Federal investigators credit thousands of hours in the "terrorist4us" chatroom with helping to thwart the latest attack planned on American soil.
"FBI agents posing as 13-year-old girls pretending to be 47-year-old terrorists first heard the chatter about six months ago," said FBI Director Robert Mueller. "Then last week we finally pieced it together."
Mueller said America Online's decision to offer its services for free to broadband users "sealed the deal." He said it was obvious to them that terrorists were trying to destroy the internet by flooding it with "those stupid-head AOL people."
"As it is, Americans are only surfing the internet at a 2002 level right now," said Northwestern University Internet Studies professor Jake Hermden. "If those AOL users escape, we'll be back to the dark ages of 1996 and all caps and too many exclamation points. We can't let that happen."
Mueller said agents arrested three 17-year-old AOL call center technicians with Middle Eastern names who "looked kinda foreign." He said trying to "weed out the terrorists from the rest of us" was not an easy task.
"But in the end we had to ask ourselves - honestly, who else could it be?" said Mueller as he shrugged his shoulders.
