Man's 'experiments' with explosives were lawful, court rules | Hacker News Reader

Man's 'experiments' with explosives were lawful, court rules

theguardian.com

83 pointsTomte108 comments

I hate how chemistry can land people in legal hot water due to overzealous government policies. While this example is not in the UK. It's illegal to own certain glassware without a permit in Texas for instance. The glassware is considered a drug precursor, like freaking glassware. Oh also federally the DEA treats Phosphorus as a type 1 precursor to meth. That's a freaking element! An element is illegal/regulated like that is just insane to me.

Anyways a low amount of explosives with no intent to hurt anyone should not be a problem. Even a large amount in a remote area that is away from other people and property should be fine.

Isn't U-235 an element?

It's an isotope of Uranium. It's restricted but I'm pretty sure its not illegal to own a small amount of it.

Not illegal to own uranium ore - I think the restrictions are only on the refined product

If we're being pedantic, pure uranium is literally perfectly refined uranium ore. Possession of weaponizable isotopes of pure elemental uranium is absolutely regulated.

Pretty sure the same is true for some of the other particularly WMD-able elements, but I'm not about to google them.

www.duckduckgo.com

Don't you find the idea sad that you would have self censor what you would read on the internet to not become of interest or concern to your government.

In D&D there is a certain type of spell called Power Word Kill which works slightly differently based on the version of D&D you're playing with, but the effect is that it essentially kills a single individual with a single word.

I'm not saying phosphorus should be legal or illegal, but at some point "it's just a packet I sent on the internet" or "it's just a PDF I sent to someone overseas" or "it's just an element" misses the point. In most democratic countries there are procedures for getting what you need if you what you're doing is fundamentally good. Nuclear power plants get uranium. Science researchers get viruses. Anti-virus vendors get malware. A certain degree of limiting the power of individual actors is wise.

> A certain degree of limiting the power of individual actors is wise.

Unless you’re the individual and you aren’t malicious, you just want some glassware.

I think your approach that people should be kept in a sandbox until they can prove to the state that they are “fundamentally good” is a terrifying one.

There has to be some line where we say that an item is too dangerous for any random individual to own. Glassware should be unregulated, but if someone wants a nuclear bomb, I want to know who they are and what they plan on doing with it.

Do you know the names of the people in your own country who have nuclear weapons? Do you have access to the information about what they intend to do with them?

Is it, perhaps, illegal for them to even tell you?

In the US the person who has nuclear weapons is Dan Brouillette.

He’s the Secretary of the DoE. He has no weapons.

Even if he were the Secretary of Defense, he would have no weapons. They merely command people who command other people who have such weapons.

You don’t know the names, plans, or motivations of any of those people.

The department of energy is responsible for the nuclear weapons program and the nominal owner of the weapons.

Noted. For consistency sake however, I find having meaningful input or influence on the legislative process dangerous. Therefore I want to know who you are and what you intend to do with your vote or political aspirations. No lying now; that's illegal, and we'll arrest you if you do.

It can very easily cut both ways, and lead to very fundamental rights which we hold dear being infringed upon. The more indirect the level of control, generally the greater the potential for abuse or de facto banning.

The best regulation is the one we don't have to make, because we can manage to work it out between one another. This has the bonus of not sending a message to our descendants that we do not care for their eventual civil liberties, and what they do given they will be in a far better position to utilize them then than we are today.

This rationale ad absurdum would suggest you should be able to keep a nuclear bomb without proving anything to the state - an equally terrifying prospect.

I doubt you're advocating for unrestricted access to nuclear bombs any more than 3pt14159 is advocating for restricting access to table salt (and I haven't seen 3pt14159 suggest glassware should be restricted either.) The question, then, is where to draw the line. It can be terrifyingly low, it can be terrifyingly high.

Restricting glassware does seem pretty absurd on it's face to me, although I'm only hearing one side of the argument so far. Phosphorus - that can be dangerous in large quantities even if you mean well. Neither I nor the fire department will be terribly amused if you warehouse large quantities of it in a residential neighborhood. Small amounts - sure, don't write laws that let you throw the book at people for small scale hobby chemestry.

Even nuclear material in some quantities can be fine. We certainly shouldn't arrest people for the americium-241 in their smoke detectors either.

> This rationale ad absurdum would suggest you should be able to keep a nuclear bomb without proving anything to the state - an equally terrifying prospect.

This is precisely what other states do. Remember for a moment that nations are fictions, and jurisdictions are fairy tales. How is johnny down the road with a nuclear weapon any different than some other person unknown to you in military of the next country over with a nuclear weapon?

Your regulation can not extend to the whole planet, and therefore someone you don’t know and don’t regulate will always have access to the highest levels of destructive technology you can’t keep a total secret, which is why the Teller-Ulam work is still classified.

I just don’t see the distinction. If others who ignore your proposed restrictions and regulations having nuclear weapons is such an existential threat, should we be trying to kick people out of the nuclear club?

I just don’t think the risk is as much as you seem to think it is. Humans don’t somehow suddenly become calmer, smarter, or more rational simply because they are wearing uniforms.

> Your regulation can not extend to the whole planet

I'd generally agree, but I happen to be from the USA - and my government spends an outlandish amount of money on military and diplomacy and geopolitical manuvering - which while perhaps not having the rigorous structure and definition of "regulation" - serves much the same purpouse.

Casting all this effort aside as mere fictions falls flat.

> should we be trying to kick people out of the nuclear club?

I'll ask a better question: are "we" trying to kick people out of the nuclear club?

Yes. In fact, "we" succeeded in doing so with Ukraine. "We" are certainly trying to keep countries like Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear club - with diplomacy, bribes in the form of economic aid, sanctions, bombs, assassinations, the works.

"We" don't have total control, but regulations don't exert total control either. They are fictions of law that influence results but do not have the binding rigidity of a mathematical proof. They are flawed and imperfect, but that doesn't mean it can't possibly help and has no impact on the real world.

Just as it's unrealistic to perfectly enforce all regulation, it's unrealistic to completely disarm the world, even if we sorely wanted to. So we focus on forcibly disarming those whom we believe to be the worst actors and the most unstable regions of the world, under the pretense of harm reduction (not harm elimination), and negotiate with others in mututal disarmament and observation treaties to ease tensions and reduce (but not eliminate) the chance of accidents. Imperfect, but realistic.

> I just don’t think the risk is as much as you seem to think it is.

I think you've got me pegged as more cautious than I am when it comes to the possibility of industrial or nuclear accidents or terrorism. I might've been asking for that by mirroring your "terrifying" wording. Either that or you're rather on the extreme end of the political spectrum yourself, in favor of deregulation, as I believe I'm less cautious than the average voter on that front, and believe my government to generally be overreacting on behalf of the voters. (Which isn't to say you're wrong, merely that I'm unconvinced.)

I think you're also more worried than I am about the risk of government intervention infringing upon civil liberties. Which isn't to say I'm unworried - in fact, it's the very thing I worry about the most when it comes to the aforementioned government overreaction. But I'm not quite to the point of "no regulation is good regulation", which you're somewhat coming across as.

EDIT: Aww heck, let me explicitly answer this too:

> How is johnny down the road with a nuclear weapon any different than some other person unknown to you in military of the next country over with a nuclear weapon?

Simple: I kinda half maybe partially trust my government, to kinda half maybe partially vet and trust the next country over, to kinda half maybe partially vet and trust their military personel before giving them access to nuclear weapons.

It's not perfect, but it's kinda half maybe partially better than nothing.

If we gave Johnny down the road nukes without vetting him at all, I bet that'd make a lot of countries nervous. Nervous enough to try and pressure us socially and economically into doing so. Maybe even enough to try and interfere with our elections, or use their own bribes, or assassins, or ...

Bah, here you can have nuclear material as long as you're registered and certified for handling. It is somewhat pain in the rear but for a good reason - because otherwise we end up with radioactive garbage in normal trash.

In said license you get to specify maximum radioactivity and amount of material as well as means of disposal, processing and storage. Includes auditing. Paperwork, but not that hard to meet - pertains to every x-ray machine out there. Kind of like ISO certification.

If you're trying for something big, sure, you won't get it without good reason.

Combined with explosives license, you can actually have a nuclear bomb. Just tiny and exploded in very controlled conditions.

Big amounts and processing hardware are big deal.

Our entire world system right now is predicated upon territorial sovereignty, and that the sovereign state has a monopoly on legitimate use of force. Thus a sovereign state is in a different category than an individual.

> should we be trying to kick people out of the nuclear club?

Oppenheimer and Einstein spent a lot of their later lives trying to keep people out of it, so I think you'll get a lot of answers of 'yes' to that.

Deciding what is fundamentally good or drawing the line (eg the glassware) is the muddy part. The road to hell is paved with good intentions -- next thing you know, science chemistry kits are illegal & large swaths of population no longer believe in a spherical earth, evolution, and climate science.

Even setting aside the questionable association of beakers and evolution, you can take the same logic both ways: "next thing you know, asbestos is in every home and large swaths of the population take mass shootings for granted as an unpreventable phenomenon."

Asbestos used to be in most homes. There was a good reason and a replacement for it, as well as good rules for disposal.

With high explosives, governments tend to go so far as to require a licence for handling. Fine for breaking that is enough of a deterrent. It's relatively easy to acquire, because otherwise that makes explosive use rather tricky to monitor.

Sales and widespread manufacturing is regulated separately.

Easier and cheaper to get than CFC gas license. Or the general chemical laboratory license required to do such experiments like synthesis. (You can go to a lab and practice there, with supervision. Much less silly, more expensive.)

They're of course limited by volume, just so you don't go building unlicensed rockets and mines.

Chemistry sets were emasculated right around 1970. I know because I got one of the good ones immediately prior. Had lots of fun making stink bombs, burning various chemicals just to see what would happen, dissolving things in acid, generating hydrogen gas, etc.

The ones after 1970 were like "hey, watch salt dissolve in water."

Looking back on it, the chemistry set I got in the 90s could have easily been outdone by rooting around under the kitchen sink with a copy of the AC.

I was lucky enough that mine (late 80s) at least had some acid and magnesium. And although “just burn the magnesium” wasn’t part of the instruction booklet, my dad knew enough to make it cool. We also filled balloons with hydrogen and lit them with a match. Otherwise though, grew lots of copper sulfate crystals...

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

https://archive.org/details/GoldenBookOfChemistryExperiments...

I think more regulation is kinda inevitable. Technological progress gives single bad actors more and more tools to cause damage. The issue is that single bad actors or small groups are far more common than entire developed states. Right now a drone can disable an entire airport.

To give an example with current technology, drones are being regulated now and likely will get remote off switches one day that police can trigger, but for that regulation to be effective, self built drones have to be under a similar regime... so maybe in the future it will become illegal to own innocous drone parts without a permit, etc.

Do we want to distribute science kits that allow people to play around with viruses? Sure, most viruses are affecting bacteria and playing around with them is fun, but if you can also change their genomes with those kits, some idiots might use them to make a superbug.

No it isn’t. We’re told it’s fuzzy to let politicians off the hook.

Your rights end where mine start.

Let’s be real here: a mathematical majority is unable to afford flying anyway. This freedom people ramble on is really economic dominance of the majority for minority benefit.

Stop living in an emotional clean room. The literal world doesn’t have to give a shit about your bubble.

"it's just a number!"

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

in all seriousness, I think it's worth drawing a distinction between laws that prohibit actions that actually harm people and laws that make life easier for law enforcement. sidestepping the controversial issue of drug policy itself, the manufacturing of drugs is the problematic behavior in the phosphorus example. the controls on phosphorus itself are just to make enforcement easier. we should look on the latter type of laws with great skepticism.

this is not to say I feel fully comfortable with private citizens enriching large amounts of uranium, but to as great an extent as possible, people should be free to do stuff that doesn't actually hurt anyone. imo that's a key aspect of what we call a "free society".

If the intent is to protect people from phosphorus, I'd just like to point out that you can buy large amounts of gasoline without any paperwork, without even raising any eyebrows. If somebody wants to commit arson, bullshit regulations on phosphorus won't stop them. Nor does it require any knowledge a gradeschooler doesn't possess.

This isn't even academic, a maniac killed 36 people like this in Japan last year.

If the point is being missed, then what is the point being missed? What does regulating small amounts of phosphorus actually accomplish in a society where gasoline is available in every neighborhood?

I share your position, but the obvious counterpart to this is that many regular people need access to gasoline as part of their daily lives. not so with phosphorus.

in general, I don't think citizens should have to answer "why do you need this?" to the government, but you're not really comparing apples to apples here.

It's about the societal costs of denial vs. the risks of availability. Restricting gasoline to only certain individuals would cost millions to billions of dollars and would save us from a few fires a year. Restricting access to nuclear bombs costs almost nothing and saves huge risk.

> Restricting access to nuclear bombs costs almost nothing and saves huge risk.

That makes me wonder, if nuclear bombs were deregulated, who would actually be rich and stupid enough to actually construct their own? Larry Ellison maybe? Probably not even him.

If John McAfee ever became terminally ill, I could see him building one, driving out into a desert, and going out with a literal bang.

some might say that restriction of X, even if X has no "real" value, is already a significant cost. depends on whether you think freedom is merely a means to an end or a value in and of itself.

I think it is apples to apples, since as you say, the "why do you need this" question isn't relevant. Gasoline is easier to cause harm with and would be more readily accessible even if phosphorus were totally unregulated; regulating ownership of phosphorus nets a society nothing. It's as inane as banning switchblade knives when machetes, handguns, rifles, etc are all legal and available. Does anybody need a switchblade? No. But does banning them accomplish anything at all? I can't see how.

Phosphorus and gasoline even share the same potential for substance abuse. Just as you can make meth from phosphorus (apparently) you could huff gasoline. I wouldn't recommend either, but you could. Both can be used for arson, and both can be used as drugs. One you can buy anonymously in large quantities with cash in literally every neighborhood in the country.

the "why do you need this?" question isn't irrelevant. it's my personal opinion that it shouldn't matter, but other people aren't wrong if they disagree. I can only hope to encourage them to see things my way.

If you want to deprive someone of their access to phosphorus, you need to deprive them of either their access to urine, or their ability to boil liquid.

I don't know what that endgame looks like, but I'm not a fan of it.

Gasoline is regulated. Trucks transporting large quantities of it requires hazmat registration for the safety of first responders. Zoning regulations limit and regulate how large quantities of gasoline can be stored. Try parking a gas tanker in a residential HOA without proper hazmat plates and see how long it goes "without even raising any eyebrows". Try driving one without a hazmat license and see how long you get away with it.

Now, yes, regulating tiny amounts of phosophorus might be a bit much. But I'm pretty sure you'd object to an unregulated chemical plant next door - those things can be dangerous even with well trained, well meaning personel. The question, then, is where to draw the line, not if it should be drawn at all.

Gasoline in the quantities required to burn down a building with people inside it is, for the intents and purposes of an arsonist, unregulated. They might yell at you if you use an unapproved jerry can, but otherwise it may as well be unregulated as far as homicidal nut is concerned.

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

Buildings are pretty flammable on their own - people die in house and building fires without any gasoline being involved whatsoever. An animation studio filled with paper, without a fire supression system, and possibly without fire escapes is no exception.

When holding out the kyoto animation studio tragedy - are you sure you're not arguing for better fire codes and gasoline regulation, rather than the deregulation of phosophorus? You're certainly not making a good argument for deregulating gasoline entirely, if that's your intention. Yes, an arsonist can get their hands on enough to do damage. Suggesting we remove all those pesky regulations so they can trivially get a gas tanker and drive that into a building - making it easy for them to cause an even larger tragedy - certainly doesn't follow as a logical conclusion, nor does giving them ready unregulated access to potentially more dangerous materials:

https://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/1337 https://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/11498

...which would allow them to do more damage, or shrink their packages, or maybe just delay detection and reaction to their actions. Gasoline has a distinctive smell that would make me curious/cautious. What does phosophorus smell like? I could see myself mistaking someone spreading it out for someone spreading fertilizer or something, at least until the point it starts spontaniously combusting.

By all means write better fire codes, but unless you wrap yourself in a mile of asbestos blankets I don't think anything you do will render you immune to burning gasoline. There is nothing you or any government can do to stop a nutjob from killing you with gasoline.

Yet here you are, unscathed. Nobody has thrown gasoline at you yet, and probably nobody ever will. Why? It's not because of any gasoline regulations, nor because of your reaction time to smells, nor because of tanker truck regulations, or anything like that. The true reason nobody has lit you on fire yet is because there aren't really that many arsonists who want to light you on fire. That's it; it rarely happens because it's rare that anybody has the inclination to do it.

So how about phosphorus crime? Is that common? No, and I see no rational reason to believe it would be more common than gasoline attacks if phosphorous were as unregulated as gasoline. Even if phosphorus were unregulated, the market demand for it would be low and therefore few stores would sell it. Gasoline would remain the obvious accelerant for any would-be-arsonist.

I've actually lived in a neighborhood that was being randomly targeted by a nutjob arsonist, with multiple fires, and some burned down buildings. Fortunately, IIRC, no deaths, but perhaps one injured firefighter. In attempting to find an article about the bloke to refresh my memory as to if the arsonist used accelerants like gasoline - I believe he did at least once, but perhaps inconsistently - I didn't find google particularly helpful, as there have been apparently more recent arsonists in that same neighborhood cluttering up my search results. Arson is perhaps not quite as rare as you think, although I'm still pretty relaxed about it. Turns out most arsonists don't think to get an entire trolley or cart full of gasoline, and in smaller quantities it isn't quite as dangerous.

I'm more worried - although still rather relaxed - about accidents. I've caught a gas leak. I've walked up to a restraunt I frequent only to find the building condemed due to a nearby gas leak resulting in an explosion overnight, rendering the structure unsound. I've had insulation in heating ducts catch fire. I've had drunk neighbors in a shared apartment complex set their kitchens on fire as they've gone to sleep. I've helped stomp out grass fires caused by someone's discarded cigarette butts. I'm sure there's more I've simply forgotten. Again, no deaths, despite plenty of property damage and destruction.

> So how about phosphorus crime? Is that common? No, and I see no rational reason to believe it would be more common than gasoline attacks if phosphorous were as unregulated as gasoline.

I hear a lot more about war crimes involving white phosphorus than I do about war crimes involving gasoline, despite current regulations. Even if you're correct that civilian crime involving phosphorus wouldn't become as common as civilian crime involving gasoline, that wouldn't make any uptick a good thing, or even neutral.

The phosphorous crime in question is using it as a reagent in a few illicit drug synthesis paths (and poor ones too), specifically methamphetamine.

So yes, there have been a plenty of phosphorous related crime.

Now, whether we should allow just about anyone to synthesize meth is a different and more pertinent question. Synthesis alone is not especially dangerous, illegal distribution is... and this ban was taken to curb it. It is not especially successful. (Also limits on saffrol and sulfuric acid for other drugs.)

In comparison, production of explosives is dangerous. Risks fire and explosions, therefore should not be done on a bench top by just about anyone. (And reason for limits on nitric acid.)

Chemical disposal is also a quite minor problem.

Exactly, we make a lot of things that are fundamental parts of science illegal. The government bans certain properties of light without a permit to allow radio to work and uncontrolled fission reactions to stop millions from dying.

Free states write laws that criminalize harmful actions. Police states write laws that criminalize possessing things that could be used harmfully.

By that definition, there are no free states except for Somalia, as nearly all countries except for the US ban private ownership of firearms.

> nearly all countries except for the US ban private ownership of firearms.

Man that's gonna surprise all the legal gun owners in Canada, the UK, Sweden, and so on.

Or most the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation

>here are no free states except for Somalia,

You touch on an good point: enforcement.

So far in human history people have been mostly tolerant of laws that were incompatible with their way of life because resources available for enforcement has been the bottleneck and most laws go unenforced unless people really want them enforced. For example, anyone who wanted alcohol during prohibition could get it, it was just a little more expensive and lower quality. Sure alcohol was illegal but it wasn't considered immoral by most so you only had to hide your use of it from law enforcement, not from society in general. We seem to be entering an age (at least in the west) where thanks to technology the bottleneck is politicians and police willingness to face backlash from the public. I'm not going to speculate on what the future holds but I fear that it will not be good if people grow accustomed to the government ratcheting up enforcement of laws that are on the books but currently rarely used.

The constitution of Somalia[0] is actually a fairly interesting read, at least if you have a big imagination. Not sure I'd exactly characterize it as a "free state" though.

[0]http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/research/Somalia-Constitution2012.p...

Shut up, you'll annoy the an-caps with your example of their fantasy world failing in reality!

Why would a failed state like Somalia having a restrictive constitution make an an-cap unhappy?

Almost all nations allow private ownership of firearms. It's just the degree of hurdles you have to jump through that is different.

Off the top of my head, the only nation that I know explicitly bans private ownership of firearms is North Korea.

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." –Tacitus

Another way to look at this is how far back you go trying to prevent crime by punishing "pre-crime" activities. For instance, certain kinds of meetings might lead to a criminal plot; or hiding certain kinds of things; or publishing information that might be used by criminals.

> Free states write laws that criminalize harmful actions. Police states write laws that criminalize possessing things that could be used harmfully.

Would you agree that nukes run afoul of that reasoning?

Would you agree that using nukes as an example is arguing in bad faith because they are prohibitively expensive to acquire, even if they were deregulated? It's not like weapons grade uranium is just sitting around. You literally have to make it, which is "state actor" level of hard work.

It was within the capabilities of 1940s state actors. Even if it still takes a state actor level of resources now, that probably won't remain true all that long (considering that it's within the capabilities of North Korea, it can't be that far from "large corporation" levels of difficulty even now).

I can't think of any obvious examples of other materials that would be reasonable to restrict in the same way as fissile materials though. Those are kind of a special case where there aren't many uses for the material (power and bombs are basically the only uses I'm aware of for enriched uranium), and it's hard enough to obtain that trying to restrict it isn't entirely useless (unlike phosphorous, which you can buy in the grocery store in any box of matches). Chemical weapons I suppose.

Since it's an important example, I don't think it's a bad faith argument, but also note that an argument that restrictions on simple possession of one material without any proof of intent to use it for harm are justified doesn't mean that all such restrictions are justified. I think gp was arguing the "sometimes justified" case, not the "always justified" one.

> Would you agree that using nukes as an example is arguing in bad faith

Nope. I chose nukes because they were an obvious example of something that we didn't want just anyone to have within arms' reach. I didn't expect it to be subjected to the kind of criticism you're raising.

There is always an exception to every rule, except for this one.

“It’s just an element” is not good enough as a discriminator, plutonium and polonium are elements, and I want them heavily regulated.

Now, I a bit skeptical of putting Phosphorus into the drug law, it has too many uses and not too many inherent ills.

Elemental white phosphorus has some quite nasty dangers associated.

"Phossy jaw" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw

"'The Devil's element': the dark side of phosphorus" https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/oct/31/the-dev...

"White phosphorus 'burns to the bone'" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-368800/White-phosph...

I was surprised to learn about the glassware. When I learned that mdma therapy for ptsd wouldn’t be available for years and would cost 15k even with insurance, I dusted off my old organic chemistry book. I can’t believe I’ve been made to do this in order to get medical treatment.

99% of people would just find a street dealer or buy off the dark web. You're the 1% that the laws are actually established for.

> I can’t believe I’ve been made to do this in order to get medical treatment.

No one made you break bad and then brag about it on the internet... Fabricating your own controlled substances is exactly why certain types of glassware are illegal.

I haven’t done it yet so I’m not bragging. And how am I gonna take a street drug that’s dirty, tainted with other drugs and also there’s no way to know what dose you are taking which is critical to the treatment? And I’m not getting anything off the dark web because I don’t want to go to prison and also want know what I’m taking. Making single dose quantities is harmless and it’s pretty much impossible to be caught. And nobody cares anyway because I’m not distributing it or even using it in public. The number of people who do this are in the double digits and offer no threat to society. What the fuck is wrong with you.

Uranium-238 is just an element as well. However that is very highly regulated and I think is a very good thing for it be.

U-238 is natural and non-fissile.

I meant to write 235

> section 4 (1), in the 1883 Explosive Substances Act, which says that anyone who makes or has in their possession explosive substances is liable to prosecution unless they can show that it was “for a lawful object”.

> But two other judges ... declared that “to say that something is done for one’s own private education is not a sufficient object for the purposes of the section 4(1) defence, as it does not identify the use to which the explosives will be put in order to provide such education.

In my epistemology these judges have committed blasphemy. Private education is not just a lawful object, it is a primary motive and purpose of human action.

Ultimately that is enough to nullify terrorism charge unless they happen to somehow show this person wanted to commit acts of terror.

They can still be liable for unlicensed handling of explosives and controlled chemicals.

For context, the UK has suffered a number of terrorist bombings over the years; explosives are controlled substances, and anyone making them without a license will have the terrorism book thrown at them. Not really much point in spending two decades in Afghanistan "fighting terrorism" if you're going to let people brew TATP in their bathtubs like the 7/7 bombers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Arena_bombing : TATP, 23 dead, 800 injured. Grimly has a disambiguation page, for the other occasion terrorists blew up Manchester in 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_bombings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Bishopsgate_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing : very nearly assasinated most of the government!

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/the-day-an-ira-bomb-claimed-the-... : Queen's cousin murdered by bomb

And previously https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-devastating-effects-of-a...

"The Explosive Substances Act was quickly passed by parliament in 1883 in response to fears of Irish nationalist bomb attacks and because previous offences were thought to provide insufficient protection for the public."

Looking at the above list, it seems that terrorists are going to make bombs despite this venerable law. Who would have thought!

Yeah, pretty much my thought. The real question is "how many bombers were arrested ahead of time due to this law", which is a bit harder to answer though.

Rather easy. How many people were arrested due to this law as a whole?

I suspect not too many. These charges should not be thrown around willy nilly.

good for him. he only has one life and he aint spending it in a sandwich factory. hes exploring some of the most exciting chemistry this world has. and its a shame we live in a place where people are terrified and manipulated by tv into thinking anyone who shows interest in these things must be placed in a small room for a long time. 300 gears ago governments would be giving him money and patting him on the back. some people we not not born for this time. a time of sol destroying mortgages, overbearing laws, 1000's of unwritten rules and a general utter boring existence unless you were born into wealth.

Could not disagree more, for much of human history only the rich and their offspring typically had access to higher education and crucially learning materials, books where horrendously expensive for example for all but the most wealthy.

We live in a golden age for autodidacts, that people often seem intellectually incurious says less about the society and more the people who constitute it, many people are simply incurious - it’s not a bad thing, it is their life and they are free to live it how they want, it doesn’t hurt me that people binge watch the Kardashians.

And the idea that society has somehow gotten worse and prior generations where not like this is crazier still.. we are only a couple of centuries out from executing spinsters for witchcraft and believing in curses.

Right, but those people did enjoy freedom. Now? All bets are off. Since the 1960s or so, we've been through a long process of gradually filing away all the sharp edges. It will continue until we've all locked ourselves into padded cells.

You can both be right.

Maybe we live in a time of unprecedented access to education and affordable materials, which is also a time of extreme inequality and selective enforcement that grinds most people into the dust.

What you wrote is basically Hans Rosling's "Factfulness" [1] and the other person wrote the rhetoric of 1984 or whatever. I guess we see what we want to see, and the news focuses on the negative. Consider, for example, computer security. You'd think with a recent RCE in Bluetooth and in Windows SMBv3 the world is insecure. Well, it was way worse 20 years ago, and even worse 30 years ago. Heck, barely anything used strong encryption back then. Everything was MITMable! But the news does not support that statement. Only if you look into the details (which does require some specific expertise, knowledge wise), you notice such. I also don't believe this to be a conspiracy; people are generally harmless, and good. Perhaps, in a case like this, we need to figure if there were clear harmful intentions. Same with USA's Espionage Act though.

[1] Full title: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Had not heard of Hans Rosling so thanks for that it seems I'd like his books.

I've always strived (but not always achieved) to reach my opinions on the world based on evidence and figures and facts that I've looked at myself deferring to experts in the various fields where I'm not educated enough to understand (medicine - I trust my doctors).

If you look at the world through that lens for the average person this is a golden age despite all the problems we still have.

I mean, you really ought to be able to experiment with explosives in a free country, as long as you're not hurting anyone / planning to hurt anyone. It's obviously legal when companies in the industry do it. Why shouldn't it be for private citizens.

I was under the impression that like firearms in the UK you need to have special licenses to use explosives that people can apply for https://www.hse.gov.uk/explosives/licensing/how-to-apply.htm

If you're thinking of an EPP licence, that's only for a handful of specifically restricted chemicals.

”as long as you're not hurting anyone / planning to hurt anyone”

By that definition, car racing on public streets, running red lights and ignoring speed limits is absolutely fine, as long as you’re not hurting anyone / planning to hurt anyone.

Regulations that limit the risks people get exposed to exist for a reason: you can’t undo damage done to others by punishing the culprit. That’s why, for example, reckless driving is illegal.

Lots of things are only legal, not when companies do it, but when those doing it follow safety protocols.

No one was alleging that him keeping the explosives at home was putting anyone but himself at risk, which makes it crucially different from speeding. The idea behind these explosives laws is to catch people intending to cause harm while they are plotting.

You’re talking apples and oranges here - public streets are filled with, well, the public, and we have laws against racing and running red lights for that very reason. On the other hand, if you own forty acres in New Mexico and want to blow up an old washing machine with a pound of C4 on a lazy Saturday afternoon, well, more power to ya.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be able to do that, just that, if society sets rules, they should be followed, and can restrict what you can and cannot do.

For example, if you buy that C4, how does it get on your land?

If you make it yourself, how do the ingredients get on your land? Is that safe for the public? Does the process produce waste (gases, liquids) that may cause damage to neighbors or the environment?

If one of your experiments doesn’t go ‘boom’, do you toss what’s left in the garbage bin, or do you think that should be regulated?

Do you make precautions so that playing kids can’t accidentally enter the area? Do you calculate how far parts of that washing machine may get thrown away, to make sure parts don’t end up in your neighbors house?

No, I think experimenting with explosives on public streets should be illegal. But experimenting them on your private property or that of someone else who has let you do so should be legal. I also think car racing should be legal on private property.

I've always wondered about the legality of videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4JUQaLHriU

> as long as you're not hurting anyone

I think the problem is that, much of the time, there's no way to know _if_ someone is planning on causing harm with certain tools until it's too late; until they actually cause the harm. While it would be nice to allow everyone to have anything they want (as long as they're not going to hurt anyone else), sometimes it's necessary to take away some rights in order to protect the greater good. Sometimes it's necessary to make compromises, sometimes there's tradeoffs.

> I think the problem is that, much of the time, there's no way to know _if_ someone is planning on causing harm

In this case, the judgement was to decide if it's lawful to make a damp-firework's worth of explosives even if everyone agrees there's no harmful intent, or even any realistic capability to cause harm ("small amounts to produce insignificant detonations").

You can see this in the dissenting judges opinions, where they conclude that it's unlawful when only asking about "personal experimentation or own private education". There is no mention of balancing personal freedom against risks to greater society, or evaluation of whether it might be used for harm, or if the quantities produced could ever cause any real harm to anyone.

I find the quoted summary of the dissenting opinion strange:

> “to say that something is done for one’s own private education is not a sufficient object for the purposes of the section 4(1) defence, as it does not identify the use to which the explosives will be put in order to provide such education.

> “Similarly, personal experimentation is not a sufficient object for this purpose as, although it identifies in very general terms what is to be done with the explosives, it does not identify any purpose for so doing.”

Reading that, I can't help thinking that personal experimentation is what is to be done, and private education is the purpose for so doing.

But I'm not a judge, and that won't be the whole opinion.

> It's obviously legal when companies in the industry do it.

I'm not familiar with specific laws in UK, but it's possible that the industry has to seek a license before they start experimenting with explosives.

22 months in jail for making "damp firework" level explosives. What a travesty.

Years ago I remember school mates competing for the prize of "loudest bang from 1 gram".

If they did that now, I reckon they'd all be in prison...

When I was ten years old, I used to bicycle from my grandfather’s house to his farm property eight miles away. I’d sling my .22 rifle on the back of the bike so I could go hunt rabbits and as I pedaled down the highway in the hot California sun, I’d pray that I’d run into a cop because they’d always pull over, throw my bike and my rifle in the trunk of their squad car and give me a ride up the road to the property.

Good times.

We used to do this in high school and bought a single large bag of potassium nitrate from a local commercial agriculture shop. We even called ahead to make sure that it had specific chemical designations on the bag because it was far enough away to be a pain to get to. Looking back it was very dumb in a legal sense (and a lung health sense haha).

22 months on remand for terrorism charges, in a country which has seen recent mass fatalities from homemade explosives? Really this is a "don't you know there's a war on" situation, everyone should know that messing around with unapproved explosives is likely to get you reported to anti-terrorism police.

Why did they hold this person for 22 months though, is the investigation so overloaded they cannot handle it quicker?

This should have ended in a few months tops, expedited, and with a fine for breaking explosives handling licenses.

If whoever is in charge thinks long jail time will deter a terrorist, they should get their head checked.

In my wayward youth, a friend of mine and I made nitroglycerin and had a lot of fun detonating it. This was a very rural area, nobody said a word back then.

I've often thought that if I were 20 years younger, I'd be in jail for a long time for my youthful indiscretions.

> made explosives and detonated them remotely in his back garden by means of a mobile phone signal.

Scary. But amount was similar to a firework, and he had done so several times before. And he's autistic.

> liable to prosecution unless they can show that it was “for a lawful object”

> can personal experimentation or own private education, absent some ulterior unlawful purpose, be regarded as a lawful object?

They still had to prove that that was his purpose - the onus is on the defence. i.e. reversing assumption of innocence.

The dissent, that the purpose of education is not a "purpose" is ridiculous.

Yet, I bet the legislators didn't intend such a broad defence, and we'll quickly see amending legislation confining it, given terrorism fears.

The government should have offered him a job instead of treating him as a criminal, especially considering his autism.

> The government should have offered him a job

As what exactly?

Bomb disposal technician?

They can just hire all of the explosive experts that went through the right channel to develop their skill and knowledge safely.

I misread this at first and thought it said "man's experiments with explosives were awful"

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