In the last couple of years the world has changed and it was hardly noticed. Something happened that changed the status of manufacturing. When we think of manufacturing we think of factories and machines churning out parts which will be assembled into things like cars, household good, and many other things including weapons. This is precisely where the change has taken place. It has become possible for anyone at home to purchase a machine and use it to build many different things without having to order them. Like any other technology this has many good points, but also many bad ones. We now have 3D printers which build things in layers and we also have mills. A mill is a machine which can create things out of metal bars and blocks. It is nice to be able to make something you want yourself, but when that something is a weapon and you create it in a state or municipality where weapons are illegal, that is where the problem lies. If we look at a state like New York, it already has its problems keeping handguns out of the hands of people since nearby states allow weapons possession and these weapons are often brought to New York and sold for outrageous prices to criminal elements.

While the 3D printer can build a gun an even more effective way is to use a milling machine. There are plans online which will allow you to program a $1,500 mill which is about one foot square to create an AR-15 rifle like the type which was designed for military use and later became the AR-16. It comes in two forms, semi-automatic and automatic. The semi-automatic is for civilian use. These weapons can be made without a serial number thus if someone wants to supply them to criminals or terrorists after being built there would be no way to trace them. This worried FedEx so much it decided not to allow the company which manufactures the Ghost Gunner, a mill which is computer controlled, to ship the mill. Maybe the name had something to do with them making this decision. I have to wonder if the mill was called anything else, if they would have reacted the same way. The problem is mills are not only for making guns and some people feel if we would stop shipping devices we use and need which could alternately be used for bad things, it would hurt most people in many different way.

Some of the things which can be used for evil purposes are computers, routers, cell phone and so on. Microwaves can be used like bombs, sugar acts like napalm when heated and your local newspaper can be turned into a deadly weapon. British soccer fans get into many fights and some of them have created deadly clubs out of newspapers rolled so tight they are rock hard. These clubs are known as Millwall Bricks. The point I am trying to make is if something has an evil alternate use and it is something we all use, many people believe we should not stop selling it. This means they would like to see the mills continue to be made and sold and some other solution developed to control the manufacture of weapons and not even all people want to see that. There is a large group who inhabit states where weapons are all legal who see nothing wrong with manufacturing weapons at home. This is a very sticky question. The next step will probably be states stepping into the fray by either banning these machines, doing nothing or creating laws on what can be manufactured with them.

Edward Snowden is in the alternate news again. I say alternate because there is not much about him in the mainstream news lately. It is as if the main stream news media has been ordered to keep hands off in hopes that he will just go away. This time he is talking about how both the NSA and the British spy agency GCHQ have screwed everyone in the world. His exact words were, “screwed all of us.” He was talking about how the agencies hacked into the Dutch firm Gemalto. This firm is very import to the manufacture of cell phones, because it manufactures most of the SIM cards which run the phones. The SIM cards use cryptographic keys to protect information and the spy organizations. The spy agencies hacked all the company employees’ email and listened in on their phone calls until they gathered enough information to allow them to figure out the encryptions and once these were cracked they could listen in to billions of phone calls worldwide. So far there is no way to fix the SIM cards except to have the company replace them with ones with new encryption which would probably bankrupt the company and might even be beyond their capability.

People can say what they want about Snowden, but this time there is no doubt he was right when he said something to the effect that it is wrong to jeopardize the security of billions of people just to target a few. There has to be a better way to do things than to ruin a company and take away the privacy of the world. Snowden wrote, “Our governments … should never be weighing the equities in an intelligence gathering operation such that a temporary benefit to surveillance regarding a few key targets is seen as more desirable than protecting the communications of a global system…” There is more to this story however and it has to do with the Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab. They had uncovered a spy module which was believed to belong to the NSA which was designed to hack hard drives. Here is what Snowden said about that, “[A]lthough firmware exploitation is nasty, it’s at least theoretically reparable: tools could plausibly be created to detect the bad firmware hashes and re-flash good ones. This isn’t the same for SIMs, which are flashed at the factory and never touched again.”

We live in a world where governments believe it is perfectly acceptable to spy on their citizens. Our televisions spy on us and listen to our most private conversations while we are at home, our cell phone conversations are being monitored, our email is being read by others than the intended recipients, our computers are being hacked, our hard drives read. When George Orwell spoke about these things many people laughed and said this could never happen in a free country, but they were so wrong. Much of this was brought about by new technology which made it possible and which governments just couldn’t resist. Even if there was no terrorist threat, things would have went the same way, because countries with large spy organizations need to be limited as to what they are allowed to do not given free reign. It is not a question of getting all the data we can without caring what it means to others, it is about being fair and not compromising the privacy of the world. There are other ways to spy by targeting specific people not throwing out a worldwide net..