The Liberator Effect

The U.S. State Department's efforts to ban CAD files for the 3-D printed gun, the Liberator, have backfired. It's following the same pattern as the government's previous efforts to control information flow:

Downloading the gun’s blueprints has become a kind of “Streisand effect” says Michael Guslick, a hobbyist gunsmith and one of the first engineers to write about his experiments in printing and testing 3D-printable firearm components. Guslick printed his own Liberator using a printer similar to Defense Distributed’s (shown above) and has been searching for others who have printed the gun over the last week.

He says he’s found that only a small fraction of those who download the gun’s blueprints are actually putting them to use. But he compares the weapon’s CAD file to the encryption program PGP, the first strong cryptographic software available to non-government users, which like the Liberator became the target of a State Department investigation for export control violations after it was released online in 1993. “ A lot of people downloaded [PGP's] source code, but very few compiled it,” says Guslick. “It became an act of passive rebellion.”

By the time the State Department decided not to indict PGP’s creator Philip Zimmermann, three years later, his tool had already spread around the world and helped to inspire a cypherpunk movement that created everything from WikiLeaks to Bitcoin. If the backlash against the Liberator’s takedown follows a similar path, the evolution of the 3D-printed gun may be just beginning.

It is interesting that when the issue is something like WikiLeaks, the lefties get all lubed around the labia about freedom of information and the Fourth Amendment, but when it's about something they don't like -- e.g., guns -- suddenly they're all in favor of strict government controls. Yet again their elitist attitude rears its ugly, wart-covered head.