All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to read nothing

[j4]

Okay, how precisely would you go about committing an act of terrorism using only a paperback book? For the purposes of the exercise, you have to use the physical object, not its informational contents (so e.g. "Buying a paperback book on how to make bombs and following the instructions therein" would be instantly disqualified). You are allowed to pre-prepare the book using other items, but you'll get bonus points for making suggestions which would work with an unprepared book, e.g. the surprisingly unreadable Dan Brown novel that you've just bought in the duty-free.

My favourite suggestion wins a potentially-lethal pair of nailclippers. (I reserve the right not to award the prize if your suggestions all turn out to be variations on a theme of papercuts, but I trust you'll do better than that, won't you, chaps?)

ObMeta-X-spook: Delta Force Semtex $400 million in gold bullion fissionable arrangements Noriega Honduras Ortega assassination Saddam Hussein Qaddafi explosion Kennedy Nazi World Trade Center

Comments

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about this earlier, and the only thing I could come up with was threatening to paper-cut the pilot to death if he didn't divert the plane...

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

HE OR SHE for the pilot! Cripes marnameow would have my guts for garters for that gender-biased language...

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

"Glue half of the pages together, hollow out resultant wodge of paper, fill with explosives" is traditional, I believe. If you're careful I expect you could make it look realistic to casual inspection.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That's what I assumed, that they banned any largish items[1] to prevent anything being smuggled in.

[1] Unless anyone would kick up a stink. Plastic baby, anyone?

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Buy Dan Brown novel. Bludgeon air stewards on head with it to gain entrance to cockpit. Read blurb to co-pilot, rendering him unconscious either with laughter or boredom. Threaten pilot with chapter 1 unless he agrees to your demands.

In event of pilot being Dan Brown fan, skip to ending, read it aloud. If this is a spoiler, pilot will aquiesce. If not, proceed to step three: literary criticism.

[(Anonymous)]

Tear out the pages once you're on board the plane. Make them into origami snakes. Rule world.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Dude! Everyone knows that the pen is mightier than the sword, Dude!

Perhaps the terrorists will threaten to read Dan Brown or J K Rowling novels to the pilots.

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

1. Purchase book in duty-free.
2. During flight, detatch pages from book and chew until they become papier-mache (NB. doing this may require a potentially-terroristic bottle of liquid water)
3. Wander around plane on the pretence of looking for the toilets. Introduce papier-mache to all small important looking holes, locks for vital-equipment lockers, ears of sleeping people, &c.
4. It luckily turns out that some little-known airline directive states that the plane must divert to the nearest airport if the cupboard with the lemon-scented paper napkins in won't open.
5. Voila! You have caused slight delays. Osama bin Laden gives you a bronze star and a biscuit.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

wait for civilisation to fall and rise again to resupply lemon-scented paper napkins.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

take book into toilet. rip pages out. create realistic-looking papier mache gun with water from sink. threaten people.

anyway, it's all a plot to make you watch the in-flight entertainment and brainwash you!

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

How about a book of magic spells guaranteed to turn pilots, air marshals etc into frogs?

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Surely airliners have special frog-sized actuators in their cockpit for just such an occurance?

[nja.livejournal.com]

You impregnate the ink with uranium, and then once you are on board with all your martyrdom-bound friends, you rip up the books and put all the pages in a big pile, producing a critical mass of uranium, and the whole plane becomes a gigantic atomic bomb.

Or you could put ricin-producing bacteria in between the pages, and then when you're airborne you drip sugary drinks onto the book, encouraging the bacteria to breed and produce ricin. I don't really know what ricin is or what you'd do with it, but it seems to be essential for terrorist operations.

[nja.livejournal.com]

Bacteria don't breed, of course. Or is it still breeding when it's done asexually? I really don't think I'm cut out for biochemical terrorism, I didn't even do O-level biology.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

This was my first thought. OK, you could hide something inside, but couldn't the searchers just flick through?

But OTOH, do the properties "looking like paper" and "being highly nitrated" necessarily represent distinct polymers? I don't know enough about chemistry, but explosives come in different forms, maybe you could get one that looks like paper?

Of course, you might be able to soak your clothes and shoes in it anyway.

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

I used to have an old book on stage magic that included instructions on making "flash paper", an essential component in many tricks as it burns very rapidly with no residue. The instructions turned out to be "nitrate tissue paper", and we were making nitrocelulose. Alas, there wasn't any strong enough acids in my school's chemistry cupboard for it to work properly. :(

So yes, you can probably treat paper to be at the least highly flammable, and probably explosive with enough effort (a hardback book tightly shut with an ignitor and oxygen source would probably do).

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

Unprepared book - suffocate people by filling their mouths and noses with balled-up paper.

Or - make little paper balls and ping them at passengers until there's a full-scale, mid-air riot.

Prepared book - soak a couple of pages in LSD. Sneak the pages into the water-heater-thing for making tea and coffee.

[naranek.livejournal.com]

Soak the book in conc nitric until it becomes mostly nitrocellulose, then light it with a nitrogen triiodide (or similarly shock-sensitive) primer. How to get both components into the plane without blowing yourself up is left as an exercise for the reader :-).

[ironlord.livejournal.com]

Bzzaaaarrrrp! That won't work. You need a mixture of conc. nitric and conc. sulphuric acids.

Reason: nitric acid acts as a base (yes, you heard that right) and protonates from the sulphuric acid. Water leaves from the H₂NO₃⁺ produced, leaving the nitration electrophile NO₂⁺ which reacts with the hydroxyl groups in the paper. Nitric acid will not react with itself, so the sulphuric acid (or possibly something of equal strength such as triflic acid) needs to be present.

Et voilà - nitrocellulose.

[gerald_duck]

It might be a Qur'an, with which one could pray for Allah to strike the infidel.

Unpick the binding and replace it with cheesewire?

Print the book on Kevlar "paper" and use it to protect yourself from a sky marshall?

[classytart.livejournal.com]

Damn! That was my plan. Garroting wire as bindings.

[vatine]

Let me count the ways...

1. Nitrate the paper, apply heat source, make BIG FIRE
   
2. Hide ceramic shap edges in the spine; use these to creatively carve exotic art out of cabin crew
   
3. Soak book in nastyhorrible bacteria and/or virus, use plane as vector for bioterrorism
   
4. ...
   

Three, at least.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

A while ago, during the US crypto export thingy, there was a book on cryptography which was only exported in paperback because the hardback had "hard corners" which meant that it had to be carefully and expensively examined as to whether or not it was a weapon of war.

I suppose you could wear the book as primitive body armour whilst carrying out a teroristic deed? One of those big coffee table books would be best, I guess.

[naranek.livejournal.com]

It was `Applied Cryptography' by Bruce Schneier. Amusingly, I don't believe that the softback edition was never cleared for export ...

[camellia-uk.livejournal.com]

Ah but the question is, is there any of this stuff that couldn't also be done with, say, pieces of clothing?

I think you see the next obvious step... ;-)

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Then I hope they will either provide extra blankets or put the cabin temperature up a bit...although I suppose we could burn all those books to keep warm ;-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Unprepared book: Stuff the paper into air vents, preventing fresh air entering cabin; passengers and crew slowly suffocate. Use a light fitting to ignite the book, start a fire.

Chosen book: Read a particularly persuasive passage that converts others onboard to your cause. Variant: fill the book with such damning blackmail material on other passengers, or crew, that they would prefer to cooperate with your scheme than have it revealed.

[liadnan]

A la _Name of the Rose_, by dipping each page in an undetectable poison, with the added twist that on opening it the poison will emanate as a gas.

[reddragdiva]

You haven't even mentioned the explosive menstrual products they're restricting.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I favour the "nitrate it or otherwise make it very explosive/flammable" plan. Failing that, with a large spine you could hide some things in it if you were careful, like knife blades.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

And of course, it depends what you want to happen. If the airstaff don't know the ground staff consciensiously searched your book, you might be able to threaten them as if it contained high explosives, even if it doesn't, especially if you havea watch that goes beep.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

My first reaction was 'what no books?'. How on earth are you supposed to survive a flight without something to read? You'd be forced to talk to the person sitting next to you.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

My husband and I both read the article in some shock. It was only later that I mentioned that this means books would also be banned. When I mentioned it to him he gave me a look of absolute horror, and I would swear he also lost some color.

Shows how interesting my conversation must be ;-)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You'd have enough ammo to give the entire staff paper cuts all over their body. Intensely painful!

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

A friend (http://folk.livejournal.com/225793.html) suggests the possibility of hiding some kind of transmitter down the spine and pretending it's a RFID tag. He acknowledges that this is only part of what the tairists require.

[arron-shutt.livejournal.com]

Your last line triggered my official UK government anti-terrorism keyword tracking filter, and so here I am.

Books are extremely dangerous. It's a four stage process to the fall of everything that we've worked for here in the unCivil Scientific Service.

1. Read book.
2. Gain knowledge, leading to intelligent thought.
3. Realise that world could do with improvement. Attempt to work out how to make the world a better place.
4. Challenge status quo, leading to disbelief in the system, a catastrophic system crash of the Matrix and the end of your species.

The reason that we've spent so long dumbing down television with Big Brother and distracting people with lust, greed, anger, fear and an endless consumer society is to stop them from realising what they are and what they are doing.

Clever books are the key to unlock the mind, and as long as there is the threat of a key, then one must keep printing bilge like the Da Vinci code for people to lose themselves in. We may not be able to destroy intelligence, but the poison of realisation ceases to cause harm when you dilute it with a ocean of stupidity! :D

So keep buying Loaded, Nuts and Heat kids..it's for your own good. And ours too..