BLOWING A SECURITY MOM’S COVER
I’m adding the fearless Shannen Rossmiller to my list of Moms Who Rock–but with some reservations, which I’ll get to in a sec. The Houston Chronicle profiles Rossmiller today, going into great detail about how she works by day as a judge, at by night as a terrorist hunter:
By day, she’s the municipal judge of this tiny town, a wife and mother of three, but by moonlight Shannen Rossmiller is a spy.
Then, Rossmiller ? petite, blond and 34 ? assumes one of several unlikely false identities, all angry, violent, Muslim men, nurturing hatred of the United States. In that guise, she combs the Internet through the late evening and early morning and sifts through the messages and declarations on extremist Islamic Web sites.
During those hours, Rossmiller is on a quest that consumes hours of each day, days of each week. It’s one that will place her on the stand Thursday as the government’s primary witness against a National Guardsman accused of offering information to help Muslim extremists kill U.S. troops.
It’s a quest that has already placed her in danger.
Rossmiller works with an exclusive group, a coalition of seven civilians, international “cyber spies” who chase terrorists on the Internet.
They call themselves the “7-Seas.”
Until recently they were a largely unknown, almost clandestine bunch. Named for its global scope, the group consists of Rossmiller; a nuclear physicist/software designer in Canada; a corporate security consultant in Houston; a former private detective in Singapore; an Australian; and two other Americans.
Rossmiller and her colleagues would have remained anonymous if it hadn’t been for her success in nabbing National Guardsman Ryan Anderson, accused of attempting to defect to al-Qaida and offering information on troop strength and vulnerable points on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle:
After exchanging 27 e-mails with Anderson (”Abdul Rashid”), Rossmiller called the FBI. Undercover agents then met with Anderson in a secretly videotaped session, during which he designated vulnerable points on a tank and offered other information.
Rossmiller netted an arrest…
…And was called to testify at Anderson’s preliminary hearing in May. Her identity was revealed in court. Days later, phone threats were called in to Rossmiller’s office in Conrad, and she has been under police protection since.
Okay, here are my questions: This woman and her colleagues are amazing patriots. But why wasn’t her identity concealed in court? And why did the Chronicle decide to endanger her even further? As much as I was glad to read the story, it seems to me that the publicity may deter other citizens from undertaking similar efforts–the opposite of what the government would want. Or maybe not…
Update: Reader Nathan passes along this interview with Rossmiller from MTPolitics.net.
Update II: I asked the brilliant Andrew McCarthy, former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, for his thoughts on Rossmiller’s outing. Here’s what he had to say:
This revelation of her identity is something that, unfortunately, often happens in two different kinds of prosecutions — and this case features both: (a) sting operations and (b) cases featuring Internet chat room evidence.
Taking entrapment first, a defendant caught in a sting almost always claims to have been entrapped. (Usually, the evidence is so damning that he has no choice but to say “The devil made me do it.”) There are two ways for the government to defeat an entrapment defense: (i) demonstrate that the defendant took the first step toward (i.e., initiated or proposed) the crime, or (ii) even if the government operative took the first step, prove that the defendant was predisposed to commit the crime. To increase the chances of conviction, the government will always prove predisposition even if the evidence shows the defendant probably took the first step (so the prosecutor can make the “even if” argument for conviction, which is usually very powerful). Consequently, if Anderson claimed that the FBI guys entrapped him, the government would have wanted to prove his prior chat room conversations with Judge Rossmiller to show that he was predisposed to help al Qaeda long before the FBI sting ever happened. If those conversations thus became an important part of the case, she would almost certainly be a necessary witness to explain them. (Otherwise, he could claim that it was all a joke and that the person he was talking to in the chatroom was someone who knew he was kidding.)
Next, chat rooms. I do not consider myself a techno-wonk, but I know enough to know that, unlike regular email, chatroom evidence is pretty hard for Internet Service Providers to preserve — i.e., you often cannot get it by subpoena. On the other hand, a witness to a conversation can always testify that the conversation happened, and can authenticate a transcript of the conversation (if she has kept one) in a way the ISP might not be able to. Assuming that (a) the government thought it was important to prove the chats (whether to defeat an entrapment claim or because they actually charged some crimes directly out of the Internet chats), and (b) Anderson was unwilling to stipulate to the authenticity of the transcripts, the government would have needed a witness to prove those chats, and Judge Rossmiller would have been the obvious witness.
This is one reason why I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment that Judge Rossmiller is a patriot. There is ALWAYS risk attendant to cooperating with the government, and the real patriots bear the risk. Sometimes the government can conceal a witness’s identity, but most of the time people who are crucial to the government’s ability to make the case — especially if they’ve had extensive interaction with the defendant — end up being exposed. That’s probably what happened here.
This is part of the reason that I’ve been writing that the law enforcement approach to terrorism, where terrorists get the advantage of our generous due process standards (including discovery about informants), is nuts — we have to tell the bad guys too much. As this case shows, the military justice system is not a perfect antidote to that problem.
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The Chron is a mostly Democratic paper in a mostly Democratic town. Why are you surprised that the “people’s need to know” outweighs Rossmiller’s safety?
Craig at MT Politics did a blog interview with Shannen Rossmiller.
In the interview, he asked her the same thing about her identity. Here’s the exchange:
C: What kind of work were you doing on your own? Now that you’ve been “outed,” do you worry about being targeted?
SR: When I was operating on my own, I was doing the same work as I do with 7-Seas at the present time. Primarily, I engaged in commumications with persons of interest and performed threat analysis.
The only reason I would be worried about being targetted for the counterintelligence work I do would be if one of the operational identities I use were to be exposed and subsequently linked to me. However, I will say one thing that 7-Seas takes very seriously is its members’ security first. When operating online, all tracks which would trace back to me are eliminated and replaced with tracks that would lead someone to believe that I am in any given country, other than the US.
Okay, you don’t allow HTML tags, I see. Here’s the link to the interview itself:
http://www.mtpolitics.net/archives/1375
C’mon Michelle, there is not integrity in news anymore. These people would love nothing more than for a some psycho muslims to brutally murder this woman and her family. That would be big news for a long time. I am surprised they didn’t print her home address, what schools her kids go to and when you might expect to catch her at home.
How do I sign up! Sounds like a fun and rewarding job.
If I had to guess, the chatrooms they’re using are IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network rooms. Nobody monitors or logs them, and you can set one up on your own machine and have virtually limitless clients hooked up from anywhere in the world.
http://www.mirc.com has the most popular client for IRC if you want to check it out. NOBODY logs this stuff, and it is notoriously easy to fake a “log” of an IRC chat..so without a witness, this would be one hell of an uphill battle.
That being said, unless the idiot trying to sell secrets was spoofing or blocking queries, it’s also very easy to get the guys IP address…from there it’s ridiculously simple to figure out who he is….some morons go ahead and put their real names in the “info” files.
It’s a jungle out there. I’ve played with the idea of “trolling” IRC networks (certain ones tend to attract certain types, or certain regions of the world….the Turks and Brazillians, for example, are hyper-sexual and quite amusing once you get them going). I was on a middle eastern one once, and let me tell you, there are so many angry arabs on there I have no idea how you would figure out where the dilliante loudmouths ended and the real terrorists began…they all sound like lunatics.
Fox
Ah, yes… IRC…
Personally, I’ve had more problems with the Pakistanis than Brazilians and Turks, but that might depend on the IRC-net used…
I usually log those chats automatically, but since it’s just a simple textfile, it’s not much value as evidence in itself.
I tend to block out Pakistanis and ME people when I see them, few of them are able to keep a logical conversation.
The few times I have tried, they usually start with talking about how peaceloving they are, but if you dont agree with them on everything, it doesn’t take long until they start making threats.
It’s extremely easy to trace people there, I can usually trace the country and town within seconds, and that’s without much effort…
I usually do that now as a preemptive measure, to see where everyone is from. That way I know where people is from, and can easily block them if I want to.
I have thought about “trolling” there too, but I also found it impossible to see the difference between them, they all sound alike when chatting…
Probably the reason they revealed her identity is the same reason as why ‘Donny Brasco’ had to ID himself as Joseph Pascone in the big mob court cases: A US citizen has the right to confront their accuser. That means true identity, not alias.
This has bad ramifications for the career (and sometimes life) of an undercover officer, but also protects citizens from obvious abuses.
M1 tank weaknesses:
1. Occasionally runs low on fuel.
2. Sometimes the gunner falls asleep.
3. Doesn’t float too well.
4. Is unable to fly under its own power.
Additional M1 tank weaknesses:
5. Still vulnerable to bombardment from Gua’uld mothership in orbit.
6. No cupholders.
7. 2 radios, 4 antennae and still gets no good stations.
Final M1 tank weakness:
8. The self distruct button mounted on the outside. It is in the back of the tank, at eye level, centered between the tracks… Keep looking… almost there…. “Driver. Forward. Fast”
Thanks for the link. I hope to have a little more in-depth with Shannen once she can talk about the Andersen case.
“C’mon Michelle, there is not integrity in news anymore. These people would love nothing more than for a some psycho muslims to brutally murder this woman and her family.”
Chris, when you get the urge to write something like this you should go take a shower first. Then some medication. Have a beer. Read a book. Sooner or later, you’ll get a clue.