I sure enjoyed my copy of the Anarchist Cookbook as a teen. :)

Why would one use The Anarchist Cookbook to defend themselves against heavily armed cops? I think a gun would be more effective than a tennis ball filled with match heads.

What? The Anarchist Cookbook isn’t even accurate, it’s a novelty a best.

The Anarchist Cookbook has been out for a while, its probably fine.

I am mostly just disappointed in the absolute lack of creativity in their suggestions. Even The Anarchist Cookbook is a better read :(

>Of course that may not be the best comparison since governments don't exactly like the Anarchists Cookbook.

They should - anybody trying something out of the AC is likely to kill themselves in the process:

http://www.righto.com/anarchist-cookbook-faq.html

I learned about it through The Anarchist Cookbook. They don't teach you in high school not to transport gasoline in a styrofoam container.

This is an article about CIA literature. The Anarchist Cookbook is not illegal in the US.

You wouldn't, in general, be able to ban books in the US, but if it was possible to profile people based on their library records, say somebody read Das Capital, The Anarchist Cookbook and a few similar books like that and you are the police searching for an anarchist bomber?

Interestingly the Anarchists Cookbook may be unlawful[0] due to the way anti-terrorism laws are written.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/28/josh-walker-anarchist-co...

Before the Internet, how would I ever had acquired a copy of the anarchists cookbook in rural England? I did know the book existed, and I am sure I would have tried some of it out if I could have got a copy.

I'm not sure why this case even made it to the point it did. This seems in The Anarchist Cookbook or even MIT Guide to Lock Picking territory. There are probably folks on here who feel differently but in the US this wouldn't even seem to be an edge case regardless of political leanings.

Bookburnings of the anarchist cookbook, obviously...

So the Anarchist Cookbook is terrorist literature [1], but this guide is fine?

> To create a briefer but even hotter flame, put celluloid such as you might find in an old comb, into a nest of plain or saturated paper which is to be fired by a candle.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7030096.stm

>So the Anarchist Cookbook is terrorist literature [1], but this guide is fine?

If you are just now discovering that the state holds itself to a different standard than its citizens, you must have been living under a rock.

Although I'm sure the author had no malicious intent, I'm reminded of certain subcultures disguising not-so-great behavior behind comedy so they can claim it isn't serious when criticized.

Edit: and I've just now remembered what a great laugh I had reading some of the language in "The Anarchist Cookbook" even though all those non-traditional fire recipes were certainly meant to be used for some kind of malicious act :)

Anarchocapitalism, while interesting, has as little to do with historical anarchist thinking as The Anarchist Cookbook does.

Let's not forget Doug Coulter:

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-chain-smoking-gun-loving-guy-...

He has a forum dedicated to all kinds of stuff. He occasionally stopped by Schneier's blog to deliver insightful posts. I particularly liked his calling out the Anarchist Cookbook's many ways of killing people... that try to do what it says. ;)

When I was 10 I could already find The Anarchists' Cookbook on newsgroups trivially. Back then it was trivial to find thoroughly illegal porn, racist forums, and all sorts of things that never decanted into the current state of affairs.

It will usually end up getting delivered to the To: address with postage due.

This idea is about as old as the mail system itself (I first remember reading about it in the Anarchists Cookbook in the late 80's).

Nope! The Anarchist Cookbook did not ruin my dreams of becoming a Windows admin, either.

Seriously, though, if you asked me how I got started with my career, "The Anarchist's Cookbook" would be one of the first thoughts in my head.

The topic is interesting to me because my thoughts on the book are so complicated.

Not that I'd possibly remember the details, but in 1992 / 1993, during my freshman year in High School (living in 312 as well), I visited a new HS friend at his house and he showed me his array of 6 or 8 modems running a BBS.

By that point I'd only tried out BBS once or twice from my old Laser 128, and didn't really get it. After my new friend invited me to hook into his BBS, and I found all this great stuff to download and try out, I was hooked. I feel like that's where I first learned about the Anarchist Cookbook as well.

Okay so that's why things like the Radical Militant Library and ParaZite are .onion hidden services (not linking to them here, as I don't want to get downvoted to death). I always presumed they wouldn't last long on the clearnet. They are exponentially more controversial than Stormfront or other neo-nazi websites and actually have elaborate manuals on how to maim or kill your enemy, and are a far cry from silly schoolyard things like The Anarchist Cookbook.

Kepler's Books in Menlo Park CA used to have a sign that they'd order any book you wanted, except one, "The Anarchists' Cookbook". On the other hand, I've seen copies of the book in the '60s nostalgia section of a bookstore near Ghirardelli Square.

If you want that kind of info today, right-wing "prepper" and gun nut sites will have it. Amazon sells The U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook, TM 31-210. It's not like this info is hard to get any more.

Well at least he got off free.

>Walker was accused of violating the Terrorism Act because he possessed information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.”

What a dumb law. I guess they could prosecute you for reading Wikipedia on that basis.

More concise write up here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-41751193

The "possessed information" by the way was The Anarchist Cookbook, available from £24 from Amazon.co.uk https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anarchist-Cookbook-William-Powell/d...

I don't think the owner had written any/many. They seemed to be shared amongst the digerati for c00lz. Mostly very trippy colormap warping, some of them had sprites doing things over the underlying image, a lot of XOR constructive/destructive interference fringe ideas.

They had two dimensions: 1) be as trippy-cool as possible 2) be written as tersely as humanly possible

The suicide: I can't say. He left no note. I was led to believe he'd found a way to consume a huge amount of time-charged online credit, realized he had accrued a multi-thousand dollar debt, was failing university and was severely depressed. This was back in the 1990s. Computer Crime was new, and the consequences for him was probably jail time.

A lot of other stuff on the amiga was about conspiracy theory, hacking, the usual ascii copy of 'the anarchists cookbook' which almost anyone can stumble upon and hoarde. For somebody in formative years, maybe this was more exciting than in hindsight it reads. (I mean both for me, finding it, and for him, finding/owning it in the raw. I wouldn't have been significantly older than him really, perhaps 10 years at most)

I don't think I helped the family come to any sense of closure, or informed things to help the police or coroner. I did learn that this is a very emotionally stressful job to perform and I am not well suited to either the detail side of logging "what was found" or delivery of the right kind of empathetic response to people in emotional stress. The uni was pretty good about this. They gave me counselling afterward as I recall. I wouldn't be surprised to be told anyone doing this kind of digital forensics nowadays has a pretty solid support structure. Between this, and kiddyporn I think you'd need it.

I think you can learn both skills, but it takes time

Or buy a book an Amazon. UK people where prosecuted for having 'The Anarchist Cookbook'

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/28/josh-walker-anarchist-co...

Last time I flew into the US I was reading a copy of The Reluctant Fundamentalist on the plane. But I'm white, so nobody cared.

Next time I think I'll try The Anarchist Cookbook.

If they're stockpiling bombs or something and actively working towards criminal activity, sure. I think monitoring of some anti-government groups who rise to that level, such as some groups within the American militia movement, or groups such as Revolutionary Struggle in Greece, is legitimate.

But I don't think that, in a free country, the government should be monitoring people solely for their political views or what kind of books they read, without some actual evidence that they're a danger to anyone. Sure, maybe someone who buys an Ayn Rand book will eventually work to eliminate government, but I'm not sure owning The Fountainhead should land you on a watchlist; and the same should go for reading Proudhon or Kropotkin.

It's also really easy to run into false positives. In the '80s/'90s, for example, the police/media liked to paint a bunch of generally harmless BBSing kids as "dangerous anarchists" because they had an ASCII file of The Anarchist Cookbook—which is violent anarchist literature, after all.

> The Anarchist Cookbook

I remember this being passed around between kids in the computer science lab on a floppy disk when I was about 13.

1992 or 93. It was fun, exciting, nothing like anything we've experienced before on a computer. You surfed the net back then. A lot of centred text and DIY design aesthetics. Text was king, animated GIFs were used for rotating skulls and flames, and e-books (text files really) like the Anarchist Cookbook were the thing to read. IRC was where we talked to each other. Email was magic. I printed every single email I received during my first year or so. There was no spam.
At a certain point Internet Explorer was actually ok if you can believe it. But before that Netscape was king. Yahoo was where things where organised. It was the "index", The Directory. Search engines made the directory obsolete. Google made search engines obsolete.

During our first session I asked my friend if he thinks anyone will ever make money off this thing. We both answered with a "naaah" and kept on "surfing".

I think today is better in many ways (and less so in some), but it would take a lot to impress old me now, while back then it was all just gobsmacking awesome.

The Anarchist Cookbook is the title of a dead-tree book, which the article is about.

The Anarchist Cookbook is also the title of an unaffiliated text file containing explosives recipes.

Another place to find "alien signals" back in the day were in comic book shops and card shops (those that sold various sports cards).

They'd almost always have sections of weird periodicals that were made by completely unknown people. We used to share them at school, full of inappropriate content that would probably get kids expelled these days. Also things like the Anarchist Cookbook (and similar collections) which felt extremely illegal at the time, but you can pick it up on Amazon now.

I remember one that was dedicated to gruesome crime scene photos and detailed descriptions of horrific crimes. Half the pictures looked like photocopies of photocopies, which is far less jarring than what you can find online these days.

I remember, from the early 90s, reading all sorts of text files, from Phrack to Cult of the Dead Cow to Anarchists Cookbook to the Jargon File and Hacker Purity Test type stuff. I remember one "phile" in particular about how to make a soda machine malfunction and dump its coins by pouring saltwater into the coin slot, to phreaking and "social engineering" tutorials in phrack, to drug use and hacking war stories from cDc. Many of these "philes" were indexed on FTP and Gopher servers, or available from BBS download areas.

Early websites.. I remember reading Dr. Fun which was pretty similar to Far Side and all online. Church of the Subgenius had some really excellent subversive humor online, lots of fun as a young subversive teenager to read it and imagine what the authors were like. I think that just hearing about that kind of culture was a big escape for me as a teen in a rural area.

Searching was terrible especially in the early days before the web. There was a tool called Archie to search for filenames on FTP servers, and it took hours to generate results. Yahoo made it easier to find good resources, Lycos, Hotbot, and eventually Altavista were rudimentary web search engines that were pretty low quality. Site admins linked their websites to other like-minded sites in "webrings" to help find similar content.

I think that the lack of discoverability, fragmentation, and ephemerality (because hosting space WAS expensive so things DID get deleted) led to a greater sense of freedom of expression. I remember the old saying "on the internet nobody knows that you're a dog." (I just looked that up and it's a New Yorker cartoon from 1993 - very apropos for the time). I feel like that's the biggest change over the last ~30 years I have been online, the fact that most popular forums either use your real identity or are barely pseudononymous, and the understanding that today everything you do online is tracked, stored forever, and analyzed by multiple government and commercial entities.

So yeah, it was pretty great when it was like the wild west, but it's a lot more "useful" today.

The Anarchists Cookbook "2000", those were the days.

I opened the slides only expecting the analysis of the contents and security vulnerabilities of Charlie cards. As it's easy to exploit a broken fare collection system with little risk (perhaps even commercially), this design shows serious negligence on the part of the MBTA. Kudos to them for figuring out something every Boston hacker was casually wondering about.

However, these slides go beyond that, briefly covering many avenues that seem to be more aimless mischief than serious analysis. Most of the slides remind me more of the Anarchist Cookbook than a vulnerability disclosure. I wonder why they didn't include the "hop over the gate" and "pay with counterfeit money" exploits?

So he's distributing the Anarchist Cookbook?

Your local community library is also full of extremism. You will find copies of The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kamph, The Turner Diaries, The Anarchist Cookbook, Platos Republic, In Defense of Selfishness and The Koran.

It has “problematic” works like Huckleberry Finn, Satanic Diaries and To Kill a Mockingbird.

It has works written by known racists such as HP Lovecraft, TS Elliot, Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss and Kingsley Amis.

It has hard copies of dangerous films that have been memoyholed by Prime and Netflix like Gone With The Wind and The Jazz Singer. It may also have DVDs that have been produced, directed and acted in by vile, cancelled individuals like Kevin Spacey, Louise CK, Harvey Weinstein, or Mel Gibson.

Good God, it might even have a copy of the Jenna in blackface episode from the third season of 30 Rock. I am clutching my pearls and getting the vapors just thinking about it.

That was my thinking too. Along the lines of the anarchists cookbook.

Yes, it's true, me and my high school freshman friends really should have had a better grounding in pyrotechnics and demolitions before taking on the projects in the Anarchists Cookbook. Maybe we should have gone to mining school first. I'm sorry.

I'm not sure why this was left as a comment on my comment, though, since it doesn't have anything to do with it. We weren't "resorting to violence", unless "violence against garbage cans" is a political statement to you.

You also appear not to have noticed me crediting my career to the book you think I want to burn.

The parent comment seems to believe that the FDA would have some jurisdiction over the content.

It's not up to me what people read and write, or what Amazon puts on their website. Amazon has the right to choose what they sell, just as the author has the right to publish their book. In this particular case, besides Amazon's action, there could be civil suits against the author (look up Paladin Press), and even FTC actions depending on the exact claims made by the book.

How would you respond to the concern that this is not the only book that people believe has caused suffering? For example, how about Aquinas, or Marx, or Hume, or Foucault, or the Anarchist Cookbook or hell, Hugh Hefner? Books don't leap off of shelves and hit people, causing them injuries. A person, subject to the law and with their pre-existing moral system, must, having read the contents of the book, perform some action to their self or others to cause suffering.

Possession of The Anarchist Cookbook has been used as evidence against terrorist suspects in Britain, and also as a crime itself, "Possession of terrorist material". In the latter case, the 17 year old's argument was pretty much what you suggest, and he was cleared.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7030096.stm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook#Legalit...

I totally disagree that the tone of that comment sums up the article in the slightest.

While the article makes it clear that Powell now regrets authoring The Anarchist Cookbook, it is also made clear that the reasons for his regrets are far more interesting and nuanced than the quote above would have you think:

"When Powell was in his late twenties and teaching special-needs students in New York, he returned to White Plains High School. At the school he had struggled academically and socially, and looking through his results from two intelligence tests, he found what he took to be a clue to his unhappiness. “There was a huge discrepancy between my verbal and performance I.Q.,” he says. “That would have been a clear red flag in today’s world that something was going on. But at that point in time, nobody paid attention to it.” Powell thinks he likely had a learning disability of some sort, which contributed to his trouble in school, his alienation as a young adult, and his current work to support learning-disabled students."

Powell spent the rest of his life trying to help frustrated young people like his former self, which is far more profound and noble than an old hippie selling out.

It's been shown in court that source code is free speech, protected by the First Amendment (cf. Bernstein v. US, Junger v. Daley). I don't want this to get to that point, but that could be a way of getting around it.

Some might argue that speech telling you how to commit a crime is not protected speech, but the Anarchist Cookbook is legal to possess as well.

Dammit Jim, I'm a hacker, not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

I recall in middle or high school making ammonium tri-iodide with a friend whose dad was a navy seal and knew a thing or two about explosives but nevertheless for some reason thought it was ok for us to make a highly touch-sensitive explosive without supervision. We got the instructions from some variant of the Anarchist Cookbook, and they quite simply instruct you to dissolve iodine crystals in ammonia and filter it, leaving behind a residue of the product. We left it inside a plastic cooler outside for the ammonia to evaporate, which was fine until a gust of wind caused it to detonate and blow up the cooler. I don’t recall us having a plan for how to get the filter out of the cooler without detonating it though, so I’m grateful that it blew up when we weren’t nearby.

You probably didn't have access because you didn't look for it. A kid with the right mindset and a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook or similar could cause a lot of panic and draw a lot of attention.

The difference is not access, it's the inherently nonviolent nature of digital. It's easier to get a kid to care about not hurting others than about not hurting an abstract legal entity like a company.

Most people on HN are probably on several lists.

If I mention "The Anarchist Cookbook" then I imagine every username on this page will be added to a GCHQ list, I'll probably have my internet traffic mined to establish if I downloaded it (which they arrest people for in the UK -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-41802493). Presumably they have my online purchase history that relates to reagents, etc..

I also expect to be on lists for being critical of the establishment, doing online web security courses, buying remote connectable electronics, etc..

The difficulty I expect is profiling to reduce those lists to meaningful actions that have indicative value.

Reminds me of: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/09/man-charged-...

> The charges allege that Golaszewski was found with copies of 21 Silent Techniques of Killing by Master Hei Long, The Anarchist Cookbook and The Big Book of Mischief on 23 February in Leeds. It is also alleged that he had in his possession the Improvised Munitions Handbook, Murder Inc, The Book by Jack the Rippa, and Minimanual Of The Urban Guerilla, by Carlos Marighella.

The guy is charged with possession of six books, some of these books are likely to be present at archive.org

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/pawel-golaszewsk...

> Pawel Golaszewski faces six counts under the Terrorism Act and has been charged with possession of a document or record "containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

Six books, six counts.

••••••••••

Unsure where is this heading. Does anyone think the law can stop technology?

As was pointed out at the time these laws were drafted, possession of an A to Z could aid terrorism, not to mention possession of the Anarchists Cookbook. Then we get the usual nonsense of people who like to smoke a joint are accused of funding terrorism.

We are all terrorists now. Hence why we are all spied on. Get used to it, as no one seems to care.

BTW, the solicitors dealing with this, they are same firm who embarrassed Teresa May over Abu Qatada, when she got her dates wrong and couldn't kick him out. If there is anything unlawful about this, (morality and decency well aside as they simply don't count,) they will find and prove it. For reasons I cannot go in to, I have experience of how good they are. It should also be remembered that the law in general is under attack from this government, and although it is strangely under reported, the legal profession is deeply unhappy, to say the least, with this government. For those who don't know, legal aid is being slaughtered and that will wipe out a lot of solicitors firms who defend and protect the poor from blatant abuse and injustice, who make up the vast majority of criminal cases. For some reason this government wants to sell contracts to people like haulage firms to provide legal aid to people who cant afford solicitors for a little money as possible. Legal aid is currently bad, this government want it worse. Legal defense will be based on price, conviction will end up being based on police say so, with out question. So, if you are poor you will never be able to get impartial advice, since the contracted solicitors will be working to the bare minimum clock. So, essentially, they are trying to deny justice to the majority of defendants, while relying on the lie that the majority of solicitors are rolling in unearned unjustified cash, which I assume you is a lie. So, any chance of exposing, even damaging, this government will be thoroughly pursued. In short, to me, this firm being involved is the best news so far.

>Oh, and might I add, The Anarchist Cookbook isn't flawed so much in that it presents violence as a means to an end, but rather that actually following the recipes will likely get you killed or maimed. Hopefully people reading the book already knew this.

The Vice's Guide episode where they try out recipes makes this crystal clear. The napalm experiment was probably the most eye opening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcIMuoUcc1s

That Billy Blann is certainly an interesting character.

It should be noted that The Anarchist Cookbook is a very widely forged book these days. There are a ton of compendiums of various BBS text files or assorted clippings which claim to be successors, alternate editions and whatnot. An FAQ dated to 2000 actually summarizes things well: http://files.righto.com/anarchy/

Memories come back of the time when Phrack Magazine and digital copies of The Anarchist Cookbook were shared via IPXCOPY.EXE or floppies at 10Base2 LAN parties or other scene gatherings. Interesting ISDN hacks and also ntpwc.c and other things were published in Phrack back then. It's almost like looking at a vintage car magazine now.

In England several people (including children) have been arrested, and prosecuted, (and convicted?) for terrorism offences because they owned things like The Anarchists Cookbook.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7030096.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-33705944

(The explorer Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes while on service with the SAS used to work out how to efficiently use explosive, allowing him to keep small amounts after training exercises. He accumulated a small stock of explosive which he used to demolish an ugly damn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes

)

The (obvious) reply is to ban prior restraint. If you can show that the speaker really did knowingly and directly incite violence then you have remedies after the fact once you show that they had a hand in causing the violence. But you do not even arrest authors of books like Rules For Radicals or the Antifa Handbook that excuse or promote violence.

E.g. you can arrest someone for actually shouting fire in a crowded theater after they did this. But there is no pre-crime unit that will arrest someone for speaking based on the assumption that someone else might then commit violence later on inspired by the book.

Similarly there is punishment for someone planting bombs or even calling in bomb threats to a school, but there is not punishment for someone writing the Anarchist Cookbook or arguing that bomb threats are a good idea or that this country would benefit from bomb threats in order to bring about the socialist utopia. None of this requires censorship of mere discussion of controversial subjects before the fact, on the basis of fear that they might be used to incite violence in the future. We even allow people to carry guillotines in the streets and stage mock executions of their political enemies, and we allow people top speak of their admiration for Robespierre. We don't arrest them. But if someone were to actually guillotine an enemy, then they would be arrested. We punish those who commit the violence, not those who inspired them with books we don't like.

It's worth noting that the author recanting his book isn't as of recent. In fact, he dropped his views all the way back in 1976.

This editorial review on the Amazon page for the book might offer some more insight: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0974458902

Oh, and might I add, The Anarchist Cookbook isn't flawed so much in that it presents violence as a means to an end, but rather that actually following the recipes will likely get you killed or maimed. Hopefully people reading the book already knew this.

This retarded book, which has injured acquaintances of mine, is the reason I have the career I have now. If it weren't for the Anarchist Cookbook, I'd be a Windows admin today.

It's every bit as bad as the author says it is. But taking it out of print won't fix anything; the copy I had when I was 13 wasn't legit, and was accompanied by 8478439 pages of Usenet posts.