Queens 'Tin Can' Anarchist Held One Pound of Liquid Mercury

Last Thursday F.B.I. agents searched the home of Elliot Madison of Queens. The search was part of a "text-message and Twitter" investigation surrounding the anarchist G-20 protests in Pittsburgh in September. As the New York Times reports:

The man, Elliot Madison, 41, a social worker who has described himself as an anarchist, had been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements.

This is an extremely interesting story. The police found a number of items during the search, including a photograph of Vladimir Lenin. Most troubling, according to the New York Post, police confiscated one pound of liquid mercury in Madison's home, as well as two boxes of ammunition. Other items, such as machetes, were considered outside of the scope of the warrant and not seized.

It turns out that Madison was working for Tin Can Comms Collective, an anarchist cell with a self-proclaimed mission to destroy the state. According the their website:

Tin Can Comms Collective is a collection of communication rebels seeking to provide useful free tools for activists fighting the State and Capitalism. We are an anarchist group that has come together to help with the communication infrastructure for the the Anti-G-20 protests this September in Pittsburgh, because: People and Information want to be Free!

Also, the Socialist Webzine explains what went down during the events, "G20 Riots in Pittsburgh – How I organized Them Via Twitter." The author of that post writes at his own website, No-State.com. Here's his bio:

I renounced my American citizenship in protest of what has become an American Empire, a nation that I see riding an express train to police state dictatorship with flags flying, anthems blaring and deluded, complicit masses cheering it along the track. Hopefully, others will be motivated to do the same by my example, though I recognize inertia as the most powerful force in human affairs.

My political philosophy — which could be variously termed anarchism, anarcho-capitalism or individualist anarchism — informs this decision, but it is my disgust over what America has become — in bloody, murderous, thieving contrast to what it professes — which motivates it.

The guy has also written:

Where there are those who are subjugated beneath the boot heel of power, by “democratic” means or otherwise, I shall support their resistance, their condemnation, their denunciation and their renunciation.

All this helps put the significance of the Queens raid in perspective. Liquid mercury is used in bomb construction. It is used in ignition switches and electrical contact triggers for explosive devices. In some bombs liquid mercury serves as a detonator for motion-activated explosions -- that is, should someone touch and move a suspicious package, the movement would cause the mercury to complete the electical charge and the bomb would explode. This is why explosive devices must be defused without being moved.

It's easy to see why police were alarmed by the discovery. Madison's home is a terrorist supply depot for the anarcho-communists organizing campaigns against "state power." It remains to be seen how large the movement becomes. The Tin Can Comms Collective was first organized for Republican National Convention in 2004, but the anarchists have been holding massive demonstrations since the Seattle anti-globalization violence in 1999.

Firedoglake writes a post in defense of the G-20 anarcho-text-messaging systems as a matter of free speech. Of course, that's to be expected from one of the more hardline blogs of the radical netroots. Like the anarchists, "Hammering" Jane Hamsher's gang is out to destroy America.