the blast, of the brutality of a man who could stand and shoot at survivors and the public servants who had come to their aid. They joined up, like 34 million people the world over, to Fishbowl Schools repudiating what had been done and offering support to the people of Denver. They stood with the rest of the nation the next Wednesday at 12.14 p.m. Mountain Time and shared two minutes of deep, reflective silence.

And the following day, like the rest of the nation, they first heard the name Fishbowl mentioned in connection with the attack.

The rumour first surfaced in the blogosphere. Reports emerged that Buckett had been an active member of a Fishbowl School including both domestic extremists and radical foreigners that discussed resistance to the US government and had even used the site for instructions about bomb detonation. The rumour spread quickly into the Grotto. Someone notified James Langan. James walked over to Andrei's desk. There ensued a quick, hushed conversation. Every eye in the large, unpartitioned room was on the two men. But whatever conclusion they might have reached, they didn't have a chance to get there before two FBI agents came through the door.

The familiar figure of John Dimmer was accompanied by a woman who announced herself as Fay Carver, Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco field office. There was nowhere for them to talk. This was going to be way bigger than a routine National Security Letter and, as the agents waited, Fishbowl's legal officer got on the phone to find a lawyer with expertise in federal terrorist investigations. The agents said it was only an initial discussion and they didn't think there was any need for a lawyer, and suggested that they all go to the field office in San Francisco. Andrei was prepared to talk to the agents, or at least to listen to what they had to say, while legal advice was being sought. James didn't think it would be smart to get themselves locked into an FBI interrogation room. In the end, they went to the nearest hotel, where the the FBI guys got a room. They sat, Andrei and James on one bed, the two FBI agents facing them on the other, while the Fishbowl legal officer perched on a chair by the window.

Fay Carver did the talking that day. Dimmer took notes. Carver asked if they knew anything about Andrew Buckett, Walter Hodgkin or the fact that Buckett, at least, had been a registered Fishbowl user and that Hodgkin may well have been one as well. The answers to those questions were negative. Carver and Dimmer looked as if they had expected them to be.

Then Carver said: ‘Well, what we really want to say is, we're going to need access to anything you've got on these guys. Their home pages, their conversations, anything on the people they were conversing with.'

‘We'll give you anything we're legally required to give,' said Langan. ‘That goes without saying.'

‘Well, there are two ways we can do that, Mr Langan.'

‘Which are?'

‘The hard way, where we get court order after court order extracting the information from you bit by bit, or the easy way, where you go ahead and give us what you know we're eventually going to get anyway.'

‘How would I know what you're going to get?'

‘Mr Langan, I don't think you understand. We need everything you've got on these people. We need to know who they talked to, who the people who talked to them talked to, who might have helped them plan the attack, who might do the same in the future. We're talking about bringing people to justice. We're talking about prevention.'

‘And I'm talking about privacy. The way you make it sound, you expect us to show you every single thing anyone's ever said on Fishbowl.'

‘You're talking about privacy. I'm talking about lives, Mr Langan. I'm talking about your obligation as a citizen of this country.'

‘My obligation as a citizen of this country – and not only that, my obligation as a Christian – is to uphold its laws. That's your obligation as well, ma'am. And what I've just said is we will do exactly that. We will supply you with any information that the law requires us to do.'

‘Don't you tell me what my obligation is, Mr Langan! Two hundred and ninety-eight people are dead. Services like Fishbowl are breeding grounds of terrorism, they're incubators of conspiracy. Now, if I were you, I'd say that this is the time to stand up and show a little responsibility and—'

‘We'll do it the easy way,' said Andrei.

Everyone in the room looked at him.

‘Andrei, let's talk about this,' said James.

‘We'll do it the easy way,' said Andrei again.

To Andrei the decision seemed perfectly clear. He agreed to meet the FBI agents the following morning at the office of the lawyer the Fishbowl legal officer had found, in order to agree on the scope of the data and how it was going to be handed over.

That evening, Chris flew up from LA. He, Andrei, James, Kevin and Ben met at the house in La Calle Court.

Ever since John Dimmer had turned up in Robinson House with the first National Security Letter addressed to Fishbowl, it
had been clear to all that at some point a Fishbowl user or School might be identified with some kind of horrendous act – although not necessarily as horrendous as the Denver bombing. There was no way that could be prevented. Amongst the Schools on Fishbowl were a good number associated with politically or racially obnoxious views. Andrei, Kevin and Ben had long ago agreed that, beyond issuing their user policy, it wasn't their place to try to pre-empt them. The question was, what was their obligation after the fact?

By the time he arrived at La Calle Court that night, James had received a phone briefing from the lawyer. A request for any information beyond the usual transactional detail available through a National Security Letter would require a court order, and the court order would need to specify exactly what data were required. The scope could not be unduly broad and if the investigators wanted anything else, they would have to go back to court for a further order. Fishbowl would have the right to challenge each order and could expect to win unless the FBI could show how the data requested was likely to be linked to the commission of the crime.

Andrei didn't want to get involved in that kind of process. He respected James Langan's judgement, particularly after his advice to hold back over Worldspace had proven right, but if that was the direction James was headed, Andrei felt that in this case he was wrong. He didn't want to get into a situation where the FBI was turning up with court orders and Fishbowl was challenging and dragging the process out over weeks, or even months. He wanted to give the investigators the information they were seeking, right away.

James and Chris disagreed. That night, unusually, they found themselves on the same side of an argument, both counselling that Fishbowl ought to be more circumspect and at least see what the first court order specified. Otherwise Fishbowl would be tainted as a place where privacy walls crumbled as soon as the cops came knocking. Kevin naturally agreed.

Andrei was unpersuaded. ‘I think if we don't cooperate willingly and proactively, we're going to bring down more and more criticism on our heads. James, you heard what that FBI agent said today. Social networks are a place for conspiracy. A lot of people are going to be thinking that. We've always said we're not going to try to police what people are saying on the network. Well, if that's the case, the flip side is that we have to come down hard when we know someone has done something wrong.'

‘Agreed,' said James. ‘We should do exactly what the law demands.'

‘If we're in possession of evidence, I want them to have it.'

‘Shouldn't they already have it?' said Kevin snidely. ‘What have those guys at the NSA been doing? Isn't that why the taxpayer pays them? So they can read our stuff illegally?'