The US 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 fully plastic firearm, all of whose details can be printed on a 3D printer, published on defcad.org , are no longer available. The red dot in the header 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 a powerful Streisand effect . Discussion of the news on Reddit has already collected three thousand comments, in which are posted including links to the torrent with drawings and models. Many people download them and remain on the distribution simply from the principle to prevent the disappearance of this information 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 manufacture weapons at home for their 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 you to download them not only to the US citizens, but also to other countries, which in a sense is a weapon export.



In the official letter demanding that the Liberator and some other drawings of weapons details be removed from public access, there are references to ITAR - US law governing international arms trafficking.

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