At 08:00 PM 08/19/2001 -1000, Reese wrote:

We assume the lamerz posting "h3lp m3 m4k3 b0mZ" queries are LEA's trolling, but are they? Is posting bomb recipes a violation of some applicable law? If so, what law? If not, why do we assume those to be LEA trolls, and not some hopeless wank or kook who needs to get in touch with HisOrHer inner child and beat it up?

Our esteemed Senator Diane Feinstein from California, occasionally along with other people such as Joe Biden from my home state of Delaware, occasionally proposes laws against disseminating information on the internet, particularly about bombs and such. (By contrast, an elementary-school education in Delaware includes a trip to the duPont gunpowder-making mills, learning about local history, colonial industry, and safe explosives-making.) So some of the bomb ranting is about her disrespect for the First Amendment. Some of it's pretty clearly from people who troll for the fun of trolling. Some of it might even be lam3r k1ddi3z trying to look k3wl. Some if it, especially post-Columbine and post-J*m B*ll, does appear to be from people trolling usual suspects on the net hoping to find some of them who are scary or stupid enough to entrap into some witch-hunt, a political speech, a newspaper story, a criminal conviction, whatever floats their boat. There actually are laws against blowing stuff up or possessing tools to do so, at least in some circumstances, or conspiring to do Bad Things, or corrupting minors into doing so, and for many purposes an accusation is really more useful than a conviction. Most of it's actually produced by the service* that the Cypherpunks Cabal Central Conspiracy Committee hires to make the list appear to be Mostly Harmless by posting a flood of decoy material and other slanderous and evil material so that the few genuinely dangerous messages can be dismissed as "oh, yeah, kooks troll us with stuff like this all the time" or "Oh, yeah, and last week they claimed we were conspiring with hizbollah.org and the Bilderbergers." [*Plausible Deniability Inc.]