A one-mom war on terror

“Look,” Shannen Rossmiller says, pointing at her computer screen. She’s in an online chat room, and the name Terrorist11 has just popped up. “He’s one of the more popular guys.”

To get here, she signed onto Alfirdaws.org. Then she clicked into the Paradise Jihadist Supporters Forum. The site is in Arabic, so she turns on the basic Google text translator that renders the discussion into clumsy phrases.

“Take a charge with caution,” warns one jihadist posting, “this thread is monitored.” Meanwhile, Terrorist11 is praising the 2004 Madrid train bombings and posting videos of the dead for other jihadist wannabes to enjoy. Old news, terrorism-wise. Rossmiller flips her shoulder-length hair. She looks bored. “They are just flaming, ranting and raving,” she says. “Do you want to see some blood and guts? Let’s go find it.”

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In her small, one-chair home office in Montana, I sit beside Rossmiller on a little tiled table normally reserved for a lamp. Outside, the vistas stretch across Big Sky Country to the Elk Horn Ridge Mountains. Inside, Rossmiller shows me what she does as perhaps America’s most accomplished amateur terrorist hunter.

We’re monitoring jihadist chatter, and she has warned me that we’re not likely to come across anything too dangerous. Home-brew cyber-counterterrorism, it turns out, is a lot like most police work—weeks of tedious beat patrols punctuated by occasional bursts of excitement. And the section of the Internet populated by terrorists is a lot like the rest of the Internet—only instead of commenting on, say, a video of 1,500 prison inmates performing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” everyone’s chatting about the death of Americans.

Rossmiller hopes to find some people discussing an actual upcoming plot and then join the conversation. But it’s mostly just idle banter today. We come upon a thread in which participants are discussing a Baghdad sniper who has been killing U.S. soldiers. “They call him Juba,” Rossmiller says. She suspects there isn’t a single sniper but rather a cell, and that the thread is designed to create an identity for Juba, a hero who might attract others to the cause.

It’s hard for me to pay attention to Rossmiller. I’m distracted by a little GIF that pops up at the end of one person’s posts. It’s a 1.5-second cartoon of an American GI poking up from the hatch of a tank, getting shot in the head, and slumping over dead. The cartoon has an adolescent playfulness to it so horrifyingly goofy that I can’t stop staring. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump.

Shannen Rossmiller grew up on a Montana wheat farm. She is blond and slim, a former high school cheerleader. After college, she was appointed a local judge in a small Montana town, where she and her husband and three children still live. Although she’s happy to talk about what she does, she prefers not to identify the town itself: She has received phone threats, and her car got shot up once, an incident she attributes directly to her counterterrorism work.

Now 38, Rossmiller spends her weekdays in Helena working in the civil litigation department of the attorney general’s office. She gets up at 4 a.m. and does her hunting predawn. On the weekends, she tracks down killers while relaxing in the bosom of her family.

She has passed along numerous case files to federal authorities. Her information has led U.S. forces abroad to locate Taliban cells in Afghanistan, discover a renegade Stinger missile merchant in Pakistan, and help another foreign government identify a ring of potential suicide bombers. She has also assisted in nabbing two domestic would-be terrorists who have since been convicted of felonies.

There are other self-taught counterterrorists like Rossmiller, but they tend to translate and discuss, lurk and report. Rossmiller works the terrorism boards as if she were playing a complex videogame. She creates multiple characters with distinct personalities and biographies that are as richly conceived as any protagonist on an HBO series. She keeps copies of everything, time-stamps files, and takes screenshots. She has an Excel spreadsheet that details the 640 people with whom she has had contact on these boards since 2002.

Rossmiller developed her remarkable talent for chatting up terrorists after Sept. 11, when she started going into online forums and cajoling valuable information from other visitors. Like most Americans, Rossmiller woke up that September morning and couldn’t believe what she was seeing on TV. Unlike most Americans, she slipped at home that night and cracked her pelvis. She spent six weeks in bed at home, flat on her back, watching nonstop cable news about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the threats of a new kind of terrorism.

Rossmiller admits to a certain tunnel vision when she decides she’s going to master some field of knowledge—her husband, she says, sees her as a kind of idiot savant. Every time she heard a scholar quoted on television in late 2001, she’d ask her husband to fetch their book. “I bought The Koran for Dummies, and then I bought a Koran.” As her health returned, she read textbooks on Arabic, took a nine-week online language course, and began quietly lurking around jihadist Web sites.

At first she was at the mercy of mediocre shareware translators. “The stupid machine would translate sentences like ‘Respect my mustache! I have a happy mustache!’” she says, bursting into a fit of giggles.

But then she started her online courses and bought high-quality translation software. In February 2002, as her Arabic improved and she became more comfortable with her software skills, she wrote herself a goal: “I was going to try to talk to these people as someone not me.”

She quickly encountered technical obstacles: For instance, it would be easy for someone to figure out that her e-mail was originating in Montana. So she invested in a proxy server application, which creates a fake IP address off an IP server located someplace less likely to raise suspicion, such as Yemen. Rossmiller researched the area she was purporting to be e-mailing from and learned the neighborhood so she could casually mention a nearby restaurant or mosque, sometimes even the name of a local imam.

Rossmiller registered on several major sites, including Arabforum.net. “I just wanted to see if I could post something in Arabic and have them respond. Someone would say a car bomb went off and killed three infidels and praise be Allah. And every Joe was going, ‘Praise be Allah.’ So I added a simple greeting and said, ‘Praise be Allah.’”

No one outed her, so she began making her postings more sophisticated. She started watching overseas news programs on cable TV and working references to local events into her messages. Suddenly her postings began to draw comments. She took language from Mohamed Atta’s favorite poem and included it in some of her flowery posts. That got a lot of replies. She began paging through the Koran, learning its stories and noting suitable verses for quotation. “I would change and tailor it to what I needed,” she says. “These are handy little things to adjust for different occasions, like Hallmark cards for jihad.”

In May 2002, Rossmiller saw a post from a man in Pakistan who said he had access to Stinger missiles he wanted to sell. She wrote back to the person she now identifies in her files as Rocket Man, posing as someone interested in purchasing his wares. After a few exchanges, she abruptly threatened to cut off contact unless he provided proof he was who he said he was. “And I’ll be gol-danged if a few days later, a nice little ZIP file appears with pictures of him sitting on some crates,” she says. The inventory numbers of the Stingers were clearly visible. Rossmiller then realized that her hobby had turned into something that needed attention from the FBI.

Rossmiller put a file together and drove to the FBI office in Great Falls, about an hour away from her home. But she wound up just circling the building and never going in. “I chickened out,” she says. “I thought they’d lock me up. So I put all the information into little digital files and sent them to the FBI tip line.” She included her name, Social Security number, educational background, and a note saying, “I am not a crazy person.” Within a week, she got a phone call from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in New Jersey, and the feds began working on the case. She later learned that the inventory numbers matched those on Stingers the U.S. had supplied to the mujahedin—likely remnants of their war against the Soviets in the 1980s.

She caught her next big break a year later when she was poking around a Yahoo chat group called Bravemuslims. One day she saw a post from someone named Amir Abdul-Rashid who wrote a garbled Arabic greeting, “Wa salaam alaaykum,” and then went on in English: “Just curious, would there be any chance a brother who might be on the wrong side at the present, could join up ... defect so to speak?”

Rossmiller wrote back as Abu Khadija, e-mail address khadija1417@hotmail.com, to say that she was organizing some training camps in Pakistan and noted firmly, “To receive an order, contact me.” And the guy did. Pretty soon, it became obvious to Rossmiller that he was an American. He asked to write in English and confided that he was “due to enter the war zone” and “unfortunately due to my position, I will be bearing the arms of the enemy.” Rossmiller realized he was an American soldier and saw that his IP address put him in Washington state. After a few more back-and-forths, she learned his real name was Ryan Anderson and that he was a tank crew member in the Army National Guard, destined to ship out for Iraq soon.

As Anderson prepared to ship out, he wrote, “Our oppertunities [sic] are coming to an end.” And, indeed, they did—with his arrest on charges of attempted espionage and trying to aid the enemy.

Rossmiller claims that she has sent the FBI more than 200 of her “packages” since 2002, and it’s distinctly possible that, working alone at her computer, she has compiled a better track record than the entire Justice Department. A Washington Post analysis in 2005 of the 400-plus people charged with terrorism-related crimes by the federal government found that only 14 of those convicted actually had any ties at all to al Qaida or its network. Rossmiller’s cases, by contrast, have come with solid backup. Consider the man Rossmiller most recently implicated—Michael Reynolds. Reynolds, a Pennsylvania resident, had prepared meticulous plans to blow up pipelines and was shopping online for used gas trucks to implement his plot. He was arrested after traveling 2,000 miles to southern Idaho, lured by Rossmiller into a supposed meeting with a financial backer.

The FBI, it must be said, operates at a disadvantage. Since 2001, the bureau has failed in every attempt to modernize its technology, and it so restricts the software available to agents that they can’t even begin to match what Rossmiller does.

Rossmiller sympathizes. “I went to a meeting in Great Falls, and we got to talking, and someone had to look something up online,” she says. “I asked, ‘What do you use for Internet access?’ and one agent said, ‘We have to go to the public library down the street.’”

From a longer story originally published in the November issue of Wired. Used with permission.