Angry Planet - UNLOCKED: How 3D Printed Guns Will Rewrite Our Laws

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

Ghost guns. Untraceable weapons manufactured in the home. They’ve been with us forever, but they’ve taken on a new menace in the age of 3D printers and digital distribution. Here to walk us through the new phenomenon is Mark A Tallman. Tallman is an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security & Emergency Management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. He’s also the author of Ghost Guns. Ghost Guns is an in depth, data driven, and dare I say nerdy deep dive into homemade weapons in the post-industrial age.You can buy Ghost Guns here.Recorded on 8/25/20The second amendmentCody Wilson and his terrible gunWorking on guns is like working on cars“Most gun nerds are low risk”Why ban the bump stock?Additive manufacturing and the DIY weapons of mass destructionRecycling plastics into weaponsThe security implications of the fourth industrial revolutionRaytheon has 3D printed a missileThe tech backlashThe costs of compliance only hit the open sectors, but don’t halt illicit activityThe rise of the surveillance stateSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and season's greetings from Angry Planet. This is Matthew and Fade, the official Angry Planet Cat, here from the depths of winter vacation. Jason and Kevin are hard at work at stories.

I am sleeping in and playing cyberpunk and taking a much needed to rest. But I did want you to hear a little something. So what we have is an unlocked episode, the first premium episode that we did for the substack. So you can get an idea of kind of what we're doing over there and see if that's something you're interested in. That is at angryplanetpod.com. You go there.

Thank you, Fade. And for $9 a month, you get access to two, count them two premium episodes. It's more Angry Planet. So really what's not to love? Let's say we want to shut down all possible sharing of digital firearm files, right? So you just were scared of what people are going to do with digital firearms, even though there have been very few actual criminal cases involving this and many more

cases involving traditional commercial products. They get trafficked or their breakdowns and background check system or things like that. Let's say we want to shut that down entirely. What's it going to take? you have to be able to bust secure storage devices on the border in traveler's pockets. Now you're getting very invasive. And that kind of technical capability, in addition to that kind of legal authority, is probably not consistent with a free and open society and would be seriously challenged

across the board by a number of civil liberties groups. There are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know, we don't know. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country almost with infinity, and when it is near to completely, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet.

I am Matthew Goldman. And I'm Jason Fields. Ghost guns, untraceable weapons manufactured in the home. They've been with us forever, but they've taken on a new menace in the age of 3D printers and digital distribution. Here to walk us through the new phenomenon is Mark A. Tallman. Tallman is an assistant professor of Homeland Security and emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. He's also the author of Ghost Guns. Ghost Guns is an in-depth, data-driven, and dare I say, nerdy deep-dipers.

dive into homemade weapons in the post-industrial age. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. All right. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. All right, so let's get some basic stuff out of the way at the beginning, as we like to do on the show. Can you define what a ghost gun is for us? That in itself is a bit of a tricky question. Early in the intro of book, I hash out what does this ghost gun term even mean? In a lot of ways, it's a media-generated term, and sort of a roar shack test, sociologic roar attack test, what people's interpretation of what this term even means. Probably the most direct definition, the most security relevant definition of a ghost gun would be a firearm that is produced typically outside of the consolidated, regulated,

industrial environment that we've gotten accustomed to over the last approximately 100 years of industrialization and factory methods and so on, consolidating firearms production to this centralized kind of and largely accessible to regulators' environment, factory environment. But it's not just that because there's also the issue of weapons tracing. So are firearms traceable, right? So ghost guns, oftentimes the security relevant definition is going to be guns that cannot be traced through the typical industrially dependent tracing systems, right? So they may be unserialized and so forth. They may be produced without cereals. They may be produced with fake cereals. That's a rarer face. Or arguably, you could make the argument that actually most guns are ghost guns. If our definition revolves around this idea of the traceability, of firearms, particularly if they're involved in a crime. Because Aaron Karp from Small Arms Survey a couple of years ago did a large survey of this.

And he found more or less that about 88% I think of civilian-held firearms, not just in the U.S., but around the world, are unregistered. So that also adds difficulty in the tracing scheme that we have, which involves marking, serializing firearms at their point of manufacture. And you can't guarantee that's going to happen if people are DIYing it, right, outside of that normal regulatory environment. But there are also other ways around it. You can take a commercial firearm

and obliterate the serial number on that and make it almost as difficult to trace as a DIY kind of product that's un-serialized. So this whole idea of ghost guns being synonymous with homemade guns, that's not necessarily true. Ghost guns, it's not a very specific definition. Like I said, it means different things

to different people. but the most security relevant definition to try to boil it down is to say it's a gun that's hard to trace through the typical tracing schemes that have been put in place since approximately the early 1900s. And there's a panic, I would say, I think you call it a panic in the book, around the idea of 3D printed weapons. That's what I would say is like the newspeck of this story. And that's the thing that everyone's really concerned about right now, is that people can, you can digitally distribute. these gun codes and print up a plastic weapon or in your home and get a couple shots off. Like, why is this? But again, as you said, as you point out in your book, homemade weapons have been with us

for a long time and untraceable weapons have been with us for a long time. The regulating mechanisms are actually pretty new. Why do you think that 3D printing, additive manufacturing, digital distribution, like changes things? and why do you think we're so concerned about it? Yeah, I think that's a really important question to this whole kind of phenomenon, I'm trying to interpret it,

and bring the sociopolitics into it too, because from a manufacturing standpoint, from an industrial standpoint, the guns haven't changed, firearms haven't changed, right? Engineering of firearms has been principally unchanged since the late 19th century. So guns themselves today,

they might have updated ergonomics and materials and so on, updated designs, but principally they're the same as products that were available from industrial commerce in the late 1800s. So this emphasis, and some people might argue over-emphasis on digital fab as this new exotic way to make guns on a DIY basis or independently of mainstream industry. I think that speaks to a lot of people's technological anxieties. I think it speaks to a lot of concerns about the fundamental question of whether industrial era weapons policy and all kinds of other industrial era policies, by the way, security-relevant policies, are going to remain as effective or relevant into the future as some folks would argue they've been in the past.

I realize a lot of people can argue around the margins of that question, and I go into some of those arguments, and I try to treat both of those arguments with respect within the book. But basically, I think digital fabrication represented this kind of shot across the bow when it came to of DIY provocateurs that got into this space about about 10 years ago, I want to say, people, of course, were building guns already. And non-digitally fabricated processes were being used by all kinds of hobby gunsmiths and gun nerds for decades before that, using more traditional shop tools and processes, right? More traditional skill sets.

But you have a few kind of DIY provocateurs in the last 10 years or so who embrace digital fab as this new medium, this new format, and embrace the idea of digital distribution and so on. It's still really a drop in the bucket in terms of the actual numbers of DIY guns that are being made. It's not mostly digital fabrication, but digital fabrication does open up this new kind of, not just a political front or a legal front, which is actually more important ultimately than the mechanics. Why does someone want to make a ghost gun? There's various reasons for that that I've been able to discern from speaking to a number of people who do it.

There's not a lot of standardized data on this survey data. I'm thinking about trying to do some public polling on that or something representative, reasonably representative, to find out precisely what respondents are going to say. But it seems to be at least speaking anecdotally based on speaking to a number of people who do it. It's broken up into a couple different camps, right? You have hobbyists and gunnerd types and hobby engineers, some sort of entrepreneurs that want to build a better mouse trap in some area of the firearms space. People like that have been active for many decades. And I've met people who I met one gentleman who's quite old.

He's in his late 90s. He's been building guns. He's an expert, you know, machinist. Been building all kinds of guns out of his home workshop for decades, but winning awards for him and so on. And then you have DIY provocateurs who are in it more for the, the political implications, the idea that we're going to apply new technologies and challenge the traditional or historic style of supply-side gun control that has more or less existed since the early 1900s. So there's a political aspect to this of folks trying to be provocative.

There's the engineering aspect to this of folks that just really enjoy that engineering challenge. And of course, there can be overlap between those groups. And then, of course, there's also some criminals who've gotten interested in this because they understand that it is potentially a way to get guns off record. So that has happened too. And it has happened not only in the U.S. but in other countries as well, which is an interesting kind of facet of this as far as I'm concerned from a security analysis standpoint. Yeah, I would say that I live in the South Park, you live in the West. We probably both know people that even like you said before the advent of this 3D printing technology were boring their own rifles and figuring out ways to make their own lower receivers.

And it always feels it's akin to like guys that work on their car, but it's a gun. And I know that they're completely different things, but that's the energy I've always helped. But those people are very different from, say, a Cody Wilson. Sure. Can you tell us a little about who he is and like what his politics are? Sure, and that angle on it's been interesting, I think, to observe because within this period of Cody Wilson and some other kind of provocative tours within this space, you see a little bit of a split. I don't know how meaningful that split is ultimately, but a little split where, you know, early on in this research about 10 years ago when I really first started digging into this issue, a lot of the kind of older timers who'd been doing this for a long time with more traditional methods circled the wagon when you talk about ghost guns because they felt that they were unfairly being lumped in this new provocative, much hyped phenomenon that was opening this new front in gun policy and a very toxic gun debate. And they had been doing what they've been doing for a long time without much controversy. And without any connection to crime and so on as far as they knew,

to have these new kind of anarcho-libertarian provocateurs involved in this text space and intentionally trolling the media, getting attention to this phenomenon, a lot of folks who were already doing it peacefully before didn't necessarily all that new negative attention. But Cody Wilson comes along in the 2010s, more recently about the last 10 years, and it really took off in 2012.13. He comes along. He's a law student from Texas. He's articulate, but very bombastic and provocative

in the way he presents this technology. And he released a design for what he called the Liberator handgun, which was a 3D printable plastic gun. Really mediocre piece, by the way, really not useful for anything besides a one shot kind of thing. Pretty unreliable. It was more to prove that he could do it, I think. Exactly. Totally proof of confidence. concept. And this was back in 2012, 2013, about total proof of concept. The gun was absolutely mediocre. You'd never really want it for any kind of real gun application. But he did prove the concept and he expertly trolled the media from that point forward to bring essentially a perverse

kind of free advertising to his company defense distributed and some of the projects that they were involved in, bringing attention to Deptcad, which is the online forum and file repository. And since then you've got a lot more contributors to that. And bringing attention to a custom CNC machine, a desktop CNC machine, they call the ghost gunner, right, in response to all of this negative media and political attention, they start just trolling more and more. And I think they knew that was working, and it was actually in its own kind of perverse way. It was a savvy strategy to bring an amount of attention to this phenomenon that never

could have been had otherwise. He comes along and he rather articulately expresses this idea that digital fabrication and the digitization of DIY firearms is going to more or less undermine the entire concept behind gun control as we know it in modern times. And of course then, in reaction to that, you have a number of politicians on the other side of the gun divide in the U.S. who also more or less endorse and accept this idea, but with a completely different interpretation of whether it's bad or good. So Cody Wilson and some of the sort of anarcho-libertarian types,

they want to develop out this digital fabrication space and various other areas of the DIY space to undermine the idea that you can control guns with a top-down supply side, point-of-sale, retail regulatory strategy. And they're not necessarily wrong about that point. It is very difficult to control some of the innovations that they've come up with. And some of those innovations are very clever. On the other hand, politicians on the other end of this issue, a number of them, and perversely endorsed that idea as well when calling for new regulations. And so the whole concept that DIY and digital fabrication would more or less undermine all gun laws, all weapons laws, we know it, became endorsed by both sides just with completely different interpretations of whether it's a good or bad thing.

How do you write about this without, something that struck me as I was reading the book, is that, and you mentioned this in the book, is that this is such a high, hyper-charged topic in American politics. How do you navigate it and write about it without being completely swallowed by the toxic waters? That is the debate around country. Yeah, that's another kind of central question. And it was always on my mind the whole time doing research and putting together in the book. You got to be able to talk to people on both sides of what is in America, in particular, a very toxic political divide.

And people told me all kinds of different things in terms of the assumption. that people have about if an academic tries to come into the firearm space or the gun policy space, that we have a binary political system in this country for the most part. And political scientists are all over this lately, especially in the modern era, looking at polarization. And guns is one of those issues in the U.S. that is so highly polarized that you get increasingly what political scientists are calling negative choice or negative voting, where you're not so much voting for the platform of the party that you're voting for. You're voting against the other side because you're more afraid of what they're going to do, or you fear the imposition of their political preferences more than you

necessarily totally agree in lockstep with the party you're going with. So those dynamics are really perverse. They're perverse across the spectrum, but guns are really one of those issues, very hot button, very polarizing, much like abortion and a number of other issues in the U.S. And it wasn't always easy to navigate that. I will say that. I've had early on in the process, I had people from all ends make assumptions about what my editorial viewpoint must be about this and having to really, especially with the DIY crowd and the legal gun culture, having to more or less break bread and come in and explain, hey, this is not research that I necessarily want to conform to anybody's stereotype. I'm trying to be respectful to all viewpoints here. I'm trying to be respectful to all parties.

And for the most part, I think, and I hope that I succeeded at that by talking with people on all ends of that spectrum and really focusing more on the practicalities of this rather than trying to push any particular angle. I definitely have editorial views, and I'm certain that those editorial views come out in some parts of the book. And I just acknowledge that. It's up to readers to decide ultimately what they think about all of this material and how they want to interpret it in terms of any kind of real social or regulatory. or technical response to it. So this is an issue that is still in flux. A lot of the real important questions behind it are still unsettled.

And so it was difficult to write a book that could keep up with those developments as they ran because things were constantly changing and I was constantly trying to update things around some of the innovations and some of the legislation being proposed and so on. But at the same time, because it's not a fully settled issue,

I think that also played a role in creating a space where people can come in and try to sort of parse it out and understand it and talk to people from all ends of it. And as long as you try to express that, look, this is not a purely editorial exercise. This is not an exercise that's meant to be disrespectful to any party involved in this. If you look at it like an anthropologist, right, there's a lot of areas where we're supposed to be as value-free as we can be, acknowledging. our own implicit biases or internal biases. I just try to take that to heart and say, look, I have my opinions, and I'm upfront about some of those opinions in the book,

but I also want to respectfully explain and describe the positions of all kinds of key players in this whole crazy debate. What do you see as your key findings overall? I would say it's difficult to boil down to one thing because there's a whole spectrum of kind of sub-issues to this that make it very complex. I would say from a technical standpoint, one of my key findings, I think, or conclusions anyway, would be that this phenomenon, whether we're talking about more traditional methods or we're talking about new innovations like Digital Fab,

you can't really relate the new phenomenon of DIY firearms without trying to put them in some kind of context against traditional commercial products and all of the crazy toxic debates and questions we have about how to influence the social outcomes of those. And DIY, whether it's old or new tech that you're using, is a drop in the bucket compared to that. So you have to all, you know, to this issue of guns writ large, which is part of the difficulty. And that's where you get pulled into this traditional toxic binary gun debate. But I would say that from a technical standpoint, The basic takeaway is that it would be very difficult to control some of the technical innovations that are being made, as well as, particularly in the U.S. context, very difficult to regulate some of the sort of innovative tactics that are being used by both DIYers and more mainstream industries to try to meaningfully regulate guns in a way that you can directly connect to public safety benefits by focusing, as we often do in this country,

regulating sort of superficial or definitional elements of firearms, right? So one example of that being California compliance or New York compliance and things like that where you have really clever engineering decisions that are being made by even mainstream makers and designers to give consumers something very similar to what was just supposedly banned. But the language that is often used, the kind of definitional strategy that is, used to try to control guns in this country from the supply side, more or less I think misses the point oftentimes because the pace of material engineering and the pace of manufacturing

innovation is faster than the pace of legislative change oftentimes. And the legislative change itself is often very superficial, right? And this was a complaint I heard from people on both sides of that divide, that the kind of legislation we often pass as weapons control in this country and in other countries too, as a matter of fact, tends to be very superficial. And you hear Second Amendment advocates and people involved in the gun culture, legal gun culture, complain about this regularly, where it's a ban this feature, but this other thing is legal, and it's almost the same. And you can engineer around that. And in fact, a lot of folks, I would call this a fairly simplistic view, and I'm skeptical of the idea of doing this in the U.S.

I just don't think it's workable whatsoever. But people take the Australian, model as a model for the United States, which I think, again, is not workable here in the American context. But what ended up happening with that, and this is a lesser-known post-script to that story, is that there's actually more firearms in Australia today than before the buybacks and before they banned a significant swath of semi-automatic rifles and so on, and before they really tightened up legal ownership of handguns. There's actually more guns in Australia today than before that that whole series of buyback programs. And so industry actually has ways of benefiting from this, because if you ban certain variants that are popular today, not only do you

pay a political and economic and enforcement cost to try to actually have that ban translate to compliance or more than a marginal impact on crime at street level, but it also actually just opens up new space to engineer and design and market new firearms that technically comply. That's been the experience in some states where you have California compliance, you have clever innovations that people came up with to technically comply with the letter, if not necessarily the spirit. Can you get into some of like specific examples of innovation circumventing the specifics of the law? Sure. So in California, there was this whole series of legislative attempts to try to more or less restrict this concept of assault weapons.

And that's another area where assault weapons mean a different thing depending on the regulatory environment. They mean a different thing to different people. And lots of Second Amendment advocate types and gun rights advocates will say it's basically a meaningless term. It's a legalistic term. And yet the term itself is based on oftentimes a number of really superficial qualities that don't have much to do with the fundamental functionality of the firearm.

So in California, first they had, I believe, they had a regulation that required. like bullet buttons, they called it. So the magazine release on a semi-automatic rifle, for example, in order for it not to be an assault weapon or in order for it to be considered legal within the state, it had to have this mechanism where it was more difficult to release the magazine quickly. So you had to theoretically have to use a tool to release the magazine. You couldn't just have a magazine release button that could be easily

pressed with a finger. And of course, a lot of shooters and gun rights advocates were like, well, this is absurd to begin with. How much of the difference is that going to make? But manufacturers did try to comply with that, but they complied in a way that was more letter than spirit. They were coming up with designs for this where it was really pretty easy to still release those things, even though they technically complied from an engineering standpoint. So then you get another round of media concern about that. And a few years later, they re-legislate and they say, okay, bullet buttons are no good anymore. What we want now is in order to release the magazine, you have to open the action, which is even theoretically more difficult and more of a delay

on somebody reloading quickly. So then you have a number of California compliant manufacturers who found a way to engineer firearms that you could open the action really fast to release the magazine and then reload. So there are engineering innovations and little clever engineering hacks you can use to try to get around the letter of that law. And the law itself oftentimes is not necessarily written by a firearms expert, small arms expert. And there may be limits in terms of what the courts will go with constitutionally or what certain lobbying groups might go with in terms of how far can you go on those engineering requirements before you're actually just prohibiting something without prohibiting it, and then you get into this murky legal

zone where maybe you'll lose in court. Bump stocks seem like they would fit under the categorization you're talking about. People, it was originally created in order to get around the fact you can't buy a machine gun. It's supposed to increase your rate of fire. and after the shootings in Las Vegas a couple years ago, they were made illegal in some states. But I assume there are already workarounds to that. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and I think Thumbstats are a good example of this kind of gun control through definitional arguments versus crime control through some other mechanism that tries to have more of a social impact or behavioral impact rather than let's argue about firearm engineering endlessly and never, you know, really get anywhere. When it came to bump stocks, the first issue about bump stocks is that they are remarkably simple devices. And you can jury rig a similar kind of rate of fire increase a number of different ways, some of which are remarkably simple, right? I've seen examples of this. And if you go to some little corners of the internet, you're going to find plenty of info about this.

But in an AR platform, you can build a drop-in auto sear, which will emulate automatic fire with a wire hanger. If you know exactly how to do it. You can do it with shoelaces. You can do it with rubber bands and springs and all kinds of ways to just jury rig a semi-automatic firearm to have a more rapid rate of fire. And you can also, if you're a reasonably skilled machinist, you can machine from scratch a full auto receiver, or you can retrofit and customize a semi-automatic receiver. It's not super easy to do, but to a very skilled machinist, it's a trivial task to do that. So a lot of this stuff is honor system anyway, and then you have the perverse effect of all the media attention on bump stocks and the attempt to ban it through an administrative rule at the federal level, which, of course, we see this perverse impact. with gun politics in America, where every time you talk about banning something, you sell way more of them,

and you get a run on that product. So that happened with bump stocks, and a whole bunch of people went and bought them because they were going to get banned, not because they were necessarily interested in them prior to the discussion over bans. And you have a huge amount of media attention to that issue, at least briefly after the Las Vegas attack. and that kind of more widely popularized some of the divide things you can do. It spread more information to gun nerds, and most gun nerds are low-risk people,

but some criminals are gun nerds too. The result of this is to take something that was actually pretty simple. A lot of people thought that bump stocks are a silly product. Why was this ever legal in the first place? It's an endron of the National Firearms Act and the 1986 Firemanors Protection Act. which kind of grandfathered out machine guns so that you can emulate a machine gun.

But, you know, the issue is that it's not super uncommon knowledge that you can do this a number of ways where you don't have to buy any kind of legal product to do that or any kind of regulated product to do that. And there are illegal makers and traffickers in other countries that simply make full auto weapons from scratch. That hasn't happened very much in the U.S. context, as far as I can tell. And probably one of the reasons for that is because your average, criminal in the United States already has access to pretty good semi-auto firearms. There's not a great need for full auto capabilities, certainly not for most civilian applications, but even for most criminal applications, you don't really need that.

Yeah, I think it's telling I live in South Carolina, and we were one of the first states to really jump on banning the bumpstock thing, which just tells me that we understand guns and gun culture, I think better than a lot of other people in the country do. that's a tangent. Can you tell me what is additive manufacturing and how is it different than what we think of as traditional 3D printing? Right. And how does it affect all of this?

So digital fabrication is bifurcated from a technical standpoint into additive and subtractive. So subtractive processes are those traditional machining processes, traditional fabrication processes that have been around for thousands of years. You take a workpiece and you're. removing material from it to form the product. So, you know, all kinds of milling and machining and leaves and so forth. Any kind of metal work for a long time was subtracted. With digital fab, you get this new area of 3D printing, which is additive manufacturing.

So with a very high degree of precision, you have a machine that will add layers of material until the final product is formed. Okay. Now, you can have a subtractive digital fabricator, a digital machine, like a digital C. CNC machine. And digital CNC, you feed a block of billet steel into it, and if you know how to program it correctly and configure it correctly, or if you have a file, then it will basically mill or carve out the product that you want from that raw material. Added it, you have one highly perceived doing it without even removing material from workpiece. So in some ways, it's more efficient because you, you have, you're doing it without even removing material from workpiece. So in some ways it's more efficient because you don't have any waste. And I think a lot of people found it to be particularly provocative because you have new materials.

It's a new medium. So now you can print in plastic. You can print in synthetic materials. And the materials continually expand at the consumer level and certainly at the larger business level for what you can make from scratch with additive machines. There are 3D printers that can work in metal now. most of those are industrial scale. They're very expensive. They have a lot of prerequisites to being able to use them.

So that's still a barrier for your average criminal. Digital fabrication could involve carving pieces in the traditional way, but using digital precision to do it. Or it could involve building pieces with these new additive processes that are innovative and novel and involves new materials. And that's really what I think concerned a lot of people in media and a lot of people in the policy space was that what's going to happen when there's more and more materials you can build with.

People were concerned about plastics for additive DIY guns. For the most part, I find consumer-grade plastics to be very much inferior to the kind of metal firearms you can make with digital CNC, right? So you can make a much better gun with a digital CNC tool than with an additive plastic tool. It's going to use PLA plastics or other household plastics. They're just not good. materials for firearms. You have to weigh over-engineer the gun and make it clunky and

oftentimes silly to make it work in plastics, although there have been some innovations there are interesting. In terms of detectability, which is another kind of sub-question here that got a lot of attention and a lot of people concerned, it's possible to print plastic firearm that would be undetectable by metal detectors, but there have also been some innovations in weapon screen technology as well, and they call it advanced imaging technologies where instead of doing materials recognition, they're doing shape and object recognition. So they can detect things that are gun-like in a gun-like shape and a wider variety of materials. To some degree, it's a little bit of a challenge to traditional weapons screening,

but really it's not an earth-shaking difference. And the kind of firearms that you can manufacture out of all plastic are, generally speaking, so mediocre that they represent, in my opinion, as a security professional, less of a threat. actually than other more traditional means of defeating weapons screening, which could be smuggling in traditional firearms some other way through the weapon screening portal, going in through some other entryway, or just blitzing through the weapon screening portal itself. And there are historic cases of this happening with terrorism and active shooters, where they have weapons screening in place, and the attacker just doesn't care.

It has no real practical impact on them for an indiscriminate attack. So in terms of weapon screening, I don't think there's really a huge change from where we already were. And I think some of the concern about that is being over-emphasized. But the idea that you can build in plastic, and of course you can recycle plastics, household plastics, extrude them through extruders and reform them into the pellets that would use in the printers and stuff like that. It just makes at least conceptually the idea of controlling firearms from the top down through some kind of regulation at the point of sale or regulation on materials, just much more difficult to envision how that's going to work. And as a tangent, I just would add, I would ask people to expand their imagination beyond firearms,

especially with additive manufacturing specifically. Los Alamos National Laboratory has used a machine to produce high explosives using additive manufacturing. Raytheon has said it can 3D print roughly 80% of a missile using some of these techniques. Now, obviously, these are our outliers, but things are going to get super weird, super fast. I agree. I think. And I think that you're absolutely right, nailing that one of the big issues that's around all the stuff that we don't really talk about is the limits of arms control and the traditional sense when we look at these new technologies. About to be in a world where all of that stuff just does, like all these old methods just don't work anymore, really.

Yeah. And I think fundamentally, And one of the reasons I chose this topic, which was, I think, at least speaking for myself personally, it was a very difficult topic to try to provide a good treatment of that people from all different angles would be able to appreciate something from the book. But it wasn't just because I am personally a gunner and myself that I was into it. It was that I think this issue was one of the earliest and most obvious security relevant canaries in the coal mine on the security implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the open source

revolution. You can use open source tools increasingly. You have organizations like Raytheon. You have defense contractors, aviation manufacturers and things like that who have this at the very cutting edge, right, which requires capital and skills intensive deployments of these technologies at that cutting edge. But they gain so much in terms of material science and customizability that to them this really represents a move forward that's worth that invest. investment. But for every one of those mainstream, very high intensity of applications or innovations that happen in the space, you have an open source version that's built on the cheap, that people are just putting their heads together, screwing around, seeing what they can do with consumer

grade versions of the same tools and materials. And guns are just one of the earliest manifestations of this. And it's understandable in a lot of ways that, you know, especially in the American context or in a few other countries, too, that have strong gun cultures, whether legal or illegal in some cases, gun cultures, that there would be experimentation about this because it's pretty approachable as far as applying these technologies to some new space would be. But I agree. Part of the reason I wanted to get into this topic in the first place was because I think this is just the beginning, right? And we're not just talking about improvements to what DIYers can do with firearms in the future. That issue is a little more complex and nuanced than other kinds of

of applications in the security space because guns are legal in the U.S. and they're legal in most countries. They're regulated, but they're legal products. And so there's a sort of legal and ethical gray zone about how far do we want to go to try to control technology in the hopes of controlling firearms. When you relate that back to the historical trends is that even what we have in place already before you count in this new tech, the supply side gun control paradigm was not particularly effective necessarily in terms of connecting that to public safety benefits. That's not to say I would reject all gun control laws. That's definitely not true either. But the idea of we are going to prevent what is actually a very small number of trafficked firearms,

illegally trafficked firearms from being involved in crimes, out of 400 plus million firearms already in circulation, the vast majority of which are already unregistered in this country, it's an uphill regular battle to say the least. And I think that issue and this idea that you can DIY this using new tech or even old tech, it just forces what I hope will be a smarter, more nuanced, more realistic reframing of the gun policy debate. But when it comes to that light weapon space, right, or things like missiles, man pads, stuff like that, it is not currently a major concern that Violent non-state actors are going to make those things using digital fab, but there's a whole history of this happening without digital fab, and there's increasing experimentation with digital

fab among violent groups. Drug cartels have been building weapons for years, lots of militias, and some terrorist groups have built weapons with varying degrees of success, but oftentimes they've been successful. I remember some analysts from the State Department a couple years ago said, after looking at the weapon supply chain and DIY manufacture that they'd put in place, that they saw that the ISIS supply chain, they said, to paraphrase, was unlike anything they'd ever seen. And you have some clever processes that have been embraced by some violent non-state groups, Al-Nusra, I think, and a few other groups in Syria and Iraq as part of this whole ISIS mess fighting for or against them, have DIY'd all kinds of armored vehicles.

There's narco tanks. There's militias in the Middle East that have built their own armored vehicles. There's increasing ability to automate or semi-autimate vehicles. There's experimentation with weaponized drones that have been done. DIY drones that have been built by smuggling organizations. And when you catch them, because of DIY and they're not registered, because obviously if you're building it for a criminal purpose, you're not going to register it as is required, just like you wouldn't with a gun.

So when they capture those drones doing cross-border smuggling, they tend to be much harder to trace because they're using open source architectures to build everything and so on. Narco submarines, if you think about that. The engineering capabilities are increasing in some ways. And as long as there is sufficient, I think, incentive for violent non-state groups and criminal groups to innovate within this manufacturing space, we're going to see examples of that happening and increasing examples of that happening. One kind of petty version of this that I saw that's interesting is we're limited in terms of, terms of home printers to relatively cheap and non-versatile plastics. But you can use cheap and

non-versatile plastics for some purposes. There are some groups that have 3D printed plastic high-security keys that will defeat locks, right? And high security locks. There's groups that will print these ATM skimmers, right? They look like legit parts of the ATM, but it's really installed by the scammer to steal your card data. And people are 3D printing these things. So there's all kinds of weird criminal applications from very unsettling applications among terrorist groups or violent cartels and so on, down to really petty kind of deployments of this stuff. And a lot of it's pretty creative and innovative. But I just think we're just scratching the surface of where some of this tech is going to go.

And we're just scratching the surface of the hopefully not too hysterical reaction that we're going to have when some of those applications that are even, you know, more unsettling than just building some guns in a country already full of guns. Some of these applications could, I think, lead to a sort of sociopolitical backlash against tech, which has its own kind of risks involved with that. I think we're already experiencing a sociopolitical backlash against tech in America, right? Oh, yeah. I do think this stuff will... I just want to say nobody's actually boycotting the iPhone.

Everybody's happy to get a new one of those. Yeah, but I think there's a sense in which we are trapped. There's no way to, if you want to cut Amazon out of your life, you can't, really. If you're taking like Amazon Web Services as part of it, like everything, the part of the dirty little secret is that huge portions of the backbone of the Internet are built on it. But we do still have these antitrust congressional hearings. We do have people mad about maybe it's just because I'm a tech reporter and I'm in this world, but I just see a lot of pushback against it.

But yeah, you're right. Like, it does, like, we just are stuck with it. Yeah. What do you think? Sorry, go ahead. I think fundamentally it comes down to how easy or difficult is it to uninvent things, particularly in a free society. It's always difficult to try to put that cat back in the bag or genie back in the bottle.

Choose whatever metaphor you want. And when it comes to these kind of off-the-shelf technologies, in addition to the fact that what I refer to it in the book is we also have the material plenitude of industrialization. We have hundreds of years of industrialization and free trade and increasingly liberalized trade, which of course, some of that's been rolled back in recent years. But the general trend has been globalization and open trade and open exchange of technology and information over the past decade or so. And some of that is now being walked back for various purposes, good and ill. Now, I think we're definitely in one of those periods where these

kind of developments are causing people to reframe and reassess. What are some of the implications of tech and how much control do we want to put on this? How much do we want to throttle tech? Because we're worried about some of the negative applications. But at the same time, particularly in a free or open society, how much can you control information without running into that other question of the legitimacy of the gatekeepers, right? Or can the gatekeepers themselves be controlled or will this turn into some other kind of a problem? And there were people, and this is part of that political debate over DIY firearms, that there have been periods of time where technically to share the digital design files is legal, right, under federal

law. It's technically legal, or at least it has been for certain periods of this whole debate, legal, but then you have private platforms deplatforming that information among users who are trying to communicate it. That is, of course, the right of private platforms to do and to moderate, and they're under increasing pressure to do that along this whole spectrum of speech and all kinds of stuff that's going on. I don't know that I have any kind of real solution to that issue, because I think it's in many ways the issue for our time, the issue for us and the new generation to try to hash out and figure out what's going to be our new positive way to stay in open and free society, hopefully minimizing the most obvious dangers of this without necessarily curtailing people's civil liberties in a meaningful sense.

And that is the new tension. And I think we can compare that to, let's say, China, for example, which you've got the great firewall, you've got all kinds of backdooring and things of that nature. And it's pretty much a social norm there. and yet I've seen reports where considerable quantities of DIY guns are still being made in China. Traditional issues like corruption and the effectiveness of policing and incentives and why do people want illegal firearms? Why do people want illegal products?

You've got to look at that in this wider macro scale in terms of influencing demand and influencing use and behavior on the social level, instead of just saying that, well, we have to control tech. and once you do that, problem solved. It does seem like history is not exactly filled with examples of technologies staying bottled up. Even in North Korea, they have DVD players and they need thumb drives in order to watch stuff. Yeah. And the penalties there, you're not going to get a lot more draconian than that.

So if you can't keep people completely away from modern tech in North Korea, where could you? Yeah, and I actually bring up that example, bring up Qaeda. Cuba until recently was trying to stay closed off from the outside internet and outside media. And you still have mules bringing in just flash drives and solid state storage devices and so on. It's not just about, oh, if we could just get some universal system where we could backdoor everybody's encryption. In addition to all of the potential drawbacks of that in terms of cybersecurity and cyber defense for mainstream industry and all of the interactions that private sector has with, public sector, all those interdependencies, where if you theoretically weaken strong encryption in the private sector, you've got all kinds of public sector organizations that may also become

vulnerable, even if you exempt them from the weakening of the encryption. So there's all kinds of reasons that's controversial. But even beyond that, what's going to happen if you do that besides the weakening potentially of cyber defense and cybersecurity? It's that encryption algorithm themselves are open source and can still be developed and can be traded. And Al-Qaeda had its own version of encryption algorithms. I don't know how secure they were, and I'm not qualified to really speculate on that. But criminal organizations can come up with their own parallel illicit infrastructures for any number of areas of tech or manufacturing or across the spectrum of human endeavor. So if you can make something yourself illegally and continue to

operate illegally, potentially from a regulatory standpoint, a policy standpoint, we're paying the costs of compliance within those legal and open sectors, but are we actually hitting the illicit activity? Are we actually going to stop that activity? And I think the outlook for doing it that way, through regulations on what is really accessible mainstream operators and individuals, That's the disconnect and the big question about supply-side gun policy or supply-side drugs policy, for that matter, is the people that are easiest to control through regulation are, statistically speaking, the people who least need to be controlled for public safety. Right.

So that legal regulatory scheme that is applied primarily to legal operations that are most accessible to regulators, you can implement all kinds of compliance things and more or less throttle that tech and maybe reduce the privacy or security of certain legal sectors, but at the same time, are you actually hitting the illicit activity? And I think, like you were just alluding to, with North Korea, right, let's say we want to shut down all possible sharing of digital firearm files, right? So you just were scared of what people are going to do with digital firearms, even though there have been very few actual criminal cases involving this and many more cases involving

traditional commercial products that get trafficked or their breakdowns and background check system or things like that. Let's say we want to shut that down entirely. What's it going to take? You have to be able to bust secure storage devices on the border in traveler's pockets. Now you're getting very invasive and that kind of technical capability in addition to that kind of legal, of is probably not consistent with a free and open society and would be seriously challenged across the board by a number of civil liberties groups. And I think those civil liberties groups would be correct to challenge those things. Speaking as a security professional that also cares about civil liberties, how are you going to stop it? You can try bust encryption, okay, but then

you've still got peer to peer, you've still got various kinds of platforms where it could hide. You've got a digital steganography, right, where it's not even encrypted, but it's still hard define. And your average law enforcer is not going to be able to discern between legal and illegal code without some sort of artificial health or some sort of higher skill, technically skilled specialist. And it's the same thing even with firearms. It's in order to make a criminal case on some novel kind of firearm, you have to send it to a professional firearms examiner to step one, establish that it even is legally a firearm. And step two, establish that it's a type of firearm that this person shouldn't be possessing or building, right? So that kind of stuff really increases the difficulty. When you have this kind of tech gray space, this informational gray space, now you have to control information, not just physical things. So obviously the ethical and constitutional legal questions there just multiply hugely. I think that's a dire and interesting place to end the conversation. Jason, unless you've got a follow-up.

No, I like dire and interesting. That's usually where we go. That's usually where we end up. Yeah, a little depressing, a little frightening, asking questions we can't possibly have the answers to. And just shrugging and going, we'll see. Mark Tallman, the book is Ghost Guns. It should be out.

By the time you were hearing this, it should have just come out. It is excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the show to walk us through all this. Oh, well, it's my pleasure. Thanks very much for inviting me.