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InfoWarriors - Alpha / TEXT
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The True Story of the InterNet
Part III
InfoWar
Final Frontier of the Digital Revolution
Behind the ElectroMagnetic Curtain
by TruthMonger <[email protected]>
Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing
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InfoWar Table of Contents
* Predilogue
* InfoWarriors
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Predilogue
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Prologue to 'WebWorld'
The great tragedy of it, is that it didn't have to happen. Not at all...we
were warned.
And yet, still, it has come to this.
I don't know why I feel this overwhelming compulsion to go on and on about
it. I could have done something. We all could have done something.
Perhaps the final epitaph on the gravestone of Freedom will be,
"Why didn't somebody do something?"
That seems to be the common battle-cry of the legions of humanity that have
been sucked into the vortex of the New World Order.
None of the imprisoned seem to know that the very phrase itself is
reflective of the source of their imprisonment...that this desperate cry of
anguish is in no way an antidote for the terrible disease that has afflicted
'Liberty and Justice', and that it is, rather, merely the final symptom of
the cursed blight itself.
I can hear the rumbling of the trucks as they come up the street, and soon I
will be hearing the thumping of the jackboots storming up the staircase, as
I have heard them so many times before. But I suspect that this time, the
sound will be different, that it will have an ethereal quality about it, one
which conveys greater personal meaning than it did when I heard it on
previous occasions.
This time, they are coming for me.
My only hope, is that I can find the strength of character somewhere inside
myself to ask the question which lies at the heart of why there is a 'they'
to come for me at all...why, in the end, it has finally come to this for me,
as for countless others.
The question is, in retrospect, as simple and basic as it is essential for
any who still espouse the concepts of freedom and liberty to ask themselves
upon finding themselves marveling at the outrageousness being perpetrated
upon their neighbors by 'them'...by 'others'...by 'Friends of the
Destroyer.'
The question is: "Why didn't I do something?"
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience."
-Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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InfoWarriors - Alpha
Subject: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Tim May <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Some of the questions by Mark Rogaski and others ask about the nature of the
revolution I and others are predicting and encouraging.
What will a just revolution, like those anticipated by Jefferson, Franklin,
and others, look like?
The British thought the colonial rebels were "playing dirty" by shooting
from behind trees instead of marching in bright uniforms with drums and
bugles to herald their way.
Modern armies think freedom fighters are "terrorist scum" for not fighting
honestly and fairly in their own M-1 Abrams tanks and aircraft carriers.
So, too, will revolutionaries be seen as fighting "unfairly" and being
unethical sneaks, child killers, and terrorists.
(As if children and other innocents did not die in various incidents in past
wars, on all sides.)
When Jefferson predicted that a revolution was needed every 20 years or so,
he surely was not saying that throwing one party out of leadership and
putting the other party in was an example of such a revolution, or that
"campaign reform" is such an example. Nor was he saying that the only valid
revolution would be when a bunch of citizens or states got together their
own army and marched on Washington.
(Actually, raising such an army is in violation of numerous laws about heavy
weapons, licenses to carry weapons, etc. No doubt illegal. Ironically.)
No, the revolution, when it comes, will likely be different from anything
quite like we've seen to date.
--Tim May
The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
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Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Blanc <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Tim May wrote:
>No, the revolution, when it comes, will likely be different from anything
>quite like we've seen to date.
....................................................
In the revolution against the British, the U.S. was a small colony sitting
on a vast "new" land, with the Natives but a minor obstacle to expansion.
Presently there is no such unoccupied place which could be claimed for the
cause of liberty, and revolutionaries are sitting in the middle of the enemy
camp, surrounded everywhere by people who "just want to save lives".
You could temporarily send a political message and get your names in the
news, but then totally lose the war from being outnumbered and overwhelmed
by non-sympathizers. A long time ago it was possible, given the distance of
water and land between peoples, to make a break with them physically. The
enemy could be driven out, sent "home", and the winners could develop their
new living arrangements in the new setting.
But there is no new setting to go to, there is nowhere to send the infidels.
The life of a new libertarian "society" would have to be created as a
virtual one, existing among or in-between the others. Of course the basis of
the original setup is still mentioned every once in a while, and so it is
still in the minds of everyone, even if only as a dim reference, so it could
be said that the most a current revolution could accomplish would be the
return of the original ideal to the minds of the population. But I think
that it would take much more than a few skirmishes to accomplish that, as it
doesn't appear that it carries all that much support. It would be like
getting a kid to take down some medicine; many don't really want to live so
independently, nor feel the need to identify what kind of life would be the
more ideal (i.e. they don't identify precisely the difference between a
socialist atmosphere and a libertarian one, nor concern themselves with why
they should spend any time worrying about the difference it makes.)
An intentional revolution, I fear, would just look like an attempt to make
people think. And therefore not taken too seriously. (And if the
revolutionaries lose? tough luck. Oh, well. )
..
Blanc
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Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Adam Shostack <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] (Tim May)
CC: [email protected]
The distinction between civilians and soldiers, which came about in the 17th
and 18th centuries, is close to meaningless in the context of a modern
revolution. However, this distinction, and the Clausewitzian claim that war
is the continuation of politics by other means, underlay the 'law of war.'
War as the continuation of politics implies that the State sends soldiers to
war against other soldiers to fight for policy rights. War to gain
territory, war over insults or honor, religious war, is seen as a thing of
the past. Barbaric. Modern warriors can not understand people who play by
other rules. To some extent, this has been good for us civilians. The
firebombing of German cities were an exception, not the rule.
However, as the anti-colonial movement demonstrated, a people can
effectively fight a modern army, and win. They are marked as terrorists,
defamed for their capitalist activities such as drug smuggling to finance
the struggle, and hanged when caught.
A modern revolution, as Mao taught, is based on forcing people to decide if
they are with you or against you. There are no neutrals who simply want the
status quo to continue, because once the revolutionaries have started to do
their job, the state lashes out, passing fascist new laws (see Northern
Ireland, Peru, the United States). The status quo disappears, and the
revolutionaries are committed. It is only by making starkly clear who stands
where that enough people to fuel the revolution can have the manpower to
succeed. The alternative to the revolution becomes living under the
government that killed your family members. In Algeria, once the first few
thousands of martyrs died, every additional person the French killed was a
new reason to fight. Surrender, to the Algerians, became inconceivable. Life
as French was not worth living. So they fought.
When the revolution comes to the United States, it will not be a pretty
thing. Our best hope is for a rapid surrender of the current government,
which is not likely. By deploying now the tools of communication (remailers,
strong encryption, directions for building bombs and traps, cheap radio
transmitters), as well as the tools for deception (how hard is it to build a
fake GPS transmitter?), and the understanding that the US government has
grown cancerous, we bring closer the beginning and the end of the
revolution.
We bring its start closer by forcing the Government to show its true colors,
turning more people against it. We bring its finish closer by having ready
the tools to render ineffective the large fighting machines we have paid
for, by making it clear that the government does not have the support of the
people, and by making it clear that once committed, we will have to fight.
So, Tim, we disagree that it will be like nothing seen before. It will be
like many modern revolutions, because we can't force the government to fight
on our terms today.
20 years later, we will look back, and realize that governments have
murdered most of the innocents they will ever kill, because will can deploy
technology to make government voluntary. But we're not there, and getting
there may be bloody.
There is, of course, Duncan's Berlin Wall theory, but I fear things will
have to get worse before they get better.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
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Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: John Young <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Warmaking is ever changing in response to the last wins and losses. However,
winners are less likely to change than losers, for why change a successful
formula, publish it, or a well-spun dissimulation.
As ever, unknown forms of war are in gestation, being tested and debriefed,
in military institutions and wargames, in business, in education, in the
amorphous culture at large through legal competition and crime and their
variable gray areas where fair and unfair, civilized rules and their
breaking, are ever in grim and vicious dispute.
While there are piles of studies on organized and guerrilla wars of the
past, the most provocative are those that attempt to describe what's coming,
how to recognize its early warnings and what can be done to head it off or,
more likely, advance it.
The highest warmaking art is winning without physical fighting, to outfox
the enemy by demoralizing, by demonstrating that attack is futile, that
there is no chance of defeating a superior force. That's why military
exhibitionism and psy war is reputed among military and political leaders to
be as vital as that of brute force, as best exemplified by the Cold War
50-year stalemate and psychological "win-win" to a status of Cool War.
To get a handle on what's in store, imagine that completely unbelievable
methods of warfare, overt and covert, are being concocted now, composed of
strategies, tactics, warfighters and armaments never before used -- and will
not be revealed and understood until too late for defense.
Try to forget everything you know about warfighting, crime fighting,
conflict resolution, rules of engagement, black operations, guerrilla
tactics, hiding among the people. Assume the enemy knows everything you know
and more, is better armed and smarter than you, has more spies among your
supporters and in your most intimate circle.
Imagine that your toilet, your bed, your fridge, your car, your is triggered
to explode by radio or your computer by your password.
Consider that there will be no time to reflect and reconsider when things go
catastrophically wrong and the enemy is unrelenting attacking with inhuman
viciousness, when you're defenses are crumbling and weapons failing, when
mates are squealing, dead or run away, when you can't stop shitting
yourself, when your legs are buckling, when your minds racing out of
control, when you're begging god and mom for mercy and the upraised ax is
descending, the barrel back of head is firing.
Remember that who the enemy is no secret to either side, on whichever side
you're on, and presume that the emery is more ready and able to cook your
goose than you are theirs.
What actual war carnage teaches, what the current civil war in the US is
showing, is what the TV-sofa war does not: nobody wins, ever, except the
mindfuckers who've never gone berserk in combat or in the jobplace, killed
friend and foe to save own asses.
You only win wars by never having to fight them, those started by weakling
cowards unable to steal, cheat and lie well enough to satisfy their demonic
lusts.
Best to outsmart the enemy in war, work and love, so that what you're up to
is revealed only years later if ever. For the best won wars are never known
at the time, no parades, no medals, no glory, no war stories, no memorial
cemeteries and monuments, no veteran hospitals filled with carrion, just
peace and tranquillity shooting deer, harpooning dolphins, rip-tearing the
landscape for profligate cowboy wargames riding homicidal freeways.
We're all gonna lose our civil war in market place killings and road rage,
thanks to today's warfighting lesson in free fire criminal enterprise by
those who've never been shot and shot and shot, and lost for good -- the
vainglorious winners, the losers desperate to regain glory days.
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Subject: Re: Bell sentencing timed to coincide with raids on militia
members?
From: "Brian B. Riley" <[email protected]>
To: "Tim May" <[email protected]>, "CypherPunks List" <[email protected]>
On 10/31/97 3:01 PM, Tim May ([email protected]) passed this wisdom:
>Get ready, folks. By the way, I'll be at the gun show at the Cow Palace in
>San Francisco on the weekend of November 8-9, probably Saturday, the 8th.
>Seems I'm running low on certain types of ammo, and I may want to pick up a
>couple more assault rifles before Swinestein succeeds in completely banning
>them.
I used to think that way ... but then I thought, why pay all that money and
walk the line of whatever Swinestein et al come up with. Instead I have my
deer rifles and a shotgun or two and ammo for both. The way this all is
working now, I have more combat experience than 90% of the active duty
military and most cops, and every day goes by more and more are retiring. If
it ever comes down to that, I'll take down one or two of them with my deer
rifle and help myself to their weapons and ammo ... also kind of makes sure
I haven't set myself up to depend on an obsolete caliber ... if I am not
good enough to take some of them down and take their weapons, no 300 nor
30,000 rounds for my very own Armalite is going to make any difference.
Brian B. Riley --> http://www.macconnect.com/~brianbr
For PGP Keys <mailto:[email protected]?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key>
"Everyone who lives dies; but not everyone who dies has lived"
-- No Fear
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Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Jim Burnes <[email protected]>
To: John Young <[email protected]>
CC: [email protected]
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers
load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and
liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we
must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our
comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds,
as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor
sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to
the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being
insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal
and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to
account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet
their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816.
jim
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Subject: Re: FEMA site using cookies
From: Crisavec <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Attila T. Hun typethed the following...
>> The USMC 29 Palms Combat Arms Survey:
>>"The U.S. government declares a ban on the possession, sale,
>>transportation, and transfer of all non-sporting firearms
>>...consider the following statement:
>>> I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or
>>> resist confiscation of firearms banned by the
>>> U.S. government..."
>
> they were looking for a yes/no answer --no maybes. if anybody thinks
>this is a joke --it was not; it was given to most units at 29 Palms,
>Pendleton, LeJuene, and Paris Island. the percentage responses were
>interesting: men with less than 5 years service were 90% "yes" --grizzled
>old NCOMs with 15 or more years were less than 15% "yes." shows what the
>federal government educational system is capable of conditioning with a
>little help from movies and television. subliminally, was has been
>glorified by the merchants of death: arms manufacturers and power hungry
>politicians. --
This doesn't surprise me at all Attila. They don't teach the constitution in
High School anymore. That accounts for the lower ranks. The NCOM's answers
are to be expected, They STRESS Posse Commitais<sp?> and the constitution
for ALL noncom's. It's part of the testing for promotion to E-5 and up.
Most of the noncom's have been in long enough to be thoroughly disillusioned
by the military in general. The only thing keeping a lot of them in is
inertia...
--Dave
Any neural system sufficiently complex to generate the axioms
of arithmetic is too complex to be understood by itself.
Kaekel's Conjecture
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Subject: Fwd: psychoceramics: Fighting back against the Government
From: Alan Olsen <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
This is an interesting spin doctoring of Jim Bell's situation. I picked this
up off the psychoceramics list. Why it was there is unclear...
Terrorism's next wave -- Nerve gas and germs are the new weapons of choice
BY DAVID E. KAPLAN
Jeff Gordon thought he had seen it all. A veteran IRS investigator, Gordon's
job since 1988 had been to probe threats and assaults against his fellow
agents. There was no shortage in recent years--stabbings, fires, mortar
attacks, and big unexploded bombs outside IRS offices in Los Angeles and
Reno, Nevada. But in the first months of this year, Gordon found himself
working on the strangest case of his career. From an informant, he had
learned of a Portland, Ore., man named James Dalton Bell. Bell owed some
$30,000 in back taxes and served as a juror in a local "common law court."
Dozens of these self-appointed tribunals have issued "fines" and even death
sentences against public officials. Bell was also active in antigovernment
forums on the Internet, where he had posted a dark scheme threatening murder
of troublesome federal agents. Participants could send encrypted messages to
each other, Bell proposed, offering donations to whoever "predicted" how
long a targeted official would live. The winner, presumably the assassin,
would be rewarded with electronic fund transfers from anonymous donors, he
suggested. Gordon checked further. Bell, it turned out, was an electronics
engineer
at a nearby circuit board manufacturer. He was also an MIT-educated
chemist who had been arrested eight years earlier for making
methamphetamine, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. According to
court records, Bell had once told a friend: "The first thing to remember
is: Never make a chemist angry at you."
In February, the IRS docked Bell's wages and seized his 10-year-old car.
Inside the vehicle, Gordon found instructions for making bombs and molotov
cocktails. There was also far-right literature, a printout listing large
amounts of cyanide, and detailed information on fertilizer, a key ingredient
in the Oklahoma City bomb. But with no evidence that Bell had hurt anyone,
Gordon could not move. A burning stench. Four weeks later, on a Monday
morning in March, IRS officials encountered a terrible nose-burning stench
as they arrived at their building in Vancouver, the Portland suburb where
Bell lived. Investigators traced the smell to a welcome mat dosed with
propanethiol. The chemical is used by utilities in minuscule concentrations
to give natural gas its noticeable smell. "It's Bell," Gordon told his boss.
"I'm sure of it." Bell had attempted twice to buy propanethiol from a
chemical-supply company in Milwaukee, Gordon then learned. Worried that the
stink bomb was a trial run for something much worse, on April 1, authorities
raided Bell's home. They seized five computers and three semiautomatic
assault rifles, then opened his garage door. Before them stood dozens of
containers filled with chemicals. There were volatile solvents, explosives
ingredients, sodium cyanide, nitric acid, and diisopropyl
fluorophosphate--one of several ingredients that, if properly mixed, form
nerve gas--all in a residential neighborhood. "The level and type of
chemicals were extremely unusual," said Leroy Loiselle, who managed the
cleanup for the Environmental Protection Agency. "You don't need nitric acid
to keep aphids off your flowers." On Bell's computers, Gordon found two
other items: the names and home addresses of over 100 public officials--IRS
employees, FBI agents, local police officers--and a 169-page document, The
Terrorist's Handbook, with detailed instructions for making chemical weapons
and high explosives. Bell's friends told investigators that he had tried
using green beans to make botulin toxin, which causes botulism, and that he
claimed to have successfully made sarin, the nerve gas used by Japanese
cultists in their 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway.
Bell was arrested. In July he pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of
IRS agents and use of a false Social Security number, and also admitted to
the stink bomb attack and the cyberassassination scheme. He faces up to
eight years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Bell declined to comment, but
he contended earlier that he is merely "a chemical hobbyist" and the
assassination scheme only an abstract proposal. "I'm a talker, not a doer,"
he said. The IRS's Jeff Gordon remains wary. According to court records,
after his arrest Bell boasted to a friend that police never found his most
dangerous chemical weapons. Gordon believes they could include a secret
stockpile of sarin.
New generation. 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.
But other threats appear to be quite real. Four militia members in Minnesota
were convicted recently of planning to assassinate federal agents with a
biological toxin. In Ohio in 1995, a white supremacist pleaded guilty to
wire fraud in illegally obtaining three vials of bubonic plague bacteria.
Investigators have found biochemical agents in the hands of political
extremists, extortionists, murderers, and the mentally ill. U.S. News has
learned that the FBI has 50 current investigations of individuals suspected
of using or planning to use radiological, biological, or chemical agents.
Bureau officials say a major attack in the United States no longer seems
unlikely. "The consensus of people in the law enforcement and intelligence
communities is that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's
when," warns Robert Blitzer, head of the FBI's terrorism section. "We are
very concerned."
To prepare, federal agencies have scrambled to set up new counterterrorism
strike forces (story, Page 32). Behind all this is the very real fear that
the world has entered a new stage in terrorism. Widespread technical
education and high-tech communications have vastly increased the number of
people with knowledge of how to synthesize chemicals and culture bacteria.
Books and videos on creating these substances--and turning them into
weapons--are now available on the Internet, at gun shows and survivalist
fairs, and through the mail.
While its effects would be the most destructive, a nuclear incident is
actually the least likely scenario, according to security experts. More
likely, they say, would be a biological weapon attack; a chemical attack is
the next likely possibility. The impact could range from the poisoning of an
individual to sophisticated attempts at mass murder. So far, the majority
have been limited efforts by loners or small groups. Most worrisome to
officials is the possible involvement of more established, state-sponsored
terrorist organizations--such as Hezbollah--with international reach.
While the number of terrorist attacks, both in the United States and abroad,
has gone down since the end of the cold war, there is a flip side.
Individual acts themselves have grown more deadly, as illustrated by the
Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings. In its annual terrorism
report issued last April, the State Department sees a trend "toward more
ruthless attacks on mass civilian targets" and the use of more powerful
weapons.
Threshold crossed. Until this decade, biological and chemical weapons were
the province of superpowers or renegade states like Iraq and North Korea.
But all that changed with Aum Supreme Truth, an obscure sect of New Age
fanatics based at the foot of Mount Fuji, 70 miles outside Tokyo. Recent
court testimony from sect members shows how the cult's young scientists
produced not only anthrax and botulin toxin but also various nerve agents,
including the sarin used on Tokyo's subway. Later attacks were planned for
New York and Washington, D.C.
Still, it is one thing to produce deadly agents and another to use them
effectively. Aum's attack killed only 12 people of the thousands in the
subway system, and on seven other occasions, attempted Aum attacks were
dogged by equipment failures and human error. "Trying to produce 100,000
casualties is much more difficult than is often stated," observes Jonathan
Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Tucker notes that
problems abound with delivery systems, meteorological conditions, and the
agents themselves. Still, he warns that even crude weapons can easily cause
mass disruption. Aum's nerve gas, for example, was full of impurities, yet
it sent thousands to the hospital.
What worries police is growing evidence that others share similar ambitions.
In 1993, two years before the Aum attack, Canadian border agents stopped an
American electrician named Thomas Lavy and searched his car. They found four
guns, 20,000 rounds of ammunition, 13 pounds of gunpowder, neo-Nazi
literature, and $80,000 in cash. Lavy also had recipes for biological and
chemical weapons and a plastic bag filled with white powder. Had the agents
opened the bag, they likely would have died of respiratory failure and
paralysis. Tests showed the substance to be ricin, a lethal toxin extracted
from the castor bean plant. (Ricin, dabbed on a tiny pellet fired from an
umbrella-gun, was used by Soviet agents to murder a Bulgarian in London in
1978.) The poison is 6,000 times more toxic than cyanide, and there is no
antidote. Lavy had a quarter pound of the stuff.
In 1995, a man named Larry Wayne Harris was arrested after he obtained vials
of the bacteria that cause bubonic plague (Page 28). Harris is an Ohio
microbiologist and recent member of the white supremacist Aryan Nations. He
says his friends will strike at government officials with biochemical
weapons, if provoked. "If they arrest a bunch of our guys, they get a test
tube in the mail," he told U.S. News. And, he says, far worse could come.
"How many cities are you willing to lose before you back off?" he asks. "At
what point do you say: `If these guys want to go off to the Northwest and
have five states declared to be their own free and independent country, let
them do it'?" Authorities take Harris's comments seriously.
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."
The genie is also loose in the Middle East. According to intelligence
sources, notebooks and computer files recently seized from Hezbollah, the
Iranian-backed Islamic militia, contain information on how to produce
chemical agents. Hezbollah has also taken delivery of protective gear,
including gas masks and bodysuits, and obtained Katyusha rockets able to
deliver chemical warheads to Israel from their base in Lebanon. Hezbollah's
interests are shared by at least one other Islamic terrorist, Ramzi Yusef, a
trained engineer and reputed mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing. Yusef's organization researched making sarin and reportedly planned
to assassinate President Clinton in the Philippines with phosgene gas. The
trade center bombers also packed cyanide into the charge that rocked the
building; the chemical apparently evaporated in the explosion.
Some analysts believe there have been other, unnoticed, attacks in the
United States. "It's almost certain there have been uses of biological
agents that have gone undetected," says Seth Carus, a proliferation expert
at the National Defense University. "Most cases are known because they came
to the attention of law enforcement through informants, not because of
medical authorities." Health officials, for example, were mystified by a
mass outbreak of salmonella poisoning in Oregon in 1984. The cause--an
attack by a nearby religious sect--went undetected until the cult's demise a
year later.
Exotic poisons are attracting not only terrorists but also murderers and
extortionists. Several recent trials have featured ricin as a murder weapon.
Product tamperers, too, are increasingly turning to biological agents. Says
Lori Ericson of Kroll Information Services: "We're seeing E. coli, cholera,
salmonella, HIV." In one British case, microbiologist Michael Just
threatened to contaminate the products of five food companies with
dysentery-causing bacteria. To make his point, he sent the firms test tubes
filled with the pathogen.
Society can likely tolerate the occasional murderer or extortionist wielding
biological or chemical weapons. The greater challenge undoubtedly will come
from those with broader grievances, from terrorists steeped in extremism and
political hatred. Perhaps scariest of all are the criminally insane, who may
bring technical ability, but little judgment, to their homemade
laboratories. Last April, authorities raided the house of one Thomas Leahy
in Janesville, Wis. Leahy, who takes medication for schizophrenia, was
obsessed with creating "killer viruses" to stop his enemies, both real and
imagined, according to police. He pleaded guilty to possessing ricin, but a
search of his home also found animal viruses and vaccines, staph bacteria
culture, fungicides, insecticides, hypodermic needles, and gas masks. As
Leahy reportedly told his wife, you can "never have too many poisons." With
Douglas Pasternak and Gordon Witkin
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