working draft

Typewriters. Firearms. Binoculars. 3D Printers. Fax machines. What do these have in common? They have been or may soon be subject to confiscation or registration as dangerous instruments of sedition, terrorism, freedom, and intellectual inquiry.

Galileo is famous throughout the world for his work on and through the telescope. Contemporary authorities probably kicked themselves (or him) for failing to invent a telescope registration scheme in time. Holy See indeed. Their successors in civil administration have been hard at work since to prevent similar lapses.

Exactly three hundred years after Galileo's legal troubles over telescopes resolved neatly with his death in 1642, thousands of other Italians and Americans of Italian descent found themselves in trouble over optics. In 2000, Congress passed the Wartime Violation of Italian Americans Civil Liberties Act and acknowledged that binoculars, radios, and other items were improperly seized from thousands of Italian-Americans and from their households,  during the second world war. These are just excerpts from a spectrum of indignities.

Better late than never. It is heartening, at least, that an open acknowledgement was so obviously warranted that HR 2442 passed a Republican House by unanimous voice vote. It was promptly signed into law by a Democratic President.

Our true national position on freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry is not evident only in our lame apologies for past infringement of rights. We use issues like these to highlight tyranny and oppression world wide. It was widely reported that Ceausescu's Romania required police registration for typewriters in the early eighties. In the nineties, polite commentators used a Chinese ban on fax machines as a shorthand for the abuses of an inhumane and anti-democratic regime. Last week, brief Internet outages in Syria were blamed instantly on a hated tyrant. Even sources still waiting for all the facts on the purported use of chemical weapons have jumped on the condemnation bandwagon over such Twitter holidays. I bet Bashir al-Assad is responsible for my DSL troubles. It would be so very like him.

More recently, intrepid lawmakers, like California's Leland Yee and Washington, D.C.'s Tommy Wells, are leading a charge away from traditional American views on freedom. CBS13 in Sacramento has this quote from Yee speaking about 3d printers:

“Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free, and that is something that is really dangerous,”

Yee is lucky that reaction has so far been loudest from quarters of the gun crowd who caricature themselves with bile over his ridiculous comments. Many are quick to say that plastic guns are junk, that printers are expensive, that cheap pistols are cheap, or that pressure cookers are cheaper. They are wrong to play down the issue based on present-day cost or quality.

Here's the thing: Ceausescu was right to fear the typewriter. The FBI was right, in 1942, that a good pair of binoculars and a radio could imperil thousands of lives and tons of vital war material. China would have done the world and the Internet a favor if it had been able to strangle fax.

A 3d printer could certainly be used for evil. The answer is that we have to accept these risks to retain the benefits of a free, empowered, and creative citizenry. We thrive on a stream of dangerous machines and ideas that have contributed immeasurably to our quality of life and our pool of knowledge. Ever seen a combine harvester? Yikes.

As a personal matter, I benefit enormously from a controversial government decision to allow the previously classified cavity magnetron to pass into civilian hands without registration. Burritos microwaved in the US since 1945? Billions. Homemade terrorist radars used against the public? Zero.

Would you buy a microwave if you had to drag it down to police headquarters to get a license?

3d printers will become more precise and more prolific. Somebody will get stabbed by a horrible 3d-printed Klingon ceremonial battle-stapler -- and without any royalties paid to Paramount. The drug cartels will develop cocaine filaments and print everyday objects directly from drugs. All the more reason for us to be proud for tolerating these machines and for encouraging their further development.

These worst case scenarios are a sideshow. Affordable devices for personal, prototype manufacture are made to support freedom and they do. They will be used to devise new methods of making collagen scaffolds for replacement organs. They will jump start thousands of garage businesses. They will catalyze a revolution in patent and copyright law. They will, perhaps, embolden a new generation of backyard astronomers to look skyward with better homemade telescopes. Galileo found moons around Jupiter. Amateur astronomers have since mapped the Jovian moon Ganymede and witnessed asteroid collisions against the planet itself with instruments that might have been confiscated during the war.

Congress was lucky in 2000 that there were Italian-American victims left to apologize to. If we screw up a next industrial revolution, the manufacturing economy may not be left to hear our apology.

Here's my plea: would somebody please get a 3d printer to make a campaign contribution? If we can establish that their output is protected speech, then we should be fine.