Friday, August 11, 2006

The Eleventh Hour

In the last twenty-four hour a terrorist plot to repeat the tragedies of the past having been unveil. As usual a deluge of information became available. As I sift through all the information a particular article title Ingredients for a Bomb Are Not Hard to Find from Washington Post especially caught my eye.

"From available commercial material, and with the right basic knowledge, it doesn't take too much expertise," said Tal Hanan, a security expert at Demoman International Ltd. in Israel. "Any second-year chemical engineering student, probably with the right guidance and some handbook they pull off the Internet, could probably compose such an explosive."

Alas, this is not anything new... I doubt even a second-year chemical engineering background is needed; for that of course, the key is the information available over the internet. Long before this millennium and September 11, before internet became widely used, I have seen random 'journal' and 'cookbooks' of amateur pyrotechnicians with detail instruction of how assemble home-brewn explosives, abtaining ingredients from local drug store, even social engineering involved. And to this day, these information have probably multiplied yet remains easily accessible to anyone who has a second to search for them or simply stumble upon them.

This is very wide spread and not confined to explosives, the instructions for making methanfedimine and various other drugs, hate groups etc etc are all available across the world wide web. Alas, such is the problem of instanteous communication and freedom of information. Without a doubt freedom and sharing of information is essential absolutely essential, but the question is what you do when these information fall into the wrong hands?

posted by Stavanger at 5:02 PM

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