New Jersey Escalates Battle over 3D Printed Firearms and Parts
February 11, 2019
Update 2/15/19: This story has taken a remarkable turn over the last two days. On Tuesday, news broke that the takedown notice referenced in this article was, in fact, not submitted by the office of the New Jersey Attorney General. A Monday court filing submitted by the (real) New Jersey AG revealed that the “[Attorney General has] no reason to believe the Attorney General’s filed this takedown notice… our investigation thus far demonstrates the office did not do so.” A request from the AG’s office to Cloudflare further revealed that the IP from which the demand was submitted is assigned to a service provider in Slovakia.
Why Cloudflare did not verify this information prior to notifying the admins of CodeIsFreeSpeech is puzzling. Takedown notices like this are, understandably, taken very seriously by hosting providers and content delivery networks like Cloudflare, but even a cursory examination of the relevant data would have raised serious questions regarding the validity of the notice. As of this update, the CAD files are still unavailable on CodeIsFreeSpeech.com.
The legal battle over 3D printed firearms is escalating. Months after a judge upheld an injunction against Defense Distributed’s rerelease of 3D firearms files, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal has threatened major content delivery network (CDN), Cloudflare, with prosecution if the site CodeIsFreeSpeech.com is not removed.
CodeIsFreeSpeech.com (hereafter referred to as CodeIsFreeSpeech) was established in response to specific legal actions taken against Defense Distributed by multiple states’ attorneys general that ultimately led to the aforementioned injunction. With Defense Distributed legally blocked from publishing firearm files, several enthusiasts and Second Amendment groups defiantly founded CodeIsFreeSpeech to host Defense Distributed’s files alongside others. Their message was clear – blocking the files violates the First Amendment, and there’s absolutely nothing the government can do to prevent their proliferation.
Grewal’s notification to Cloudflare was sent on 2/2 and follows a law passed by the state’s legislature last November, effectively banning the dissemination of information regarding so-called “ghost guns.” In response to that notice, the parties behind CodeIsFreeSpeech (Defense Distributed, Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation, The Calguns Foundation, California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, and Brandon Combs) filed on 2/5 a lawsuit and motion for a temporary restraining order against Grewal’s threat. With the result of that request still pending, the files have been removed from CodeIsFreeSpeech’s website (though some aggravated supporters and contributors have posted the files elsewhere).
The implications of this situation are significant. While Grewal claims the presence of CodeIsFreeSpeech-serving Cloudflare servers in New Jersey as the impetus for his decision, his demand that the entire site be shuttered goes quite a bit farther. As submitted, his notice would remove the site from the Internet, rendering it and the files it hosts unreachable not only for citizens of New Jersey but everyone. If allowed to stand, Grewal’s actions could set a precedent allowing state laws to censor speech on the Internet wholly – a sort of least common denominator approach that severely limits freedom of expression for the bulk of Americans.
We know that the tech press is uninterested, but to be clear, this is a state politician telling a host in California and a national CDN service that they are guilty of a speech crime in New Jersey-based on the public content they’ve merely re-published on the free Internet.
Defense Distributed
CodeIsFreeSpeech’s initial compliance with the order is understandable. No doubt, Cloudflare probably instructed the group to remove the files until the matter can be sufficiently settled. Cloudflare has, for better or worse, stood relatively strong against efforts to limit or censor content that its infrastructure hosts. Beyond the company’s widely-publicized decision to revoke services to Daily Stormer, a white-supremacist site, Cloudflare’s policies have largely been content-agnostic, and they should be commended for waiting until legal action was threatened before interfering with CodeIsFreeSpeech’s ability to operate. The only surprising detail here is that CodeIsFreeSpeech chose a US-based host, rather than an offshore option, one potentially less likely to cooperate with Grewal’s demands, though it isn’t clear that such a distinction would matter much in this case.
It will be interesting to see how this case unfolds. By all reasonable measures, CodeIsFreeSpeech is in the right – especially considering the limited viability of conventionally-printed (desktop FDM or SLA technology) firearms – but Defense Distributed’s recent tribulations have proven that nothing in this realm can be guaranteed.
An information security professional by day and gun blogger by night, Nathan started his firearms journey at 16 years old as a collector of C&R rifles. These days, you’re likely to find him shooting something a bit more modern – and usually equipped with a suppressor – but his passion for firearms with military heritage has never waned. Over the last five years, Nathan has written about a variety of firearms topics, including Second Amendment politics and gun and gear reviews. When he isn’t shooting or writing, Nathan nerds out over computers, 3D printing, and Star Wars.