Finnish Bomber Used Internet – And?

All information comes from somewhere: the Internet is just a more efficient and rapid delivery system than a library or other physical print archive:

Police Monday named the chemistry student they suspect of carrying out Finland’s deadliest bomb attack since World War II and said he used an Internet chat room that exchanged tips on home-made explosives.

They said they were checking chat rooms to try to find why Petri Gerdt, a shy 19-year-old student from a middle-class Helsinki suburb, set off a bomb in a busy shopping center, killing himself and six other people and injuring about 80.

Gerdt, the only suspect in the bombing, used the alias RC in a Finnish Internet chat room called “Forum for home chemistry” for people interested in explosives, National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Inspector Rabbe von Hertzen told Reuters.

“RC is Gerdt. It is the name he used,” von Hertzen said.

The authorities have shut down the chat room, which Finnish media said was a popular forum for discussing do-it-yourself bombs-making.

“RC knew a lot about chemistry and he was an expert at explosives,” the chat room host, who was not named, told Finnish national radio news YLE. The home-made bomb, weighing up to 6.6 pounds and packed with metal shards, went off Friday evening in a crowded shopping mall in Vantaa, the Helsinki suburb where Gerdt lived with his parents and attended a local technical college.

….Contributions to the chemistry chat room by RC gave no clear clues to a planned bomb attack.

“I have not taken part in any larger accidents, but once I dreamt that a police car drove to the site of the detonation, but luckily I was already floating to other places,” RC wrote. “In my next dream I was in the deep forest.” In the same message RC also quoted lyrics from dead rapper Tupac Shakur’s song “Hail Mary,” saying: “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me … revenge is like the sweetest joy.”

RC also signed off “Killuminati,” echoing Tupac Shakur’s album “Don Killuminati — The 7-Day Theory.”

Gerdt’s use of the chat room seemed sure to revive the question of policing the Internet.

“Shoe bomber” Richard Reid said he had learned how to make a bomb from the Internet, members of the al Qaeda network are suspected of obtaining bomb-making technology there and the 1999 Columbine High School killers warned of their plans via the Internet before acting.

Again, the Internet is just a big old collection of information, like a library, or even group of people: before there were libraries, people stored information in their heads and passed it on orally. Clearly there is information that shouldn’t be available in print, but if it is in print, it will find its way to the Internet. If we can’t keep information out of books, we can’t keep it off of the Internet. It is pointless to blame the information delivery system for the information it conveys.

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