BBC.co.uk does it again.

In this article on the bbc.co.uk web site we see once again the underlaying knowledge is sorely lacking. They lable the, by now ancient, Anarchists' Cookbook  a 'terrorist manual'.

At a risk of being tagged by the all seeing police state which Great Britain has become as a terrorist myself I put Anarchist Cookbook into google and once passed the obligatory adverts the first hit returned was on Wikipedia. It says there that it first appeared  circa 1971. And just to show how easy it is, even now, to download the Cookbook, at the end of the Wikipedia link it leads you to here.

Not exactly hard to find is it. Though as the FAQ on that web site says the original Cookbook cannot be downloaded anymore there are several other similar Cookbooks available some of which can be downloaded from there.

Anyone who has traveled since 1971 through Fidonet, the early none WWW based Internet through to its modern WWW equivalent, the all singing all dancing Web2.0 based Internet, knows that that 'Cookbook' has been around for years. I do not know when it first surfaced nor if it is still being added to or updated in any way as I have not seen a copy of it for at least 10 or more years. It has probably been around for 30 years or so.

I cannot remember when I first came upon it, suffice it to say it was uploaded to my BBS (old style BBS not its modern meaning) which I ran from 1977 until 1997 or so. Having taken a quick look at it, as all good SysOps did when something had been uploaded to their BBS, it became clear very quickly that while the information held within was aimed at doing things considered illegal there was not much aside from  homemade bomb making, that would lead to anyone getting hurt. Sure, telephone companies would (more on that later) but as everyone considered them money grabbing thieves they were considered fair game.

If you never lived through the days before the Internet existed or the days before Broadband access then it is hard to think of such things as 'phreaking'. Phreaking allowed one to play a tune, usually using a penny whistle (also known as a tin whistle), which fooled the telephone exchange which then allowed one to make a free telephone call. If you get it right you could fool the exchange to allow a free call to be made and also to 'dial' the number for you. All considered clever stuff back in those days Modern telephony systems are no longer prone to being fooled in such a manner. There are, or perhaps were, many such olde worlde things in the Anarchists' Cookbook that the BBC author called a 'terrorists manual', that bare no use in the modern technologically laden world. Whether this has changed and such things within it removed i have no idea as i have not seen a copy of the Cookbook for years.


This basic lack of in-depth writing is proliferating all across the
news reporting media. Be they an on-line  place or part of the dying
dead tree newspaper brigade. One can see it everywhere one reads the
news. It is as alarming as it is appalling.

Do the BBC consider everyone who reads their articles to be under 10 years old? On reading some articles the answer would appear to be a resounding yes. It is this appalling lack of both quality and knowledge that has infiltrated the BBC in the last couple of years that makes reading such a joy and irritant at the same time. The BBC of course will say that it was the police who made such comments and all they were doing was reporting the news. But that in and of itself is no excuse.

Perhaps because those who write such articles are a new breed they do not know such things have been available for 30 or more years but surely in that case it would make perfect sense, as well as add some credibility to the author, to seek out some information on it? Is that really asking too much of a modern reporter that they do some very basic sleuthing so that they do not appear amateurish?