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.

Comments

Eh, it's tame...

[TWX]

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.

Re:Eh, it's tame...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They have to offer some job perks to encourage people who could be chemists to endure a classroom packed with children...

I do the same thing.

[imamac]

That's how I backed up all my floppy disks, too!

Well meaning.. but evil

[Hatta]

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.

Dangerous book w/ incomplete instructions

[WillAdams]

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

Re:Dangerous book w/ incomplete instructions

[circletimessquare]

gun control is not meant to stop criminal masterminds and intelligent determined boy scouts. its meant to stop casual hotheads and insane people. if you stop people from getting guns easily someone like yourself and criminal geniuses will still have guns. nobody thinks making guns harder to get will stop someone like you

so who won't get guns? the kind of guy who shoots up a disco because a chick looked at him funny or the guy who shot the congresswoman in arizona. these people aren't fine thinking specimens: they get guns simply because they are easy to get. so make guns less easy to get, and insane people and casual hotheads won't get guns. that's it

you have to understand, they aren't trying that hard, at much of anything in life, and it is these sort of people that cause all of the tragedy with guns

i would be able to understand gun lovers a little better if they didn't freak out at the most sane obvious and prudent restrictions on guns

Re:Dangerous book w/ incomplete instructions

[Ben4jammin]

I think there are a couple of issues here. First of all, how are you going to define a "casual hothead" before the fact? Sure it easy to see after the fact, but how do you define it beforehand in a way that isn't also going to snare a lot of people that it shouldn't?

With someone who is insane, once they are diagnosed you have a paper trail. But what about before that? Exactly when are they insane? How can you tell before they act without also limiting the rights of everyone?

The NICS guidelines (http://crime.about.com/od/guns/a/handgun_check.htm) can help, but what about people that up to a point have been good citizens, but for whatever reason, go off?

And if you look at what has been going on in CA (http://www.redding.com/news/2009/oct/12/gov-signs-ammunition-sales-bill/) check this part out:

De Leon spokesman Dan Reeves has said the local laws have helped police track down 200 criminals who bought handgun ammunition. Some were drug dealers and many had large caches of illegal guns or explosives

So even with a BUNCH of laws, both state and federal, covering both guns AND ammo bad guys still get guns/ammo. Now true, they are referring to convicted felons, which is not what you were talking about. But none of those people were convicted felons the first time they committed a felony. Are you sure it is so easy to predict? At some point, if you aren't careful, the gun laws will just put law abiding citizens at a severe disadvantage without actually helping to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Where that point of diminished returns is, I don't know. But my point is that I think you are oversimplifying things a bit.

Re:Dangerous book w/ incomplete instructions

[i.r.id10t]

I also recall at least Germany having a problem with a government that systematically rounded up what they considered undesirables and putting them to death...

The 2nd amendment isn't about hunting, self defense, or casual target shooting - it is about the ability for the citizenship to revolt against the government.

Re:Dangerous book w/ incomplete instructions

[swillden]

The idea that a well armed populace is safer is clearly a boy scout fantasy.

It's not at all clear to me, nor to many scholars who've studied the issue. I assume you've read John Lott's seminal work that kicked off an ongoing debate about the effect of widespread concealed carry, right? And the many other research papers that support his finding that the more law-abiding citizens are carrying firearms the less violent crime there is? And noted the fact that the (relatively few) studies that find to the contrary, with only a single exception, find that rather than more guns increasing crime, they have no significant effect? And I'm sure you've also read the FBI reports that analyze the question from the criminal's perspective, and conclude that citizen concealed carry is the largest single deterrent in the minds of most violent criminals. I can provide links, but all of this information is readily accessible via Google.

I think this is a case where what appears to be common sense is actually just ignorance. Real study of the issue shows that privately-owned, concealed firearms are a real deterrent to crime, and the numbers show that the otherwise law-abiding "hothead" who "flips out" and starts shooting people doesn't exist. In the case of Jared Loughner, I think the crowd is lucky he had a gun. Without that, he'd have had to fall back on simpler and far more deadly weapons -- like his truck. What would be even better, of course, is to identify mentally ill people like him beforehand and get them into treatment. People wouldn't die, and they'd have happier lives. But the presence or absence of guns doesn't significantly affect that dynamic.

It is time for the USA to join every other sober industrialized nation in the world and severely restrict guns. Reason will prevail, it always does. Even though we will pay a horrible price in senseless deaths until the stink finally gets too high. Eventually, too high even for those with an irrational religious conviction about the virtuousness of guns. The rest of us are waiting for you to finally come to their senses. We're not too patient though, we're sick of the carnage. Hurry up and figure it out.

What carnage?

Yes, approximately 30,000 people die in the US annually from gunshot wounds. That's terrible. But when you break down the numbers, you learn some interesting things.

First, approximately half of those deaths are suicides. Without access to a firearm, would those people still be alive? Perhaps some of them, only because guns tend to be a quite effective way to do yourself in. But they're hardly the only way.

Second, the vast majority of the deaths that remain are gang- and drug-related. If you want to eliminate most of those deaths, the solution is quite apparent: Legalize drugs. Regulate them tightly, but make them most readily available through legal channels and you'll cut the legs from under the gangs. Without drugs, they have no funding. Without funding, they die. We experienced all of this nearly a century ago, yet we continue paying a horrible price in senseless deaths and loss of civil liberties, and will continue paying it until we wise up and deal with drug abuse as a social and medical problem, not a criminal one.

Third, we get the portion that are really hard to address: domestic violence. There are about 4,000 deaths per year where an angry spouse/child/parent/whatever grabs a gun and starts shooting. Some of these people would not die if guns were unavailable, and I don't really know what we can do about it. More readily-available family counseling services, perhaps. More shelters and programs to help battered women and children escape a dangerous situation before their abuser grabs a gun and kills them -- or before they grab a gun and kill their abuser (though I have to say I find those outcomes less heartbreaking... not that they're the best outcomes, but they're better than many of the alternatives).

Congressional ignorance

[Morris Thorpe]

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.)

Re:Great Page Turner for Miscreants !

[definate]

Then you should have tried the saltpeter and sugar smoke bomb. We smuggled quite a lot of saltpeter out from school. We also decided to throw in some match heads, and naphthalene (why not?). Cooked it on the oven, luckily in a small test quantity. All of a sudden, BAM, the room was full of smoke, from what was about a 50cent piece worth of material.

The smoke was initially red, making me think the match heads got too hot. Scared the shit out of us. A red/white cloud, that races at your face, and quickly fills the entire kitchen. Mum was shocked, and impressed.

I'd highly recommend this recipe to anyone. Given the quantities are small enough (and given we weren't extremely lucky), we had it literally blow up right in our faces, and all we got was a little smoky, and the shock of our lives.

Having a look at ones like this...
saltpeter smoke bombs inside
Smoke bomb (KNO3 + Sugar)

I don't know what we did differently. Perhaps they're using a low grade KNO3, we were using lab grade stuff, and we prepared the mixtures specifically, made sure it was consistent. Also, we did a very thin, but wide mixture. Additionally, maybe the match heads (and naphthalene?) made it react quicker. Also, it reaching some temperature on the oven, might have triggered it to all ignite at once.

Ours was more like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IZX80i4cpU

But in a confined space, with a fraction of the material, and it all went off at once.

BIG BADA BOOM! (Minus boom, just menacing hissing, and fuckloads of smoke)

I Don't Understand This Legacy

[eldavojohn]

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.

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 ... 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.

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?

Re:I Don't Understand This Legacy

[Steauengeglase]

It was a bit like the Hacker's Manifesto in that it was written by a very passionate young person (William Powell, 22 at the time) that ran like wildfire amongst other passionate, like-minded (or at least very curious) young people. It also had the same reaction as H.M. when it's author went back, re-read it and was startled by how angry, foolish and idealistic they were in their youth and that almost all of that rage was caused by other sources.

From what I've read Powell has felt very guilty about that book and he doesn't advise anyone to ever bother reading it.

Don't like

[JustOK]

I always found Anarchists a bit gamey, no matter how they're cooked.

Re:Lame

[mangu]

I wanted to learn how to make Napalm from human fat

Napalm is a mix of gasoline with soap. To make soap from human fat, get (by weight) 7 parts fat, 2 parts water, and 1 part sodium hydroxide. Mix thoroughly in a blender until it starts thickening. Pour in a mold and let stand for a few days. To make napalm, grind the soap and mix 2 parts gasoline with 1 part soap.

"Not Always Complete"

[bmo]

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

The Real Power behind The Anarchist Cookbook...

[MaxNomad68]

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.