Websites to die for
"Buy a 10cm diameter metal pipe, about 30cm long, with screw on ends. Drill a small hole in the end, just wide enough to insert a firecracker fuse. Next, you will have to make some explosive..."
So begin instructions for how to make a pipe bomb on a site that explains how to create a further 35 explosive devices. It is highly likely that David Copeland, whose nail bomb attacks in London killed 3 people and injured over 100, visited this site to learn how to make explosive devices.
Details of how to do nefarious things were being published before the invention of the internet. Once, no self-respecting squat was without The Anarchist Cookbook. Written in 1971 by a 19-year-old New Yorker called William Powell, it was a guide to such things as growing marijuana, killing someone with your bare hands and making nitroglycerin (the recipe for this, I am told, does not work and is highly dangerous). Last year, on www.Amazon.com, Powell renounced his work and the creed which advocates violence as an acceptable tool of political change. While his cookbook is not available online, this has not stopped others posting their own versions. The most ubiquitous is written by the amiably named Jolly Roger, whose prose combines the freewheeling style of Jamie Oliver with the politics of the Baader Meinhof gang.
What has changed with the advent of the net is the speed with which information can be obtained. Using www.google.com and searching for "How to Make a Bomb," it took me 0.09 seconds to locate a link to instructions for making a fertiliser bomb and a page called "Making a Bomb Using Plutonium From a Power Reactor." I haven't actually tried any of the recipes, although a chemist friend warned me that I would be "insane" to attempt any of the procedures it lists. David Copeland, according to five psychiatrists who interviewed him, is insane. And, sadly, some of the guides do work.
Usenet, meanwhile, is the web's wild west. Comprising mostly of bulletin boards, it enables people with similar interests (world affairs, say, or neo-Nazism) to exchange ideas and files. One newsgroup has had a long running and highly technical discussion about how to build the smallest possible nuclear weapon.
I've also encountered the genuinely alarming Terrorist's Handbook, sites dedicated to bio-terrorist scenarios and the outpourings of paranoid government haters, like those who bombed Oklahoma.
The web simply delivers more rapidly what was previously obtainable through the library or mail order. But it is the multi-faceted nature of the internet that makes it dangerous. It is the place where a merely damaged person can find thousands of others to give credence to his views, direct him to sources of destructive knowledge and, crucially, reinforce his commitment to turn fantasy into action.
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