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