ClumsyMonkey.net

In a case that may test limits on Internet free speech in the wake of Sept. 11, armed federal agents last week raided the home of a Los Angeles teenager suspected of hacking into several Web sites to post anarchist messages and using his own site, Raisethefist.com, to publish bomb-making information. Sherman Martin Austin, 18, is believed to have violated federal computer fraud and abuse laws, as well as statutes prohibiting the distribution of bomb-making information, according to an FBI affidavit.

After subjecting the house to the kind of forensic scrutiny accorded a jumbo-jet crash, the feds decided not to arrest Austin, whose anarchist Web site, Raisethefist.com, had aroused their interest when it posted a link to another site offering bomb-making instructions. But a week later the government changed its mind and held him without bail for 13 days. Then it let him go. Six months later, in August 2002, it had another change of heart and charged him, following a plea agreement, with a single count of distributing explosives information.

Now 20, Austin appeared downtown Monday to be sentenced. He was dressed in a gray suit his mother had bought at an Out of the Closet thrift store. He’d worn the suit the week before for this same hearing, which had to be postponed because a clerk had forgotten to enter it on Judge Stephen V. Wilson’s calendar. It was the same suit Austin had worn June 30, when he appeared before Wilson for sentencing, only to be told by the Reagan appointee that the second plea agreement worked out between Austin’s defense attorney and the federal prosecutor was too lenient. And, for all I know, it was the suit Austin had worn last September, the first time he appeared for sentencing, only to have Judge Wilson declare the original plea deal too light.

So here were Sherman Austin and Judge Wilson once more, each wearing their respective court attire. Wilson again asked assistant prosecutor Rob Castro-Silva if anything had changed his mind toward increasing Austin’s sentence of four months’ custody, four months in a halfway house and three years’ probation. And again the prosecutor said no.

This time, however, Wilson was ready to pass sentence: 12 months in prison, a $2,000 fine and three years’ probation. Austin will not, during those three years, be allowed to sit in the same room with anyone who vents violent anti-government rhetoric or to use a computer without the okay of a probation officer — who will also have access to Austin’s telecom bills.

“Is this the maximum probation I can give?” Wilson asked the prosecutor.