US federal agents arrested a California man on Friday for allegedly threatening to detonate a “dirty bomb” at an agency field office in Los Angeles. In a series of letters to the agency, the man compared himself to the notorious ‘Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski.
Mark William Anten, 52, was arrested at his home and charged with making threats by interstate communication, a felony offense that carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison, the US Department of Justice announced in a press release.
Beginning in July, Anten “sent numerous threatening communications to the FBI,” the press release claimed. After supposedly telling agents that he was voted most likely in high school to become the next ‘Unabomber’, he allegedly sent them an email in November stating that he was working on a “manifesto.”
The FBI said its agents told Anten to stop contacting them, but he continued. In a series of messages on December 5, Anten allegedly threatened to “unabomb” the FBI field office in Los Angeles, attaching an image depicting the results of a Google internet search for “how to make a dirty bomb.”
“I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact, it would be very explainable by your actions,” he allegedly wrote, signing his email “supermax or death,” an apparent reference to the kind of super-maximum security prison where Kaczynski was locked up from 1998 until his death by suicide earlier this year.
A child prodigy and mathematical genius, Ted Kaczynski became the youngest-ever professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. After leaving his position and withdrawing from society in the early 1970s, Kaczynski committed a string of bombings between 1978 and 1995. Mailing explosives to academics, businessmen, and others he considered leaders of industrial society, the recluse killed three people and maimed 23 more. He was arrested in 1998 and sentenced to life in prison.
Kaczynski’s manifesto, ‘Industrial Society and its Future’, was published by the Washington Post and New York Times in 1995. The document railed against the alienating effects of technology and called for a revolution that would return humanity to a state of harmony with nature. It has since become something of a cult classic, celebrated by radical environmentalists, anarchists, and more recently, the anti-big tech right.
Following Kaczynski’s death, tech billionaire Elon Musk tweeted that the ‘Unabomber’ “might not be wrong” in his assessment that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”