Downloading the wrong papers from the Internet is a cheap ticket to the big house or Her Majesty's hospitality, thanks to the decade-long war on terror. In the Eighties the US survivalist fringe minted the mayhem papers of high stupid that traveled 'round the world. Then along came the Internet and a little later, Osama bin Laden and jihadists who translated them for their own pleasures.
From the wire, in the United Kingdom:
LONDON -- A British man appeared in court on Thursday accused of having instructions to make a bomb and being in possession of a recipe to make the deadly poison ricin.
This post was originally published at the informative and fun Dick Destiny blog.
Asim Kauser, 25, an unmarried British national whose family hail from Pakistan, is charged with four offences under anti-terrorism legislation after material was found on a USB key.
Kauser, from Bolton in Lancashire, was arrested at his home on June 6 "on suspicion of possessing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing, or preparing an act of terrorism, between January 2009 and June 2011″.
He was charged with having "various instructions in how to make an improvised explosive device".
This ricin recipe can get you jailed, from my now half a decade old work at GlobalSecurity.
They'll warm up a bunk for you in stir once these kinds of things are taken from your digital belongings.
This is not progress in service of the rule of law, it's decline. However, that's where we are.
This was published, in very readable form, in the Washington Post around 2005. England, it's good for a conviction if in your possession, pure sucker bait.
The UK has a solid record of jailing people for possession of "terror documents" judged to be useful in facilitating terrorism. The enthusiasm for it has waxed and waned over the course of the war on terror. But it is always present.
One example, from 2008, at my old blog is discussed here.
And here, in a case in which Samina Malik, a hapless person with what turned out to be legally hazardous curiosity, was convicted. (Disclosure: Malik's defense, at one point, asked me to describe -- for her defense -- the nature of the materials she had downloaded.)
It is entirely remarkable that ten years into the war on terror, when all these things first came to mainstream media notice, fools everywhere still download the same old rubbish.
And the same old trash shows up in court cases again and again, the moldy mythology of printed out useless terror tracts -- thought up and published by the American right wing survivalist fringe in the Eighties so we'd all have something to aid in filling our home bunkers with canisters of poison and improvised landmines
They're not of much practical use but still very capable of sending people over. (It's the legacy of American publishers who specialized in this peculiar and odious market, like Loompanics, which went out of business a couple years ago.)
What happens when you think about this too much. (Or music to cheer and warm you, depending on your disposition, Jesus H. Christ & the Four Hornsmen's "Alcoholics in Our Town.") "Happy days, the party never ends ..."
