I was once investigated for terrorism by Special Branch in the UK in about 1996.
They came to my parent's house at a weekend to question me. I'd just happened to have gone home for the weekend to see my folks. I was running perhaps the largest warez site on the Internet at the time, so I thought I was super busted.
The detective sat me down and said to me, "What do you know about a plot to kill the President?" and I burst out laughing, mostly out of relief. He stares daggers at me and says "You're not taking me very seriously, are you Mr Charles?"
Luckily he did not detain me. We came to the conclusion that one of the hundreds of people I'd given an account to on one of my Linux servers had sent a death threat to president@whitehouse.gov. Apparently it contained information about the president's movements that was "not well known."
I never saw the email, but the detective called me on the day they were going out to pick Kushil up. I'd given him an account a few months previously so he could play MUDs and download porn. Seemed like a really nice guy. The detective read the end of the email to me over the phone, "Come get my ass you bastards," it said, and then had his address and map co-ordinates to his house.
Back then you could send an email “from” any address without verification, and I’d bet they weren’t sophisticated enough to detect that. There were many open and/or hacked SMTP gateways. I went to a federal military school and showed people how to do this on our own .mil servers. This would be deadly serious today, but email was 95% jokes and flame wars anyway, so it just made things more hilarious. Even Stanford CS’s SMTP in the 2010s allowed unauthenticated “from” addresses, and someone was using it to impersonate the Google founder emails for promoting and funding their startup.
Those wild times. I would often use a cia.gov FROM address on a lot of stuff. The crazy shit you could do. I ran one of the EFnet servers, so I just added HOSTS entries to the server so that I was on from cia.gov and whitehouse.gov all the time which confused a lot of people.
They came to my parent's house at a weekend to question me. I'd just happened to have gone home for the weekend to see my folks. I was running perhaps the largest warez site on the Internet at the time, so I thought I was super busted.
The detective sat me down and said to me, "What do you know about a plot to kill the President?" and I burst out laughing, mostly out of relief. He stares daggers at me and says "You're not taking me very seriously, are you Mr Charles?"
Luckily he did not detain me. We came to the conclusion that one of the hundreds of people I'd given an account to on one of my Linux servers had sent a death threat to president@whitehouse.gov. Apparently it contained information about the president's movements that was "not well known."
I never saw the email, but the detective called me on the day they were going out to pick Kushil up. I'd given him an account a few months previously so he could play MUDs and download porn. Seemed like a really nice guy. The detective read the end of the email to me over the phone, "Come get my ass you bastards," it said, and then had his address and map co-ordinates to his house.
Nobody ever saw Kushil again after that.