Criminal Minds - The Complete First Season

The first mail bomb was sent in late May 1978 to Prof. Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. The package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with Prof. Crist's return address (and a send to address of Prof. E.J. Smith at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state). The package was sent 'back' to Crist. Suspicious of a package he never sent, Crist notified campus police. A campus police officer by the name of Terry Marker opened the package, and it exploded; Marker sustained minor injuries.

The initial 1978 bombing was followed by bombs to airline officials and in 1979 there was a bomb placed in the cargo hold of a commercial airplane. The bomb began smoking and the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing. Many of the passengers were treated for smoke inhalation. Only a faulty timing mechanism prevented the bomb from exploding. Authorities said it had enough firepower to obliterate the plane. The FBI became involved after this incident and came up with the code name Unabomber. They also called the suspect the Junkyard Bomber because of the material he used. The FBI at first thought the culprit was a disgruntled airline mechanic. FBI Agent John Douglas, the father of "profiling" criminals, disagreed with this. He claimed the bombs were much too sophisticated and that the bomber was most likely an academic. Profiling was a new investigative tool at the time and Douglas's theory was largely ignored. After Kaczynski's arrest, the FBI came under much criticism. It was pointed out that if they had only checked into the disgruntled academic theory that they could have easily caught this man years earlier.

The first serious injury occurred in 1985, when a Berkeley graduate student lost four fingers and vision in one eye. Captain John Hauser had applied for astronaut training and only a few days after his injury he learned he had been accepted. The bombs were all hand crafted and carried the inscription "FC" — at one point reported to stand for "Fuck Computers," but later found to mean "Freedom Club." A California computer store owner was killed by a nail- and splinter-loaded bomb lying in his parking lot in 1985. A similar attack against a computer store occurred in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 20, 1987.

After a six-year break, Kaczynski struck again in 1993, mailing a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University and developer of Linda, a distributed programming system. Gelernter has written a book on the subject, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Another bomb in the same year maimed the geneticist Charles Epstein. Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times claiming that his "anarchist group" called FC was responsible for the attacks.

Kaczynski's younger brother David recognized Ted's writing style from the published manifesto and notified authorities, who sent officers to arrest Kaczynski on April 3, 1996, at his remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. David Kaczynski had once admired and emulated his elder brother but had later decided to leave the survivalist lifestyle behind. David had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that in particular his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was later leaked — prompting an unsuccessful internal investigation by the FBI. In addition, the family received guarantees, which were later betrayed, that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty against Ted. David donated the reward money — less his legal expenses — to families of his brother's victims. A professor of English noticed that the outlook of the Manifesto resembled that of the protagonist Verloc, an anarchist from Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. It was discovered that Kaczynski grew up with a copy of the book in his home and had read the book over a dozen times. He had also used the pseudonym Konrad on occasions.

In 1995, Kaczynski, mailed several letters, some to his former victims, outlining his goals and demanding that his 35,000 word paper Industrial Society and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto") be printed verbatim by a major newspaper; he stated that he would then end his bombing campaign. There was a great deal of controversy over whether it should be done. A further letter threatening to kill more people was sent, and the Justice department recommended publication out of concern for public safety. Eventually, the pamphlet was indeed published by the New York Times and the Washington Post in September 1995, with the hope that somebody would recognize his writing style (as indeed happened; see below).

The main argument of Industrial Society and Its Future is that technological progress is undesirable, can be stopped, and in fact should be stopped in order to free people from the unnatural demands of technology, so that they can return to a happier, simpler life close to nature. Kaczynski argued that it was necessary to cause a "social crash", before society became any worse. He believes a collapse of civilization is likely to occur at some point in the future; thus, it is better to end things now, rather than later. If it does not occur, he says, humans will have the freedom and significance of house pets, although they may be happy, in a society dominated by machines or an elite social class.

Although Kaczynski called himself "anarchist", other anarchists disagree as to whether his manifesto truly represents an anarchist critique of technology. Given that there is little indication that he ever had any contact or involvement with the anarchist movement prior to his arrest, it seems his adoption of the label is uninformed at best. Virtually everyone within anarchism agrees that his tactics (similar to the disastrous "Propaganda of the deed" of the late 19th century) were unacceptable and not likely to succeed in any meaningful way.