Atlanta resident Marc Schultz may be the first American interrogated by the FBI for reading an article published in an alternative news weekly — or maybe he’s just the first American to have written a testimonial about it. In “Careful: The FB-Eye Might Be Watching,” (www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-07-17/rant.html), printed in the July 17 edition of Creative Loafing (Atlanta’s alternative weekly), Schultz wittily recounts his recent encounter with two agents curious about what he had been carrying during a recent stop at an Atlanta Caribou Coffee shop.
“Any reading material? Papers?” an FBI special agent named Clay Trippi asked Schultz.
Schultz didn’t think so. “Then,” he writes, “Trippi decides to level with me: ‘I’ll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about it. So that’s why we’re here, just checking it out.
“Like I said, there’s no problem,” Trippi continued. “We’d just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can’t, then you may have a problem. And you don’t want that.”
Schultz remembered that during his visit to Caribou, he had toted along an article that his father had printed off the Web and sent to him. When pressed by the agents for details about the article’s title and author, however, he blanked. After a search of Schultz’s car turned up nothing, the agents left. Schultz then called his father to “retrace some steps together,” and they concluded that the article had been “Weapons of Mass Stupidity,” a damning feature story about Fox News and Rupert Murdoch written by Hal Crowther of the Tampa Bay alternative Weekly Planet (owned by Creative Loafing). Schultz called Trippi to inform him of the details of the article; so far, Trippi hasn’t called him back. (The FBI maintains that all investigations are confidential and won’t comment on the Schultz interview.)
How did the FBI find out Schultz’s name or where to find him? Schultz believes that the person who tipped off the feds must have walked outside to the parking lot to note the license plates on his car. “The first question [the agents] asked me was, ‘Do you drive a black Nissan Altima?'” he told the Chronicle this week. He doesn’t believe the informant was a Caribou employee, because “they’re kind of nice … and I’m a regular.”
Since his article hit the shelves, Schultz has appeared on MSNBC and has received calls from newspapers and magazines across the country intrigued by his Big Brother experience. He’s also spoken to Crowther (whose “Weapons” seems no more explosive than any other leftist commentary) and a man who offered to help him if he ever needs to hide from the government. But Schultz believes he’s off the feds’ hook: Though he describes himself as “very lefty” and “afraid” of the Bush administration, he’s not an activist or rabble-rouser — just a reader of the “wrong” materials, apparently. Earlier this year, he jokes, “I kept meaning to go to a peace rally, and I never did.”
This article appears in July 25 • 2003.