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Warped priorities and wanting to belong. #796467
07/21/08 10:08 PM
07/21/08 10:08 PM
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 2,777
Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia
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rosscut
The geekiest arsonist
Software engineer Jennifer Kolar is to be sentenced this week in
federal court for her role in Earth Liberation Front arsons, including
one at the University of Washington. Her time in prison will be
reduced because she turned state's witness, but that doesn't mitigate
the fact she is now regarded as a snitch by peers and could be labeled
a terrorist by the government.
By Kim McDonald
July 16, 2008
http://www.crosscut.com/washington/15954/The+geekiest+arsonist/

"Don't hang up," FBI Special Agent Jane Quimby told Jennifer Kolar on
Dec. 10, 2006. "There were arrests and there is a target letter for
you." She gave Kolar the name and number of Andrew Friedman, the
assistant U.S. attorney handling the Washington state indictments of
the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). "It's in your best interests to talk
with him," Quimby warned.

In December 2006, Kolar was in New York for meetings concerning her
then-employer, AOL. A friend called her in the middle of the night,
telling her about the arrests of Stan Meyerhoff, William Rogers,
Chelsea Gerlach, Kevin Tubbs, and Daniel McGowan in what later became
known as "Operation Backfire," an FBI roundup of ELFers involved in
arson and other vandalism of facilities deemed to be symbols of
corporate or government damage to the environment. The friend also
warned her that her former boyfriend, Joe Dibee, had been interviewed
by the FBI in Seattle and that the FBI seemed to know a lot. The
critical part of the message was that Kolar's name came up during the
interview. It was after digesting that news that Kolar's cell phone
rang with Agent Quimby on the line.

Kolar was well-versed in the security practiced by underground
movements such as the ELF. After she hung up with Quimby, she turned
off her cell phone, removed the battery, and used a landline phone in
the hotel restaurant to call a travel agency and friends in Seattle.
She decided to return home, contacted an attorney, and began talking
with the FBI and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mark Bartlett and Andrew
Friedman. Those debriefings led to the indictment of Briana Waters.
Kolar was a key witness in Waters' recent conviction in the 2001 arson
of the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington
in Seattle.

On Friday, July 18, in the same Tacoma courtroom where Waters listened
to Jennifer Kolar testify against her, Kolar will be sentenced for her
role in that arson and others. Her plea agreement calls for a sentence
of five to seven years in prison plus more than $6 million in
restitution to the University of Washington and Cavel West
Slaughterhouse in Redmond, Ore. To remain consistent with Waters'
sentencing recommendation, the prosecution will also seek court
determination that the three arsons Kolar participated in were acts of
terrorism. While the so-called terrorist enhancement will not increase
her sentence beyond the plea bargained agreement, it will have
implications for Kolar. This look at her life is based on court
testimony and documents from the case.

While many of the Pacific Northwest ELFers were highly educated,
Jennifer Kolar's resume in particular stands out. She grew up in
Spokane and attended the University of Colorado in Boulder. She became
involved in animal-rights issues through her father but became active
in college and while volunteering at Rocky Mountain Animal Defense.
Kolar participated in chat rooms, attended conferences, and eventually
become romantically involved with Jonathan Paul, known to
Washingtonians as one of the spokespeople for anti-Makah-whaling
activists. Meanwhile, Kolar also obtained a degree in applied
mathematics and a master's in astrophysics, and completed coursework
for a doctorate. Kolar is a geek.

But it was her romantic involvement with the swashbuckling and
charismatic Paul that led her to ELF. Paul is one of four Oregon ELF
defendants who assert they did not cooperate with the government,
although they received significantly reduced sentences. He is serving
51 months. When Kolar met Paul, he was already a folk hero for
refusing to testify to a grand jury in 1992 convened in Spokane to
investigate property damage to animal labs at Washington State
University. Paul became an instant martyr in the animal-rights
movement for spending six months in jail for contempt of court. He
then went on to acclaim in the movement in which Kolar eventually met
him. Kolar and Paul corresponded via e-mail, and after a brief time,
Paul invited her to visit him in Southern Oregon.

Kolar's visit led to her participation in the Cavel West
Slaughterhouse arson in 1997. Among the security-conscious ELFers,
Paul came under a lot of suspicion for bringing along a total stranger
without any notice. But the arson provided Kolar a taste of "direct
action," and within months of returning to Boulder, she and another
student planned an arson at a gun club in Wray, Colo., that apparently
used prairie dogs for target practice. None of the timed incendiary
devices worked, however, and according to Kolar, she did not
participate in any other direct action until she moved to the Pacific
Northwest to begin her career in the software industry. By then, her
relationship with Paul was over.

When Kolar moved to Seattle, she became involved in the protests
outside of Neah Bay relating to the Makah Tribe's desire to hunt gray
whales. Kolar's work on the whaling issue led her back to Jonathan
Paul, who was the public face along with Josh Harper and Jake Conroy
of an organization called Sea Defense Alliance, which owned a Zodiac
and another boat named Bulletproof that monitored, harassed, and
sometimes jeopardized the safety of the Makah whalers. Kolar was there
with her then-boyfriend, Joe Dibee.
Dibee was also a geek, working at Microsoft and spending his money on
private planes, diving equipment, and causes. While Paul was the
charismatic charmer of the Sea Defense Alliance, Dibee did all the
behind-the-scenes work. Dibee and Paul eventually clashed over
ownership rights to the boats. During the prosecution of the Oregon
ELF cases, evidence was presented that Dibee once drove to Southern
Oregon with the intent of killing Paul. Dibee is a fugitive and is
believed to have left the country shortly after the 2006 arrests.

After the whaling protests, Kolar continued making a nice living in
the Seattle dot-com boom, working for a company called SchemaLogic,
according to Kolar's online profiles. She broke up with Dibee after
being introducted to William Rogers, who included her in so-called
"Book Club" meetings, or the gatherings of the ELF cell.

While the FBI portrays Rogers as the "leader" of an ELF cell that
ranged from Northern California to Colorado to Seattle, ELF doctrine
holds that there is no leader of the groups. Rather, anyone who does
the recon and research of a target can organize a direct action. In
fact, of the 20 known actions attributed to the "group," Rogers only
participated in seven. From the court documents and testimony in the
Waters trial, however, it is clear that Rogers was a quietly effective
collaborator-in-chief.

At the Book Club meetings, Kolar was instrumental in teaching the
other ELFers how to use anonymizers and Internet proxy servers, as
well as encryption technologies to disguise their e-mails, including
codes based on novels by Leslie Marmon Silko. Kolar devised elegantly
simple methods for ELFers to leave e-mails as drafts of a shared
online e-mail account which were to be checked once a week. That
avoided having digital transactions over the Internet which could be
intercepted by the FBI. In the Book Club, Kolar found her outlet for
direct action.

For all the vivid pain and suffering the victims of the Center for
Urban Horticulture feel, Kolar remembers few details about the
planning, the execution, or the ideology behind the target. In fact,
she barely remembered that Briana Waters acted as the lookout for the
four other ELFers the morning of May 21, 2001. By the time Kolar
committed the UW arson, she was in a stable relationship with another
computer geek who was unaware of her lawless activism. Together they
owned a sail boat, moored at Shilshole Bay Marina, which they raced
through membership in the Corinthian Yacht Club. During Briana Waters'
trial, Kolar also testified that she traveled to Hawaii fairly soon
after the arson. She also described her interest in "four-wheeling" on
National Forest land (though not in protected areas). It is an
understatement to say Jennifer Kolar lived a complicated life.

While Kolar's testimony pinpointing Waters was riveting, her
description of walking into her office the next morning was mundane.
She saw a Seattle Times headline about the Center for Urban
Horticulture arson, but based on her testimony it does not appear that
there is much introspection to reconcile two seemingly contrary lives.
Even after her arrest became public, Kolar continued to race
sailboats, was active in the yacht club, and moved up the career
ladder in the dot-com world.

For all the compartmentalizing Kolar may be doing, though, the reality
of being called a "snitch" has to be scary. Her picture and Lacey
Phillabaum's — they were the two lead witnesses for the prosecution of
Waters — are spread all over the Internet, with threats including this
implied one from Animal Liberation Front activist Peter Young: "to
snitch is to take a life. I call anything done to keep an informant
out of the courtroom 'self-defense.'" Or statements from an anonymous
poster who said: "they are snitches ... they sold out freedom fighters
to the state. They should be rubbed out ... that is ... shot dead." It
seems odd that such threats come from a community of people professing
to care for the Earth. Aside from the obvious intent of frightening
anyone from cooperating with the government, the threats must be scary
for Kolar and Phillabaum.

After Kolar's sentencing on Friday, she will be designated to a
federal woman's prison. But it is when she is released, five to seven
years from now, that being labeled a snitch by peers and a terrorist
by the government might haunt her. Her future work in the tech world
may be hampered if security clearances are required. And as she well
knows, it only takes a few moments on the computer to find her face
and read the hyperbolic and angry testimony denouncing her choice to
accept responsibility and the penalty for her role in the ELF arsons.
Kolar is a traitor to her former friends and a terrorist to the
federal government.

Kim McDonald is a forestry scholar and freelance writer who lives in
Seattle. You can reach her in care of editor@crosscut.com.


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Re: Warped priorities and wanting to belong. [Re: Mira Trapper] #796469
07/21/08 10:10 PM
07/21/08 10:10 PM
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 2,777
Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia
Mira Trapper Offline OP
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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 2,777
Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia
Seattle Post Intelligencer
Woman gets 5 years for UW arson
ELF member helped torch lab
By PAUL SHUKOVSKY
P-I REPORTER
July 18, 2008
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/371347_kolar19.html?source=mypi

A Seattle woman was sentenced Friday to five years in federal prison,
and five years' probation, for participating in an Earth Liberation
Front/Animal Liberation Front rampage of arson that hit targets across
the West.

Jennifer Kolar, 34 -- while part of an ELF/ALF group dubbed the
"Family" -- was one of five people accused in the May 2001 firebombing
of the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture.

The underground cell torched the lab based on the erroneous belief
that genetic engineering techniques its members reviled as dangerous
to the environment were being used there. The building was destroyed
along with samples of rare and endangered species of plants being
cultivated for reintroduction into the Cascades.

Kolar also targeted the Cavel West horse meatpacking plant in Redmond,
Ore., in July 1997, a Colorado gun club whose members killed prairie
dogs for sport, in October 1998, and a federal wild horse and burro
facility in California, where the animals slated to be killed for
grazing on federal land were freed before the facility was set ablaze.

In a plea agreement with the government in October 2006 that set a
sentencing range of five to seven years, Kolar pleaded guilty to
conspiracy to commit arson and make unregistered destructive devices,
attempted arson, arson at both the UW and at Cavel West and use of an
incendiary device.

Kolar, who has a master's degree in atmospheric physics, is described
by her attorney, Michael Martin, as "idealistic, bright and stubborn,
wanted to save the world."

Perhaps Kolar's biggest contribution to the ALF/ELF cell was her
prodigious digital skill, used to train her fellow radicals on how to
encrypt and otherwise hide Internet communications. Federal agents say
the sophistication she provided was a central reason why they eluded
detection for years.

Martin, in a memo to the court, portrayed his client as being drawn
into extreme radicalism because she was "desperate for the attention"
of men in the Earth Liberation/Animal Liberation underground. "She
wanted to prove herself and wanted in some ways to share her skills
with these 'friends' to impress them," he said.

In asking for leniency from U.S. District Judge Franklin Burgess,
Kolar embraced her responsibility to pay more than $7 million in
restitution for the destruction of the urban horticulture center.
On
Friday, she turned to her victims, scientists and staff members from
horticulture center who were in the courtroom, and said:

"I am a scientist. I should have known better ... you were going to
put some information out there that would have made the world a better
place. I see that I hurt the very cause that I thought that I was
helping. I am horribly saddened.

"Not only was it a horrible crime, but it was just stupid. I fully
accept responsibility," she said.

Since leaving the radical movement seven years ago, Kolar said, "I
have lived a very productive life." Kolar is now a senior software
architect at a firm in Kirkland.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bartlett had asked for seven years
behind bars for Kolar -- far below the federal sentencing guideline
range of 235 to 293 months -- because of Kolar's extensive cooperation
with agents and prosecutors in making the case against her former
comrades.

"It is fair to say that it is highly unlikely the U.S. would ever have
solved the mystery of ... the arson at the urban horticulture center
without Ms. Kolar's assistance. She was really the lynchpin in
breaking that case open," Bartlett said.

"In many ways she is an enigma to me that I will never understand,"
Bartlett said, contrasting Kolar's sincere concern for the environment
with her participation in "heinous crimes that victimized hundreds of
people. You cannot wipe the slate clean, as grateful as the U.S. is
for her for her decision to cooperate."

"As a result of her cooperation, Kolar has been demonized by her prior
'friends' in the eco-activist community," the prosecution told Burgess
in its sentencing memorandum. "There is a risk that radical elements
... might seek retribution against Kolar."

Martin made the same case, saying Kolar has been called a "snitch" and
a "liar." He said that unlike Briana Waters -- who protested her
innocence even as she was sentenced last month to six years in prison
for participating in the urban horticulture center arson -- Kolar has
"clearly accepted responsibility for her actions."

Kolar, who has been free pending sentencing, will be allowed by the
judge to remain free until reporting to the Bureau of Prisons on Sept.
22.

P-I reporter Paul Shukovsky can be reached at 206-448-8072 or
paulshukovsky@seattlepi.com.


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