FBI puts a lid on an Internet trash can

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 4, 2002 | by John Elvin

The FBI has begun cleaning up some of the trash on the Internet. Agents raided the home of a Los Angeles teen-ager who published bomb-making information and, according to an FBI affidavit and his own admission, hacked into other Websites to post anarchist messages. Sherman Martin Austin, the 19-year-old anarchist behind the raisethefist.com site, said agents took his computers as well as documents relating to "the anticorporate globalization movement."

Sympathizers describe Austin as an activist with the Los Angeles chapter of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. He hosted several anarchist sites in addition to his own, including LAAnarchists.org, a "collective" devoted to protests.

On his own Webpages, Austin had posted information detailing the making of bombs using pipes, fertilizer and match heads, according to a report on the Newsbytes Website. He claims he was just being a copycat, as if that's any excuse. "If you do a search" Austin wrote in a posting on the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media site after the raid, "you should be able to find the same exact guide on other Websites." Austin also asked if anyone could spare $300 to help him pay off some debts.

Without checking Austin's claim that "the same exact guide" to bomb-making exists elsewhere on the Internet, it can be confirmed that there is a lot of dangerous information available out there for anyone who goes looking.

One site we located months ago and since have been monitoring, expecting to see it disappear, includes the old "Anarchist Cookbook," a classic of counterculture terrorism. Other pages listed in the index for the site include: "Bombs, explosive, experiments," "Ozymandias sabotage skills handbook," "The new complete terrorists," "Checklist for raids on labs," "Ways to kill a man with your bare hands," "Tools you can use for terror and havoc," "How to easily make a reliable detonation timer," "Torture with things lying around" and dozens of other how-to guides on explosives, terrorism, robbery, burglary, drugs, weapons, fake identification and so on. The authors of that site extend their thanks to an outfit called Freespeech.org for hosting their site.