The police said they seized numerous chemicals and paraphernalia that may be associated with production of high-explosive and improvised explosive devices.
Lets see, I could build an improvised explosive device with lawn fertilizer and motor oil. Both of which I have on my property. Does that make me a mad bomber?
Oh for god's sake, almost any garage or gardener's shed contains materials that "could be used in bombs". And every kitchen has objects that "could be used" for murder or assault, every typewriter in the world "could be used" for slander or libel, and every male on the planet has body parts that "could be used" for rape. Bet you almost anything there's more rapes each year in any single large city in any of the Western nations, than there are major acts of terrorism in that entire nation.
I wonder how the west is going to maintain (what's left of) its competitive edge if everyone with a spark of intelligence and curiosity is treated as a criminal?
I've been wondering this since the '90s, with the crypto and copyright craziness. At least crypto is pretty much legal now. On the other hand, IIRC, a number of info-security conferences have moved out of the US since the copyright lobby has made their fields of study dangerous to pursue in the US.
On the bright side, wossname, Steve Kurtz, did eventually get his charges thrown out, after a few years of persecution.
Since diesel and fertilizer in the same garage would constitute ingredients for making a bomb, it isn't hard to concede there were likely the needed ingredients. The intent is another thing entirely.
It is always difficult to understand what is going on in a teen-agers head. Many teen-aged males I knew when I was growing up would have thought it was cool to have bomb-making paraphenalia... not because they were evil or malicious but more for the reasons 12 yr old boys love to watch Mythbusters. Lots of those teens I knew grew up to be normal and, to my knowledge, none of them ever broke a law other than the occaissional driving offence, jaywalking or the inhalation of the smoke of illegal herbs.
Heck, my father encouraged us to play with incindiaries, explosives and firearms and I knew kids who had ready access to dynamite. Most of us lived and the ones who didn't learned valuable lessons.
"Oh crap I shouldn't have done that ow". Admittedly they didn't get much time to apply the lesson.
The only blowed real good death I remember from High School was the guy who noticed a pinhole leak in his car's gas tank, so he drained it and then tried to patch it using some hot instrument. I don't recall if it was just a soldering iron or a torch but whatever it was was hot enough to ignite the air-fuel vapour left in the tank. Usually people died in car wrecks or in hunting accidents.
I do recall hearing about a group of teens who were blasting stumps who got to the last stump with half of their supply of explosives still unused. Obviously this would not do so they put half of what was left under the stump and the other half in a hollow within the stump. This was apparently very impressive to watch in action but the farmer whose stump it was then insisted they clean up all the wood chips scattered across the field.
Yeah, one of my brothers was chainsawing a tree trunk, hit a knot and had the chainsaw buck back towards his face. He managed to stop it before it made contact.
Modern chainsaws are designed so that when you let go, they turn off but I am not sure that was true back when.
As I mentioned elsewhere, back in the distant days of my youth, you could buy such items as sulfur, potassium nitrate, powdered charcoal, powdered zinc, ammonium nitrate, potassium perchlorate, etc, off the shelf. Even as a minor.
And my best friend had custody of the family .38 Smith and Wesson at grade-school age. With his father absent, he was the man of the house.
To be fair most chemistry students experimenting with explosive materials never intend to blow anything up.
I can understand why they might have thought he was operating a meth lab, aside from the lack of output of meth, or any connection to meth dealers, or was in fact being bankrolled by a local meth corporation or anything like that.
What I can't understand is then taking the view that he has to be imprisoned anyway, and trying to stick him with a charge that requires intent, and thus isn't exactly hard to get out of.
As forms of petty police harassment go, it's a very expensive and pointless one.
Not pointless: "If we can convict him of *anything*, we can pretty much torpedo any lawsuit he might bring against us. And even if we can't, just the fact that we charged him can help us."
Messing around with chemistry was de Rigeur when I was a kid (I shudder at the uses to which we put Mercury). Rocket fuel was of course one of the targets, my father used to make it in the kitchen. Really souped up the Victoria day firecrackers (my contribution, that was).
I have none of that stuff now, but I do have the formula for at least two different types of rocket fuel *in my head*. Oh No! Perhaps my sentence could involve enough heavy drinking to forget them? Funny how that idea doesn't seem as appealing as it once did.
The escalating suspicion and paranoia with which the modern world views youthful attempts to explore scientific principles greatly dismays me. When I was a kid (in the 70s), I experimented with electronics and chemistry sets like many other curious children of the day, and some of the sorts of projects I undertook - without malice and incurring no harm to myself or others - would nonetheless be viewed darkly by the police in this more authoritarian age.
Governments which treat their citizenry as presumptive criminals only succeed in engendering a growing sense of mistrust and animosity between all the subsets of their own society... which of course serves as reinforcing feedback to justify further restrictions on what is acceptable and licit, under some misguided notion that perfect social control can ever be achieved (or is desirable even were it possible).
Of course, nowadays 'preventing terrorism' is the popular catch-all justification for many such police overreaches, as it paints anyone disagreeing with the latest abrogation of civil liberties as being in support of terrorists. I wish the kid and his family all the best in the court case, since I thoroughly expect such language to weasel its way into the prosecution's tactics.
It does seem to be true. However, the 18-year-old in Maryland who was found with chemicals was also found with weapons, federal ID, plus a map of the route Bush takes to Camp David. WashPost article.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2008-12-28 11:30 pm
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That's a crime now?
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(Anonymous) 2008-12-29 01:02 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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On the bright side, wossname, Steve Kurtz, did eventually get his charges thrown out, after a few years of persecution.
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It is always difficult to understand what is going on in a teen-agers head. Many teen-aged males I knew when I was growing up would have thought it was cool to have bomb-making paraphenalia... not because they were evil or malicious but more for the reasons 12 yr old boys love to watch Mythbusters. Lots of those teens I knew grew up to be normal and, to my knowledge, none of them ever broke a law other than the occaissional driving offence, jaywalking or the inhalation of the smoke of illegal herbs.
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The only blowed real good death I remember from High School was the guy who noticed a pinhole leak in his car's gas tank, so he drained it and then tried to patch it using some hot instrument. I don't recall if it was just a soldering iron or a torch but whatever it was was hot enough to ignite the air-fuel vapour left in the tank. Usually people died in car wrecks or in hunting accidents.
I do recall hearing about a group of teens who were blasting stumps who got to the last stump with half of their supply of explosives still unused. Obviously this would not do so they put half of what was left under the stump and the other half in a hollow within the stump. This was apparently very impressive to watch in action but the farmer whose stump it was then insisted they clean up all the wood chips scattered across the field.
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Or something horrible involving farm equipment.
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Modern chainsaws are designed so that when you let go, they turn off but I am not sure that was true back when.
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And my best friend had custody of the family .38 Smith and Wesson at grade-school age. With his father absent, he was the man of the house.
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My high school stocked picric acid at one point (because until the 1970s, most Ontario high schools did).
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I can understand why they might have thought he was operating a meth lab, aside from the lack of output of meth, or any connection to meth dealers, or was in fact being bankrolled by a local meth corporation or anything like that.
What I can't understand is then taking the view that he has to be imprisoned anyway, and trying to stick him with a charge that requires intent, and thus isn't exactly hard to get out of.
As forms of petty police harassment go, it's a very expensive and pointless one.
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(Anonymous) 2008-12-29 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)I have none of that stuff now, but I do have the formula for at least two different types of rocket fuel *in my head*. Oh No! Perhaps my sentence could involve enough heavy drinking to forget them? Funny how that idea doesn't seem as appealing as it once did.
William Hyde
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Governments which treat their citizenry as presumptive criminals only succeed in engendering a growing sense of mistrust and animosity between all the subsets of their own society... which of course serves as reinforcing feedback to justify further restrictions on what is acceptable and licit, under some misguided notion that perfect social control can ever be achieved (or is desirable even were it possible).
Of course, nowadays 'preventing terrorism' is the popular catch-all justification for many such police overreaches, as it paints anyone disagreeing with the latest abrogation of civil liberties as being in support of terrorists. I wish the kid and his family all the best in the court case, since I thoroughly expect such language to weasel its way into the prosecution's tactics.
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