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FBI Releases File On the Anarchist Cookbook
An anonymous reader noted that the FBI has released its file on The Anarchist Cookbook, the 1971 manual of mayhem. It's a pretty long PDF that isn't actually OCRd but there's some crazy stuff in there. But my personal favorite is the scanned in images of 3.5" floppy disks.
There was a chemistry teacher at my high school who had a copy printed off and bound on his front counter desk.
Of course, he also like to set up those little green plastic army men on that counter during tests, pour flammable liquid over the scene, then light it and play with them, making sound of death and agony as they melted.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Put that in your nitrate and smoke it
That's how I backed up all my floppy disks, too!
Ah the book with the recipe for napalm that will according to legend blow you the fuck up. Great stuff. Its all fun and games until someone explodes into a ball of fire.
ACK
So much for transparency.
Page 33 of 171 from the .pdf;
"William R. Powell, student at Windham College, Putney Vermont."
My ANARCHIST.TXT doesn't have an actual name in there for author...
Of course by "scanned" you mean "photocopied" (and that photocopy later scanned).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Back in the day, like in 7th grade or something, a guy at my school took it with him to school because we were all very cool back then. Then they had a meeting with his parents, lol.
It was a great read back in the days before the internet. About 10 years ago around the time my son turned 7 or 8 I got rid of my copy. I didn't want he finding it and trying some of the recipes and killing himself, his friends, us, etc..
I wanted to learn how to make Napalm from human fat and all I find is a bunch of letters signed by Edgard Hoover :(
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
It was 'must have' for every BBS back in the 90's
Remember different versions, editions. Most of them in txt format.
Is it just me...I am able to select a lot of the text as if it has been through OCR. Is that a feature of acrobat reader?
Disturbing to look at letter after letter to the FBI. All these well meaning people thinking that they're doing the right thing by reporting this work to the FBI, suggesting that the FBI stop it's publication. These people are a greater threat to freedom than anyone who has bought this book.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Or should I say...
DALE GRIBBLE?
No, I shouldn't.
When my father found me reading a copy he took it and destroyed it, providing me w/ a copy of the TM 31-210 Improvised Munition Handbook instead:
http://www.libertylib.com/improvised-munitions-handbook/improvised-munitions-handbook.shtml
Which if nothing else should be mandatory reading for people who mistakenly believe gun control can be made to work --- I used to make black powder by collecting nitrates from underneath piles of cow manure in local fields, collecting charcoal when emptying the ashes from the fireplace and sulfur by purchasing sulfur candles from the local store (unfortunately there weren't any naturally occurring sulfur deposits w/in bicycling distance).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The letter from congressman George Mahon (D-TX) is disheartening.
He tells Hoover that "several of my constituents" have expressed alarm about the book. He then says he has not read the book but "the reviews have caused quite a bit of controversy." Finally, he asks for something to tell the constituents.
The process is totally hollow. And isn't that the way things continue to work40 years later? If anything, it's worse. Today's congressperson would scream louder and vilify the opposition (all while willingly ignorant about the issue at hand.)
Why are Americans so damn neurotic?!
Btw. the guy next to you looks a bit like a terrorist, don't you think? Maybe he's got a bomb on him.
Ah the book with the recipe for napalm ...
I simply don't understand the legacy this "book" has gathered over the years. I, in my infinite youth, once read the manual and you know what jumped out at me wasn't all these alleged homemade napalm and pipe bombs ... in fact, that stuff seemed so low quality and stupid to me that I don't even remember much of it. And I've often been told the napalm in the book really isn't the best stuff you can make with homemade items. Apparently there are much better mediums to use with fuel like Vaseline (petroleum jelly) if you can get enough of it.
... oftentimes this trouble is easily traced back to you no matter how well the book tries to convince the reader you're being super careful and are virtually untraceable.
But what really stuck out to my late teenage mind was how the author of it seemed to be obsessed with disruption. I remember it reading like a case study for "common" scenarios whereby you could operate within questionable circumstances to undermine regular corporate and government actions -- specifically in Western nations.
For example, in one of the scenarios the book presupposes that you have a large contractor building some huge building right next door to your home that you refused to sell (like the beginning of the film Up). So it goes about how to put nails through strips of webbing, then lay them across the dig site at night and cover them with a bit of gravel to puncture holes in the tires of machinery. Or get used oil from your car and go spill it next to their machinery and then tip off the EPA. The list went on and on for many pages about how to sabotage several scenarios.
And I wasn't too impressed with it. It was as if everyone thought that until this point in time no one had ever engaged in determined guerrilla warfare or an unfriendly neighborly spat. This book exhibits somewhat of an active imagination in causing trouble
It simply blew my mind that someone could be arrested for possession of this book because after all the notoriety it's really not that useful. Sure, if your given scenario matches any in the books, you've got some cheap tricks at your disposal but anyone with an imagination would be far better equipped than anyone with that book. I found nothing permanently useful in that book and would recommend any of the US Army Field Manuals for reading before that since the information is more generalized and interesting like the one on Counterinsurgency. FM 21-76 served me well in Boy Scouts -- probably better than the boy scout's manual. Why do we flip out that The Anarchist's Cookbook is available to terrorists when the Army is releasing far more useful books to anybody and everybody?
My work here is dung.
Don't download it...they'll grab your IP and add you to a database of possible miscreants. Buy Catcher in the Rye or Mein Kampf and you'll be swarmed by men in black within 30 sec.
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Don't copy that floppy!
I always found Anarchists a bit gamey, no matter how they're cooked.
rewriting history since 2109
From the PDF under "enclosure" from someone reviewing the book:
"The formulas and procedures presented concerning the production of high and low explosives cannot be called incorrect but they are not always complete and therefore present a hazard to anyone using the information"
No kidding. Darwin Awards waiting to be handed out.
As a BBSer with my own copy back in the day, we didn't dare try any of that shit because it even looked like it was missing steps.
The Amateur Astronomer's Handbook has recipes for silvering mirrors, and there are warnings to not keep the mixture (sugar recipe) standing around too long because it creates silver fulminate. The complete lack of similar safety warnings in the Anarchists' Cookbook is a red flag not to try this stuff. Consult a real explosives manual instead.
--
BMO
You'd think if the recipes were really dangerous (as opposed to harmless, they just don't work) more people would would be blowing their faces off.
Probably most idiot readers just tried smoking the roasted banana peels and after they realized all it gave them was a headache and coughing up nasty phlegm, they gave up on the remainder of the book.
I still have a copy of this book somewhere in storage
OH , I thought you were talking about this
LOL, CIA
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The true power of The Anarchist Cookbook has almost nothing to do with its contents. Matter of fact, if it were Mexican Cuisine, the Anarchist Cookbook would be day-old Taco Bell. The thing that William Powell (the original author) managed to do was accidentally come up with one of the underground's most powerful BRAND NAMES, one that could single-handedly ignite the imaginations of a typical teenager so much that it got out of his control. Once the publisher saw that it was such a money-maker, they refused to let it die. Eventually, the early crop of computer underground "anarchists" on the BBS scene took the book concept and created digital extensions of the information in the form of "G-Files" and early 8-bit graphics. By the time the Anarchist Cookbook made it to the Internet, it was no longer a book. It was a movement, one without direction or guidance or measurable intent, all loosely bound together by a set of files that had been slapped with the same Anarchist Cookbook brand name. Most of the people who downloaded the Cookbook, in whatever form, probably never tried much beyond a smoke bomb or two. The thrill was in the power of the potential of the information itself, even if it was incorrect. For the FBI to dedicate this much time studying it makes me sit back and scratch my head. Truth be told, the Central Library in any given city is far more dangerous... it just doesn't sound anywhere near as appealing to the typical kid.
Max Nomad . Bohemian Griot Publishing, LLC . http://www.bgpublishing.com
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747/
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
My Gram taught at the Jr. High chem depart, but it turned out she was a Mole for the FBI. /Joke
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I love how they clearly breached copyright law on page 170 of the PDF and made a duplicate of the floppy disk before giving the original back...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
I have always though that "Imaging a Disk" was a little more complicated than putting it on a copier. No wonder the FBI isn't the lead agency for cyber security.
The people writing to the head of the FBI to get the whole investigation started really surprised me.
Just imagine what all these 'concerned citizens' are reporting to the head of the FBI these days.
I purchased this book at Borders some years ago. I had to order it, as they didn't have it in stock. The first time the order came in, they gave me "The Anarch Cookbook" Turns out it's not the same thing. It's quite an amusing read. I'm not sure there's actually one piece of useful information in there.
If you don't build a steam-powered robot to go into a place to shoot it up, you're just some limp-dicked pussy playing with himself.
Can't you at least bother with the effort to build an armoured bulldozer if you feel disgruntled and want to smash shit up?
Although stealing a tank and rampaging down the freeway generates some lulz for a while...
geeze, going by this, and my other posts in this thread, you'd think I have a full set of looney collector cards or something...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The BBS version dates to the early 80s (for certain 1981 - I had a borrowed modem and 48k Apple ][ that summer, though I'm not 100% certain that was the huge 336 page one I printed by 1983 -- and I'm sure it got bigger). It had a lot more techie stuff than the printed copy I saw years later (for instance phone phreaking boxes, hacked modem lines like the pentagon press server, etc).
You just became "them".
He didn't say he didn't want his son making explosives. He just doesn't want him doing it wrong.
Leaving the Anarchists Cookbook around is like leaving a cookbook around that uses arsenic as the main ingredient. It's just a bad idea that could easily mislead someone reading it into doing something that would hurt them simply because it was wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For anyone who doesn't know, the author has since disowned the book. See his comment on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0974458902
Such a mixture is sometimes referred to as "Rocket Candy", because you can make your own solid fuel rocket motors from it:
http://www.jamesyawn.net/
http://www.nakka-rocketry.net/
http://sugarshot.org/
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
It's good to know that even back in the 70's people were still using multiple punctuation marks to make a point.
"Danger! What are you doing about this???"
Sent from my CR-48
Anybody ever read "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffmann?
(anybody ever steal a copy of Steal this book?)
Required reading if you like the Anarchists Cookbook. See also:
http://earth-liberation-front.org/
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/
Which have practical field tested techniques.
I'll probably end up on a watch list for this post.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIpLd0WQKCY
- I'd kill you if I had my gun!
- Yeah, well, you don't.
.
You just need a more specific kind of book.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20067785/7797489-Eco-Defense
Plenty of detailed instructions on neutering heavy construction equipment.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
"Five day waiting period? But my psychotic ex is threatening to kill me and my children TODAY!"
I'd say my chemistry teacher was lucky to survive us students.
Just two of the incidents that occurred:
One of them had us splitting water to release hydrogen. I'd done this before and knew I was doing it right, but the stupid punks wouldn't ignite the hydrogen. After a half hour of frustration, I turned the beaker over the bunsen burner and got a nice little explosion. As the teacher went to yell at me, the rest of the class, also very frustrated by this time, followed suit. It sounded like a battlefield with all the explosions. After that he dismissed class and went to the teachers lounge.
A second incident he was demonstrating the volatility of manganese in water. (Or was it magnesium, I always get those names mixed up.) He was having each of us take a tiny piece off of this huge chunk he had, and tossing it in the fish tank to watch it skitter around on top. Right after I did it, my friend came up. He didn't take a small piece, he tossed in the entire chunk before the teacher could stop him. The teacher only had time to yell "oh shit, duck!" just before the fish tank blew. This was yet another day he dismissed class and went to the teachers lounge.
There were several other things that happened there that year, all were the fault of us students. That poor chemistry/science teacher probably lost his hair and sanity very early because of us.
I loved that Star Trek episode too.
When I was about 16 my mom found my Anarchist Cookbook. She proclaimed "Son, I'm so proud of you! You have a cookbook!". True story.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
From reading the actual FBI file, I noticed something interesting :
1. The FBI made an effort to investigate the book's author BEFORE they determined a crime had even been committed.
2. The FBI wrongly assumed the author was a pseudonym because they felt the topics "spoke from firsthand experience". They obviously never asked a chemist or someone who had actually tried these techniques if anything in the book would work. Had they done so, they would have realized the book was fake. Also, these government agents tended to take advertising copy at face value...getting information from the media the same way we do.
3. The FBI REALLY IS WATCHING YOU. Send them a letter and a news clipping and complain, and the FBI will INVESTIGATE YOU! Every letter written by some old lady had a note attached where an agent checked the files on that lady and found out what she had sent in the past. (evidently each time when the FBI found that a person had sent them things that seemed supportive of the agency, they would stop investigating)
The Man's own private records reveal many of the things we say about him are true. The Man really is ignorant and responds to popular opinion, not common sense. Criticize The Man, or communicate with him at all, and he will try to find a reason to send you to prison.
I don't think the scan of the floppy disk is particularly crazy. They were just cataloging it along with anything else that came with it.
Yes, but if you do, you had better do it carefully. When I was in 7th grade, one of the other kids in the same grade blew part of his hand off making a rocket engine out of that stuff.
It's one of those simple formulas that most people will (or at least should) stay the hell away from.
That I didn't see an analysis of the book anywhere in that whole stack of crap. If this is what constitutes and FBI file, either the FBI didn't take the book seriously, or they waste a lot of effort on stupid BS.
How about neither.
I choose not to be robbed.
How do you justify that ridiculous binary choice?
Being a victim is a mindset/attitude. Your choice to be one, or not.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
It depends, really.
Personally, I think somebody robbing me with a gun is less likely to shoot than a guy with a knife is going to stab me. Why?
A gun is LOUD. A knife, not so much. In most areas I frequent, a gunshot is going to get a lot of attention, and a robber is most likely going to know that.
Plus, guns are just plain more valuable - if he fires, he has to worry about ballistic evidence, and especially today there's a fairly high probability of not getting enough money to replace it. With a knife? Simply discard after wiping prints(or wear gloves), they're not even $20.
I don't read AC A human right
Someone who keeps making his own bombs is likely to blow himself up soon. That's what happened to a classmate back in highschool -- put a quick end to his promising football career.
I think the letters to the FBI are more frightening then a book's content ever could have been.
American citizens calling for someones first amendment rights to be stripped, simply beacuse they disprove of the content, should scare the hell out of anyone with 1/2 a brain.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The putting nails in webbing then covering with gravel to puncture tires made me laugh. Why? Because I'm picturing them trying to use 2" nails to puncture the tires of a bulldozer - either treads or tires with multi-inch layers of rubber.
Why do we flip out that The Anarchist's Cookbook is available to terrorists when the Army is releasing far more useful books to anybody and everybody?
Not sure. I think it's because it's attained a sort of cult legend status.
And arresting somebody for merely possessing it seems to be like asking for a lawsuit.
I don't read AC A human right
tell me, how many would gelman have killed if he had a gun instead of a knife? understand yet?
Just to weigh in on this facet of the debate, I would like to point out that you have here committed a logical fallacy often referred to as Moving the Goalposts.
I tripped balls on bananadine.
I bought a copy of this book about 1971 in NYC in the Village and it was a laugh. No formulas for explosives, poisons, etc., just a load of crap like putting a contact explosive in a whistle. I can't believe the FBI wasted time and money on this. I think it cost me $2.98 and that was $2.97 too much.