Date: Thu, 14 Jan 93 18:13:13 EST
From: sc03281@LLWNET.LINKNET.COM(Cheshire HS)
Subject: File 6--Keyboarding Explosive Data for Homemade Bombs

Sunday, January 10, 1993
Hartford Courant (Connecticut Newspaper)

	KEYBOARDING EXPLOSIVE DATA FOR HOMEMADE BOMBS
	     Bomb Recipes Just a Keystroke Away
	  By Tracy Gordon Fox, Courant Staff Writer

They use names like Wizard and Warrior and they talk via computer
networks. They are usually high school kids, but their keyboard
conversations are not about girls or homework:  They trade recipes for
homemade bombs.

Teenagers learning how to manufacture bombs through home or school
computers have contributed to the nearly 50% increase in the number of
homemade explosives discovered last year by state police, authorities
said.

"It's been a hellish year," said Sgt. Kenneth Startz of the state
police emergency services division, based at the Colchester barracks.
"Our technicians worked on 52 of them: a real bomb on an average of
one per week. This is a marked increase from other years."

In addition to the misguided computer hackers, local experts attribute
the state's vast increase in improvised explosive devices to growing
urban and suburban violence and bad economic times.

"The number one reason for someone leaving a bomb is vandalism, and
the next is revenge," Startz said. "There have been significant
layoffs and companies going out of business and they make targets for
revenge."

Recently, state police and federal authorities confiscated 3 pipe
bombs that were destined for members of the street gang, the Almighty
Latin King Nation, in Meriden, Startz said.

"This is a weapon of intimidation," he said, holding a foot-long,
2-inch-wide bomb made from household piping.  "Pipe bombs will send
out shrapnel just like a hand grenade will."

And while bombs may be associated most often with terrorists, "the
vast majority of bombings are done by the guy next door," said Det.
Thomas M. Goodrow, who heads Hartford Police Department's bomb squad.
The state police emergency services unit handles bomb calls in nearly
every town in the state, except in the Hartford area, which is handled
by Hartford's unit.

Making bombs is not a new phenomenon, but the computer age has brought
the recipes for the explosives to the fingertips of anyone with a
little computer knowledge and a modem.

University of Connecticut police say they do not know if computers
were the source for a series of soda-bottle bombs that exploded
outside a dormitory last February.

Police have dubbed these explosives "MacGyver bombs" because they were
apparently made popular in the television detective show, "MacGyver."
Two-liter soda bottles are stuffed with volatile chemicals that cause
pressure to build until the plastic bursts. The bombs explode either
from internal pressure or on impact.

"There were a number of students involved in making the soda bottle
bombs. They knew what ingredients to mix," said Capt. Fred Silliman.
"They were throwing them out the dorm windows and they made a very
large boom, a loud explosion."

No one was injured, but Silliman said UConn police took the pranks
very seriously, calling in the state police bomb squad "to render a
number of these safe for us."

Several pipe bombs were discovered in a school in southeastern
Connecticut, Startz said, and police found several more at the home of
the student who made them.

"Our increase, in part, seems to be kids experimenting with
explosives," Startz said.

As one of the first police officers in the area to discover that
computers were being used by teenagers to find bomb-making recipes,
Goodrow has a stereotype of these computer hackers.

Typically, they are loners, who are socially dysfunctional, excel in
mathematics and science, and are "over motivated in one area," he
said.

In a West Hartford case four years ago, the teenager had made a bomb
factory in his basement, and had booby-trapped the door and his work
room.

"This shows the ability kids have," Goodrow said.  Goodrow said he was
at first amazed when teenage suspects showed him the information they
could get by hooking on to computer bulletin boards.

Incidents in which bombs actually exploded increased by 133% in 1992,
according to state police statistics. Bomb technicians responded to 14
post-blast investigations last year, compared with only 6 in 1991,
Startz said.

Hartford has also seen an increase in explosive and incendiary
devices, Goodrow said. Their technicians responded to 85 incidents in
1992, compared with 73 in the prior year.

The trend has been seen around the country.  The 958 bombing incidents
reported nationally to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms was the highest in 15 years, ATF authorities said.

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