Offshore 3D printed gun blueprint protector Kim Dotcom reportedly deleting files
From Gregory ferenstein, Techcrunch
3D printed guns are reportedly even too scary for the infamous free-information hacker, Kim Dotcom. After the U.S. State Department demanded that the designer of the world’s first fully printable gun remove the files from his network, New Zealand-based Dotcom committed to keeping them safely online in his offshore legal safehaven.
“I think it’s a serious threat to the security of the community. I think it’s scary that people can print 3D guns that can’t even be detected by metal detectors. This should concern everybody,” said Dotcom, according to a statement emailed to us by a spokesman.
According to New Zealand’s Newstalk ZB website, “The plans were available on Dotcom’s Mega website, but the New Zealand-based entrepreneur asked his staff to delete the public files. Dotcom says he thinks they are a serious threat to security of the community.”
Last week, Texas law school graduate Cody Wilson made global headlines for freely distributing digital blueprints for manufacturing a lethal weapon with a 3D printer. In a mere week, Senator Chuck Schumer called for immediate regulation and the blueprints themselves had been downloaded over 100,000 times.
Because of Dotcom’s commitment to guarding them against U.S. interference, it was questionable whether any government entity could prevent them from being distributed. Dotcom is an entrepreneur and hacker, who became famous for a massive police raid of his Megaupload site that housed pirated entertainment content. He seemed like a natural ally in the fight for radical open information.
Now that even he’s abandoned 3D weapons, perhaps there is some information that the Internet and government can collaboratively reject.
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