Friday, May 10, 2013

ITAR: Dood, It's State. They Will Lawyer You To Death.

    Some rather interesting up and down today, with people hosting the Defense Distributed "Liberator" files, and then thinking better of it, while others stand on the sidelines and jeer.

     "Grow a spine," is it?  Hmpf.

     Here's the thing: this is not the awkward, waddling BATFE, stepchild of alphabet agencies.  State will not SWAT-raid you.  They will not put FBI snipers in the trees, shoot family members and then work the system to buy the survivors off and protect the shooter.

     Nope.  It's the Department of State.  They play for keepsies, they know what "martyr" means, they know from "rallying cry" and they have a whole lot of nice, dull-seeming boys and girls with law degrees who wear nice suits and carry nice fat briefcases with way more than lunch in them and who take -- or who have their staff take -- copious, detailed notes.  When the dust settles, if they win?  They will take you apart and leave you nekkid.  In a Federal pen.  And nobody but nobody will care.  They have plenty of time and most of 'em lack any sense of drama.  Or, for that matter, sense, period.  If the job is to settle your hash for an ITAR violation, they'll do it, no matter how petty or stupid the violation, no matter how many Canadians are doing the same thing and no matter if the code in question got published on the front page of the Times yesterday.

     To stand up to them, you need deep pockets and deep lawyers.  You need EFF.  You need ACLU.  There is a fight to be fought -- and won! -- here, but painting a target on your nose is a suboptimal opening gambit for most of us.

10 comments:

Borepatch said...

You need the EFF, and they're a lot more sympathetic to source code than to guns. That's a long shot, although I wouldn't bet against a crowd sourced legal defense fund.

But I wouldn't want to be the test case. There are about 5 lawyers I'd want defending me on a source code issue; there are none I know who are obvious on this sort of thing. I wish I were a little more optimistic.

Especially since nobody needs to go through this - the plans are out, and others can make their own plans and get them out. Bittorrent and Pirate Bay and TOR will keep the toothpaste out of the tube. All of State's Horses and All of State's Men and all that ...

Drang said...

Thing is, realistically, they need to round up every copy of The Poor Man's James Bond, and the Underground Weapons Workshop manuals or whatever they were called, and Steal This Book, and then shut down the Wile E Coyote School of Gunsmithing and all the files anyone ever downloaded from it...

Oh, and a small CNC setup is cheaper than a 3 D printer, and the files for making a gun in your garage out of steel are also readily available.

The Jack said...

If the BAETF is populated by the kids that pretended to be ninjas and Judge Dredd, the State is populated by the debate team and model UN club kids.

The State is the lawyer and "process" club. And if their eyes are on you, they don't care what anyone else is doing.

And ITAR is their baby. I've had to deal with the insanity of Export Control quite a bit.

They don't care that you own the data, they don't care that someone else can get it from the public domain, they don't care that the guy down the street is selling it.

They don't care about that, if they see you distributing it without the right permission slips they will blot the sky with JD's.

And has been said before, there are ways to get the information out, ways that don't paint a big target on your back.

Old NFO said...

Concur with all. Plain and simple you are absolutely correct...

The Freeholder said...

It really isn't a problem. If the plan was to get the information out there, it's Out There in spades. There are torrents clogging up the Intertubz even as I type.

And ditto what Drang said. Need to do some research into that, since my son is interested in machining-type things.

Sevesteen said...

"Grow a spine" from the safety of a couch, doing nothing. Meanwhile, the files are out there, and the Streisand Effect means that the gov's attempt to suppress the information has brought attention to it instead.

Mark said...

While I don't disagree, it does bear pointing out that State is not in the best of odors at the moment.

Not that that would really change anything.

I wonder what it would take to get a movement to legislate that State is forbidden to operate on US soil, ala CIA.Prolly more'n it's worth, more's the pity.

M

Anonymous said...

I just wonder if they will call it one wilfull violation (for posting) or 100000 wilfull violations (for each download) of ITAR. At up to $1M and 15 years per wilfull violation, this could get really interesting really quickly.

Roberta X said...

Anon, they pretty quickly reach the "no reasonable expectation of ever collecting fine" point with most of us. So what do they do then? Go after the ISP? If it's not on a server I own, do they go after the owner?

Questions I would not care to determine the answer to by direct experiment.

Y'know who we need in this fight? A player who's already in it: Anonymous. And they really haven't made any major moves yet. It could get interesting.

Anonymous said...

State can be downright ruthless when they want to be. They have warehoused full of law school grads who love to run around and impress each other with how much nonsense they understand and how little about the real world they comprehend. That they would go after DD (if they didn't create it to begin with) and anyone asdociatex with them was a foregone .conclusion.