| The Week Magazine | - |
The
online blueprints for a fully functional 3D-printed gun have
disappeared faster than a speeding bullet. On Wednesday, the State
Department ordered the company that posted the schematics, Defense
Distributed, to remove them from the web.
The Obama administration takes aim at 3D-printed guns
The State Department says posting instructions for the gun online may be illegal
The online blueprints for a fully functional 3D-printed gun have disappeared faster than a speeding bullet.
On Wednesday, the State Department ordered the company that posted the schematics, Defense Distributed, to remove them from the web. (Watch a Defense Distributed video explaining the gun above.) According to the State Department, publicly posting the instructions may have violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs the "transfer of, and access to" certain weapons and their technical details. By posting the files to the web where anyone in the world could download them, the company may have inadvertently violated those export restrictions.
"Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export," the State Department stated in a letter.
However, the State Department did not say that the instructions must remain offline for good. Rather, the department asked that Defense Distributed file the necessary paperwork for the government to determine if the blueprints are, in fact, a violation of ITAR. In the meantime, State wrote, the company "should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled."
That letter came just two days after Defense Distributed, through its open-source printing project DEFCAD, posted the instructions for its "Liberator" handgun to the Internet. In just three days, the instructions had already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Here's how it works, according to The Guardian:
And indeed, by Thursday evening, the webpage to download the instructions had been updated with the following message: "This file has been removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information."
Still, the federal order does not mean all copies of the blueprints have been be wiped from the web. The instructions have been posted to the file-sharing sites Pirate Bay and Mega, among others, meaning they're still available for download.
Wilson, who claims to have been inspired by anarchist writings, himself made that point in an interview Thursday with Betabeat, saying he thought he would ultimately be free from the government's oversight.
"I still think we win in the end," he said. "Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it — to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about."
Lawmakers at the state and federal level have already moved to ban printable firearms.
In California, Democratic state Senator Leland Yee said in a press release that he would soon introduce a bill to ban weapons that "are invisible to metal detectors and that can be easily made without a background check." At the federal level, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have likewise called for legislation to ban such firearms.
"A terrorist, someone who's mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage," Schumer said recently.
On Wednesday, the State Department ordered the company that posted the schematics, Defense Distributed, to remove them from the web. (Watch a Defense Distributed video explaining the gun above.) According to the State Department, publicly posting the instructions may have violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs the "transfer of, and access to" certain weapons and their technical details. By posting the files to the web where anyone in the world could download them, the company may have inadvertently violated those export restrictions.
"Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export," the State Department stated in a letter.
However, the State Department did not say that the instructions must remain offline for good. Rather, the department asked that Defense Distributed file the necessary paperwork for the government to determine if the blueprints are, in fact, a violation of ITAR. In the meantime, State wrote, the company "should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled."
That letter came just two days after Defense Distributed, through its open-source printing project DEFCAD, posted the instructions for its "Liberator" handgun to the Internet. In just three days, the instructions had already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Here's how it works, according to The Guardian:
Fifteen of the gun's 16 pieces are constructed on the $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, Forbes said. The final piece is a common nail, used as a firing pin, that can be found in a hardware store. [Guardian]
"We have to comply," the company's founder, Cody Wilson, told Forbes.
"All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says.
That might be an impossible standard. But we'll do our part to remove it
from our servers."And indeed, by Thursday evening, the webpage to download the instructions had been updated with the following message: "This file has been removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information."
Still, the federal order does not mean all copies of the blueprints have been be wiped from the web. The instructions have been posted to the file-sharing sites Pirate Bay and Mega, among others, meaning they're still available for download.
Wilson, who claims to have been inspired by anarchist writings, himself made that point in an interview Thursday with Betabeat, saying he thought he would ultimately be free from the government's oversight.
"I still think we win in the end," he said. "Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it — to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about."
Lawmakers at the state and federal level have already moved to ban printable firearms.
In California, Democratic state Senator Leland Yee said in a press release that he would soon introduce a bill to ban weapons that "are invisible to metal detectors and that can be easily made without a background check." At the federal level, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have likewise called for legislation to ban such firearms.
"A terrorist, someone who's mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage," Schumer said recently.
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The Obama administration takes aim at 3D-printed guns
Here is the problem with the 100,000 dowloads already: begin repeat quote from above:
Here's how it works, according to The Guardian:
Fifteen of the gun's 16 pieces are constructed on the $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, Forbes said. The final piece is a common nail, used as a firing pin, that can be found in a hardware store. [Guardian]
end repeat quote from above.
The problem most people would have with this is that it would be invisible to airport scanners. And all someone would have to do to get through a scanner with one of these is to wear steel toed shoes with a nail alongside the steel toe. (or it could be disguised as a pen in someone's pocket). It likely could even be a ball-point pen that works.
Then the person would go onboard with the parts disguised as something else in his backpack, then take the backpack and assemble it in the flying bathroom and come out and shoot a hole through one of the passenger windows at 40,000 feet causing explosive decompression and the deaths of all onboard except maybe the pilots who might be able to land the plane if the air going out of the plane explosively (as well as some of the people) didn't damage the plane too much. This is the problem with the 100,000 downloads already because you only need 1 of these people to be a suicide terrorist.
The pilots would survive because the cockpit doors are always closed now in flight. So when explosive decompression hit it likely wouldn't affect the pilots much because they would put on their oxygen masks and simply land the plane if it wasn't damaged too much.
12 hours later: After sleeping on this I realized that this is even more serious than I wrote about above. Here is my reasoning: after a person goes through the Security check, pat downs and other devices, one is then free to go get something to eat, go to the bathroom and wait for their plane to take off. So, the device wouldn't even need to be assembled on board the plane because it could be assembled in a bathroom stall just as easily and carried on the plane completely assembled in a backpack or bag or even in one's jacket, hat etc.
At that point all someone would have to do is to stay calm and wait for altitude to shoot out a window with the 3d gun to literally blow out or up a part of the plane and potentially blow passengers (that were not seat belted in) out the hole in the plane which might cause the plane to crash or not. But for sure, if the caliber of the bullet was big enough, cause the deaths of all passengers and crew on board not in the cockpit of the plane because all air would leave the plane in a few seconds to one minute until it reached equilibrium of the air pressure at 30,000 to 40,000 feet. At the very least many passengers (even if they were seated with seatbelts in place) would rupture ear drums or have their lungs come out of their mouths possibly before they put their oxygen masks on during the explosive decompression.
So, 3d printed guns are far more serious than I originally thought.
12 hours later: After sleeping on this I realized that this is even more serious than I wrote about above. Here is my reasoning: after a person goes through the Security check, pat downs and other devices, one is then free to go get something to eat, go to the bathroom and wait for their plane to take off. So, the device wouldn't even need to be assembled on board the plane because it could be assembled in a bathroom stall just as easily and carried on the plane completely assembled in a backpack or bag or even in one's jacket, hat etc.
At that point all someone would have to do is to stay calm and wait for altitude to shoot out a window with the 3d gun to literally blow out or up a part of the plane and potentially blow passengers (that were not seat belted in) out the hole in the plane which might cause the plane to crash or not. But for sure, if the caliber of the bullet was big enough, cause the deaths of all passengers and crew on board not in the cockpit of the plane because all air would leave the plane in a few seconds to one minute until it reached equilibrium of the air pressure at 30,000 to 40,000 feet. At the very least many passengers (even if they were seated with seatbelts in place) would rupture ear drums or have their lungs come out of their mouths possibly before they put their oxygen masks on during the explosive decompression.
So, 3d printed guns are far more serious than I originally thought.
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