Art & design blogUS news This article is more than 15 years oldCleared - the artist the FBI branded a bio-terrorist
This article is more than 15 years oldSteve Kurtz's case has finally been thrown out of court - but were the FBI pursuing it so doggedly to send a message to other artists?
'A colossal overreatction' ... FBI agents raid Steve Kurtz's home. Photograph: Don Heupel/AP
In May 2004 the American artist Steve Kurtz woke up to find that his wife Hope was not breathing. Paramedics summoned to his Buffalo home noticed laboratory equipment and petri dishes containing bacterial cultures, which Kurtz used in his art work. His wife died and the paramedics immediately notified the police. The Joint Terrorism Task Force swooped in, detaining Kurtz on suspicion of bio-terrorism. Agents in bio-hazard suits - from the FBI, the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, among others - sealed off the street and seized equipment that Kurtz had already told them was harmless (indeed, much if it had already been exhibited in public) and carried off books, papers, computers and his cat.
Within a week the Commissioner of Public Health announced that the seized cultures were harmless - one, Serratia marcescens, is commonly found growing on tile grout - and that Kurtz's wife had died of natural causes. His lawyer called the FBI's response "a colossal overreaction", but only now, four years later, has the case finally been dismissed.
While it may have been immediately obvious to some that the bio-terrorism investigation was an embarrassing mistake, the FBI, with its curious knack for groundless tenacity, went ahead and indicted Kurtz for mail and wire fraud, the maximum sentence for which had recently been upped from five to 20 years by the USA PATRIOT Act (which I, as an American citizen, am ashamed to inform you is actually an acronym for the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act). It claimed that he had obtained the $256 worth of harmless bacteria illegally. This week a federal judge ruled that the government's case was "insufficient on its face", offering support to the assertion by Kurtz's lawyer that no crime had been committed.
Why the FBI chose to pursue this case is unclear, but Kurtz's supporters are convinced that it was an intentional attempt to punish an artist who is critical of the government's authoritarian tendency. As Nature magazine put it: "It seems that government lawyers are singling Kurtz out as a warning to the broader artistic community".
Perhaps, as far as the FBI is concerned, a science experiment posing as politically-motivated art is a form of terrorism.
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