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You probably mean "...countries that have not done anything, except aggressively invade their neighboring countries, refuse to disarm, and use poison gas on their own inhabitants that warrent[sic] an attack."

Well, damn. I'm glad to see that only Iraq ever does those things.

Just wait until the next release. They will monitor you all the time. (See story I submited a few days ago, obviously not news worthy back then.)

This, I think, is the page that gave the feds their weapons charge.

You're right, though; that information can be found in numerous other places on the Web, even through Amazon. The FBI obviously knew about the site defacements some time ago, since one of the charges the warrant was issued on was "computer fraud and abuse". I was confused about the reason for this charge until I found out about the defacements.

The timing just seems a bit strange. He could have been nailed a long time ago just on the cracks and scripts. LA Weekly claims that disseminating bombmaking information over the Internet is now illegal under the PATRIOT Act, which to me is just reason to mirror the whole thing and keep the information out there. The information supposedly went up "not long ago"; the text of the Guide seems to indicate it went online somewhere not long before the antiwar protests in Washington, D.C. last September.

I have a theory about why the site was raided now, but it sounds a bit paranoid; namely, there's this little protest thing going on in NYC this week, and police forces haven't been above infiltrating, raiding, and arresting people to collect evidence of "violent intentions" and "weapons" before the actual demonstration to justify use of force during the action, regardless of how aggressive the protesters really are. They also haven't been above confiscating numerous items during protests and displaying them as weapons afterward; in Ottawa last November, a boom microphone clearly marked with CTV's logo somehow made it into a police display of "illegal material" shown on TV, and one reporter pointed out his own gas mask in a related display. An acquaintance who I met while covering demonstrations in Toronto last October had her CDs confiscated by the police, and street medics regularly had their water and eye-flushing solutions poured out. At least one journalist was arrested for not consenting to a search of his camera bags, when he was clearly a photographer; illegal searches and confiscations were rampant.

Cracking web sites was just plain stupid, but I don't entirely trust the intentions of the law enforcement agencies involved, either. And, quite frankly, the federal government of the U.S. has stomped on the Constitution so often that it has become words on a page, little more than legal terms to be weaseled around.

Sherman was a hotheaded kid. The stuff he posted on his site came across more aggressively than some other anarchist sites I can think of, but his opinions on government and hierarchical power are held by a lot of people around the world, and every day more people come to see the government of the U.S. not as their representatives, but as their rulers. I think he shouldn't have cracked any sites, and he has to take responsibility for those acts, but his speech shouldn't be restricted. The First Amendment makes no caveats for "dangerous information," or even calls to overthrow (and don't make me break out the Founding Fathers to demonstrate this one). There were people who said the PATRIOT act was a clear abrogation of the Constitution in several respects, and I think the charge of distributing information on weapons construction, which apparently comes from the Act, demonstrates this. Otherwise, a few hundred other raids should be going down right about now. If the charge was slapped on Sherman because of the political views he expressed on his site, then to some extent, he is being prosecuted for his opinions, at least on charges related to bombmaking information. This doesn't excuse the defacements in the least; that's something that the government has gone after before the PATRIOT Act, regardless of political opinion. The selectivity of enforcement is what concerns me and others, and it's part of the reason I just don't trust power placed in the hands of a few, even if in theory the many selected them, because in practice Lord Acton's axiom about power and corruption kicks in regardless of how the few individuals in power got there.