Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

3D-printed guns and the crypto wars

So there’s a working set of plans for the “Liberator.” It’s a working firearm you can print on a 3d printer. You can no longer get the files from the authors, whose site states: “DEFCAD files are being 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.” Cue Streisand Effect.

My understanding is that the censorship order was issued under the ITARs, the “International Traffic in Arms Regulations.” Cory Doctorow has said “Impact litigation — where good precedents overturn bad rules — is greatly assisted by good facts and good defendants. I would much rather the Internet-as-library question be ruled on in a less emotionally overheated realm than DIY guns.” I think that’s reasonable, but recall that Shaw claimed that all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Doctorow also refers to Bernstein, who did good work, but his lawsuit was the last nail in ITARs applying to crypto, not the first. (ITARs still do apply to crypto, but in ways that allow both open source and commercial software to ship strong crypto, which wasn’t the case in the 90s.) Me, I see lots of evidence that gun control doesn’t work any better than alcohol control or marijuana control. And I think that the regulatory response by the DoD is silly. (One can argue that the law gives them no choice, but I don’t believe that to be the case.)

So the right step was demonstrated for crypto nearly 20 years ago by Phil Karn. He filed a pair of “Commodity Jurisdiction Requests.” One for Applied Cryptography, a book, and one for a floppy disk containing the source code.

The State Department ruled that even though the book itself is “in the public domain” and hence outside their jurisdiction, a floppy disk containing the exact same source code as printed in the book is a “munition” requiring a license to export. It’s old news that the US Government believes only Americans (and maybe a few Canadians) can write C code, but now they have apparently decided that foreigners can’t type either!

In the past three years I have taken my case to all three branches of the federal government. Here is the full case history in the Executive and Judicial branches, including all my correspondence with the US State Department, the Bureau of Export Administration (BXA) in the Commerce Department, the US District Court for the District of Columbia, and the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

I believe the analogy is obvious. The DefCad files are 2mb zipped, and the STL files can be opened with a variety of software. Unfortunately, STL looks to be a binary format, and it’s not clear to me after a few minutes of searching if there’s a trivially printed text format. But that’s a very low hurdle.

As Doctorow implied, reasonableness on all sides would be nice to have. But at home printing isn’t going to go away, and censorship orders are not a productive step forward.

[Previously here: “What Should a Printer Print?“]

One comment on "3D-printed guns and the crypto wars"

  • PHB says:

    The problem I have with this 3D printed zip gun is that its only real use is to thin the herd of gun nuts.

    Plastic is a much less suitable material for making guns from than plenty of materials trivially obtained at a Home Depot that might be assembled into a gun with rather less effort and expertise than the $8000 printer used in the example.

    The British used what amounted to a zip gun during WWII. The sten gun was designed to be easily made with low tech materials and equipment. The Polish resistance made thousands in basements and garages.

    The 3D printed gun in contrast can last about 15 rounds before it destroys itself and could never be described as ‘safe’ to use.

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