Firsty has posted the full text of Abbie Hoffman’s seminal Steal This Book to a wiki so that it can be collaboratively updated for today’s world. Steal This Book was a kind of extended HOWTO for living for free in the American counterculture, with information of scamming or salvaging everything from meals to accommodation to new identities. It was written in a highly engaging, wisecracking style, like Hints from Heloise reinterpreted by Bugs Bunny. I love the idea of producing a contemporary edition.
AIRLINES
Up and away, junior outlaws! If you really want to get where you’re going in a hurry, don’t forget skyjacker’s paradise. Don’t forget the airlines. They make an unbelievable amount of bread on their inflated prices, ruin the land with incredible amounts of polluting wastes and noise, and deliberately hold back aviation advances that would reduce prices and time of flight. We know two foolproof methods to fly free, but unfortunately we feel publishing them would cause the airlines to change their policy. The following methods have been talked about enough, so the time seems right to make them known to a larger circle of friends.
A word should be said right off about stolen tickets. Literally millions of dollars worth of airline tickets are stolen each year. If you have good underworld contacts, you can get a ticket to anywhere you want at one-fourth the regular price. If you are charged more, you are getting a slight rooking. In any case, you can get a ticket for any flight or date and just trade it in. They are actually as good as cash, except that it takes 30 days to get a refund, and by then they might have traced the stolen tickets. If you can get a stolen ticket, exchange or use it as soon as possible, and always fly under a phony name. A stolen ticket for a trip around the world currently goes for one hundred and fifty dollars in New York.
(Thanks, Firsty!)