New English-Language al-Qaeda Explosives Manual Released Online

This book is excellent, and it was popular for a while happy wheels game

We can all sit together and play this free robux generator no human verification 2021 60 game and it is very interesting game.

Or you could see the comment above from Stan, who I gather knows a thing or two or more about explosives...

I'm sure you could make it work, if you were clever and lucky, or kill yourself if you weren't. People have been seeking out knowledge of explosives ever since they existed, for various reasons and with various degrees of efficacy. Not exactly a revolutionary threat. Ever read Conrad's <i>The Secret Agent</i>?

How many of the recruits from the US have succeeded in doing significant damage to the US? How many have been caught? How do you figure they're getting caught?

Of course we can't block them, any more than we could block the Anarchists Cookbook or other various black market explosives manuals, of block potentially violent people from holding meetings or forming underground organizations (the true "lone wolf" is very rare). We have to watch and infiltrate, and the internet makes that easier, not harder. They can't block us from using it either, and whatever they can see, we can see.

I decline to panic.

We were aware of the book and it's so-called (dead) author, but we had no idea such garbage was construed as some Jihadist bible for explosives. It is comprised of various on line sources and someone just put it all together.

That they claim it was done in English for a broader audience is hysterically stupid.
All the information was already in English to begin with -- Copy Paste if you will.

Mixing primary and elective chemicals together in a make-shift lab will prove interesting, not to mention killing a lot of people (albeit the right people end up dead).

Some of these compounds are best left to scientists and chemists, not some self proclaimed explosives expert.

I enjoy reading ICSR, and I don't harbor any ill feelings with this latest entry. In fairness, ICSR probably does not have EOD personnel on their payroll and with that, cannot do much more than post and comment.
That could be said for several of our think tanks though.

The other comment I would add... Instead of providing advise such as "authorities should remove this from the internet" (hindsight), perhaps we should have removed the real information sources long ago which would have
slowed down or precluded this Jihad bible on explosives.

Dave,

Thanks for posting, and frankly while the article didn't say much at all, it should alert us to a growing threat trend that I suspect we don't fully understand yet.

As Stan stated this information has been around for years. Years ago the Army's FMs on explosives, improvised explosives and booby traps were widely available through select book companies and GI stores. You may also recall the Anarchist Cookbook and more recently one the freakish animal rights terrorist groups published a detailed on-line sabotage book for destroying machinery, arson, etc. Almost all information on warfighting, guerrilla warfare etc. is cut and paste from older documents (remember very little is new), but what is key is who promoting it and for what cause.

AQ and its affiliates are reaching out to radicalize and enable homegrown want to be terrorists in English speaking countries, especially the U.S. and the UK, but Canada and Australia aren't immune. Obviously travel to Pakistan and Somalia now draws suspicion, so they're just beginning to attempt to educate want to bes via the web. First attempts will be rough and unlikely to result in much, but they demonstrated they're learning organizations, so they will improve. Awlaqi has already demonstrated effectiveness in reaching out and radicalizing more and more Americans via the web, so now they're beginning (this is the first attempt) to follow up with their own how-to books. Sort of like earn your black belt online. The nature of the conflict is shifting, and this is truly the open source warfare that John Robb described (not what is happening in Afghanistan).

IMO we continue to mislead ourselves by telling ourselves that Afghanistan is important when it comes to AQ, it was important, it isn't that important now. At the same time we're seeing a reduction in police forces (with a concurrent increase in police KIA) in the U.S. and UK due to budget constraints. The police are the front line when it comes to protecting our people from this homegrown threat that is now gaining momentum.

Stan makes some valid points above, I learned quite bit about improvised explosives in school as a young SF Soldier many years ago, and I definitely prefered the hands on training where an instructor would save your butt if you were about do something wrong (there is a lot of nuance involved with this and a simple mistake can be a final mistake), but that doesn't mean you can't learn via the web or from books. However, the recipes are not worthless and with this knowledge and some luck they'll get it right sometimes.

Bill M,
First off Happy New Year !

I fully enjoyed reading your post. We are hamstrung by our own system and now is certainly not the time to decrease funding of our law enforcement and first responders.

Something else we sadly don't do much of is awareness training to our public. My unit spends an inordinate amount of time in schools with 6th graders and their teachers as well as hosting summer camps for adults and school age children. While we focus on UXO as a general theme, we also spend serious time on awareness training at the airports, post offices and with law enforcement.

With over 300 million people available, if we could just get a few of them smarter, I think we'd be all that much better off and some of these current threats would get the attention and funding they deserve.

Years ago we had several young adults here using the internet and trying to mix chemicals right under their parents' noses. Some real tragic events that could have been precluded. Here's a video the USG funded that is part of our Mine Risk Education (Awareness) program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FOukeboAZc

It's a little graphic but as my daughter tells me, "Tom & Jerry has more blood" !

How does posting an explosives manual constitute "controlling the cyber based battlespace"? And who's surprised? As Stan has pointed out, the material in the manual has all been available already, nothing really new.

Certainly there's a danger: many of the people who pick up this material will be too incompetent to hurt anyone but themselves, but Tim McVeigh and the Unabomber demonstrate that not all will fall in this category. Not an existential threat - or a new threat - but a problem to be managed.

The answer is to work well and effectively on the LE/domestic counterterrorism side. That is already going on, not perfectly but nothing ever is.

The time span involved in dissemination is not really a game-changer. People who want the information can get it; that hasn't changed.

Our antagonists are not "controlling the cyber based battlespace". They're using it. So are we. It provides certain advantages and disadvantages for all parties. We can't keep their material offline, but we can put up our own sites and disguise them as theirs. We can have people trolling the jihad sites and participating, engaging in the discussion and identifying participants. It's much easier to infiltrate an online group where participants don't actually know each other.

In actual point of observed fact, we see that as the planning and execution of attacks get farther from the AQ core, the competence and sophistication of the attacks decline very rapidly. Most of these "open source" attempts have either been preempted or have failed, suggesting that we're holding our own in that department. That's obviously not cause for complacency: they will evolve, so we must evolve too; we'll have to keep up and get ahead where we can. There's no evidence to suggest, though, that we're way behind or that we've been caught flat-footed by some epic change in the nature of conflict.