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Unabomber Property Up For Creepy Online Auction 109

Posted by samzenpus from the own-a-piece-of-crazy dept.
coondoggie writes "Ok this is kind of creepy. The US Marshalls Office today said it will hold an online auction of the personal effects of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The auction will run until June 2 and will include personal documents, such as driver's licenses, birth certificates, deeds, checks, academic transcripts, photos, and his handwritten codes; typewriters; tools; clothing; watches; several hundred books; and more than 20,000 pages of written documents, including the original handwritten and typewritten versions of the 'Unabom Manifesto.'"
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Unabomber Property Up For Creepy Online Auction More

Unabomber Property Up For Creepy Online Auction

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  • Not creepy but smart, (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Identifying people who are interested in this stuff is good, getting them to pay money to identify themselves is genius.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Stupid question, but... will Unabomber fans be sending their payment in by mail?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by repka ( 1102731 )

      Free registration in nationwide creeps database included!

  • "We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his various manifestos to sell artifacts of his life. [...]" said U.S. Marshal Albert Nájera of the Eastern District of California in a statement.

    • Re:In your face (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday May 27, 2011 @01:15PM (#36264886) Journal
      I'm certain that watching the state sneeringly auction off his personal effects on the internet from his cage for the amusement of the crowd will serve as a devastating rebuke to his thesis that technology inevitably tightens its grip on the individual and drives them to ever shallower and more inauthentic attempts at activity.

      I find the guy's terrorist activities deeply distasteful, and he certainly deserves to rot in jail for them; but as a theorist of the sociology of technological advance, he is actually pretty underrated...

      • I like your irony there. However, it's ok to laugh at some people in cages. ;)

      • Your words make sense, but when you criticise His actions you indeed support the system (which is bad) by not committing yourself to a serious position against the bad,horrible system (because you can just brush that aside for the sake of some leftist ideal like how everyone deserves to live (like glen beck)). You can't separate the good from the bad -- unless, of course, you want to get laid and get paid. The system will appreciate such weakness. The system appreciates the same weakness in the women,child

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by blair1q ( 305137 )

        Dude didn't think that throwing bombs was an inauthentic attempt at political speech enabled by technology?

        Or was his point that we should regress even beyond the invention of explosives, or maybe fire?

        Dude was a nutter. Nothing he said is credible, no matter how closely it might randomly match sapient expression.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Hazel Bergeron ( 2015538 )

      "If we urinate on the Koran, it makes us more right," said US Marshal Albert Nájera of the Eastern District of California in a statement.

  • So what's the deal? He was hoarding Halloween decorations and stuff too?

  • No bombs? At least plans?
  • History Channel should start running "American Pickers" and "Pawn Stars" episodes on murderer paraphernalia. Maybe do an episode on the auction from Bin Laden's TV, shawl and porn stash. Lee Harvey O's toybox. Eventually, America's supply side could glut the market.
    • I think the History Channel should do away with "American Pickers"...and "Pawn Stars" and all the other pawn shows as well as "ice Road Truckers", "Axe Men" and "Swamp People". The later three have absolutely nothing to do with History anyway.

  • Montana Property (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ISoldat53 ( 977164 ) on Friday May 27, 2011 @01:32PM (#36265094)
    Too bad the Montana property isn't included. It's in a pretty part of the state.

  • ...too bad CNN has been crying about the Kacynkski auction for 2 WEEKS now.

    Not only behind... 2 weeks behind.

    • Only two weeks behind? That's not bad for Slashdot. We've had stories posted based off blog postings that have been anywhere from 6 months to more than a year old by the time it hit Slashdot.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ari_j ( 90255 )

      ...too bad CNN has been crying about the Kacynkski auction for 2 WEEKS now.

      Not only behind... 2 weeks behind.

      The editors had to wait until someone blogged about it and then submitted his own blog article to the site.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by blair1q ( 305137 )

      all it takes is for enough ignorami to click the + button in the firehose. and there are a LOT of ignorami on /.

  • Psychological Experiments (Score:4, Interesting)

    by waterford0069 ( 580760 ) on Friday May 27, 2011 @01:43PM (#36265214) Homepage
    What's sad about this is that Kaczynski was the subject of what I'll argue were some pretty wicked and unethical psychological experiments when he was in school - long before he ever became a danger to the world. Some have suggested that these experiments pushed him over the edge.
  • When did it become legal to auction of the property of convicted criminals? I understand we lost this right in drug cases, but terrorism now too?

    • What "right" are you talking about?

      Isn't the auction to pay off a very very tiny fraction of the damage he has done to his victims? (e.g. medical bills for the survivors)

      • I honestly don't know, hence the question. From what I can tell in the article, no rational for the auction of his personal property has been given. Was there also a civil trial that found him responsible for medical bills and such for the survivors?
  • I want the hoodie and cop sunglasses from the famous police sketch.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by blair1q ( 305137 )

      don't recall seeing the hoodie (i browed the site a few weeks ago) but there were definitely several pairs of aviator sunglasses

  • All buyers placed on theorist watch list.

  • Just buy this terrorist's effects...

    ...We promise that we will not add you to a watch list, and that they contain no tracking devices.

  • most should have been donated (Score:3)

    by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Friday May 27, 2011 @02:00PM (#36265398)
    Most of these things should have been donated to psychology or criminology school, or similar scholastic endeavor.

    • There's no shortage of psychos and crazies. What made Kaczinsky interesting was that he was a very smart psycho -- but even then, there are lots of those. All the interesting stuff he wrote is public record because it was used as evidence during the trial and published in the court proceedings. Ideally they'd sell all the stuff and use the proceeds to help repay medical costs/give disability benefits to the people he injured, but more likely they're going to use it to indirectly defray some of the cost o

      • While the trial transcripts are freely available, the totality of the evidence would be hard to see without paying money. I have a solution for the ongoing cost of his incarceration, that costs less than 20 cents and makes a loud popping noise.

      • A question was whether he really was crazy or not. Sure he's a criminal, but you don't have to be insane to kill people. Society doesn't like this though and is afraid of the idea of these awful acts like this being performed by rational people. Thus the quickly applied label of insanity, only a madman could act that way. So Oswald is insane, and McVeigh, and Kaczynski, and Osama.

        The interesting thing about Kaczynski is that his writings are written very intelligently and rationally, no matter how much

      • there is a shortage of the ability to quickly identify and arrest those with ASPD who are harming others
    • The proceeds from the auction are being donated to the families of the victims of the bombs to help pay the court ordered restitution that was initially handed down as part of Kaczynski's sentence. That's a pretty good cause I think, many of his victims had permanent damage that probably required a lot of time, pain, and money to undo, and even then only partially.

  • Instead of giving such criminals a name (or worse, a nickname), it's time we start referring to them as "Moron # (sequential number)" and generally not giving them the attention they crave. No more notoriety!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The thing is, Moron #2202674, someone already thought of that.

  • To be honest, some of that stuff is creepy, but his written documents? That's cool, if i could get my hands on them that would be sweet. I love psychology of crazy humans. It's something very intriguing and interesting. Knowing how they function. I'm guessing people like me would buy such documents, and use it to identify other people who might try to do something similar. It is pretty freaky that they are selling his birth certificate

  • Ok, quick question.

    Why are the US Martials auctioning off his property? Doesn't it belong to his estate?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by devjoe ( 88696 )
      His estate? He's not dead. He's still in prison. If you'd been watching the news recently you would have seen that they are now investigating him for the still unsolved 1982 Tylenol murders, and they asked him to submit a DNA sample for this investigation but he refused. (They may seek a court order to compel him to provide the DNA sample.) The auction is occurring because he's been ordered by the court to pay restitution to the families of the victims. The court judgement occurred in 2006. [sfgate.com] Ever since then
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Some people here are saying Kaczynski is not psychologically competent. At the trial he was found to be competent by the government psychiatrist, if he were not found so he would not be in jail but a mental institution. Not that psychology is a real study outside of the biological portion (and a very small subset of social scientific experiments) anyhow.

    Everybody who doesn't agree with the dominant power structure in the US, imperialistic capitalism, and the culture around it, is ultimately "insane". Sa

  • Not so much for itself, as for a font I would like to offer to the world for filling in any IRS forms.

    Hmm. Perhaps someone has already done this, based on published exemplars?

    timothy

  • The violence can not be discounted or ignored but this man did have some very valid concerns and had a certain value to society. At the very least we can agree that he consumed very few resources in his personal life and we must admire that part of him.
    This is another individual that may need confinement but should be given study tools and allowed to progress as best he can in his mental activities. He might be able to teach us

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