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With 3D Printer Gun Files, National Security Interest Trumps Free Speech, Court Rules (arstechnica.com)
A federal appeals court ruled this week against Defense Distributed, the Texas organization that promotes 3D-printed guns, in a lawsuit that it brought last year against the State Department. In a 2-1 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not persuaded that Defense Distributed's right to free speech under the First Amendment outweighs national security concerns. From an ArsTechnica report: The majority concluded: 'Ordinarily, of course, the protection of constitutional rights would be the highest public interest at issue in a case. That is not necessarily true here, however, because the State Department has asserted a very strong public interest in national defense and national security. Indeed, the State Department's stated interest in preventing foreign nationals -- including all manner of enemies of this country -- from obtaining technical data on how to produce weapons and weapon parts is not merely tangentially related to national defense and national security; it lies squarely within that interest.'
They act as if these are nuclear or biological weapons. There is no compelling interest in keeping plans for primitive 3D printed guns away from anyway, and there is no possible argument that there is.
This is nothing new, Philip Zimmermann was receiving similar threats during the first crypto-war so published the source code of PGP in a book (https://www.amazon.com/PGP-Internals-Philip-R-Zimmermann/dp/0262240394/) and more or less dared the feds to ban a book.
He won.
(this is the short version).
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Print the code for the lower receiver in a book.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"That's only because the gun control laws in neighboring states are too lax" - Typical response from control proponent regarding Chicago, New York, DC, etc.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Those people who are always worrying about "activist" judges should look at this case.
It appears to me that the court has used a completely made-up "national security exception" to override a clear constitutional right.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
These files are in the open. The are publicly available to anyone who wants to look. I found several in minutes.
This ITAR issue is prior restraint...trying to put the genie back into the bottle. It reminds me of the silliness in trying to get people with security clearances to not read the Snowden files.
It is public record. Subjecting it to ITAR at this point simply makes it glaringly clear just how incompatible ITAR is with Constitutional principles.
Also, we are no longer in danger of the government suppressing free speech, so the 1st amendment no longer has justification either.
Here I was thinking that national defense was the purview of a different department... The name escapes me at the moment.
Trump later downplayed this in various ways, but what it SOUNDS like is a suggestion that if Hillary packs courts with judges that deny rights, that the " Second Amendment people" (gun advocates?) could do something that others couldn't... Which could be interpreted as a call for assassination.
Obviously Trump didn't explicitly say that. But you have to admit that this quote sounds pretty bad the way it came out.
Yes it is ridiculous, but it is also trivial to comply and legally make those plans available to 300 million Americans. Just label the files with the appropriate export control warnings and have down-loaders agree to the restrictions via the type of click through legal agreement that many software downloads have.
We went through this with encryption software and even web browsers that supported https... ITAR could have broken the Internet except people figured out how to comply and in their compliance show how silly the regulations actually were. The criminal act is in actually sending the files to a foreigner. So you just need to have someone state they are a US citizen and they agree not to export the files to a non-US citizen. Keep a log of downloads in case any downloader chooses to commit fraud and makes an unauthorized download.
Just comply with the bare requirements and then fight on the stronger grounds that the legal restrictions don't actually de facto prevent export, but that further restrictions on publication and distribution would indeed prevent the lawful distribution of the files to American citizens.