Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Breaking: Defense Distributed website seized, Cody Wilson arrested on conspiracy charges!


Unknown details at this time. Defense Distributed website now displays the logos of Department of Justice and Homeland Security Investigations, and the following information:
This domain name associated with the website DefenseDistributed.com or Defcad.org has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court.
The webpage goes on to say that several individuals and entities have been indicted and charged with federal crimes including conspiracy to violate the Arms Export Control Act, the Undetectable Firearms Act, and others.

At this time, I have no other confirmation of these arrests or actions.

There is some doubt about this action as the word "entities" is mispelled as "entitites" on the page.

If this is confirmed, it is a major chilling of free speech and net freedom. Defense Distributed had just obtained a federal license to make firearms.

Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed have been primary promoters of the concept of 3D printed firearms and magazines. There are obvious political motivations for the Obama administration to stop their activities, which have often been cited as showing how it would be impossible to enforce a federal magazine ban or ban on semi-automatic modern sporting rifles.

Cody Wilson had always said that they would be careful to follow federal law.

This may be a case of "three felonies a day" where the federal government is able to find that anyone has committed felonies every day, under broad and vague federal statues.

Link to "seized" webpage

Link to article on Defense Distributed federal license

Update: The timing is suspicious for an April fools joke!

©2013 by Dean Weingarten Permission to share granted as long as this notice is included.

2 comments:

Dean Weingarten said...

More people are pointing out that the "seizure" occurred on 1 April, and that this is very likely an April Fool's joke.

Dean Weingarten said...

An alert reader on freerepublic.com noticed:

"Looks like it was modified again Monday, April 01, 2013 11:24:55 AM to address the spelling issue."

Someone is paying attention to what is being said about the webpage.

I suspect (and hope) that Cody Wilson is getting a good laugh about this.

More power to you Cody!