Depending on who you ask, Karl August Mueller is either one of the Web's funniest satirists, or a malevolent threat to society.
From his side-splitting letters to Virginia newspapers purporting to be a right-of-Rush conservative to his fictitious Lobster Liberation Front that encourages readers to free tank-trapped crustaceans, Mueller has made an art of encouraging visitors to think twice about whether what they're reading is real.
But the Feds don't appreciate his humor. Mueller, a 33-year-old Web programmer in Los Angeles who goes by the online name of "Gus", said two FBI agents paid him a surprise visit at 7:30 a.m. PDT Thursday.
"I was in the shower and, knock, knock, knock, my housemate's knocking on my shower telling me there are two FBI agents on the door," Mueller says. "They wanted to talk to me about this website. They were like "We're having trouble with shootings and schools throughout the country and you're promoting this, you know."
The portion of his website Mueller is talking about is the "Trench Coat Mafia" page -- a parody he placed online soon after news broke about the Columbine massacre. It says: "Hello and Heil Hitler! My name is Eric and this is my Web page! I hate jocks, Jews and jiggaboos. I loathe wops, spics and blood-engorged ticks."
It pretends to be written by a white supremacist Goth geek obsessed with two things: Pipe bombs and getting even with the "jocks" in his high school. "Our master plan is to kill at least 500 people at our high school, besiege the local neighborhood, seize the airport, and then crash a plane full of jocks and cheerleaders into the Pentagon," the page says.
"He calmly looked me in the eye and asked me directly, 'Do you make bombs?'" Mueller said about one of the two FBI agents. "It was a ludicrous question but this guy wasn't into smart-ass remarks, so I said no."
Friday is the second anniversary of the killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, by two students who used the term "Trenchcoat Mafia." That seems to have put law enforcement on edge.
A detective in the sheriff's office for Jefferson County, where Columbine High School is located, says the FBI talked to him about Mueller's website three weeks ago.
"They had received it through their local jurisdiction and got a complaint about it," says Detective John Healy. "They were concerned about it."
"I recognize it's covered under the First Amendment, which is why I can't do a whole lot about it," Healy says. "I can't mandate to have any court order to take the site off (the Internet)."
This isn't the first time the FBI has reportedly investigated a parody website. In February, the FBI launched an investigation into bonsaikitten.com, and in 1999 the FBI tried to censor a Y2K hoax video from the Net.
Mueller has a habit of playing pranks on unsuspecting Internet denizens: He's posted fake spam in rec.music.filk and once set up a hoax website of an 8-year-old boy obsessed with pedophiles.
So is he telling the truth about the visit by the Feds, or is it just another prank?
Mueller swears it's true, and he sounds believable enough: "It absolutely did happen."
He gave Wired News the names of the FBI agents, Peter Damos and Peter Hoffman, who he says visited him. Hoffman wasn't available, but Damos answered the phone and said "we don't confirm or deny the conduct of any investigation" before hanging up.
An FBI spokesperson also refused to say anything.
Mueller said his site is undoubtedly protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression. "It was an intimidation move," Mueller says. "They were there to intimidate me from making lawful use of the First Amendment. I said at one point, 'What is this, Russia?'"
"This guy is a really talented artist," says Sonia Arrison, director of the Center for Freedom and Technology at the Pacific Research Institute. "The FBI should recognize that his website is art, not terrorism. The feds are going after Jonathan Swift, not Timothy McVeigh -- this is dangerous for free speech."
Mueller, whose father was a radical environmental activist, said that Davos and Hoffman took his roommate outside the house and asked whether he knew of any pipe bomb material on the property. "They kind of shoved him around a little bit," Mueller said, stating that the agents pushed him with their chests and acted thuggishly.
