Unleashing the FBI on America's Novelists

Here's a news item you're unlikely to encounter elsewhere. It's from the Winter 2005 issue of the Author's Guild Bulletin, which arrived in my mailbox half an hour ago. The story, titled "Baseless Hysteria?" describes the experience of a writer researching a novel who stumbled upon information about "atrocities committed by an al-Qaeda-linked group in Cambodia, her novel's setting."

What happened next? According to the Bulletin:

Six federal agents, including three from the FBI, raided her home before dawn. . . . they confiscated her computers, photocopier, files, books, discs, computer programs, music CDs, contracts, television, pens, paper and postage stamps. . . .It tooks months for agents to return the author's computer, she said, which now contains monitoring software apparently installed by the government. The agents also returned some of her discs, which she said were ruined. Nothing else seized by the agents has been returned. . . .

The author believes that in her research, she stumbled onto a website the government created "for the sole purpose of entrapment." She learned, too, she said, that her e-mail was being tracked and monitored by a powerful government tracking program called Carnivore.

Remarkably, the source of the article in the Authors Guild Bulletin was a story in the November, 2004, issue of the Romance Writers Report. Somehow I never thought of romance writers as a collection of dangerous radicals--but give the Bush administration time . . .