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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

I think that the most disturbing thing about this article is the comments. I'm amazed that there are people that seem to think this sort of treatment of people for non-crimes like owning acetone and hydrogen peroxide is justified.

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The scariest one for me was the one that said, "This idiot should be jailed for life for he potentially could have done." Er, what? By that logic, all of us should be pre-emptively jailed, because we all have the "potential" to become terrorists.

Just about to say the same thing, the fact that the article highlights in a fashion just to scare you:

"In his house, sonne had acetone and hydrogen peroxide—common chemicals that can be used to make a bomb"

But fails to say that could have been nail polish and a first aid bottle of hydrogen peroxide for when you get a cut. Much less scary and like you mentioned is something that everyone owns.

Edit from the article: "The main ingredients of TATP are hydrogen peroxide (which he had for his rocket experiments) and acetone (a solvent he kept in his garage)"

Seriously, as I read that part I thought "um, doesn't everyone have those?"

I imagine that the hydrogen peroxide wasn't the off-the-shelf stuff seeing as he was intending to make rocket fuel from it. The off-the-shelf disinfectant is extremely weak. Concentrations of like 0.001%.

edit: in response to the downvotes, I don't agree with his treatment. I'm just stating my thought that it probably wasn't the same as the bottle of hydrogen peroxide that you have in your medicine cabinet.

Don't some people use it to dye their hair with a much higher concentration?

The only person that I've known that bleached his hair w/ hydrogen peroxide used the disinfectant-grade stuff (though this was a while ago so I could be mis-remembering).

I used to bleach my hair using a L'Oreal 'professional' powdered bleach. Since it's a beauty product, finding fast facts has proven difficult. I think maybe it uses a different bleaching agent, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_hypochlorite

As far as I know, that's pretty typical of hair bleaching products. i.e. a powder which isn't hydrogen peroxide. It looks like people use peroxide, but just the over-the-counter stuff, and just for highlights.

Off-the shelf hydrogen peroxide is 3%. The tooth-whitening stuff is 10-30%.

It's water with some extra oxygen, folks. Let's not get too bent out of shape over this. Saying you can clip some wires while owning tooth bleach and nail polish remover does not exactly make you the criminal mastermind of the century.

I'm not getting 'bent out of shape' on this (And really, I'd like you to point out where you were able to ascertain that from my post). I just know that the stuff used in rocket fuels is more like 98% hydrogen peroxide. Whether or not that's what he had? Who knows? I certainly don't think we should arrest people for 'having the ingredients in their home to make a bomb' because a good percentage of the population would qualify for that.

Your remarks remind me of something I read eons ago about a guy getting arrested for owning a still and allegedly making moonshine. He claimed he was a collector and did not make moonshine. There was some remark in the trial about "but you had the equipment". His comeback was along the lines of "By that logic you should also arrest me for rape." He was then asked if he had raped someone/was confessing to rape. His reply: "No, but I've got the equipment for it."

It is guaranteed that he was not keeping 98% hydrogen peroxide in his garage, pyre. Many different concentrations are used in rocket fuels, but anything over 70% is extremely dangerous, not only because it can eat flesh but also because it can spontaneously combust.

I've been reading "Ignition!", a 1972 book about rocket fuels by rocket-fuel chemist John D. Clark. I got it from http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/. It is extremely entertaining, although often in train-wreck fashion. (Did you know that titanium immersed in red fuming nitric acid sometimes spontaneously detonates? The guy who discovered that never got a chance to tell anybody, because you know what happens when glassware full of fuming nitric acid blows up in your face?)

I was being unclear. I meant that it's unclear whether or not he had 'industrial grade' stuff. And with reference to 98% hydrogen peroxide, I'm not sure it's needed in that high of a concentration for the kind of rockets that he was attempting to make. I just recall John Carmack complaining that it was difficult to get 98% H2O2 in the large quantities needed for his X-Prize attempt.

I suspect you're right. The hydrogen peroxide used by amateur rocketry folks has a much higher concentration (~90%) and is highly reactive. It's not the easiest thing to obtain. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_test_peroxide

Yeah... it reads like some sort of apology for fascism and "Let's All Think Mainstream".

The comments are absolutely terrifying.

I think the most disturbing thing about this article is that it's on HN.

Whatever happened to the no-politics rule? I really liked the no-politics rule.

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