Mom says Patriot Act stripped son of due process
Posted: Apr. 29, 2009

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby's bedroom in his mother's Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

Ashton Lundeby
[url] http://www.wral.com/news/local/video/5050332[/url]
Teen's mom questions Patriot Act


The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

"Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats," Lundeby said.

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

"I was terrified," Lundeby's mother said. "There were guns, and I don't allow guns around my children. I don't believe in guns."

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son's IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.

Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

"There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire," Lundeby said.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

"We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution," she said. "It wasn't intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can't even defend."

Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Patriot Act allows federal agents to investigate suspected cases of terrorism swiftly to better protect the country. In part, it gives the federal government more latitude to search telephone records, e-mails and other records.

"They're saying that 'We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we're going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States," said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.

Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.

"There's nothing a matter of public record," Boyce said "All those normal rights are just suspended in the air."

In a bi-partisan effort, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., last month introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives a bill that would narrow subpoena power in a provision of the Patriot Act, called the National Security Letters, to curb what some consider to be abuse of power by federal law enforcement officers.

Boyce said the Patriot Act was written with good intentions, but he said he believes it has gone too far in some cases. Lundeby's might be one of them, he said.

"It very well could be a case of overreaction, where an agent leaped to certain conclusions or has made certain assumptions about this individual and about how serious the threat really is," Boyce said.

Because a federal judge issued a gag order in the case, the U.S. attorney in Indiana cannot comment on the case, nor can the FBI. The North Carolina Highway Patrol did confirm that officers assisted with the FBI operation at the Lundeby home on March 5.

"Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from," Lundeby said. "This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now."

Lundeby said she does not think this type of case is what the Patriot Act was intended for. Boyce agrees.

"It was to protect the public, but what we need to do is to make sure there are checks and balances to make sure those new laws are not abused," he said.

Reporter: Amanda Lamb
Photographer: Chad Flowers
Web Editor: Kelly Gardner

Sadly this isn't the first or will it be the last time this will happen.

The Patriot Act is indeed scary legislation when considering how broadly written it is. It has always left me a bit uneasy that our government felt it neccessary to put in writing something that any president or head of a government agency would obviously do or act on with or without judicial consent. I am generally opposed to the slippery slope argument but after personally thumbing through this piece of legislation it is truly scary how much power it bestows and how much it restricts personal freedoms and liberty I too am leary. I have yet to understand how the Republican party justified this bill to it's constituents who believe in freedom and limited government. If Barack or Clinton had proposed the Patriot Act it would have never even made it to the House or Senate floor. I understand the need for a piece of legislation to be able to thwart terrorism in a timely fashion but I would just like it if our Nation's Congressmen would actually craft legislation for a change instead of accepting whatever lobbyist A, B or C hands them... I seriously hope the scope of this bill is seriously narrowed if Barack chooses to renew any version of it!

He doesn't sound all to innocent too me:

Teen Ashton Lundeby Charged as an Adult for Bomb Threats
By Kevin Poulsen July 8, 2009
A 16-year-old North Carolina boy arrested for allegedly making a bomb threat against Purdue University has been charged as an adult for that threat, and for threats against eight other schools and two FBI offices, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

Ashton Lundeby allegedly staged bomb hoaxes from mid-2008 until his arrest last March. He’s charged with conspiring to make threats against Purdue, the University of North Carolina, Florida State University, Clemson University, Boston College and FBI offices in Colorado and Louisiana.

The indictment also accuses him of making a series of five more calls to high schools around the country on March 4, two days before his arrest.

Lundeby’s mother, Annette Lundeby, admitted in an interview with Threat Level in May that her son was “Tyrone” — a notorious prank phone caller who performed for a live internet audience in exchange for PayPal donations. But she claimed that he was with her in church at the time of the Purdue hoax.

An former fan of “Tyrone” who helped police track him down told Threat Level that the prank caller had begun accepting donations in exchange for shutting down donors’ schools for a day with fake bomb threats — a charge reflected in the indictment.

According to prosecutors in South Bend, Indiana, where the case was filed, a federal judge granted a government motion to try the teenager as an adult — an unusual request from the feds that cleared the way for his indictment and the public release of his name. Lundeby is in custody.

Ashton Lundeby’s arrest stoked widespread outrage on the web after Raleigh, North Carolina’s WRAL-5 reported on the case, noting that the boy is a patriotic homeschooled student with an American flag bedspread. Much of the online fury was triggered by Annette Lundeby’s incorrect claim — uncritically reported by the station — that the boy was being held without any legal rights on the authority of the 2001 USA Patriot Act.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/lundeby-indictment/