[EXCERPT FROM A SHORT AUTOBIO - 2006]
By 1999, I had been involved in a degree of online activism for about two years. I was just becoming aware of the level of online surveillance that occurred, managed by the National Security Agency. The full extent of it would not be made plain to me until about three years later but what I had already found out necessitated resistance, I thought.
So we devised a plan to get millions of people, worldwide, to send out emails on October 21, 1999, that would contain a long list of known keywords in the NSA's Echelon dictionary. Echelon monitors phone calls and emails for known keywords and other 'suspect' patterns. If you mention the word 'bomb', for instance, a hundred times in a months, a human will be reading your emails and evaluating you as a potential threat. If you set up a Hotmail account and send an encrypted email, the same day, to Baghdad, a red flag most definitely will go up. I think you get the idea.
The alert we sent out globally managed to get translated into at least seven languages. Very soon, though I had conducted all of this via webmail, I was getting vaguely threatening emails in my home AOL account. I left family, house, and home in order not to endanger them and went underground for a while. I thought that I would be safe. What I would soon find out was that my interests had been recorded as a signature in some surveillance CPU. I was alright for about a week but when I got online on a public computer in Santa Cruz, California and began to merely catch up on news, suddenly a two-year period of intense harassment would begin.
Jam Echelon Day had targeted the premier surveillance outfit in the world. What had I expected - that they wouldn't find me? We had brought awareness of Echelon from conspiranoia trash to the spotlight of Sixty Minutes. I had personally done an interview with the Village Voice. Yeah, they had figured out I was Robert Kemp.
Today, according to the Patriot Act, such a fight to publicize a lack of American privacy is categorized as terrorism. We knew we would not jam up the computers but we knew that by getting people to participate we would raise awareness.
Over the next two years I would be harassed and come to know the meaning of hell, at least my own personal one. When one is homeless, and one has few options, cornering such a person into certain situations becomes easy. Soon, I was experiencing sleep deprivation, constant innuendos by people I didn't recognize, attempts to hook me on methamphetamine, and on and on...
A woman who was a very close friend of mine for over a year, one day, told me she had been assigned to me. With the Aryan overtones that had managed to make their way into my life, I dropped her like a sack of potatoes and have not returned to California since. I went to Boulder, Colorado which turned out, as well, to be a mistake. While California is behavior modification central, Boulder is defense contractor central, where the harassment is less subtle and more direct.
Here, near the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, near umpteen NRO, NGIA, CIA, NSA, and DOE contractors, I would happen upon a vein of research that would open a Pandora's box of revelations regarding 9-11 and America's drone program.
It was at the Boulder RTD bus depot that I would receive the first in-person death threat that I had ever had. An Alabama boy (judging by his drawl) with war written all over him would say these words: "I am going to kill you."
[END EXCERPT]
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