Re: Jim Bell's Mug Shot

[Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com>]

At 21:31 -0500 11/14/97, John Young wrote:
>   http://jya.com/next-wave.htm

Fascinating. My original article about Jim Bell's raid is at:

 http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/editorial/0,1012,800,00.html

I like these grafs:

Characters like James Dalton Bell are giving federal officials fits these days.
Bell, they believe, is one of a new generation of tinkerers and
technicians, of college-educated
extremists threatening to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons
to achieve their goals.
Since the Aum cult's Tokyo nerve gas attack, FBI officials say the number
of credible threats to use
these weapons has jumped from a handful in 1995, to 20 last year, to twice
that number this year.
Among the incidents was the 1995 mailing of a videotape to Disneyland,
showing two hands
mixing chemicals and a note threatening an attack on the theme park.
Despite a major investigation,
the sender was never caught. Just last April someone sent a petri dish
labeled anthrax, an animal
disease deadly to humans, to the B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington,
D.C. That proved to be
a hoax.

The recipes for such poison cocktails are available from underground
publishers and on the
Internet. One popularizer is an Arkansan named Kurt Saxon. Through books
and videotapes,
Saxon has been putting out ricin recipes for at least nine years. Convinced
that the U.S. will be
invaded and that the federal government can't be trusted to defend the
country, he has fashioned
various homemade explosives and poisons, including cyanide grenades and
ricin applicators. In one
segment of a $19.95 video, Saxon performs like a sinister Julia Child,
blending salt water and
solvents with castor beans. ("Pour in about 4 ounces of acetone," he says,
"and shake it up nice.")
"Uncle Fester," another near-legendary figure in the chem-bio underground,
has authored such
family classics as Silent Death, Improvised Explosives, and a guide to
methamphetamine and LSD
manufacture. Fester claims degrees in chemistry and biology, and his Silent
Death describes how to
produce poison gas, botulin and shellfish toxins, and ricin.

Similarly, entire manuals for making homemade explosives--TNT, plastic,
napalm--can be
downloaded from the Net, as well as plans for building triggers, fuses, and
timers. At least 11
online vendors offer books with recipes on biological or chemical weapons,
including Silent Death
and Kurt Saxon's The Poor Man's James Bond. All are based in the United
States. Adding to the
problem, many of the chemicals used to make nerve gas and other agents have
perfectly legitimate
uses and are readily available. "The genie has always been out of the
bottle," says one intelligence
analyst. "People are just discovering it."

-Declan