The online posting on Aug. 30 sounded like the rantings of a crank: The subject was "911," and it warned "Something is going to happen tomorrow ... REPENT!"
On Sept. 4, the author of the first message, "Xinoehpoel," was back: "Wait 7 days," he wrote.
The few people reading the obscure Internet discussion over the prophecies of Nostradamus dismissed it. But seven days after the message, on Sept. 11, the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. Xinoehpoel quickly returned to the discussion to gloat that he had predicted the disaster.
And that was when the FBI and anti-terrorism investigators in 10 cities started calling the offices of O1.com, a Sacramento, California firm that sells Internet access to smaller Internet service providers.
Xinoehpoel's messages could be traced back to one of the company's clients, said Brad Jenkins, the company's president.
When the subpoenas came, Jenkins said that he acted personally to make the process of handing over information go quickly and smoothly: "With this one, we said, `don't send 'em through the hoops.'"
As investigators piece together clues from every possible source after the Sept. 11 attack, it is no surprise that they would look heavily within the online world, said James X. Dempsey, the deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. "All of us live in that world, including the terrorists."
Other providers of Internet services, including such giants as America Online and Earthlink, confirmed that they have been approached with requests to help conduct online wiretaps as part of the investigations the attacks. The FBI did not comment.
Some online advocates have suggested that law enforcement has gone further in the current investigation, demanding that companies attach the Carnivore Internet wiretap system to their networks. Carnivore is controversial, in part, because the technology could be used to listen in on a multitude of online interactions for certain words like "hijack" or "bin Laden." But its intended use is to gather only the source and destination of a criminal suspect's e-mail.
Dempsey said that the use of the broadest capabilities of Carnivore to snoop would be illegal, and would jeopardize the chances of winning a later trial of any suspects who were arrested.
Mark Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said that even though there is no evidence that the technologies are currently being used in a way that oversteps legal protections, "our test for now is whether we can remain a nation of laws even at this time of national crisis."
Jenkins said that his view of government surveillance has shifted over time -- and especially in the last week. "Certainly it appears that one of the ways these guys communicate is electronically," he said. "I think everybody would say, `Let 'em watch it.'"
As for Xinoehpoel, Jenkins said he believed that was a false lead -- a "goofball" who finally got a prediction right.
There is evidence that true terrorists are more circumspect. According to security experts, Osama bin Laden and his followers do not trust the Internet, and pass the most important messages face to face.
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