| HN Mirror

I assume you don't live in the USA (neither do I, in fact).

However, the gun debate has a number of parallels with topics that hackers obviously do care about, irrespective of geography. It wasn't all that long ago that cryptography was considered to be a "weapon" which should be regulated. I would not be surprised to see attempts at classifying some pieces of software as "weapons" at some point in the future - botnets, say, or certain "security" tools. In the fairly near future we can expect debates about synthetic biology, 3D printing and "cyberwarfare", and we'll reach for our existing legal traditions as the means to resolve them.

For hackers to offer meaningful input to these debates, we need to understand how other difficult problems have been resolved. If someone tries to frame "botnet control" as being "like gun control", we really need to understand how and why gun control works, or doesn't work, and how and why the analogy can be applied or refuted.

The future is almost certainly going to involve legal disputes over what we are allowed to do with the technology that we create, own and operate. Some of this technology will be dangerous. In the wrong hands, plenty of technology already is! If you advocate gun control, you need to have a clear understanding of why guns are different from cars, even though cars can kill people too. If you argue against gun control, your arguments may be useful to those who argue against cryptography control, or synbio control. 3D printing could attack some of the fundamental premises of gun control (that it's possible to control the physical flow of weapons and ammunition in a modern society) and the attempt to re-assert control could undermine a number of basic freedoms if done incorrectly. At this moment, I'm not even sure what the 'correct' regulation of 3D printing would look like, but we need to have an answer soon, before someone comes along with a much worse answer and tries to impose it. Sooner or later, someone is going to kill someone with a 3D-printed weapon, and if we don't have good, well-researched and discussed answers to how we deal with this, we'll end up with bad, poorly-researched laws.