The availability of bomb-making instruction on the Internet has been a cause célèbre

Cause célèbre

A is an issue or incident arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning and heated public debate. The term is particularly used in connection with celebrated legal cases. It is a French phrase in common English use...

 amongst lawmakers and politicians anxious to curb the Internet frontier by censoring certain types of information deemed "dangerous" which is available online. "Simple" examples of explosives created from cheap readily-available ingredients are given.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation

Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...

 reported 1,699 criminal bombings in 1989, but the number had risen to 3,163 five years later.

Moral philosophy

Supporters of digital rights

Digital rights

The term digital rights describes the permissions of individuals legitimately to perform actions involving the use of a computer, any electronic device, or a communications network...

 argue that managers of Internet traffic do not have a right to deep packet inspection

Deep packet inspection

Deep Packet Inspection is a form of computer network packet filtering that examines the data part of a packet as it passes an inspection point, searching for protocol non-compliance, viruses, spam, intrusions or predefined criteria to decide if the packet can...

, the automated system of analyzing what information is being transmitted, for example refusing to deliver a packet with the words "bomb instructions" and alerting authorities to the ISP that requested the information. They suggest that "we never seem to hear" about how the same instructions, including those for building nuclear devices, have been available in public libraries

Public library

A public library is a library that is accessible by the public and is generally funded from public sources and operated by civil servants. There are five fundamental characteristics shared by public libraries...

 for decades without calls for censorship. In the late 19th century, Johann Most

Johann Most

Johann Joseph Most was a German-American politician, newspaper editor, and orator. He is credited with popularizing the concept of "Propaganda of the deed". His grandson was Boston Celtics radio play-by-play man Johnny Most...

 compiled Austrian military documents into a booklet demonstrating the use of explosives and distributed it at anarchist picnics without repercussion.

Mike Godwin

Mike Godwin

Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , and the creator of the Internet adage Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation...

, then of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...

, claimed that journalists have played a key role in linking the creation of "bombs" with "the Internet" in the public conscious.

Critics of the prosecution of Sherman Austin

Sherman Austin

Sherman Martin Austin is an American anarchist and musician who was arrested for inflammatory content on his website and subsequently convicted. He was the first person to be successfully prosecuted under 18 U.S.C...

, an American anarchist charged with publishing instructions on the Internet, have pointed out that the Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 article on Molotov cocktail

Molotov cocktail

The Molotov cocktail, also known as the petrol bomb, gasoline bomb, Molotov bomb, fire bottle, fire bomb, or simply Molotov, is a generic name used for a variety of improvised incendiary weapons...

s contains more detailed instructions on the construction of homemade explosives, than Austin's website did.

Most American websites offering bomb-making instructions would not face civil liability, since Hess v. Indiana and Waller v. Osbourne determined that free speech restrictions can only be applied if the goal was "producing imminent lawless conduct" among a single target group – which is not the case for a website available to a large swath of the population – making the situation comparable to music advocating violence or suicide in its lyrics.

History

In 1986, prior to the widespread use of the Internet, police investigated the sharing of a computer print-out from a digital manual entitled the "Complete Book of Explosives" written by a group calling itself "Phoenix Force", as students shared the list with classmates and experimented with building many of the bombs it listed.

After the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing

Oklahoma City bombing

The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19...

, anonymous usenet

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 posts criticised the construction of the bomb, and offered suggestions on how to overcome the failure of the bomb to do its maximum intended damage. On March 23 1996, the full text of the Terrorist Handbook was published online, including instructions on building the bomb used in the bombing, with the suggested upgrades. When Mohammed Usman Saddique was arrested in 2006, he was charged with "possessing a document or record containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" for having a copy of the manual on CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

.

Also in 1994, a thread on the National Rifle Association

National Rifle Association

The National Rifle Association of America is an American non-profit 501 civil rights organization which advocates for the protection of the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights and the promotion of firearm ownership rights as well as marksmanship, firearm safety, and the protection...

's bulletin board

Bulletin board

A bulletin board is a surface intended for the posting of public messages, for example, to advertise things to buy or sell, announce events, or provide information...

 a user named Warmaster detailed how to make bombs out of baby food

Baby food

Baby food is any food, other than breastmilk or infant formula, that is made specifically for infants, roughly between the ages of four to six months to 2 years. The food comes in multiple varieties and tastes, can be produced by many manufacturers, or may be table food that the rest of the family...

 jars.

A 1996 copy of the left-wing online German magazine Radikal hosted on a Dutch server provided detailed instructions of how to sabotage railroad lines. In March of that year, a New South Wales

New South Wales

New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...

 MP

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

 called for legislation regarding internet access for youth, following reports of a boy injuring himself while trying to follow a bomb recipe online.

Through 1998, the common view of the instructions was that they were used by curious youth anxious to build explosives simply as a dangerous experiment "with no intention of hurting anybody".

Police claim that they found printed copies of bomb-making instructions downloaded from the Internet in the bedroom of Thomas Solomon, the perpetrator of the 1999 Heritage High School shooting

Heritage High School shooting

The Heritage High School shooting occurred May 20, 1999, at Heritage High School located in Conyers, Georgia. The gunman was 15-year-old, high school sophomore, Thomas Solomon, Jr. He shot six students in the school's common area before getting subdued....

.

Also in 1999, David Copeland

David Copeland

David John Copeland is a former member of the British National Party and the National Socialist Movement, who became known as the "London Nail Bomber" after a 13-day bombing campaign in April 1999 aimed at London's black, Bangladeshi and gay communities.Over three successive weekends between 17...

 planted nail bombs in London, killing 3 people and injuring 139, based on techniques discussed in The Terrorist's Handbook and How to Make Bombs: Part Two, which he had downloaded from the internet.

The militant pro-life

Pro-life

Opposition to the legalization of abortion is centered around the pro-life, or anti-abortion, movement, a social and political movement opposing elective abortion on moral grounds and supporting its legal prohibition or restriction...

 movement Army of God also provided information on constructing bombs in preparation for anti-abortion violence on their website.

In 2001 at al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

's hastily evacuated operations center in Afghanistan, journalists uncovered evidence that the organization used the internet to research rudimentary bomb-making.

In Finland in 2002, "RC" discussed bomb-making techniques on the internet on a Finnish website whose moderator displayed a picture of his own face on Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...

's body, and then RC set off a bomb that killed seven people, including himself.

The report "How to Bomb Thy Neighbor: Hamas Offers Online 'Academy'" describes a Hamas

Hamas

Hamas is the Palestinian Sunni Islamic or Islamist political party that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas also has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades...

 online interactive 14-lesson course for Muslims on bomb-making, as part of a campaign to increase the number of bomb-makers.

In 2004, a Palestinian group posted an online video showing the proper construction of suicide vests, hoping to support the Iraqi insurgency

Iraqi insurgency

The Iraqi Resistance is composed of a diverse mix of militias, foreign fighters, all-Iraqi units or mixtures opposing the United States-led multinational force in Iraq and the post-2003 Iraqi government...

.

The 2004 Madrid train bombers, who killed 191 people and wounding 1,800, downloaded their bomb-making instructions from the internet.

The Canadian Saad Khalid

Saad Khalid

A 19-year old University of Toronto student, Saad Khalid was one of 17 people detained and arrested on June 2 and June 3, 2006, in the Greater Toronto Area in the 2006 Toronto terrorism arrests....

 admitted that he had downloaded bomb-making materials online in 2006, leading to the 2006 Toronto terrorism case

2006 Toronto terrorism case

The 2006 Ontario terrorism case refers to the plotting of a series of attacks against targets in Southern Ontario, Canada, and the June 2, 2006, counter-terrorism raids in and around the Greater Toronto Area that resulted in the arrest of 18 people found to be Al-Qaeda members of an Islamic...

.

Isa Ibrahim was a teenager when he made a “suicide vest” bomb from instructions on the internet, and planned to detonate it in a crowded shopping mall; he was sentenced in England in July 2009 to a minimum of ten years in jail.

Najibullah Zazi

Najibullah Zazi

Najibullah Zazi is an Afghan-American who was arrested in September 2009 as part of the 2009 U.S. Al Qaeda group accused of planning suicide bombings on the New York City subway system, and has pled guilty as have two other defendants. U.S...

, an al-Qaeda member who pleaded guilty in February 2010 to a plot to bomb the New York City Subway

New York City Subway

The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system owned by the City of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority, a subsidiary agency of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and also known as MTA New York City Transit...

 system, engaged in internet research on the components for making explosive devices.

Legislation

In 1995, Dianne Feinstein

Dianne Feinstein

Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein is the senior U.S. Senator from California. A member of the Democratic Party, she has served in the Senate since 1992. She also served as 38th Mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988....

 produced a bill to the United States Senate

United States Senate

The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 making it illegal to distribute bomb-making information, punishable by a $250,000 fine and 20 years' imprisonment. Two years later, the body voted 94–0 in favor of implementing it. Although it was frequently said to be in response to Timothy McVeigh

Timothy McVeigh

Timothy James McVeigh was a United States Army veteran and security guard who detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995...

's Oklahoma bombing, he had actually used two traditional hard-copy books titled Homemade C-4, A Recipe for Survival and Ragnar’s Big Book of Homemade Weapons and Improvised Explosives. Critics later pointed out both books were still for sale at Amazon.com, suggesting that legislators were not concerned about the true dissemination of such information. When lawsuits erupted over DeCSS

DeCSS

DeCSS is a computer program capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc. Before the release of DeCSS, there was no way for computers running a Linux-based operating system to play video DVDs....

 technology available over the Internet, allowing users to "crack" DVD encryption, the founders questioned why bomb-making instructions were legal, while software cracks that simply cost corporations money were not.

In 2004, German authorities forced a seventeen-year old to shut down his Web site, entitled Der Abarisch Sturm after he posted detailed instructions of how to build a bomb. That year, French police also arrested a computer student in Alfortville

Alfortville

Alfortville is a commune in the southeastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.-History:The commune of Alfortville was created on 1 April 1885 by detaching its territory from the commune of Maisons-Alfort.-Transport:...

 who claimed he had posted similar instructions "for fun."

A 2007 attempt by the European Commission

European Commission

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....

 to suppress bomb-making websites by making ISPs criminally liable for allowing a user to view such a page was ridiculed by The Register

The Register

The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...

as "fantastically ignorant of internet realities"

Web sites offering advice on construction explosives are labelled as "Refused Classification" in Australia, as it is deemed to violate "all acceptable community standards".