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Comment by shereadsthenews | Hacker News Reader

If anyone can show that Beto has a hard copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook I'll vote for him twice.

Why would he? I'm sure he downloaded it so he didn't have to pay for it, like all of the cracked games he was getting. Sounds like he was phreaking and stealing from long distance companies, too. I wonder what war dialer he was using.

> At the time, people connected to bulletin boards by dialing in to the phone lines through a modem. Heavy use of long-distance modem calls could add up to hundreds of dollars a month. Savvy teens learned techniques for getting around the charges, such as using other people’s phone-company credit card numbers and five-digit calling codes to place free calls.

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...

That's in the UK. Such a law would run afoul of the First Amendment in the US.

Do texts that contain bomb-making information really fall under the first amendment in the US?

Of course it does, and it would be a fundamental insult to the history and legacy of Western culture if it wasn’t protected speech.

IANAL, but I don't see anything like that here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce.... So, decent chance it's protected speech.

Yes, except possibly when containing classified information.

Publishing and/or otherwise mishandling classified information isn't a crime unless you have (or had) a security clearance.

IANAL, but pretty sure that this is not true. There is not a blanket ban on prior-restraint for national security reasons, but New York Times Co. v. United States did establish limits on it.

One takeaway from that case could be that it did at least partly imply that the burden of proof is on the government, not the press. However, since all 9 justices had differing opinions, there's a lot of uncertainty over what is and isn't legal.

According to Wikipedia[1] the legal status of the book has been challenged or been brought up by politicians over the years but that it is still readily available from online retailers like Amazon.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook#Legalit...

I think this book in particular is not serious in that respect, it's something written by an angry teenager (who became a communicant member of the Church of England five years later!). The person in the article above was acquitted on the basis that he was just a prankster, and that's mostly the audience of the book. I'm more interested in the general principle.

The government can't exactly ban chemistry textbooks, can it?

Anyway, for this type of censorship to be effective to prevent dissemination of knowledge, it would need to happen before distribution, and prior restraint is generally considered unconstitutional in the US, except in matters of national security. National security could likely include planned troop movements and nuclear weapons manufacturing procedures (although, you can figure out a lot by reading physics textbooks).

There's a pretty big difference between a chemistry textbook on the one hand, and a step by step layman's guide on how to make a bomb, avoid detection and so on on the other. And then of course beyond that you can go into progressively more dangerous weapons. Would a guide to building IED's with shaped explosives fall under the protections, for instance? I was just watching a documentary yesterday about Iran taught these techniques to Shia militia in Iraq. And then you can get into progressively more dangerous weapons.

The interesting thing is where the line is drawn, how far 'national security' is interpreted.

The Chemistry textbook is more dangerous, because it isn't full of errors and bullshit like the Anarchists Cookbook.

The I in IED stands for improvised. I'm sure there's better or worse ones, but put some stuff that goes boom in a tight container is a pretty good start.

If your society is held together by a lack of available knowledge on how to blow stuff up (or take other dangerous actions), I don't expect it will be held together for very long. Motivated people can figure this out pretty quickly.

It's for sale on Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/Anarchist-Cookbook-William-Powell/dp/... I think it falls within the margins.

Of course they do.

It's horrifying to me that there's places where that isn't allowed.

Yes, however I bet it might fall under 'providing material aid' if provided to a foreign "terrorist" entity.

Oh, that's interesting. Difficult to see how such a link could be demonstrated with online publishing though.

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

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

It seems distributing TAC online should be fine, I thought it might fall under some kind of ITAR requirement but I am just ignorant of the truth.

"Imminent lawless action" is the current constitutional standard.

That seems to be about incitement, do that apply to technical documentation? As described above, instructions to build a nuclear bomb, to take an extreme example, are restricted, but surely not on that basis.

I should probably disclaim at this point that I'm not a lawyer, let alone a constitutional law scholar. I'm also not a physicist.

Here's some instructions to build a nuclear bomb, right off the top of my head:

1. Take a mass of U-235 about half the critical mass of U-235 and shape it into a rod.

2. Take another equal mass of U-235 and form it into a hollow cylinder, into which the rod will fit. DO NOT PUT THE MASSES OF URANIUM TOGETHER!

3. Put some kind of inert material between the two masses of uranium to keep them separated, and also to keep the rod lined up with the center of the cylinder. Place the separated uranium in a tight cylinder with room left on top of the rod.

4. Put a charge on top of the cylinder, behind the rod. Connect the fuse for this charge to whatever detonation mechanism you like--igniting this charge will also ignite the bomb.

You might say, "hey, that's cheating! Where do you get all that U-235 in the first place?". You're right, that is a hard problem. The entire US managed to scrape together enough U-235 for one of these bombs and just dropped it on Hiroshima completely untested because getting U-235 is a pain in the ass.

Instead, you'll want to have concentric shells of plutonium that implode together into a critical mass with the use of shape charges. Plutonium isn't even a naturally occurring element, but it's still easier to get than U-235. The shape charges are a little harder to figure out (this is one of many things John von Neumann is known for) but enough of it has been documented that it can't be that hard to work out. This is the design of the bombs tested at Trinity and later dropped on Nagasaki.

So, yeah. Some details of specific, advanced nuclear bomb designs are restricted, but largely because the information is currently classified and virtually everybody with that information works in a government position where the laws surrounding classified information and the non-proliferation treaty are binding to them personally. Also, actually putting the information into practice requires lots and lots of hard, large-scale work to get enough fissile material in the first place. I'm pretty sure the physics and engineering faculty of the average American university could build working nuclear bombs if they had unlimited budgets and resources, it's just that once you start trying to refine weapons-grade plutonium, it's kind of obvious and then someone from the Department of Energy shows up and confiscates all your plutonium and you probably end up on some sort of watchlist somewhere.

They actually didn't do it that way. The rod was held in place, and the hollow cylinder got fired towards it.

My way would work too! Although...yes, that actually makes a lot more sense.

just dropped it on Hiroshima completely untested because getting U-235 is a pain in the ass.

Somewhat more related to your argument, it was also because the device was simple enough not to require explody testing.

I'm pretty sure the physics and engineering faculty of the average American university could build working nuclear bombs

Not quite building but the design part of this was, in fact, done.

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

Spawned a relevant court case as well.

> Somewhat more related to your argument, it was also because the device was simple enough not to require explody testing.

That's not only less funny, but it's also a little hard to believe. I mean, I know how simple the design is, but for something as innovative and novel as the first atomic bomb, you'd think you'd still want to test it. Although I guess if it didn't work, that would have been fine since they had another tested design by then anyway.

Um. So - if by "lawless" you mean: "reading a book about making bombs" . . .

Yes. In fact you'll find the better ones on the shelves of technical libraries [1], both in the US and in other English-speaking countries.

Introductory:

The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives by Tenney L. Davis.

Advanced:

Chemistry and Technology of Explosives by Tadeusz Urbanski (English translation by M. Jurecki).

Encyclopedic:

Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items by Basil T. Federoff.

Advanced applications of explosives, toward the destruction of materiel and human beings:

Tactical Missile Warheads by Joseph Carleone.

When I was an undergraduate I even found a book about nerve gas on the shelves -- Some aspects of the chemistry and toxic action of organic compounds containing phosphorus and fluorine by Bernard Charles Saunders. Dig into the citations and you find a further wealth of detail, papers now universally accessible through sci-hub.

The main obstacle to making effective bombs isn't restrictions on information. It's that most people inclined to violence [2] can't or won't teach themselves something new even if given a wealth of high quality literature to do it with.

[1] And on Amazon and Library Genesis.

[2] Most non-violent people too have trouble with learning on their own. People who keep learning new things may overestimate how common that ability is in general.

What if he had the digital copy, stored on floppy disk?

how floppy?

3.5

8" or bust!

Then he is some compression wizard too!

Edit: I guess that could be read as plural...

It was both a book and a series of tfiles. Most HPAV boards had copies. They would not have come close to filling a floppy.

To be fair, we had not and have not stipulated what we mean when we say "floppy". Maybe you were a rich kid but a lot of us were still on some pretty low density stuff into the late 80's. Embarrassingly, I was still on cassette for most of the decade.

There is no PC, Mac, or Amiga floppy drive that could not have held the tfile Anarchist's Cookbook (the tfile cookbook is not the same as the book, which fits easily on a single-density 3.5 but not on a 5.25).

Anyways, Beto will always be a wizard in my book.

Voting twice seems like some kind of vote stuffing scheme.

Probably best not to telegraph such intentions.

> Voting twice seems like some kind of vote stuffing scheme

Sounds like a commitment to do so in the primary and general election both, which is quite legal.

Or just someone being an anarchist. ;)

Ah, good point!

As an independent I don't participate in primaries typically.

You should; lack of moderate voices in primaries only helps fringe candidates.

Exactly; this is why we frequently get such lousy candidates winning in the primaries, who then go to the general election for everyone to vote on.

I tend to credit the two party system for there being a general lack of good candidates who make it into the general election with only two having more than a remote chance of winning.

Duverger's Law only applies to the general election, where each main party only fields one candidate. It doesn't work for primaries, where the party has lots of candidates running. There's nothing really stopping the parties from selecting better candidates in their primaries, since the parties have control over who they select anyway (they're not actually bound by the results of the election, and can rig it if they want, such as with "superdelegates").

Except when you're not allowed to, which happens a lot if you're registered as an Independent...

> In a closed primary, only voters registered with a given party can vote in that party's primary. States with closed primaries include party affiliation in voter registration so that the state has an official record of what party each voter is registered as.

https://www.fairvote.org/open_and_closed_primaries

The system isn't nearly as open as people seem to think.

I don’t understand arguments for open primaries. If you’re not a member of a political party what business do you have in voting who they want to represent them in the presidential election?

What stops people voting for unpopular candidates in order to sabotage the party?

Isn’t it basically the same as entryism?

This has happened before. In the 2008 primaries, Rush Limbaugh ran an "Operation Chaos" campaign where he called on his listeners to vote in late, open primaries for the then-losing Hillary Clinton in order to extend the Democratic primary season. In 2016, even in some closed primaries like West Virginia, a majority of voters who supported Sanders in the primary, according to exit polls, still planned to vote for Trump in the general election.

Not allowed to here in MA AFAIK; have to register with a party to vote in the primaries.

Plenty of people want nothing to do with either major political party, even as a "moderate".

In some states, like PA where I live, you have to be registered with one party or the other to vote in primaries. I changed my registration from independent recently due to this. There is talk of legislation to change it but I'm not sure of it's current status.

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