Terrorist hunters get mixed welcome

OLYMPIA — They comb Islamic Web sites for terrorist messages hidden in digital photos or music.

Using translator software, they pore through Arabic Internet forums, looking for codes based on text from the Koran.

A year ago, they say, they unearthed communications — and warned government officials — about terrorists trying to use cell phones to remotely detonate bombs. They say they warned about the May 12, 2003 terrorist bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Their intelligence work, they say, “was directly responsible for the raising of the national terrorism threat level on May 20, 2003.”

“They” are a little-known group of seven civilians — unpaid, volunteer terrorist-hunters — called “7 Seas Global Intelligence.”

The international group stumbled into the spotlight this week when one of its members, small-town Montana judge Shannen Rossmiller, testified how she’d tracked down Ryan Anderson, a Washington National Guardsman accused of trying to slip military information to al Qaeda terrorists.

On Friday, some national counterterrorism experts praised the group’s good intentions. But they warned that amateur terrorist-hunting is potentially a very dangerous game.

“I’m a little torn,” said James O. Ellis III, a terrorism analyst at Oklahoma City’s National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. “On the one hand, I think it’s admirable. But do not try this at home. You don’t know what the blowback might be.”

“I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea,” said Daniel McBride, a former Army counterintelligence agent who teaches at Kaplan College in Boca Raton, Florida. “It’s always a little unsettling and counterproductive when civilians are conducting their own criminal investigations.”

Rossmiller, reached at home Friday in Conrad, Mont., would say little about 7 Seas. A military investigating officer has told her not to discuss the Anderson case until it’s over. (The officer on Thursday recommended that Anderson be court-martialed. If convicted, the former Washington State University student could face the death penalty.)

But in testimony Wednesday, Rossmiller revealed some things about the group and its motivations.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Rossmiller said, she was recovering from an injury. Immobile, she spent days soaking up the television coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“It changed my life in many ways,” she said. “I wanted to try and understand how something like this could happen to our country.”

She studied the Koran and Arab culture, and connected up quickly with several like-minded people at an online discussion group called itshappening.com.

The group named themselves 7 Seas, got a free Web site, and began sniffing around.

Rossmiller is 33. She was born and raised in Conrad, a rural county seat with a population of about 2,700. It’s a farming and ranching community east of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. One of the city’s big annual events is a rodeo and festival called Whoop-Up Trail Days. For the past four years, Rossmiller has worked part-time as an appointed local judge.

Much less is known about the other members of the group, who live in Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, Australia, Singapore and Canada. All are civilians, Rossmiller said, although some have security-related jobs. At least one’s an economist; another trained as a physicist. The group’s Web site is www.7-seas.net.

“We’re citizens. We were affected by what happened on Sept. 11 and we have a right to participate in what capacity we can,” said the group’s Canadian member. A 44-year-old unemployed computer systems analyst, he spoke on condition of anonymity.

The group’s members work from home, on nights and weekends, he said. He compares the work to wartime scrap-metal drives or to civil-defense wardens, scanning the night skies for paratroopers.

“We want to fight back in our limited way,” he said. “And we have found intelligence that would not otherwise have been found.”

Rossmiller told Army lawyers that she tracked down Anderson through things he’d posted on Muslim- and gun-related Web sites. They exchanged about two dozen messages before she turned him in to the FBI and military agents.

Anderson wasn’t the only suspicious person Rossmiller corresponded with. For a while, she e-mailed “The Arab Knight,” who claimed to have Stinger missile parts for sale. He disappeared, she said. Another one, “Expected Dawn,” said he had schematics for cell phone bomb detonators.

She said about 20 to 30 potential terrorists have been reported by 7 Seas to government authorities. She said the group routinely provides information to the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, embassies abroad, the Canadian intelligence service, and to Israel’s Mossad.

Unbeknownst to some members, 7 Seas apparently has at least one indirect link to law enforcement. According to testimony by FBI special agent Troy Sowers, one of the founders of 7 Seas was a confidential informant the FBI paid in cash. Sowers identified the man as Merrill Singletary, although there was no way at the tightly controlled Army hearing to confirm the spelling of the name. Rossmiller, who said Singletary is no longer one of the group’s members, referred to him as Terry Singletary. She said he lived in Pocatello, Idaho. He could not be reached for comment.

The tactics of 7 Seas have also caused some unease at the FBI. Sowers testified that Rossmiller told the agency she had used a snooping program called “Realtime Spyware” on some people. The $80 program allows someone to secretly peek into the victim’s computer.

When the FBI seized Anderson’s computer, they were worried that Rossmiller might have infected it with the spy program, which apparently would have caused legal problems. She hadn’t. In fact, she told the FBI that she hadn’t used the spy program on anyone in the United States.

But it’s those sorts of worries that give some counterterrorism experts heartburn about efforts like those of 7 Seas.

“I’m troubled by it,” said McBride. “Much of what they do is already being done by the federal government already, although it’s not being discussed.”

Amateur terrorist hunters may actually be dealing with undercover federal agents, with both sides posing as terrorists, McBride said.

Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore, has similar concerns.

“People would be well advised to be very careful if they do this sort of thing,” he said.