U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and his deputies won't say what caused the April 21 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raid on the computer command center at the Deer Valley School District in Glendale, Ariz. The attorney general also refused to say whether other school districts have been targeted for additional FBI raids.

The timing and certain comments by Ashcroft, however, have led to speculation that the raid is part of a much larger FBI crackdown on pirated music, CDs, and movies.

The raid in Glendale came just one day before U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in Washington announced the creation of a new Intellectual Property Task Force to step up copyright enforcement.

During an April 22 press conference, Ashcroft would neither confirm nor deny whether Deer Valley was a target of the investigation, but he did make a point of saying that educational institutions with high-speed internet access often foster environments conducive to the illegal swapping of copyrighted material.

FBI agents raided the Deer Valley School District's Administration Services Center at 6 a.m. on April 21 and stayed most of the day.

The site houses the district's information services and technology offices, essentially the "brains" of the district's computer system, said Timothy Tait, a district spokesman.

School officials were not warned beforehand, and even the district's top officials, including Superintendent Virginia McElyea, learned of the search warrant only when computers went down.

Classes were not disrupted, but computer use in the district office was limited, with no internet access or eMail. As of press time, the district's web site remained down as a result of the investigation, though it was expected to be up and running by April 23.

The Associated Press reported that some of the stolen copyrighted material being sought in the raids is suspected of having been distributed from overseas sources, but Deer Valley's Tait said the FBI did not specify what it was looking for.

"We don't know who or what the target is," he said. "But we don't believe it was students."

Tait said the FBI did not indicate when details of the investigation would be released. The agency's only comment, he said, was that it "wouldn't be soon."

More than 120 searches were conducted in 24 hours in 27 states and 10 countries to thwart online networks that distribute copyrighted goods, said DOJ. The targeted organizations are known by such names as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class, Project X, and APC, officials said.

The initiative, known as "Operation Fastlink," has resulted in the seizure of more than 200 computers, including 30 that served as storage and distribution hubs containing thousands of copies of allegedly pirated material. One server seized in the United States contained 65,000 separate pirated titles, authorities said.