The Case of Sherman Austin: Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror

On the afternoon of January 24, 2002,  approximately 25 federal agents, guns in hand, stormed the home  of Sherman Austin, a Sherman Oaks, California activist who founded www.raisethefist.com, an online site that hosted many political activists' websites. The federal agents, who had been monitoring Austin's Internet activities for several months, seized his computers  and other personal belongings, including anti-war and anti-globalization  literature. "They showed me a search  warrant, and I just glanced at it They just went into the house.  They searched all the rooms in the house. They knew where my  room was. They went back there, looked at all the computers,  asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were  for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I  had been running," Austin recalled. "They searched  the garage, pretty much everywhere with their guns still out  and drawn. They still had people surrounding the house with their  weapons drawn." When the agents later left  Austin's home, his room had been ransacked, but they failed to  charge him with a crime. Austin, bewildered by the search, still  planned on driving to New York City to protest the World Economic  Forum in early February 2002. Upon arriving in New York,  though, Austin was quickly apprehended by city police. "While  I was in jail, they handcuffed me and took me to a backroom,  where a detective from the FBI and a Secret Service agent were,  and they interrogated me for about three or four hours,"  Austin said. "During this whole time, I kept noticing more  and more FBI agents walking in and out of the room. They asked  me stupid questions like whether I was a terrorist or involved  in any terrorist organizations. I told them, 'No,' and it's funny,  one of the agents looked at me like I was seriously a terrorist  and that I was lying to him." [more