() It was 20 years ago Saturday that the world awoke to a strange treatise published in print by The Washington Post. The piece espoused extreme hatred for technology, what the manifesto’s author described as the “industrial-technological system” that would someday end up “depriving people of dignity and autonomy.”
The author turned out to be Theodore John Kaczynski, the Unabomber. He infamously sent the manuscript to the Post and The New York Times, saying if they published his rant against technology, he would stop killing and maiming people with letter bombs. After consulting with the FBI, the newspapers jointly published the manuscript, a move based largely on the belief that doing so could end the nearly two-decade long killing spree and perhaps lead to the author’s capture.
The Unabomber’s brother, David, read the published manuscript, realized it was his brother, and turned him in. Suddenly, the nation’s longest and costliest manhunt for a domestic terrorist was over. The Unabomber is serving three life terms in connection to a nearly two-decade terror spree that injured 23 people and killed three others in the United States between 1978 and 1995. He was labeled the Unabomber because his main targets were university scholars and others associated with science and technology.
“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we had to kill people,” the manifesto said.
The Post on Friday recounted the internal machinations behind the decision to publish the 35,000-word manuscript. One particular paragraph in the story points out a larger theme, one essentially having nothing to do with the Unabomber but everything to do with technology:
Two decades later, the events surrounding the publication of the Unabomber’s manuscript seem both distant and eerily familiar. Some elements suggest a bygone age. The manifesto, for example, was perhaps one of the last newsworthy documents to appear only in print. Although the Internet was starting to seep into everyday life, few Americans relied on it for news. Within a few years, that would change irrevocably.
Fast forward to today, Kaczynski clearly wouldn’t need the Post or Times to spread his philosophy. Thanks to technology that the Unabomber railed against, the Internet of today would have provided him a forum for his rants—just like it does now for stodgy news agencies, political protesters, tech sites, the mom and pops of the world, bloggers, and even the ISIS crazies.
The Post‘s reflection on the Unabomber also sparked a reflection of sorts of my own dealings with the Unabomber. The anniversary prompted me to look for my own Unabomber files, the ones I maintained when I covered the Unabomber’s court appeals for The Associated Press. As time passed, I think I must have thrown away most of the files, but I did find a three-page, photocopied letter the Unabomber addressed to me at my former press room office in the San Francisco federal building 15 years ago. Where that original letter is, I haven’t a clue. There were also others that I cannot find.
Still, I did discover this Unabomber hand-written correspondence that has not yet been published on the Internet. I found it late Saturday in a file marked “Sadie,” the folder I maintain with updated health information about my black Labrador dog.
As far as I can remember, this letter (PDF) was sent to me unsolicited from the Unabomber while he was in prison. At the time, he was demanding that he be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea. He claims he was coerced by his attorneys to plead guilty—in exchange for a life sentence instead of a death sentence—to avoid a trial where his attorneys would focus on him being mentally ill.
J. Tony Serra, a prominent San Francisco lawyer who would later go to prison on tax evasion charges, told me 15 years ago that if Kaczynski won a new trial, he would put on a so-called “political defense.”
“He always wanted to go to trial. He wanted to air his principles, his ideology behind his actions,” Serra said. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was executed after his political defense flopped, one in which he said he blew up the building and killed 168 people as retribution for the FBI’s Branch Davidian attack in Waco, Texas.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001 declined to allow Kaczynski to withdraw his guilty plea. If allowed a new trial, in which he said he would have accepted the death penalty if he lost, Kaczynski said in his letter to me that his defense would surround “dishonesty and incompetence of the FBI.” The letter also said I mischaracterized his relationship with Michael Mello, the author ofThe United States of America versus Theodore John Kaczynski.
But on the anniversary of this unusual op-ed printing, I wonder how different this Unabomber episode might have turned out had Kaczynski been privy to today’s Internet society and culture. Perhaps the answer to this question is worthy of a treatise in and of itself—print or online?
