Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Arrested for ordering a chemical

Arrested for ordering a chemical

Fantasma4500 - 13-4-2014 at 07:34

ill try to keep it short.
ordered 1kg NH4NO3 over polish site named strzaly
after the entire norway thing my countrys NSA so to call them reported that i bought 1kg NH4NO3
1:20 past midnight i got a call, got told by a cop to go outside my door and hold my hands infront of myself above my head, he assured me it was just a talk with one police officer
guess wat
7 guys dressed in full pitch black tactical gear, 3 submachineguns, pistols, blast proof shields, a anxious dog, lasers and red dot sights
''get down on the floor''
8 hours later i was released after they had also gone through my place, deciding to confiscate my computer(s)

but... the package never arrived.. it was just an order.. i dont know if it is anywhere near ok to without any physical proof to arrest a person?!

ofcourse they are digging with eternal effort in my computer to find SOMETHING criminal appart from the mails (which are on the internet?) to prove that i bought the kg

but even that, confiscating my computer to look for something that is not there..

i never really liked police by any means, its like they just do whatever they want because they have fully automatic guns, basically demonizing me trying to get me thrown in jail without any reason, only suspicion and hypocritical assumptions on what that one kg could potentially be used for!

i would however like to thank the entire team for deciding to take my computers from me at the time where i have 13 satanic school projects to write in which i will have to drop high school if i done deliver them within short time

take it all like an experience, but dont ... dont order ammonium nitrate from poland if you live in scandinavian countries

just consider tannerite, do i even need to say more?

Zyklon-A - 13-4-2014 at 07:40

Un-fucking believable! That's absolutely crazy, ammonium nitrate? What a shame, I can't believe they'd be that stupid.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 13-4-2014 at 08:31

Sounds like you got hit hard by the new-ish EU regulations. I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunate that they took your computers; those of course were not hazardous and I assume they already had records of the sale. Hopefully they'll return them after finding no master plan to bomb buildings. Best of luck to you.

Mildronate - 13-4-2014 at 08:54

wtf? in EU you can buy amoniumnitrate in garden shop

Etaoin Shrdlu - 13-4-2014 at 09:45

It's cut, probably? Unless something changed I don't know about.

GoldGuy - 13-4-2014 at 14:10

Wow! They saw that you were young and wanted to show you a lesson you wont soon forget. A kg of ammonium nitrate?? There are so many peaceful uses for that. Guess who will probably never step foot in the European Unionm after reading this thread?

O Canada, true north strong and free,
O Canada we stand on guard for thee!

Chemosynthesis - 13-4-2014 at 14:30

Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu

Sounds like you got hit hard by the new-ish EU regulations. I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunate that they took your computers; those of course were not hazardous and I assume they already had records of the sale. Hopefully they'll return them after finding no master plan to bomb buildings. Best of luck to you.

A raid not related to chemistry, but eerily similar in post-warrant-evidence-gathering methodology:

Wayne Chiang was raided after VA tech presumably due to being Asian, having just broken up with his girlfriend, and being a VA tech alumn (as the shooter was, except a current student), and an FFL, after news reports falsely identified him as a school shooter.

The FBI raided his home, took his computers, and left his firearms. Why raid in the first place in that instance is beyond me, and the settlement appears to vindicate my confusion. Further, why leave firearms at the house of someone you believe to be a danger, yet confiscate the computer...? He can't discuss the circumstances, due to an out of court settlement, but I kept track of the situation as it developed.

Antiswat, you did mention confiscation of anything other than your computer. Was your computer the only item taken? I would not discuss any of your involvement, but merely report on the police action to avoid giving any sort of self-incrimination. They should undoubtedly know who you are here and be watching. If you were in the wrong, they need to just do their jobs and catch you legally. No reason to accidentally give them any ammunition when you're innocent of crime or ill intent.

phlogiston - 13-4-2014 at 14:30

That is sad. It sounds like they are clueless what they should be looking for and you paid the price for that.

I do hope very much for everyones sake that they'll educate themselves in this area because it seems unlikely to me they are going to catch the real big bad terrorist this way, rather than annoying and pestering innocent people.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 13-4-2014 at 14:42

Quote: Originally posted by Chemosynthesis

Wayne Chiang was raided after VA tech presumably due to being Asian, having just broken up with his girlfriend, and being a VA tech alumn (as the shooter was, except a current student), and an FFL, after news reports falsely identified him as a school shooter.

The FBI raided his home, took his computers, and left his firearms. Why raid in the first place in that instance is beyond me, and the settlement appears to vindicate my confusion. Further, why leave firearms at the house of someone you believe to be a danger, yet confiscate the computer...? He can't discuss the circumstances, due to an out of court settlement, but I kept track of the situation as it developed.

That's just sad. The way LE officials tend to target computers confuses the heck out of me. I can see looking for an offline manifesto or plan of attack, but why on earth leave actual weapons in that case? I'm glad to hear he got his settlement.

The speed with which false accusations travel nowadays is pretty scary as well. I recall similar things happening after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Bert - 13-4-2014 at 15:01

I am a bit curious as to how he's accessing the net to post this?

It's up to each of us to know our local laws, ignorance isn't a defense ANYWHERE.

AFAIK, you can buy Calcium Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer, not pure AN without questions or record keeping in EU and the USA. It's hygroscopic, deliberately made quite difficult to refine for pure AN and nearly useless in ANFO type mixtures. Anyone who's resourceful and has had a decent exposure to chemistry and physics could still use it for everything from low explosives to nitric acid and high explosives syntheses though.

You can buy small (less than 50 lb.) quantities of pure AN in the the USA still, at the federal level.

At the state or local government level in USA, you'd better do your own legal research- And if you draw official attention, be ready for a long and expensive process even if you are legal & correct.

thesmug - 13-4-2014 at 15:09

The article lists fertilizers containing less than 16% nitrogen. Since ammonium nitrate is 22% nitrogen, you could buy the same amount of ammonium nitrate with a bit of some non nitrogen-containing ingredient added

jock88 - 13-4-2014 at 15:39

read up on your stocieometery thesmug (i'll read up on me spelen)

thesmug - 13-4-2014 at 15:44

I mean molecularly, there are 5 atoms in the ammonium ion, 1 of which is nitrogen, and 4 atoms in the nitrate ion, 1 of which is also nitrogen. In total that gives 9 atoms, 2 of which are nitrogen. 2/9 is 0.22repeating, meaning 22.22repeating% nitrogen.

[Edited on 4/13/14 by thesmug]

Etaoin Shrdlu - 13-4-2014 at 16:09

The percentage is by mass, actually. So 35% nitrogen. But yes, you could get it cut with something else.

Zyklon-A - 13-4-2014 at 16:12

You should read up on your stoichiometry jock88, and your spelen!

thesmug - 13-4-2014 at 16:25

Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu

The percentage is by mass, actually. So 35% nitrogen. But yes, you could get it cut with something else.

Oh, well then nevermind! It would still be pretty easy to bypass. I guarantee you somebody's going to try exactly this.

hyfalcon - 13-4-2014 at 16:58

Ammonium sulfate works wonders for removing the calcium.

I've tried using this for some target practice and it works, just not quite as good.

[Edited on 14-4-2014 by hyfalcon]

Bert - 13-4-2014 at 19:08

I have blueberry bushes, they need a high nitrogen acidifying fertilizer. Ammonium sulfate provides both high N and a good soil acidifying effect, it makes them THRIVE!

I've also got apples, plums, cherries, apricot, even a really winter hardy peach tree. They do quite well with a good dose of Calcium nitrate fertilizer at regular intervals.

I never buy ammonium nitrate fertilizer, just don't need to.

hyfalcon - 14-4-2014 at 15:30

It's really hard to beat for heavy feeders like dent corn. Tobacco growers still need it also.

Fantasma4500 - 15-4-2014 at 07:11

well calcium nitrate is available if you can find supplier, and yeah AN is illegal to buy where i live or posess, however i know people who have 200kg standing around and they arent even farmers
farmers? 500 tonnes straight ammonium nitrate

even heard one of them used massive amounts of 95% H2SO4 to clean some tanks out to remove the stench from it

anyhow i got to loan a computer from my school

but ammonium nitrate.. go to croatia and you can buy 99% nitromethane for 2 euro per litre perhaps even less, and 25kg fertilizer for 10 euro, being 18kg relatively pure AN after simply filtering off CaCO3 etc

but yes.. indeed.. its all so messed up these days.. however the anti terror .. 'watchers'? took some rather interesting picture however.. ebay.co.uk -- commented on something with pyro grade aluminium, they were sure i bought it, never did.. i just commented as a reply to some nutcase who implied that aluminium itself is an explosive and was referring to 9/11 and beyond

not to mention they still dont know where my hat is

they are today desperate to get people thrown in jails, and if they fail to do so they get angry and sad, even on television shows where you follow the cops around when they find some guy and they cant arrest him.. guess what
sad music starts playing, violins and all that, then abit of zooming in on the sad officers face and his explanations on why he wasnt able to arrest this random guy

actually potassium nitrate can be bought legally
combine that with super cheap 'tower acid' 50% H2SO4 bought by the kg for acidifying pools and a ultra simple destillation setup plus cheap and pure 25% NH4OH and you got plenty of NH4NO3

anyhow -- the reason for buying AN i have plenty of reason for.. i collect stuff and in chemistry there are so many pretty things to collect, and so many useful chemicals to stock up on, ammonia being one of the most useful and with most interesting properties in the inorganic section -- if you ask me

they will go through my entire HDD although they have no reason to do so at all, its all online, there is nothing about orders on my HDD ''fishing'' my lawyer called it
even tho they have nothing to put me up on they can still apparently take all my stuff until i have been proven to be innocent although in this country it is per law 'doubt comes handy for the suspect'

in other words .. done ever come to denmark, possibly the least chemist friendly country of all, perhaps topped or sided by germany where people have been raided for ordering copper sulfate

Praxichys - 16-4-2014 at 11:27

Well... It probably doesn't help that your name is "Antiswat" and that you post most often in the EM subforum. Hopefully that had nothing to do with the raid.

GoldGuy - 17-4-2014 at 12:23

Well if his password to get logged into this site is also something that could be considered potentially threatening it wouldn't help. You have to be very smart these days. They look at usernames and passwords when profiling.

Fantasma4500 - 17-4-2014 at 21:55

ahah.. the name is not something i came up with after i got interest in chemistry
probably +12 years since i first used that

asides.. if i was to use compounds and salts for such purposes i wouldnt have copper carbonate and lithium salts laying around.. that kind usually only buys exactly what would be needed and nothing else.. think i have more different chemicals than my school does by now

woelen - 17-4-2014 at 23:02

This indeed may help you in your case. Years ago I read about a similar case of someone in the USA who was raided, because he had ordered chemicals which can be used for making drugs (IIRC he ordered I2 and some organic solvents). When they came to his house they found quite a few other chemicals, well-labeled, nothing drug-related in a clean environment and then they were convinced that this is a science type of person and no cook. Maybe the same is true for you.

I, however, would never order something from a shop like Strzaly, see this thread:

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=25034#...

I actually am surprised to see that it is not yet taken down. The site also has changed a little since last summer, I remember that at that time it had anarchy signs and texts like "terrorist's needs" on the web page. It was looking extremely kewlish or even plain wrong!

wow!

popi - 18-4-2014 at 15:10

Thanks for the post .I am in Canada and we are pretty liberal here with our laws.But a few years ago I went to a Rona or Home Depo and asked for a little of A N,and was shocked when they nearly phoned the man on me and asked what for.I said I grow crops as a farmer ,ya know corn,soya bean ,pot etc..I split quit and have never mentioned that name again.It's used alot here as shake n bake...They freaked at not a kilo but just a couple hundred grams!

kmno4 - 19-4-2014 at 08:56

Quote: Originally posted by Antiswat

ordered 1kg NH4NO3 over polish site named strzaly
....dont order ammonium nitrate from poland if you live in scandinavian countries

Sory, but you behaved like an idiot.

foreign NH4NO3 + scandinavian countries = another Breivik
1 kg of NH4NO3 was a sample, next order would be 1000 kg....

So hard to anticipate it ?

Quote:

All official companies selling such things in Poland are monitored by Polish "security services"

BTW:

Quote: Originally posted by woelen

I, however, would never order something from a shop like Strzaly, see this thread:

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=25034#...

Woelen, just simply fuck off strzały. I understand that you wanted to order something from there but you did not succeed and you do not like them very much.

Fantasma4500 - 26-4-2014 at 11:07

yes woelen, i was abit worried if they would see those signs, and very luckily its now changed..

popi.. AN for shake and bake?? shows how little i know about meth synthesis.. lol

kmno4: yes i indeed felt the risk and decided to pull it, that price is literally less than sugar in my own country
i shall not interlude in you guys internal friction however..

woelen - 28-4-2014 at 01:35

@kmno4: A site like Strzały's is bad for the hobby of pyrotechnics and also for the hobby of general home chemistry. It has improved, however, a little bit, but still I would be very reluctant to order something from them if I wanted some of these chemicals. I expect a seller of chemicals to have a certain professional appearance and not to look like k3wl's heaven. Compare it with e.g. pyrogarage.pl or Keten's site, then you certainly understand what I mean. From the latter two I have ordered some chemicals (Keten has quite a few less common things like P2S3 and pyrogarage has very affordable metal powders and metal compounds).

Illusionist - 4-5-2014 at 12:10

Did you get the computer back, or at least asked for a copy of your data so you could finish school?

Being parano on computer security, i am pretty sure they are taking their time to install key-loggers and all sort of crap spy-ware in your pc. I would not trust a computer that spent more than 60 seconds in the hands of those specialists as they might change things directly on the hardware.

I guess that someone with a full disk encryption hardened linux cluster would be even more suspicious for them.

I Hope you can get over all that hassle soon.

aga - 21-5-2014 at 13:54

Quote:

someone you believe to be a danger, yet confiscate the computer...?

Computer records can be used as Evidence, so it's standard practice to steal your computer if you get investigated for anything other than jaywalking.

Law Enforcement is really hard these days, so what is required is Hard (drive) Evidence.

Refinery - 29-5-2014 at 01:19

Everything's up to computers nowadays so it's a standard practice to seize computer.

I got raided times ago for similar order and got my computers seized. I had FDE in use though so they couldn't get anything out from them, and as a revenge they kept them for several months and threatened this and that. I told them that I was a decent chemistry hobbyist and explained some simple experiments I was conducting and eventually they dropped the case and returned all the stuff. But they came in force, the setup was at least twice as large as Antiswat's, and those boys didn't bother to knock.

This is why I buy my chems OTC and nowadays my hobby concentrates mostly around the question: how complicated stuff can one make from OTC? Ammonium nitrate is sold everywhere, although it's very cut, containing mostly 30-50% max and EU limits the max content of ammonium nitrate nitrogen to 16% for consumers, this limit does not apply for companies. OTC AN contains other crap like sulfates it must be purified, but a proper chemist does this like no tomorrow..

Fantasma4500 - 25-6-2014 at 10:18

sulfates?? i thought its still in belgium and south europe just regular KAS
i know that you can in croatia buy 25kg where 18kg of that will be AN, at least, so supposing those 25kg is standard 80 20 AN CaCO3 would make sense, only 2kg lost AN purifying it
price about 10 euro for 25 kg.. totally blowing my mind

they didnt know on my door because they were entirely sure my door was one big bomb, not making this up
think they asked me +10 times whether i set up any booby traps etc

anyhow in 1.5 months we'll see what this ends up with or well.. one month now
if i get the main computer back ill sell it to someone, one week old when it was taken and i have gotten a new one in the meantime, but the hardware would be on the HDD anyways wouldnt it?? hard discs arent that expensive

also.. i found one of their police scanners, expensive thing.. we looked brand and model up
not sure how the hell they managed to drop that thing outside while searching for terrorisms
finders keep..

woelen - 25-6-2014 at 23:15

KAS (Kalk Ammon Salpeter, which is pure NH4NO3, mixed with magnesium carbonate and/or calcium carbonate and/or magnesium oxide) is not available anymore for the general public. There is a replacement. It is an intimate mix of 50% NH4NO3 and 50% (NH4)2SO4. Optionally, magnesium carbonate, calcium carbonate or magnesium oxide may be mixed in, but these can easily be removed by adding the fertilizer to water and then leaching out. In some brands you can even manually separate the prills, white prills for the ammonium sulfate/nitrate mix and grey prills for the carbonates. Separating the ammonium sulfate and nitrate, however, is not trivial.

This new fertilizer is not interesting anymore for its anionic content, but still it is a great cheap source of ammonia gas. Mixing the ammonium sulfate/nitrate mix with NaOH and adding a few drops of water results in formation of a lot of ammonia gas.

The nitrogen contents of these fertilizers is appr. 25 in the N-P-K rating, or somewhat lower if the Ca-salts or Mg-salts are mixed in.

Burner - 27-6-2014 at 05:35

Quote: Originally posted by woelen

Separating the ammonium sulfate and nitrate, however, is not trivial.

Couldn't you just use some agricultural calcium nitrate to make quick work of the sulfate and turn the whole mix into ammonium nitrate?

woelen - 27-6-2014 at 06:39

Where I live, calcium nitrate is not that easy to obtain, calcium fertilizers are based on calcium carbonate over here, usually mixed with other soluble fertilizer-components. And besides that, you first need to know the precise composition of the ammonium sulfate/ammonium nitrate mix.

The idea is nice though, if you have calcium nitrate or can obtain that easily, then this is an option to get reasonably pure ammonium nitrate.

Burner - 27-6-2014 at 07:38

A small scale titration of the sulphate/nitrate mix with the calcium nitrate (until no cloudiness from the calcium sulfate is observed) would get you pretty close.

BTW, even Ebay has calcium nitrate (http://www.ebay.com/itm/25-Pounds-Calcium-Nitrate-Calcinit-W...) for about 1USD/pound delivered.

[Edited on 27-6-2014 by Burner]

woelen - 28-6-2014 at 12:10

That link is meaningless in the context of this thread. It is in the USA and they do not ship to Europe. In Europe we have certain chemicals which are hard to get, while they are easy to obtain in the USA. On the other hand, over here other chemicals are easier to get (e.g. iodine, red P). It is just a matter of what governments fear most.