His one-man Web-hosting company hosted a Y2K-disaster spoof video and drew him fire from both sides: from the FBI, who asked him to pull the video down, and from free-speech advocates who flamed his e-mail with denunciations for his "cowardice" on behalf of his "mortgage and Lexus payments". Now the spoof is back on his Web site, but Mark Weiger isn't exactly feeling great about it.
After all, as he tells Wired, it's not exactly easy manning the Constitutional parapets when you can barely afford a lawyer and when your "Lexus" is a seven-year-old van. But with the site back online, he says he'll have one more message for the FBI, according to Wired: "I'm going to say, 'F*** you! You probably cost us our business, you assholes!'"
He says he pulled the site at the FBI's behest while trying to figure out precisely what was going on, but then came the real flame-throwers - online free speech advocates who smothered his e-mail with brutal denunciations once his brush with the FBI hit the news.
The e-mails went to some of his clients, Wired says, resulting in some threatening to close their accounts. That's despite Wieger putting the Y2K spoof back online once he learned it didn't overstep any legal bounds, and despite the video's maker saying to blame the FBI and not the Web host.
Here's what one angry advocate wrote to the beleaguered Wieger: "I have put my life on the line several times for [free speech] and all the freedoms guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. You were not given a court order. You just got scared for your mortgage and your Lexus payment and are in that light a coward."
"They're making it out like we're AOL and we're censoring people's content," Wieger tells Wired. "Let's turn the wrath on the appropriate villains. "The FBI and the US Attorney's office basically lied to us. They said, 'It's our job to make sure that propaganda like this isn't on the Internet and doesn't start riots. We've contacted your upstream service provider, and if you don't pull [the video site] down, they'll pull it down.'"
He says the provider had refused to pull the site and the FBI was bluffing, according to Wired. That's when he himself pulled the site while awaiting clarification. "I've got a one-man company. I can't afford lawyers," Wieger tells the magazine. "I tried to call [the video's creator], too, I couldn't get through. We feared the worst, that he'd been arrested and was already in an orange suit." The creator, says Wired, identified only as Zieper, had locked his computer away and taken his family away, too.
For its part, the FBI, says special agent Jim Margolin, says there was no formal request to modify or remove the site, but "I'm not at liberty to discuss (what was there) in great detail. We feel that we've taken action that is appropriate. We want to emphasize that, consistent with the constitutional rights afforded everyone, we've undertaken an investigation after receiving complaints from the public."
