In the wake of the Thursday arrest of two women accused of attempting to build a bomb, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote on her website that the 1971 book on bomb making, which may have aided the terror suspects in some small way, should be "banned from the Internet.”
The senator seems to fail to realize that not only has The Anarchist Cookbook been in print for decades (it’s sold on Amazon!), but also has openly circulated online for nearly the same period of time. In short, removing it from the Internet would be impossible.
"I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine,” Feinstein wrote. "These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet."
On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged the two American women living in New York City with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. The 29-page criminal complaint details how these two women, Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, began meeting with an unnamed undercover agent beginning in 2013, where they expressed extremist ideology and sympathy for Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and related groups.
According to an FBI affidavit, in August 2014, the women discussed learning "science,” in order to learn how to construct a homebrew explosive. Later, the women and the agent went to the library in order to begin teaching themselves basic chemistry.
By November 2014, as the women’s research continued, the undercover agent told them that he or she had downloaded the Anarchist Cookbook—the complaint seems to suggest that it was the agent that provided the text to the women.
No one answered the phone when Ars called Feinstein's Washington, DC and San Francisco offices.
The book’s author, William Powell, has written that he researched the book at the New York Public Library and has since renounced the book’s message after becoming an Anglican Christian in 1976
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