Egregious E-mail
The Secret Service comes calling after a St. Louisan pens a message wishing bin
Laden would eliminate Bush
BY MALCOLM GAY
Malcolm.Gay@riverfronttimes.com

Hakim Aziz is seldom hesitant about making radical pronouncements, but when two
U.S. Secret Service agents showed up at his doorstep at 10:30 on the night of
April 7, he was meek as a lamb. He'd just put his two daughters to bed, and his
wife looked on as the two agents asked if they could search the house. Aziz
says he didn't have much choice.
"They made it plain to me early on that 'because of this ten-year-old bench
warrant [for a DWI] that you didn't take care of, we can just haul you in and
make you sit until Perry County comes to get you, which may be never,'" the
42-year-old Aziz recalls the agents saying. "I think they pretty much knew that
I was going to do whatever it took to keep from being hauled in that night."

Accompanied by three St. Louis cops, the khaki-clad Secret Service agents
sifted through Aziz's files and books. Picking up a copy of Muammar Qadhafi's
Third Universal Theory, one of the agents asked Aziz if he admired the Libyan
strongman.

"I just couldn't believe they were questioning what I felt," says Aziz. "I was
still in shock."

The agents also homed in on a videotaped lecture by Louis Farrakhan and Ahmed
Rashid's book Taliban.

"The way they were looking, they honestly expected to find something,"
remembers Aziz, a self-employed St. Louis accountant who converted to Islam
roughly a decade ago. "I couldn't believe that."

The Secret Service did not respond to interview requests for this story, but
according to Aziz, the agents said they'd decided to visit him after
intercepting a particularly bitter e-mail he'd authored the day before.

"I hate that imbecile Bush so much that I would celebrate if the Honorable
Sheik bin Laden succeeded in ridding the earth of his filth," wrote Aziz in an
ongoing e-mail debate he'd been having with a neighbor. "Did you honestly think
the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans after they finished bombing them
and then walked down the street? That is just sheer arrogance to think that you
can overthrow the government of a sovereign nation and the people will welcome
you with open arms and rose petals."

According to Aziz, the agents told him they'd singled out his e-mail because
he'd used the words "Bush" and "bin Laden" in the same sentence. It's a fairly
Orwellian explanation, hinting at a bevy of federal computers whose sole task
is to scrutinize e-mail word placement.

But according to the American Civil Liberties Union's Christopher Calabrese,
federal law enforcement really does have that capability. "It's definitely
possible for his e-mail to be intercepted," says Calabrese. "But they would
have to be looking ahead of time."

In other words, for Secret Service agents to wiretap Aziz's e-mail account,
they had to have been tipped off. And according to Calabrese, there are a
variety of surveillance programs that might pluck him from obscurity, most
notably the new Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX).

First developed by the Seisint Corporation in Boca Raton, Florida, MATRIX
scours multiple databases looking for so-called information fingerprints. By
cross-referencing an individual's various "fingerprints," MATRIX can measure
the likelihood that a given person is, or could be, a terrorist.

According to documents recently obtained by the ACLU, Seisint compiled a list
of 120,000 people identified as "High Terrorist Factors" (HTF). The company
then donated the list to several federal law enforcement agencies, among them
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service. It is difficult to
determine what, if anything, was done with this information, though in a 2003
slide show Seisint claimed its list had led to "several arrests within one
week" and "scores of other arrests using the HTF."

Nonetheless, MATRIX alone would be incapable of rifling through e-mails looking
for the word "Bush" in close proximity to "bin Laden." For that, the Secret
Service would need a warrant to install a tracking device on Aziz's Internet
service provider. It is impossible to determine whether the Secret Service has
taken any such action: Under the Patriot Act, it is illegal for an institution
to inform an individual when a terrorism-related warrant has been executed
against that individual.

Still, Aziz's ten-year-old bench warrant and far-leftist politics hardly seem
so extraordinary as to attract the government's notice. He says he's never been
investigated before, and like most people aware of the episode, Aziz is
convinced his neighbor tipped the feds to his e-mail diatribe. He and his
pro-war neighbor had been e-mailing back and forth for days. The dispute first
erupted on the normally genial "Shaw Talk" listserv, an online forum where
neighbors discuss all things neighborly. The opponents quickly took to
e-mailing each other directly, a sort of online equivalent of taking it
outside.

"I was thinking that I was going to use him to go into the conservative camp to
start recruiting votes for John Kerry," says Aziz. "That using the 'Honorable'
[bin Laden] was more to get under his skin than anything. He just fried my
brain and made me so mad that I had to get back underneath his skin the best
way I knew how."

Apparently it worked. After receiving Aziz's e-mail, his neighbor threatened to
call the cops if Aziz wrote him again. Although Aziz hasn't written his
neighbor since the agents paid a visit, he suspects his fellow Shaw
neighborhood resident ratted him out.

Regardless of the Secret Service's reason for visiting Aziz, the agents left
after an hour without Aziz or any of his files. "The [men were] just doing
[their] job," Aziz says of the agents. "They were completely professional the
whole time."

riverfronttimes.com | originally published: June 9, 2004