Can Open Source Give Comfort To the Enemy?

zlite writes "We make open source Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones), mostly for geomapping and other amateur uses. One of our problems is that most people think of UAVs as Scary Things, and despite our efforts to prove otherwise there's always the risk of regulatory crackdowns. We have amateur UAV participants from around the world, but now they've been joined by an Iranian in Tehran, who has made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag. My instinct is that we should welcome everyone, everywhere, but I'm sure some in Washington worry that this looks like helping an 'Axis of Evil' country make advanced weapons. They could shut us down with the stroke of a pen. My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?"

Comments

It ain't rocket science

[FlyByPC]

Yes, making a UAV is not trivial, but neither is it incredibly difficult. There are plenty of cheap parts out there that, with a little programming, could tie together a small GPS module and aircraft control servos. It wouldn't be too terribly difficult for any country to make a UAV; I would say with a parts budget of $1K US, I could probably get a simple one (that could fly to a given waypoint) working within a few weeks/months. With $10K, you could make a very capable one -- probably with a range of several hundred km -- which could carry a small payload (a few grams of radioactives go a long way, ya know.)

Bottom line -- trying to restrict such technology is laughable these days. Microchip literally gives away microcontrollers capable of handling a small aircraft, given the right software and interface electronics. These "evil terr-a-rists" will always be able to get their hands on technology. What we need is to find a way to make it politically difficult for them to continue as terrorists. (I.E. find a diplomatic solution.)

Since when did Iran become your enemy?

[siyavash]

Might be a bit offtopic but Wait a minute... there is no war going on between USA and Iran, Since when did Iran become your enemy? Just because your president sais something stupid you see a whole country as "your" enemy?

Call me crazy, but that is just wrong.

I'm from Iran myself and I know that most people in Iran do not see USA as the "enemy" at all. People should not judge a country by the small minority which rules it.

I might be a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Re:Since when did Iran become your enemy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that and Iran Air Flight 655
Shooting down a civilian airliner, refusing to apologize and giving medals to the crew that shot it down would create a wee bit of animosity even if it was an accident.

Respect Mah Authoritay

[hardburn]

My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?"

Crypto was kept out of the Linux kernel for a long time, since the US had regulation on exporting crypto systems. These were mostly lifted under Clinton, though there's still a list of countries that it's illegal to export to (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, according to: http://www.epic.org/crypto/export_controls/regs_1_ 00.html).

RMS has stated that if copyright laws in the vein of the DMCA continue to be passed, Free Software development could no longer take place in US borders.

Germany was recently hit with a law that outlawed "hacking software", apparently including nmap or packet sniffers.

It's nice to say that you want to do things for the good of humanity, but beaurocrats have other ideas.

Re:Give the

[WhiplashII]

While I do personally agree with your sentiments, that is not really the question being asked. The question being asked is "Is it legal?".

That question is more complex. I am working on a rocket - similar issue arise. ITAR is the governing regulation, and the state department decides what ITAR means. And they are not logical about it.

I want to develop human rocket transports - but anything that goes into space is automatically a weapon, according to the state department. That means that if I talk to a non-US citizen about my improvements to rockets, I go to jail - let alone hiring or working with a non-US citizen.

UAVs seem very likely to fall under ITAR, because the state department will almost certainly say so. Ignorance of the law does not free you from the consequences of it, so I would tread carefully. One of the biggest problems with ITAR is that it is difficult to know exactly what it makes illegal - and so you end up having to consult lawyers every time you want to do anything involving foriengers. Very annoying, and very expensive! But it does lock in big profits for government contractors, of course... (You did know that they get reimbursed for all legal expenses, right?)

My dream is that knowing this will so enrage the Slashdot community that everyone will call their senator and tell them to force the state department to make the ITAR list less inclusive, and only include things that have weaponry as a primary purpose - and get congress to force state to change.

I'd also like a pony...

National security BS

[Anonymous Coward]

My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?

National security issues can put the kibosh on nearly anything. Just ask the amateur rocketry hobbyists about the hoops they have to jump through due to the PATRIOT Act. In a few more years you'll probably be lucky to be able to find chemistry sets with experiments more interesting than mixing vinegar and baking soda.

Re:Give the

[Reality Master 101]

You ever read failed states or hegemony or survival by noam chomsky?

Not to get into a debate on Chomsky, but he suffers from two major logic flaws: Proof by selective evidence, and he presupposes his conclusions (e.g., Given problem A, the conclusion will be that the U.S. holds the vast majority of blame).

No doubt he's a bright guy, but he has some huge blinders when it comes to politics. Unfortunately, his anger overwhelms his rationality.

Re:Doing the government's work for them

[1u3hr]

implement controls on the information you are providing (to prevent access by countries on the weapons export list)

Ah yes, all those "If you are a terrorist, please do not download this file" warnings we see on stites with encryption software and such. I'm sure that is extremely effective. And terrroists don't know how to use proxy servers to hide their IP location either.

Re:Give the

[ScrappyLaptop]

Believe it or not, there was a time in American history when lots of people carried guns. Used them to catch dinner, too. Shooting a person was considered bad form.

Re:Give the

[WhiplashII]

If you take a russian rocket engine into the US, it then becomes illegal to send it back to Russia or to tell anything technical about it to Russians. The only exception is anything "published", which you can quote (but not embellish - even saying "this looks good" could be construed as an ITAR violation).

I've heard that the best way around it is to patent it. A Patent counts as publishing it, which means that you can then talk about it. If you had published it yourself, they would consider that an ITAR violation - but if the PTO publishes it, you are off the hook.

The most annoying and inane rules anywhere. Seriously, call your senator!

Re:Give the

[Runefox]

Well, the Soviets tried that several decades ago, and, well... Yeah.

Re:Give the

[Runefox]

You don't see Native Americans strapping explosives to their chests and screaming that, in the name of their god, they shall take back their homeland from the filthy paleskins that conquered them, do you? Israel was created generations ago, after World War II came to a close - It seems as though a fair amount of time has passed since then, over half a century. Have the Arab people (or at least their leaders) of those lands surrounding Israel been breeding nothing but unbridled hatred and fury over the past nearly sixty years? Do survivors of World War II teach hatred and distrust of Germans and Japanese, and vice versa? Why must the fighting continue as it is? Why is Israel's mere existence considered such a stain on the face of the Middle East?

Don't Ask Slashdot, ask ICE

[pcaylor]

Instead of asking a bunch of Slashdotters what they think the government might say, why not ask the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency themselves. ICE and the Department of State have joint jurisdiction over ITAR. I've never been able to figure out who handles what, but I'd recommend starting with ICE. You can call them at 1-866-DHS-2-ICE. (Yes, this may be the first time in Slashdot history that someone has recommended calling DHS not as a joke.)

ICE has a program called Project Shield America that is designed for exactly this type of thing. Their goal is to try to educate industry about what can and can't be exported.
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/shield071204 .htm

Lastly, IANAIA (I am not an ICE agent) but I suspect their answer is probably going to be that exporting UAV technology to Iran is a no-no. I'm sure it depends on exactly what you are doing, but from a quick googling, it looks like a lot of UAV related technology is restricted.

Why is it that I feel like I'm about to get modded back into the Stone Age?

Re:Give the

[Cassius Corodes]

A little of topic but I think you misunderstood what he was trying to say. We don't all speak the same 'language' but all languages use similar constructs which are pre-wired into the human brain allowing us to acquire language (something that only humans can do). The theory is not unnecessary - it is vital to understanding the development of language, and it is demonstratively true. He is very well respected within linguistics - but his writings on politics are rather one sided.

Patent is No Protection

[Anna Merikin]

against the government; all patent applications are screened to see if there is a national secutrity interest involoved. If the gov. decides there is, there is no application published, and the idea/device becomes property of the governent for as long as they deem appropriate.

They seem to have all the bases covered.

Re:Regulatory Bodies

[Antique Geekmeister]

You do realize that ITAR is not a law, it's a regulation? It was not written by Congress, but rather set by the State Department itself, and that therefore both its purpose and its implementation are thus set by the executive branch? This helps keep the legislature out of it, since they didn't write it. It also means that the judiciary would need to stop it, and when they've interfered with such regulations in the past, the regulation has been simply transferred to another executive department andn it starts all over. (Look up the history of regulations in exporting encryption technologies: the executive department *does not want* and does all in its power to subvert any widespread encryption technologies that they cannot tap at whim.)

Re:Give the

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the West Bank and Gaza occupied territory or is it a part of Israel?

Who said anything about the West Bank or Gaza?

There are many Palestinians who were born in parts of modern day Israel. The founder of Hamas is one example.

You really might want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_ return

Re:Give the

[Dun Malg]

The most annoying and inane rules anywhere. Seriously, call your senator! It wouldn't do any good. The problem isn't so much vague language in the regulations, but the people interpreting that vague language. My father worked for one defense contractor for his entire career--- nearly 40 years. Upon retirement, he chose to travel to Europe and basically live there half the year (he was born in Austria). A couple years after retirement, his former employer asked him to come back as a contractor to help on a project (B-2 stealth bomber related) which he essentially created and ran for the last ten years of his career. He filled out the paperwork to have his security clearance renewed and it was refused. The reason given was that he had too much contact with foreign nationals and spent too much time out of the country, so giving him access to this top secret information would be a security risk. Completely ignored was the fact that he himself originally wrote or reviewed every bit of that top secret information when he worked there. He says the problem can be traced to one thing: Big-Haired Women from Mississippi.

OK, so they're not all literally Big-Haired, from Mississippi, or Women; but that archetype typifies the kind of person who ends up implementing security policy in the DoD. They're minimally educated low to mid level administrators. They're hard working, but solidly average intelligence folks. Watch a little prime time TV and imagine the sort of person who enjoys it. It's people like that that are actually turning the crank that makes the bureaucracy machine go. When you hear about the government moving to classify a bunch of formerly unclassified information, the temptation is to think that the decision to do so originated from Cheney or Scooter...err..Bush, but the reality is that the notion that it ought to be done at all originated from below, from the BHWfM, and the "terrorists are everywhere" paranoids just signed off on it. Even outside those single wholesale orders to classify info, the BHWfM are responsible for a continuous and irrational "classification creep" that you don't even see unless you work in the system. It works like this: XYZ Corp designs a rocket (call it the X-123) for the DoD. The X-123 rocket design is reviewed by the DoD project managers, who tell their BHWfM to stamp it "top secret". A couple years pass, and XYZ Corp submits some design modifications to the LOX pump of the X-123. It's a bog-standard pump design, straight out of an engineering 101 textbook, but it's part of the top secret X-123 rocket, it too is stamped top secret by the BHWfM. A year later, XYZ Corp designs an improved life support module for the ISS and they re-use the same pump. Whoops! DoD says no go, because it uses a top secret LOX pump design! Since once something is classified it's nearly impossible to get it declassified, they have to create a new pump design.

Now imagine that happening every day, and not just with big, tangible things like LOX pumps, but with mundane crap like a table of performance characteristics of mild steel that was included in some report. It's totally asinine, but apparently unstoppable.

UAVs ARE scary things

[tm2b]

Here's the thing: if you're a pilot, UAVs are scary things.

We're already trained to look for birds, which are bad enough bad at least have the courtesy to move in a way that attracts the eye naturally. But UAVs are very hard to see and do not talk on the radio to let other aircraft know where they are ("I see you about 2 miles off my wing"). They can't even look around to see what other VFR aircraft (who are not required to carry anything more complex than eyeballs to avoid collisions) they might be nearing and steer clear.

Outside of controlled airspaces, these things are deathtraps waiting to happen unless very clear rules govern their deployment, just as there are rules for other moving hazards like sykdivers ("sykdivers in the air from x-thousand feet in the area imediately south of mumblefrotz airfield, traffic steer clear"). Too many, and they're be the only things in the sky. Too few, and there won't be enough general awareness of their use in VFR airspaces.

Re:Israeli citizens

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean the people who didn't evacuate during the war. Yes, that's true, but Israel actively blocked anyone from returning unless they were Jewish. It's ongoing discrimination, codified by Israel and made into law by the Knesset's absentee property law to authorize rampant theft of land. Many Israelis like to say the Arabs fled, but in many instances they were actively thrown out by Jewish militias, making it culpable.

On December 19, 1947, Ben-Gurion advised the Haganah on rules of engagement with the Palestinian population:

"we adopt the system of aggressive defense ; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176-177 and Israel: A History, p. 156)

Re:"Give the" a break...

[meringuoid]

This is the same State Department and ITAR that banned exportation of strong encryption as being "dangerous to National Security". As a result, the US could not compete in the international marketing of effective encryption, while everybody else could.

Interestingly enough, that kind of behaviour was a common symptom of the decline of the previous world superpower. Who invented computers, the jet engine, public-key encryption? Not Americans. But who made a fortune mass-marketing them, and who sat on them as vital defence secrets?