14 DAY TRIAL // It's hard to believe, but New Zealanders are the most likely to search for bomb making recipes on the Internet, in the whole world. That's what a leading counter-terrorism expert said at a security conference in Sydney yesterday.
They use the most popular internet search engine, Google, to learn how to make various explosive devices. Nicholas O'Brien, a former Scotland Yard terrorism expert, now working at the Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, analyzed data provided by Google, on its internet statistics web page.
Recipes for making bombs are not so hard to find, although the most common search used by New Zealanders, "make bomb," is not so effective at first glance, since most website owners know it's illegal to publish a recipe for making a bomb, but some people are using clever disguises to mask the content of their postings.
New Plymouth and Auckland recorded the highest volume of per capita hits for the search term, shows Google trend, followed by Australian cities like Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne.
The surprising statistics seems to contradict military analysts, who claim that the regions most prone to terrorism activities are the Middle East and some of the former Soviet republics.
Recently, CNN announced that al-Qaeda distributed a videotape over the internet, on which an instructor provides step-by-step lessons on how to construct pure TNT and bomb components from common household ingredients, including instructions on manufacturing detonators and fuses.
The three-hour training session was hidden inside an action movie videotape, so it wasn't so easy to find using the basic "make bomb" keywords. But this doesn't mean that this kind of applications is impossible to find, if one has enough patience and time by his/her side.
It's not clear from the statistics if the New Zealanders were really trying to build a bomb for terrorist activities, or if they were just bored with being so far from all the action, since the country has no significant records of terrorist activities within its borders.