Now lawmakers will have to develop their own solution that blocks all 3D printers from printing guns
Kerry Stevenson of Fabbaloo says that a technical solution is not feasible but it's on the bill's proponents to show how it can be done.
Kerry Stevenson’s June 1st article on Fabbaloo, New York’s New 3D Printing Legislation Raises Questions about Feasibility, looks at a bill passed into law in NY that requires 3D printers to block the fabrication of guns or gun parts. A similar bill passed the Assembly in California and awaits a vote by the Senate.
Lawmakers have ignored input from 3D printing experts, so it’s on them to figure out how to make technology that prevents 3D printers from printing guns or gun parts from digital files.
Summary of the legislation
The New York bill (link):
Requires first-in-the-nation minimum safety standards for 3D printers sold in New York to be equipped with basic technology that prevents the unlicensed, illegal production of lethal firearms and firearm parts.
Requires the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services to lead a task force of experts to recommend regulations that will ensure New Yorkers are protected from these dangerous weapons. Following the implementation of the resulting regulations, state law will allow for recourse against any actor who sells a 3D printer in New York without equipping it with such technology.
Criminalizes the unlawful possession, sale, or distribution of blueprints that allow the printing of illegal guns and gun parts, and the manufacture of 3D-printed firearms.
Requires all pistols sold in the state to private citizens be designed in such a way that ensures they cannot quickly and easily be turned into machine guns using common tools.
The California bill, AB-2047 Firearms - 3D Printing Blocking Technology:
Requires manufacturers to register each printer model with the California DOJ for approval.
Makes it a misdemeanor to knowingly circumvent the protections (i.e. installing open source software).
Bans the sale or transfer of nonapproved printers which do not have “firearm blocking technology”.
Allows civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation for selling or transferring non-compliant printers.
Interview with Kerry Stevenson of Fabbaloo
Dale Dougherty: I want to talk to you about the 3D printing bills aimed at preventing users from using 3D printers to make guns or components of guns.
Legislators can pass bills asking technology to do something, but it doesn’t mean that what they’re asking for can be done. You called technology “unfeasible” in your article. The technology doesn’t seem to exist.
Kerry Stevenson: I’m not even sure it can exist. But, you know, it’s really security theater. These people do not have a proper understanding of the technology, and technology is advancing far more rapidly than legislators and legislation can keep up.
But they’re probably thinking in the back of their minds about photocopiers. Photocopiers have features where you can’t copy money. And so it could be done in other systems too, right? But the difference is that how many different kinds of images of money are there? There’s not that many. You could probably count them on one hand. But how many different types of geometries could there be for a firearm part? It’s infinite. It is literally infinite.
People think, “Isn’t there just a bunch of designs (for guns)?” There are, but they’re always changing. How do you keep track of them? And even if you did, you can still manipulate them. In my story, I had the example where you could take a printed coffee cup, and then in your CAD program, paste the firearm part on the side of that, print that, and then you cut off the cup, and ta-da.
How is the system gonna detect that? It is completely infeasible to do this.
Dale Dougherty: On one hand, these legislators might say, “What’s the harm in passing this bill?” Let’s say a solution does exist. Most people aren’t printing guns, so it’s not going to affect most people.
Kerry Stevenson: I was thinking in this magical world where you somehow do have an algorithm that could detect this stuff, which we’ve said is impossible, how would you actually implement it?
And I see two ways of doing that. One way is you could take that algorithm and somehow bundle it, integrate it into the printer itself, and then models that had that feature would be approved for sale. But, detecting arbitrary geometries, you’d have to have a pretty beefy system to do that, so you’d obviously raise the price of the machine way up.
But even worse, you would have to put a library of the offending models in there. You’d basically be distributing the models you don’t want to be printed out to all these machines. That just seems insane. The other way to do it is to have it embedded in a cloud system where you have this stream of prints going by and something is inspecting it as it happens.
So for, companies like Bambu Labs or others that have a cloud system, maybe they could bolt that on. If you’re a big company, you’ve got a cloud system. If you’re an open source developer making a machine, you don’t have a cloud network. You’re going to have to do option A, which is beef up your machine. Do these people even know how to do that? Basically, it’s a showstopper as far as I’m concerned.
Dale Dougherty: The other side is, if you’re talking about criminal uses of 3D printing, it’s already criminal to print a gun. Criminals won’t be stopped by some cloud solution that a large company has. It gives them every incentive to figure out how to break any system, which is just uploading the file locally and it’s perfectly easy to do that. They will figure their way around it.
The problem is they’ll make it worse for a lot of people that aren’t printing guns. They’ll damage an ecosystem that has really grown up quite nicely and faced challenges to just exist as a 3D printing company.
It’s all moved to China, with Prusa being the exception. We allowed that to happen with drones and, now the U.S. is saying, “Oh we need to have some domestic drone manufacturing.” Putting, these kind of regulations in place will not help the manufacturers of 3D printers. It’s just damaging to that overall ecosystem.
Another analogy is wanting to ban the manufacturing of illegal drug such as methamphetamine. We attempted to deal with it originally by banning access to ephedrine in over-the-counter sales. The criminals found they could make it or drugs like fentanyl out of other industrial chemicals that weren’t banned or controlled.
They’ll create their own 3D printing devices if they really want to. So what if it’s illegal. They can also make guns that are not made with 3D printers. They’re illegal, but they’re in the business of doing things illegally, so they’ll figure it out.
It just seems to cause more harm for good people, and not really restrict what bad people are doing.
Kerry Stevenson: For sure. I was speaking to David Tobin the other week. I did a story with him as well, and he’s chasing around the legislators in California. He’s talks directly to these legislators, and they basically don’t have a clue about this stuff.
And they have very wrong ideas. Some of them literally think you push a button on the machine and you get a working gun printed in one piece. That is absolutely not what happens. It’s far more complicated than that. So really, I think what they’re doing is just chasing headlines and votes. Maybe that’s how democracy works, but it’s got a lot of carnage along the way.
Dale Dougherty: The other thing they always do is they put it off into the future, actually. It’s gonna hit them in a year or two that this isn’t feasible.
Kerry Stevenson: If you look at the timeline of the New York bill, a working group has to be formed, and they have to come up with recommendations, and there’s several steps before this thing would actually happen.
The working group is going to discover that this can’t be done, and then it may actually just completely stall at that point.
Dale Dougherty: Or they’ll spend a lot of money with some consultant who tells them that they can do it but the government needs to fund their team to do it?
Kerry Stevenson: I had another thought, which was, there’s the Bambu and, AnyCubic and Creality and the big guys. They could maybe do something to build this kind of cloud detection in. But there’s all these other players that don’t, or they’re not really capable of doing it. So there would be a market opportunity here for some entrepreneur to come up with a cloud validation system that you could just plug into.
And if you’re like an open source developer and, you gotta do it because the law says so, you just hook up with an API to this service, wherever it is, and they would do it for you. But the thing is that would inevitably end up being a for-pay service, which would lead me to think that these machines will be pay-per-print in the future.
And that’s not good either. In fact, even if Bambu builds their own, they could even offer that as a service to others for a fee. If you’re in a region that needs it, that’s what you’d do.
Dale Dougherty: It will probably create an opportunity for black market 3D printing. Which might be used 3D printers, or ones that have been broken.
Kerry Stevenson: How many 3D printers are in the world right now? There’s probably, I don’t know, 10 million 3D printers out there. And, that’s a lot of parts, and, just buy a car load of leftover Ender 3s and you could probably build a whole bunch out of those parts.
Dale Dougherty: They’ll have to outlaw designs for making 3D printers, for printing 3D printer parts on 3D printers.
Kerry Stevenson: No, it’s just a mess. Then there’s the privacy aspect, do you really wanna to be sending every print job you’re doing up to somewhere where it could be recorded or... in my case, I’m in Canada, and does that mean I have to be sending my design files to the States. Or to China or somewhere. That’s all kinda crazy too.
Dale Dougherty: I do expect the bill will generate lawsuits and get fought out in the courts. The legislators are happy enough to have the appearance that they’ve done something, and maybe you just have to give them that and then wait to see what they actually implement. (It’s like passing a law that can’t be enforced.) Now, it’s on them.
Kerry Stevenson: That’s true. They put the ball in their own court. The other thing to think about is suppose you actually implement all this stuff, and you’ve got this system that’s checking for good or evil, but then what happens later when say Disney shows up and says, “Hey we’d like to use that same infrastructure to prevent people from printing Mickey Mouse.”
Dale Dougherty: Yes, exactly.
Kerry Stevenson: And it would be very easy to turn that on and one can quickly imagine an avalanche of all kinds of claims of copyrighted material. It would just be —
Dale Dougherty: Chaos. You could see them spending a lot more money than the anti-gun people to achieve their ends.
Kerry Stevenson: It would be very tempting for a whole bunch of different parties to do that.
Dale Dougherty: Possibly there’s some AI that can do it — automatic detection. I think the false positives would be interesting. You mentioned security theater and it’s like the TSA bans full water bottles through the security. The criminal elements are figuring out how to, disguise things and get around those things. They wanna know exactly what the machine is doing and detecting, and then they just route around that. It’s this arms race, build the system and break the system, build the system and break the system,
Kerry Stevenson: There’s also a question of scale. David and I, when we were talking, we figured out the percentage of incidents of firearms versus the number of machines, and it’s absolutely microscopic. It’s you know 0.003%.
Dale Dougherty: They’ve managed to find a problem that’s probably not as big as they think it is, and then attempt to solve it in ways that are, as you used the word, not feasible. We just have to wait it out and see how this will tally up at the end.
Kerry Stevenson: One of my personal axioms is that any complex situation can be reduced to an analogy involving automobiles. In this case, it’s like you’ve got the interstate highway system. It’s occasionally used by bank robbers, so let’s make every single driver file a flight plan or driving plan before you go anywhere. That’s basically what we’re doing here.
Dale Dougherty: There’s so many things that were scare episodes on the early internet. Oh, you could put a bomb drawing on the internet. You could do all these things. And yes, they’re there. But we didn’t really try to legislate it away because most were illegal to begin with. It is an overreach by legislators to try to create blocking technology.
Kerry Stevenson: That’s true. Like I read news about 3D printing, so I’ve got all sorts of searches and automated things to find new stories for me, and like in the past couple of months, like every single day, I will see multiple stories about cops busting somebody, and they found 100 guns and 10 printers in some guy’s basement in Delaware or Australia or wherever.
And I was like, “Okay this stuff is happening, and they’re arresting these people, so what’s the issue then?” You are arresting these people. It’s happening anyway.
Dale Dougherty: One issue that you’ve written about is Bambu Labs change in policy, which appeared to be locking down their system and which affects users of open source software. When I read your article, there was a more reasonable explanation behind it.
There’s a difference between using their cloud service, which they regard as proprietary, and using slicer software to create an object on your 3D printer. They want to block users of open source slicers from accessing their cloud service.
Kerry Stevenson: Some open source guy writes some software to run a cloud service and then runs it, but does that give everybody the right to use their cloud system instance? No.
Dale Dougherty: Where you end up in that article is making the point that you don’t quite own your 3D printer the way you think you do. Like a lot of those user agreements that say you’re leasing or renting or borrowing the equipment. It’s at their discretion whether you get to use it. I guess your automobile analogy would be whether you’re actually buying a Ford or just borrowing it until they call it for it back.
Kerry Stevenson: It’s actually an Uber. I think all this is part of this split between the DIY and the consumer space. It used to be there was no consumer space because consumers were simply not capable of running these machines. But now they are, and companies like Bambu are increasingly going to be selling into that space. And they’re gonna be leaving the DIY guys behind.
Dale Dougherty: That’s what I worry about. That will include makerspaces and libraries and schools. When they buy a cheap Bambu 3D printer, they may find that they’re locked out from some of the things that they have been able to do inexpensively. They don’t want to buy a cloud service, for instance.
Kerry Stevenson: The market’s gonna split because of that need. Bambu Labs is going to be increasingly closing things off because they’re making it easier for consumers. And they care less about the other guys because they’re so small.
But that means there’s an opening for somebody to say “no we have the makerspace-friendly version here.” I think that’s the way it’s gonna go. You’re going to have two kinds of machines here.
Dale Dougherty: Back to the bills in NY and California, I don’t feel like there’s much the maker community can do to prevent this from happening. We don’t have that kind of weight or whatever to change what seems to be inevitable. The only consolation is that this puts the ball in their court to enforce what they said they’re going to do, and they will struggle to do it, if it is as unfeasible as you say.
Kerry Stevenson: If they actually enact it, and all of the libraries start closing down their makerspaces, then that might start getting some attention.
Dale Dougherty: Kerry, thank you for taking time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.
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