FBI agents created a fake news story mimicking The Seattle Times web page to locate and capture a suspect behind multiple high school bomb threats in 2007, according to a new report, causing the paper to express outrage on Monday night.
In order to track down a young suspect believed to be involved in a series of bomb threats called into Timberline High School in Lacey, located an hour south of Seattle, the FBI reportedly created a false Associated Press byline piece and posted it on a bogus website "in the style of The Seattle Times" in 2007, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Then the agents, recruited by local police after the school had been evacuated twice due to a number of bomb threats, sent the story link to the suspect's MySpace account, eventually tracking down the suspect's software information and location details after the article was opened, the Times said.
In June 2007, 15-year-old Josh Glazebrook was identified and arrested through the surveillance tactic. He later pleaded guilty to the bomb threats.
Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, highlighted the FBI's actions on Twitter Monday night, calling them "irresponsible."
"We are outraged that the FBI, with the apparent assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office, misappropriated the name of The Seattle Times to secretly install spyware on the computer of a crime suspect," Seattle Times Editor Kathy Best said. "Not only does that cross a line, it erases it."
"Our reputation and our ability to do our job as a government watchdog are based on trust," she added. "Nothing is more fundamental to that trust than our independence - from law enforcement, from government, from corporations and from all other special interests."
"The FBI's actions, taken without our knowledge, traded on our reputation and put it at peril."
"We are extremely concerned and find it unacceptable that the FBI misappropriated the name of The Associated Press and published a false story attributed to AP," AP Director of Media Relations Paul Colford wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. "This ploy violated AP's name and undermined AP's credibility."
However, the event's actions were defended by the FBI, which claimed that this particular technique only occurs "in very rare circumstances," The Huffington Post reported.
"Every effort we made in this investigation had the goal of preventing a tragic event like what happened at Marysville and Seattle Pacific University," said Frank Montoya Jr., special agent in charge of the FBI's Seattle division. "We identified a specific subject of an investigation and used a technique that we deemed would be effective in preventing a possible act of violence in a school setting."
