The U.S. government has blocked the distribution of drawings of the gun, which can be printed on a 3D printer



    Drawings of the Liberator pistol , the world's first all-plastic firearm, all of which can be printed on a 3D printer, published on defcad.org , are no longer available. A red dash in the heading of the site says that the files were removed from public access at the request of the US Department of State, which regulates the arms trade. The online community predictably responded to this with Streisand's powerful effect . The discussion of the news on Reddit has already collected three thousand comments, which include links to the torrent with drawings and models. Many people download them and remain on the distribution simply out of principle, to prevent this information from disappearing from the Internet.

    Defense Distributed, the company that created Liberator, has a license to manufacture weapons. Also, according to the laws of the United States, every citizen has the right to make weapons at home for his own needs. Most likely, the claims of the Ministry of Defense are related to the fact that the publication of drawings on the Internet allows citizens to download them not only in the USA, but also in other countries, which in a sense is an export of weapons.

    In an official letter demanding to remove Liberator and some other drawings of weapon parts from public access, there are links to ITAR , the US law governing international arms trafficking.

    A similar story happened with the PGP cryptographic library. In 1993, the government launched an investigation against PGP author Philip Zimmermann, as the law prohibited the export of any cryptographic solutions with a key length of more than 40 bits. Then Zimmerman was able to circumvent this limitation by fully publishing the source code in a book published by MIT Press. Anyone could scan and recognize the code. Book exports cannot be banned due to the first amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech.


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