The State Department’s Dangerous New Proposal to Regulate Gun Enthusiasts’ Internet Speech

From National Review:

Last week, the U.S. Department of State published an alarming notice in the Federal Register, which, if transmuted into regulatory action, could prove downright disastrous to the nation’s rapidly multiplying gun fora. “In updating regulations governing international arms sales,” Paul Bedard recorded at the Washington Examiner, the State Department is effectively “demanding that anyone who puts technical details about arms and ammo on the web first get the OK from the federal government.” And if they do not? They could “face a fine of up to $1 million and 20 years in jail.”

At present, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) dictate that any weapons-related “technical data” that is in the “public domain” can be published and discussed with impunity. This arrangement, State submits, was all very well when “public domain” meant “in a library,” but it is simply not good enough in the era of Twitter and WordPress.
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In its brief against the measure, the NRA supposes that “because all such releases would require the ‘authorization’ of the government before they occurred . . . the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech.” Technically speaking, this is a slight overstatement. Per constitutional precedent, “prior restraint” involves the government’s taking specific measures to prevent specific speech (an injunction, for example), and not the establishment of penalties designed to punish the violation of a general rule (e.g. State’s ITAR proposals). In theory at least, we are not dealing here with a classic case of “prior restraint.”

In practice, though, this distinction is a slim one. In both cases, the imposition of penalties serves to impose a chilling effect on the discourse of free people; in both cases, one “can” violate the rules providing one is prepared to pay the considerable penalty; and in both cases the scope for abuse is appreciable. Evidently, neither should be acceptable in a country that was conceived in Liberty.

This is the same thinking that the State Department used to threaten Cody Wilson, who published the plans for his 3-D printed pistol.