The Anarchists' Cookbook, like the many widely available CIA sabotage manuals (an illustrated version was distributed to civilians in Nicaragua during the 1980s), contains recipes for making explosives. The book has been out of mainstream circulation for years. But in the UK, a 17 year was caught with a copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook in his possession. He's now been charged as a terrorist.

The boy wasn't charged with attempting to carry out an act of terrorism, or even plotting an act of terrorism. He was charged because he had a book. Obviously the wrong book. But a book, all the same.

Philip K Dick's concept of pre-crime - arresting someone before they even attempt to break the law - is now a rock solid reality in the UK, the US and Australia, thanks to the vaguely defined sprawl of anti-terror laws.

Good thing the 'War on Terror' has managed to preserve so many of our rights to free speech and free expression, otherwise it might look like the terrorists are winning by changing the undermining the foundations of our free societies.

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Presumably World War I and World War 2 memoirs and histories, where veterans recount how they fashioned makeshift bombs from scratch to blow up train lines or to take out tanks, will be the next books to make you a criminal for simply owning them.

They don't need to burn books this time around, they just arrest you for reading them instead.

From BBC :

Read that line again : "possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism."

Like a Rambo movie? Like a book about the Irgun, the Jewish terrorists who massacred hundreds in Palestine in the late 1930s and 1940s? Like the classic Australian Henry Lawson short story, the Loaded Dog, which explains in great detail how to make a bomb powerful enough to kill dozens?

The UK law under which the 17 year old has been charged doesn't even specify explosives, books or manuals. Merely information.

Possession of information with which you could prepare for, but not necessarily plan, an act of terrorism is a crime in the UK. That may well mean you don't even need to have the information in book or paper or DVD form. You can possess information simply by storing it in the memory banks of your head.

But who determines what information is safe and which is dangerous to possess? Does the public get a say in the setting of parameters for 'dangerous' information?

Pre-crime and thought crimes. These things which Philip K Dick wrote about as science fiction only a few decades ago are now reality.

Don't you feel safer already?