Free Republic

Nevada’s Democrat secretary of state says he’ll do all in his power to crush a conservative organization that ran ads against him in his campaign to become the state’s attorney general. Sound familiar? It’s part of a “disturbing trend,” said Matthew Walter, executive director of the State Government Leadership Foundation, the conservative nonprofit behind the ads that earned the ire of Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller. “This is all about freedom of speech,” Walter said. “Whether it’s President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service and their unbalanced scrutiny into conservative organizations, or whether it’s Ross Miller with his threats and blustering...

Shannen Rossmiller, a former judge from Montana, has posed as Muslim militants to infiltrate extremist chat rooms. Now she wants to expand her one-woman operation, she says at an FBI conference.

Shannen Rossmiller, a former Montana judge whose late-night hunts for al-Qaeda on the Web led to the two largest terror convictions in U.S. history, announced yesterday that she would begin teaching others her arcane and dangerous craft.

U.S. to Offer Turkey Help on PKK The U.S. is to offer Turkey a package of measures to dissuade Ankara from mounting a large-scale military incursion into Iraq to attack PKK Kurdish guerrillas, who have killed scores of Turkish soldiers in recent weeks. Ahead of a meeting in Washington on Monday between President George W. Bush and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, U.S. officials said Ankara would have to get concrete American help to combat the PKK, which has bases in northern Iraq from where it frequently launches attacks into Turkey. “Erdogan has to go back with the...

Al Qaeda 'Re-Emerging' in Pakistan Sanctuaries The U.S. military said Tuesday it expected Al Qaeda to continue its "re-emergence" in sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas from where it supported attacks in Afghanistan. Sanctuary was provided to Al Qaeda and Taliban rebels after Islamabad signed a peace deal with militants in a desperate attempt to quell the unrest in its federally administered areas in September 2006, a U.S. military official said. The militants called off the deal in July this year after Pakistani security forces raided a radical mosque in Islamabad where rebels had massed. Dozens were killed in those...

SCRANTON, Pa. - Shannen Rossmiller isn't a terrorist. She just plays one on the Internet. In the wee hours of the morning, while her family sleeps, the former Montana judge goes online and assumes the identity of a Muslim extremist — the better to strike up conversations with actual terrorists and, she hopes, ferret out their plans to harm the United States and its allies. Then the 38-year-old former Miss Congeniality and married mother of three feeds the intelligence she gathers to the FBI. Her moonlighting as a volunteer terrorist hunter has brought down two suspects in the United States...

What happens when a mother of three and small town municipal judge decides to take on the online Jidhad? Shannen Rossmiller tells the story of how she helped unmask a number of malefactors, including some who were seeking to acquire Stinger missiles and finally track down a renegade in the US National Guard. Viewed from one perspective, it is a fascinating case study of the private citizen warrior, embarked on what Rossmiller called her own "counterJihad". "...Before 9-11, I had no experience with the Middle East or the Arabic language. I was a mother of three and a municipal judge...

CONRAD, Mont. — Shannen Rossmiller finds early mornings are best for hunting terrorists. When it's 4 a.m. in this one-stoplight prairie town, it's 3 p.m. in, say, Karachi, Pakistan, the sweltering hours just before the evening call to prayer. That's when Rossmiller, while her husband and three children sleep, finds the Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards frequented by radical Muslims and jihad warriors are busiest. It is when Rossmiller pursues her deadly serious hobby: Citizen cyber-spy. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Internet has become sprinkled with self-proclaimed intelligence agents and freelance threat analysts like Rossmiller — ordinary...

Tracking Down Terrorists Was it coincidence? Fate? Shannen Rossmiller isn't sure. But on the evening of September 11, 2001, after a wrenching day absorbing horrific images of death and destruction from the East Coast, Rossmiller stepped out of the tub in her Montana home, slipped and broke her pelvis. For the next six weeks, Rossmiller, 31, a mother of three, was under doctor's orders to remain in bed. All day long, for stretches as long as 12 hours, she watched -- and wept -- as TV cameras showed the crumbling Twin Towers, the crumpled Pentagon, a blackened field in Pennsylvania....

Montana judge, 6 others use Web to snare suspects CONRAD, MONT. - By day, she’s the municipal judge of this tiny town, a wife and mother of three, but by moonlight Shannen Rossmiller is a spy. Then, Rossmiller — petite, blond and 34 — assumes one of several unlikely false identities, all angry, violent, Muslim men, nurturing hatred of the United States. In that guise, she combs the Internet through the late evening and early morning and sifts through the messages and declarations on extremist Islamic Web sites.During those hours, Rossmiller is on a quest that consumes hours of each...

Montana mother who is fighting al-Qa'eda from her sitting room By Francis Harris in Helena (Filed: 26/06/2006) Radical Islamists may not know it but their global jihad has more to fear from Shannen Rossmiller, an American mother-of-three, than from a squadron of F16s. The former cheerleader doesn't phrase it quite like that. That isn't her style. Shannen Rossmiller turned freelance spy after 9/11 Yet a summary of case histories and transcripts seen by The Daily Telegraph reveals that she has uncovered the whereabouts of al-Qa'eda fighters in the lawless highlands of Pakistan, shopped groups of would-be terrorists from Liverpool to...

Federal agents contend that a Pennsylvania man tried to work with al Qaeda in a plot to blow up the Alaska pipeline, another pipeline in Pennsylvania and a refinery in New Jersey, according to a published report. Michael Curtis Reynolds, 47, has not officially been charged with terrorism, but a prosecutor at a hearing said that Reynolds tried to "provide material aid to al Qaeda" and that the case "involves a federal offense of terrorism," The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in its Sunday editions. CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reports that a tip from Shannen Rossmiller - a judge from Conrad,...