Trying to retrieve the _Handbook_ some weeks later, I read the following: “Are you sure this resource exists?” Cute. The heat is on. _Handbook_-style items caught the attention of the U.S. Senate after sickos blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 160 people. The response in effect was: “Ban the bomb manuals—from the Net and otherwise!” and as of this writing, it looked as if such sentiments might end up as law. Still, a little problem arose in the case of _The Terrorist’s Handbook_ on the Net. The material was coming to me from Lysator, a respected academic computer society at Linköping University in Linköping, _Sweden_. Last I knew, the U.S. Senate did not enjoy jurisdiction over its counterparts in Stockholm. The Swedish computer that stored _The Terrorist’s Handbook_, however, contains megabyte after megabyte of valuable material on computing and other subjects, and the electronic librarians didn’t want to anger the university. So out of prudence, they voluntarily removed the bomb manual after hysterical stories appeared in the press. The _Handbook_ wasn’t worth the fuss. Perhaps in other cases Washington will use diplomacy with other countries to unplug _Handbook_-style items. But no one should count on this approach working in the end. Inevitably the same material will be secretly making the rounds of obscure electronic bulletin board systems, as opposed to the Net itself. As if that isn’t enough, Washington has unwittingly given out instructions for bomb-makers by way of the tax-financed _Blaster’s Handbook_ from the Forestry Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even _The Encyclopedia Britannica_ has printed material on explosive making. Most disturbing of all, Constitutional issues arise here. We don’t need the government to restrain free speech. As writer Brock N. Meeks wrote in his _CyberWire Dispatch_ newsletter, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal was “a break in the dike.” It was “the trickle that could become a river of regulatory hammers meant to turn the rough-and-tumble, open and free-flowing online discourse into something with all the appeal and intellectual acumen of tofu.” Newsgroups are a bit like local bulletin board systems except that some newsgroups reach hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Mailing lists are more intimate than newsgroups since you usually need to sign up for them electronically before you receive the messages. “The funny thing,” Harmon says of freshly created mailing lists, “is that you never know what will result. What I found was that most depressed people couldn’t produce that much art and mysticism, but they were interested in supporting each other, and I looked at that and let it go on its own.”