# Anthrax letter "person of interest," Steven Hatfill is suing the government.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anthrax-letter-person-of-interest-steven-hatfill-is-suing-the-government/197859>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [August 26, 2003, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anthrax-letter-person-of-interest-steven-hatfill-is-suing-the-government/197859 "2003-08-26T23:35:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![IzzyR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/2acd7d/32.png) [@IzzyR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IzzyR)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2003, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anthrax-letter-person-of-interest-steven-hatfill-is-suing-the-government/197859/21 "2003-08-28T20:47:15Z")

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> [@](#):
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> \*Originally posted by Tranquilis \*  
> Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?

Nothing happened, but it has never been connected to police work. If the police assumed everyone was innocent they would never catch anyone. “innocent until proven guilty” has to do with the court system.

> [@](#):
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> Seems to me that the soft pseudo-science that is profiling is far too weak to support _two years_ of extraordinarily expensive harassment, especially as it’s almost certain that if they haven’t found enough to charge him on yet, they never will.

I tend to agree with you about the likelihood of his being caught. But I don’t think the harassment is based solely on the profile. Hatfill is one of perhaps 100 people in the world who are thought to have the expertise to produce the anthrax. He had a job designing some sort of related material. He had an interest in the subject - he wrote a novel about biological warfare. He had a connection to some right-wing South African group. He failed lie detector tests. Bloodhounds had a strong interest in his house (& that of his girlfriend). He had been denied government security clearance. Each one of these facts are weak on their own, and even all of them together are very far from being conclusive. But they are suggestive.

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**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2003, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anthrax-letter-person-of-interest-steven-hatfill-is-suing-the-government/197859/22 "2003-08-28T21:08:59Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic \*  
> \*\*IIRC, FBI profilers thought that the Unabomber would be uneducated and possibly a high school drop out. Kazynzky was an ivy league mathemetician, That shows what profiles are worth. \*\*

The early profile predicted he would be a 30 to 40’s blue-collar worker, possibly in aviation, and had “at least a high school education, and was familiar with university life”, but a later profile by FBI profiler Bill Tafoya predicted he would have a graduate or doctoral degree with a background in science or math, and be in his 50’s.

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