In the UK, Possession of the Anarchist's Cookbook Is Terrorism

Anonymous Terrorist writes "Back in the midsts of time, when I was a lad and gopher was the height of information retrieval I read The Anarchist's Cookbook in one huge text file. Now it appears the UK government considers possession of the book an offense under the Terrorism Act 2000 and is prosecuting a 17 year old boy, in part, for having a copy of the book. 'The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000. The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year. The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.'"

Comments

Amazon.co.uk

[rvw]

This means Amazon is a terrorist organization! See Amazon.co.uk: The Anarchist Cookbook (Paperback).

Re:Am I the first person who gets to say...

[Zelos]

I would have said that the Human Rights Act provided that, but reading the actual text it doesn't: Article 10
Freedom of expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Re:Terrorism or Suicide?

[Matt_R]

http://onlinebooks.110mb.com/tm%2031-210/31-210-contents.htm for anybody who was wondering...

Re:He was making explosives

[ritesonline]

Thanks for the link. For anyone too busy to go there here's a quote:- "A Yorkshire schoolboy was found with chemicals used for making bombs under his bed, a court heard yesterday. The 17-year-old, from Dewsbury, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is accused of plotting to make bombs following a trip to Pakistan. He is also alleged to have had a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook on his computer. Piers Arnold, prosecuting, told City of Westminster Magistrates' Court the book had instructions for "viable" bombs" Look's like most Slashdotter's took the bait with the original post...

Re:Terrorism or Suicide?

[Mark_in_Brazil]

It's really interesting that The Anarchist Cookbook is neither anarchist nor a good "cookbook" (as the parent post noted).
The book contains nothing about anarchist political beliefs or history. There is no mention of Lao Tzu, Kropotkin, Bakunin (yes, that's the name they used for the guy with the Russian accent on Lost, but I'm talking about the original), Proudhon, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin, the Anarcho-Syndicalists of the Spanish Revolution (specifically, the anarcho-syndicalist organization and administration of Catalonia), or Food Not Bombs. There is no mention of the centuries of anarchist thought and political philosophy. There is no mention of the Haymarket Affair, which was used to give anarchists the image of bomb-throwers, nor of the fact that of the eight Haymarket anarchists (labor leaders), four were executed and one killed himself in his jail cell before Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned the three survivors when he investigated and found that there had never been any proof of the guilt of the "Haymarket Anarchists," and that the jury had been stacked to guarantee a conviction even in the absence of evidence. Altgeld's Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab is worth reading. Follow the link and you can read it free.
Also, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook apparently knows nothing about the subjects covered. He (or they, if it's not really one author) apparently just copied stuff from a bunch of different sources. If you read the explosive section, you'll see a given explosive mentioned on one page as being relatively stable and safe, and on another page the same explosive will be described as being very unstable. It appears that a lot of the information was just copied from other sources without any analysis of what was being copied. Further, it appears that the chunks of text copied are sometimes incomplete. It may be that The Anarchist Cookbook is somebody's idea of a practical joke, making gullible kids do things ranging from goofy (like trying to smoke banana peels to get high) to deadly (like blowing off limbs or burning their skin and eyes with chemicals when trying to follow the explosive and drug recipes). It has been suggested that the book may have been put in the market by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO program. To me that seems a bit tinfoil hatty, but some of the things the FBI actually did in that program really were bizarre, and a person describing them without showing proof (and yes, the proof of some really scary stuff in COINTELPRO does exist) might sound like a tinfoil hat type.

So The Anarchist Cookbook may be nothing more than a sick joke, but even if the book actually contained any useful information, the idea of banning books about how to make arms is not new. Governments want that for the same reasons they want to ban firearms: to keep the people easier to control. The overblown "threat of terrorism," when you consider how few people are killed by terrorism each year, is just the tool governments an