DoD Descends On DEFCAD

First time accepted submitter He Who Has No Name writes "While the ATF appears to have no open objection to 3D printed firearms at this time, the Department of Defense apparently does. A short while ago, '#DEFCAD has gone dark at the request of the Department of Defense Trade Controls. Take it up with the Secretary of State' appeared on the group's site, and download links for files hosted there began to give users popups warning of the DoD takeover." Well, that didn't take long. Note: As of this writing, the site is returning an error, rather than the message above, but founder Cody Wilson has posted a similar message to twitter. At least the Commander in Chief is in town to deliver the message personally. Update: 05/09 21:17 GMT by T : Tweet aside, that should be Department of State, rather than Department of Defense, as many readers have pointed out. (Thanks!)

Comments

Re:Well there ya go

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on. This is not about the First Amendment. What they were doing was a brazen violation of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) which explicitly prohibit the sharing by US individuals/entities of technical data pertaining to defense articles (i.e. those items that appear on the US Munitions List) with foreign entities. Posting on an open website certainly qualifies. To share any such data with a foreign entity requires a license from the State Department.

http://pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/official_itar/2012/ITAR_Part_121.pdf

Uh, no.

[neoshroom]

Uh, no, it doesn't. The first amendment is the right to free speech. The second amendment is the right to bear arms.

What you are missing here is that these files this guy is sharing are essentially just descriptions of shapes and therefore typically would be considered speech. The files then let you make arms (though really poor quality ones). He is sharing information though, not arms, which is why this has been transmuted from a second amendment issue to a first amendment one.

I'm still wondering though due to that Tao of Math line if I've been expertly trolled or not.

Re:Well there ya go

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything on the US Munitions List is considered a defense article. These are enumerated in the PDF I referenced and the definitions are quite broad. To wit, the first two items in Category I

* (a) Nonautomatic and semi-automatic
firearms to caliber .50 inclusive (12.7 mm).
* (b) Fully automatic firearms to .50 caliber
inclusive (12.7 mm).

Direct download link??

[zidium]

Here's the direct download link to all of their published files...

http://defcad.org/stl/zip/DefDist_DEFCAD_MEGA_PACK_v4.2_(Saito).zip

"This T-Shirt is a Munition"

[Fencepost]

I know that you're all young whippersnappers who should get off my damn lawn, but does nobody remember the RSA Perl T-Shirts from Joel Furr from back in 1995? Yeah, yeah, most of you weren't out of kindergarten, whatever.

Basically, the shirts had RSA as implemented in 3 lines of unreadable-even-for-perl code, which at the time was illegal to export in machine-readable format (Thanks, ITAR!). I believe there were multiple variations, including barcode versions for extra-crunchy machine-readability and at least one person who attempted to turn himself into a munition by getting it tattooed on. Later on there was a similar movement around DeCSS (not "munitions" related); I still have at least one of the shirts from that.

Seems to me that this is pretty clearly in the same general category.

Oh, and "damn kids"