Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals Prominent British bookseller W H Smith voluntarily shut its website for emergency "maintenance" last night after being warned by The Register that it was selling a range of DIY terror manuals – such as the Improvised Munitions Handbook that offer procedures for making bombs and explosive booby-traps. The site also offered two …
Uncle slacky, from your link; "Mixing these common household chemicals can be extremely dangerous. Learn which chemicals don't mix and what happens if they do. "
Looks like terrist education to me, or is it just the welfare of chemistry students?
Any decent chemistry major/mad bomber (I was both during my childhood) knows that you find all of the information you need in any decent university library.
When I was in middle school, I hopped on the bus and rode down to the state university's chemistry department library to search in Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry, It was huge, had to be 400-500 volumes on the shelves! A very helpful librarian taught me how to locate specific molecules in the indexes (it is all an online database now). Dad was a duPonter and helped me build a beautiful lab in the house -- even had a homemade fume hood. And the chemical supply store clerks in town knew me by name and would sell me things like nitriic and sulfuric acids, no problem.
The article was written in German, which wasn't a problem as I was well aware from my father that German was more or less a required skill for chemists.
I didn't do too badly. The neighborhood has fewer treestumps in the parks and I still have all of my fingers and toes.
... than that was the case with the publications openly available during my youth.
So it has obviously become a lot easier to get deeper introductions into the "How-Tos" of potentially dangerous activities. I can understand that that makes some people uncomfortable - especially those who may never have gotten in touch with suchlike.
For me, growing up in Germany where I was able to buy nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, H202, permanganates, glycerin, potassium nitrate and what not else while I was a kid, experimenting with all kinds of things that went "bang" was quite natural. That went on for several years.
We went as far as making cannons shooting steel spikes several hundred meters and electrically triggered bombs from fertilizers. Our muzzle-loaded guns shot 10 mm bearing balls clean through several petrol cans in a row. And we only stopped when one of us got a serious warning from police that they would interfere at his employer (we were around 17 by then) because he obviously had to have done some welding of parts there. He did not, he had a proper welding device at home, but it was sure not the time to argue with police about such details at that point.
Today we would be off far worse with such behaviour, probably for all times sharing a place in some directory of potential terrorists and dangerous misfits. It has ended up for me with a Ph.D. in chemistry instead and I have no terrorist tendencies at all, except sometimes in some evil dreams or fantasies.
I was by the way just today able to openly find and download all of the named books from the web, so whether some seller offers them or not is pretty irrelevant.
For me personally the question is not whether such information is dangerous or not, as it is in the world and you cannot keep it down by whatever means you use. It rather is a question of weighting such information. It may seem cynical to some, but the chances of being killed by some terrorist in Europe are remote compared to e.g. traffic, food additives or air quality.
So my Opel Astra Diesel is (alas) a surer killer than any of the books mentioned, at least in the numbers the model goes on our roads. And a lot more people die from fast food than from terror. One should keep that in mind before strirring panic among the people and trying to cut down civil liberties to achive a minimal effect on security.
EPIC FAIL!
The Koran is stillf or sale on their site and includes the following commands...
1. Thou shall Rape, Marry, and Divorce Pre-pubescent Girls. Koran 65:4 2. Thou shall have Sex Slaves, Work Slaves. Koran 4:3, 4:24, 5:89, 33:50, 58:3, 70:30 3. Thou shall Beat Sex Slaves, Work Slaves, and Wives. Koran 4:34 4. Thou shall have 4 Muslim male witnesses to prove rape. Koran 24:13 5. Thou shall Kill those who insult Islam or Mohammed. Koran 33:57 6. Thou shall Crucify and Amputate non-Muslims. Koran 8:12, 47:4 7. Thou shall Kill non-Muslims. Guarantee receiving 72 virgins in heaven. Koran 9:111 8. Thou shall Kill anyone who leaves Islam. Koran 2:217, 4:89 9. Thou shall Behead non-Muslims. Koran 8:12, 47:4 10. Thou shall Kill AND be Killed for Allah. Koran 9:5 11. Thou shall Terrorize non-Muslims. Koran 8:12, 8:60 12. Thou shall Steal & Rob from non-Muslims. Koran Chapter 8 (Booty/Spoils of War) 13. Thou shall Lie to Strengthen Islam. Koran 3:28, 16:106 14. Thou shall Fight non-Muslim even if you don't want to. Koran 2:216 15. Thou shall not take non-Muslims as friends. Koran 5:51 16. Thou shall Call non-Muslims Pigs and Apes. Koran 5:60, 7:166, 16:106 17. Thou shall Treat non-Muslims as the vilest creatures with NO mercy. Koran 98:6 18. Thou shall Treat non-Muslims as sworn enemies. Koran 4:101 19. Thou shall Kill non-Muslims for not converting to Islam. Koran 9:29 20. Thou shall Extort non-Muslims to keep Islam strong. Koran 9:29.
The withdrawal from sale could be because of its possible use in making nitrogen tri-iodide. It used to be that one could buy iodine crystals too.
The clamp-down in response to trrrsm has spoiled a lot of schoolboy fun. Mind you, one of my chums was fortunate that the prompt criticality he accidentally triggered left him with nothing worse than yellow hands for a couple of days.
I actually bought some a while back, as a "Prepper" just in case KI was not available in a nuclear incident.
Hint: Iodine is found in: Seaweed, some types of salt and also old pacemaker batteries.
Probably going to get watchlisted now but you can't criminalize knowledge.
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