I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
"Legality" of 3-D-printed plastic weapons and their supporting literature will surely lead to private platform censorship online
The State Department reportedly reached an agreement
withDefense Distributed in Texas, and on Wednesday August 1anyone
will be able to download instructions and materials from the company and print a weapon at home.The CNN story is here.
It’s pretty obvious that there is a serious public
safety issue at stake, as the CNN article points out big time.
But there will also be a speech and “first amendment”
issue.While lawful, social media
companies (and YouTube) will certainly feel pressured by the public to ban
these from their platforms (as YouTube does now with most other weapons-related
directive material).This pressure will
even extend to hosting companies, who right now sometimes make operating
private gun sale stores on their servers a violation of their AUP’s.(That generally means most weapons companies
would have to host their own servers.)It could also extend to domain name registrars, as we saw after Charlottesville
with extreme right wing sites.
Defense Distributed, however, has a fully active
channel in YouTube with a substantial number of subscribers. I’m not sure how
this fits into the YouTube TOS issue now.
Wired has a YouTube video on the issue.
David Hogg has tweeted about the issue (after I
emailed him the first CNN story) and become quite vocal about the public safety
dangers.How will the TSA deal with
this?
It probably is harder to make a weapon at home than
the critics say, hopefully. I’m reminded of the downstream liability ofPaladinPressin the 1990s.
Update: July 31 Federal Judge Robert Lasnik has at least temporarily blocked DD from releasing the blueprints online at midnight tonight, ABC11 story here. The plaintiffs included eight states and D.C. The company is run by Cody Wilson (Arkansas). Vox discussed Trump's ambiguous tweet here. Trump has conceded the NRA position that homemade weapons are illegal even if the plans to make them are not. You get to a logical situation that could even parallel child pornography -- in trying to defend the plans with the First Amendment.
So right now the link on this posting can not lead to these instructions.
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