DHS admits “impossible” to control 3D-printed guns

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:25:00 +0000

As Salon noted, when DHS ordered that Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson take offline his design for the the 3-D-printable “Liberator” handgun to review the files for export compliance, The Pirate Bay stepped in. Users shared the file by the tens of thousands within days -- that Wilson had complied with DHS demands and removed his files was one little consequence to the sprawling, sharing online networks. The Libertarian Wilson at the time expressed what the DHS has now admitted concerns about: Referring to the letter he received from the government ordering that his files be taken down, he told Forbes, “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard.”

US-approved weapons wound up with Libyan militants

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:58:00 +0000

The New York Times reported that the Obama administration secretly approved arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but later learned that the weapons were being turned over to Libya's Islamist militant fighters. According to the Times:

The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.

More than a year after the overthrow of Gaddafi, Libyan authorities have failed to establish full control over Libya’s disparate armed factions. According to the Times, "The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government."

Salon.com > Arms

DHS admits “impossible” to control 3D-printed guns

US-approved weapons wound up with Libyan militants