The rare Unabomber documents being kept hidden by a few zealots and rich people

The people with access to rare Unabomber documents

Ted K’s journals were bought at auction by a pretentious artist who gets paid a ton to display collections of ‘spectacle’.[1][2]

Julie Ault visited Benning in the mountains in 2005, where he offered her a recent reproduction of Kaczynski’s code. In 2011, she and Danh Vo were able to procure the actual code system made by Kaczynski for Benning so that he could study and decipher it, in return for making a copy of the code for each of them.

You had mentioned that you got access to Kaczynski’s journals when a friend of yours bought all of them in the auctions a few years ago. What was reading them like?

Yes, I met Danh Vo through Julie Ault, they both came down to Buenos Aires to see a number of my films that were at the festival there. He’s also visited me in the mountains a few times and when he heard that Julie and I wanted Kaczynski’s journals, he came up with the money and bid on them with a real commitment. At the same time he bought Kaczynski’s typewriter, and gave the journals to Julie. He said to me he was very interested in what I would make from them.

At a London art gallery Danh Vo and Julie Ault put on an exhibition which included a framed single sheet of paper with Ted’s codes on it, copied down by the filmmaker James Benning:[3]

So, after being bought at auction, the journals were being shared between this small group of artists.

And it’s obvious Julie corresponded regularly with Ted because Ted wrote a glowing acknowledgment to her in his latest book Anti-Tech Revolution:[4]

After Susan, the most important person in this project has been Dr. Julie Ault. Julie has read drafts of the various chapters and has called my attention to many weak points in the exposition. I’ve tried to correct these, though I haven’t been able to correct all of them to my (or, I assume, her) satisfaction. In addition, Julie has provided valuable advice on manuscript preparation. But most important of all has been the encouragement I’ve taken from the fact of having an intellectual heavyweight like Julie Ault on my side.

So, it’s highly likely that the journals are also shared between a small group of self-described ‘anti-tech revolutionaries’ like Ted K’s publishers Fitch and Madison.

The people trying to limit access to them further

In 2021, FBI scans of some of the journals were released for free online by California University.

These journals were then uploaded to this website. These journals include writings that Ted K fans would probably not like the public seeing.

One includes Ted planning to torture animals:[5]

“…I hadn’t previously been troubled by rats around here, but I just discovered that my pack has been chewed up so badly that it is nearly ruined, though I guess I can patch it up well enough to get my gear home…. This means some deadfalls are going to be set. I hope I catch one of those [expletive] alive—I will torture it to death in the most fiendish manner I can devise.”

Which he later admitted to ‘succeeding’ in doing to a bunch of animals including dogs and squirrels:[6][7][8]

“I tortured small wild animals (two mice, one flying squirrel, and one red squirrel, as far as I can remember offhand)”

“In such circumstances, it would be much easier and safer to simply kill the dog and get rid of a pest,”

“A bullet wound right in her rectum. A horrible way to kill an animal. So painful. A slow death caused by internal bleeding.”

Another includes Ted thinking about killing a 3 year old girl he was aiming at with his gun:[9]

“It would be easy to take the little bitch out. But then the big bitch could get away.”

The archive was then threatened with being taken down as two DMCA’s were sent to the server owners and domain provider, with a lawyer specializing in copyright law CC’d in.

Around the same time, some luddite ignoramus tried to bait who they thought the website owner was into revealing themselves, but when that failed, they just resorted to weak ass internet threats:

It’s obviously amusing to see a bunch of luddites opportunistically use copyright law to try and control how Ted’s work is distributed.

Even funnier is when it results in them eating their own, as happened with a die-hard Ted K fan who recorded a 6 hour audiobook of ‘Anti-Tech Revolution’ and then got rewarded with a DMCA, with no further explanation:

Finally, here’s an example of Jorge's ‘return to monkey’ posting on reddit of all places:

The rare Unabomber documents

The uncoded journals and notebooks

As discussed above, they’re extensive and are in the hands of zealots and wealthy private collectors:

The coded journals and notebooks

These coded documents and code keys produced by Kaczynski were decoded by the FBI and determined to contain many admissions and discussions of the UNABOM crimes.

A glimpse into the procedure:[10]

The first and more complex encryption system, Code # I, is written in a notebook that Kaczynski called Notebook X. Notebook X is composed as a dated journal containing plaintext journal entries intermixed with portions of ciphertext. This system utilizes numerous safeguards, including the use of intentional misspellings and encryption errors, meaningless punctuation, nonsense words, and Spanish and German text intermixed with English plaintext and ciphertext. Kaczynski also chose to omit and add word breaks at random and use nulls throughout his enciphered text.

Everything you’d need if you had the will and time to give it a go:

• Decoding Procedure by Ted Kaczynski

• Notebook X by Ted Kaczynski - a partially coded notebook

• The Unabomber’s Codes by David Oranchak - a video guide and transcript

• Kaczynski’s Ciphers by Jeanne Anderson - a written guide

Most of the decrypted messages from Notebook X were released by California University not long ago and are shown in the link above. But, there are still some number sequences included where if they have been decrypted, they haven’t been publicly released.

James Benning wrote a computer program to decrypt all the journals, but again didn’t release them publicly. He showed a sample of his code in his book Two Cabins.

I wonder also if the deciphering procedure could be demonstrated to work on a spreadsheet with various array formulas.

I'd also respect a cryptography university professor using the Unabomber's coding system to wake up bored maths students to the history of cryptography in counter-terrorism, war and revolution:[11]

This technique is basically a type of one time pad, which is a kind of cipher that is impossible to crack, if it's used properly, and the key (known as the pad) is kept secret.

Here’s an example of a one-time pad used by Communist spy in Japan in 1961. It looks similar to Kaczynski’s system.

Earlier drafts of the Manifesto

The novel research value of these documents being made public would be noticing Ted being more open about aspects to his philosophy posited in the manifesto in earlier drafts. For example he wrote somewhere that “he planned to have a section on natural selection and how evolution drives the development of technology. So there was a lot more to be written about the evolutionary underpinnings. Of his view of technology.”[12]

The interest for many political researchers would be simply noticing elemental similarities to minor trends within the mainstream environmental movement that it would be good to confront. Such as, the aging hippie misanthrope claiming that ‘nature is pure and tainted by humanity, so better off without us.’

One reason why Ted was likely hesitant to name all his political influences is also is that “he had sent letters (in his own name, without bombs) to the authors he admired, and he feared that citing them would provide leads for the FBI.”[13]

Also, just on an amusing sidenote, you can discover things like how that famous first line of the manifesto was almost an absolute clunker:

Letters sent from Ted’s cabin in Montana

Many letters were sold at auction to wealthy private collectors and never publicly released.

Interesting letters again for political researchers looking at trends in political movements today include:

• Ted’s letter to Jacques Ellul which I think showed he didn’t fully understand how Ellul’s arguments all tied together. As I think he read into the text what he wanted to be there and not what was actually written; “what’s interesting about the relationship between Kaczynski and Ellul is not just that Ellul influenced Kaczynski, but also that Ellul anticipated a lot of Kaczynski’s arguments and tried to pre-empt them. He anticipated that someone much like Kaczynski would eventually come along and try to use his arguments to justify a violent revolution against technology. He tried to head that off in advance.”[14]

• Ted’s Letter to Paul Kurtz on Determinism in which Ted was wrestling with his desire to ‘deprogram’ himself from his empathy for his fellow man whilst also desiring to believe there were demi-gods and spirits inhabiting the forest.

This strange mix of evolutionary determinism and panpsychism can be found in some of Ted’s followers today:[15][16]

I myself expect that the people who’ve lived with/in Nature and have spoken of hearing spirits are correct, and I expect I’d find the same if I didn’t live in a city. I’ll let you judge whether I’m animist or not.

It’s not about worshipping or replicating anyone; I think we need to start conceiving of Technology as... an entity pursuing its own goals, which are contrary to those of Earthlings and are incompatible with Nature. (What “God” refers to among Civilized people seems to be an anthropomorphized notion of Nature, and I suggest that Nature be understood as a pantheon of localized spirits/gods.) Primarily this is a strategic choice, but I’m open to it being actual reality.

If any animals operate on rationale primarily it is not our species; atheism isn’t working out that well, overall. Religious people have a lot of psychological advantages and benefits over those with no faith to lean on, and it is observable that purely rational argument and the standard POV of environmentalists is not motivating an adequate response to the Technology problem.

I think the simplicity of this “Nature:good, Tech:evil” understanding is helpful, it does not prevent a rational and well-reasoned understanding of the Technology problem or a logical response to it, and I think we need a ton more of that irrationally passionate defense of Nature (and hatred of Technology) such as religious people have for their gods (including tribal HGs who vigorously defended the lands where they lived with their gods).

Ted Kaczynski’s 1979 Autobiography

Eric Benson:[17]

[A]t age 37 he was back home with his parents in Chicago. After nearly a decade living in his cabin in the woods and it’s almost uncomfortably intimate. It feels more intimate than Ted’s journals themselves. He describes a teenage sexual encounter with another boy, talks about girls he lusts after and professors he hates. His own lifelong feelings of social inadequacy are everywhere, and this document Ted says there’s a particular reason he’s writing it, he’s going to start killing people, and if he’s captured or killed by the police, he wants people to find the document. Read his life story as he sees it.

Excepts from the autobiography have been archived here, using excerpts from an FBI document called A Review and Compilation of the Writings of Ted Kaczynski & the photo below from the auction where this text was sold into a private collection:

The final draft of Truth versus Lies

Eric Benson:[18]

It's 548 pages long, written during his first years as a prisoner. In it, Ted attempts to rebut nearly every claim made about him in the wake of his arrest, but he also spends nearly half the book over 200 pages writing about his relationship with his brother David. There's a chapter titled ‘My Brother’s Character', another called ‘My Brother's ambivalent feelings toward me’. There's even a chapter entitled ‘I hurt my brother's feelings cruelly’.

The original draft was archived on this website: Truth Versus Lies (Original Draft)

There's a few updates he asked for that got included in the context books final draft, but they also deleted parts out of libel and copyright fears: Truth versus Lies (Context Books Copy)

So in order to understand what his final draft vision was, it would just be a case of working out what parts are updates he wanted.

Someone could go through all his Context books correspondence to see where he requested updates, but either not all the letters were sent to the U. of Michigan and/or potentially the librarians mistakenly forgot to scan everything up when fulfilling scan requests, as people have compared the same item request and noticed they got back different length PDFs, so with pages missing: Context Books Correspondence

An example value for researchers would be highlighting the key life events that contributed to Ted’s violent tendencies, and events where he could have been stopped:[19][20]

Kaczynski showed a letter to his brother, parents and romantic interest that he planned ‘violence of a serious nature’ against the romantic interest who had broken off their romance, but no steps were taken to either get him help or report him. His journal entries later revealed that he brought a knife with him in a paper bag, to disfigure her face.

[W]e all walk around with naive assumptions that people we know well could never act in evil ways, if we're ever forced to come face to face with the fact that they are, we have this realization of the ways we were blind to being able to help those people.

Conclusion

Ted made his hardest working copywritist and researcher Susan Gale his copyright heir, so I doubt we'll see any of Ted's autobiographical writing published anytime soon. But, who knows, kooky ideologies like primitivism and neo-luddism have a high fall off rate. So, she might have an awakening to Ellul moment, like many former Kaczynski fans.

If we see technique as nothing but objects that can be useful (and we need to check whether they are indeed useful); and if we stop believing in technique for its own sake or that of society; and if we stop fearing technique, and treat it as one thing among many others, then we destroy the basis for the power technique has over humanity.

—Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work.

[1] untitled by Danh Vo

[2] Sympathy for the Unabomber by Allan MacInnis

[3] untitled by Danh Vo

[4] Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How by Ted Kaczynski

[5] Unabomber: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski by Chris Waits and Dave Shors

[6] Ted’s Notes on his Journals (Feb. 1996)

[7] Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber by Jamie Gehring

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Kaczynski’s Ciphers by Jeanne Anderson

[11] The Unabomber’s Codes by David Oranchak - a video guide and transcript

[12] The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism by Sean Fleming

[13] Kaczynski, Ellul, and the Future of Anti-Tech Radicalism with Sean Fleming

[14] Jorge Cluni reddit comment #1

[15] Jorge Cluni reddit comment #2

[16] Ibid.

[17] Project Unabom by Eric Benson.

[18] Ibid.

[19] The Ultimate Ted Kaczynski Research Document by Theo Slade

[20] Ibid.