Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Federal Bureau of Investigation

well..... where to begin...

This afternoon around 9:30 I received a call on my mobile from an "unidetified caller" answering the phone I greeted by a womans voice with a slight southern accent. Mr Klimke? yes, I replied. This is Stephanie Hancock from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ummm ok, how can I help you? She proceeded to tell me that they were at my house and had conducted interviews with my roomate regarding internet material that had been accessed from our I.P. Address. She then asked when I would be able to meet with them for an interview? I thought that at first it must be a horrible prank perpetrated by a friend. I told Agent Hancock that I would immediately leave work and meet them at the house. The whole drive there I was thinking what the problem could possibly be. Driving on the 101 I rapidly called Carly, then Will then Brian, Liz and Finally Pat. Neither Brian nor Liz answered their phones which concerned me greatly. Pat answered very cautiously and told me that I just needed to get there, he then handed the phone to an Agent named Ken Hancock who wanted to verify that I was enroute. Arriving at the house I came to the rapid realization thatitwas in fact no joke. Three different Government vehicles and 5 people scattered around the front yard caused me to suddenly feel less than at ease. Stephanie greeted me on the lawn and we went inside to talk. I was shown a copy of the search warrant and the itemized list of confiscated objects from the house, or more specifically my room. It seems that our I.P. address had been associated with "5 images" of illegal content that had been uploaded via a P2P file sharing program. I explained to the two agents that interviewed me that we had an "open" wireless network and that "WEP" security hadnot been enabled on it. I also told them how my personal access to the internet had been interruped for the last month while my laptop was in California for repair. They asked me many questions about "child pornigraphy" how I would describe it and if I had ever downloaded any. I told them that I of course had never intentionally sought out that kind of content and that there must be some sort of mistake, or that the download was accidentel. While their questions were very in depth and made me uncomfortable I felt that they realized that we were not running an illegal image ring of any sort. They asked if I would submit to a Lie Detector test and I quickly said that I would dowhatever necessary to clear this up. After 10 minutes of conversation they seemed to be satisfied with the information I had given them and said that we were done. When we walked into the living room they advised Brian, Liz, Pat and myself of what steps would follow next in the investigation. Brian went on to tell me how when the Agents arrived at the house at 6:50 in the morning it was just like in the movies and they flooded out of their cars with guns drawn and wearing bullet proof vests. How they pushed into the house and called for everyone to come out after identifying themselves as FBI agents. I still can't believe all this has happened and I am not sure what the next steps will be but I know that none of us knowingly did what they clame and led to todays events. They seemed like very capable people who were just doing their jobs and I hope all this can be resolved without anymore nerve shattering events like what happened today.

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