Cody Wilson | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Central Arkansas (B.A., 2010) |
Known for | Defense Distributed |
Cody Rutledge Wilson (born January 31, 1988) is an American gun rights activist, and crypto-anarchist. [1] [2] He is a founder and director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization that develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called "wiki weapons", suitable for 3D printing and digital manufacture. [3] [4] Defense Distributed gained international notoriety in 2013 when it published plans online for the Liberator, the first widely available functioning 3D-printed pistol. [5]
In 2012, Wilson and associates at Defense Distributed started the Wiki Weapon Project to raise funds for designing and releasing the files for a 3D printable gun. [6] At the time Wilson was the project's only spokesperson; he called himself "co-founder" and "director." [7]
Learning of Defense Distributed's plans, manufacturer Stratasys threatened legal action and demanded the return of a 3D printer it had leased to Wilson. On September 26, 2012, before the printer was assembled for use, Wilson received an email from Stratasys suggesting he was using the printer "for illegal purposes". Stratasys immediately canceled its lease with Wilson and sent a team to confiscate the printer. [8] [9]
While visiting the office of the ATF in Austin to inquire about legalities related to his project, Wilson was interrogated by the officers there. [8] Six months later, he was issued a Federal Firearms License (FFL) to manufacture and deal. [10]
In May 2013, Wilson successfully test-fired a pistol called "the Liberator" that reportedly was made using a Stratasys Dimension series 3D printer purchased on eBay. [11] After test firing, Wilson released the blueprints of the gun's design online through a Defense Distributed website. [12] The State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanded that Wilson remove the files, threatening prosecution for violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). [13]
In October 2014, Defense Distributed began selling to the public a miniature CNC mill named Ghost Gunner for completing receivers for the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. [14] [15] In November 2014 Wilson was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 , [16] a pick the publication regretted nine years later, placing Wilson on its Hall of Shame, featuring ten picks it wished it could take back. [17] [18]
On May 6, 2015, Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation filed Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dept. of State, a constitutional challenge of the ITAR regime used to control their speech. [19] On July 10, 2018, the State Department offered to settle this lawsuit and Wilson resumed work at DEFCAD. [20]
After his arrest on charges of sexual assault against a minor in September 2018, Wilson resigned from Defense Distributed. [21] After his plea deal in September 2019, he rejoined Defense Distributed. [22] [23]
In 2013, Wilson, along with Amir Taaki, began work on a Bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet called Dark Wallet, a project by which he planned to help anonymize financial transactions. [24] [25] [26] He appeared on behalf of the Dark Wallet project at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas in 2014. [27]
On U.S. election day, November 4, 2014, Wilson announced in an interview that he would stand for election to a seat on the board of directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, with "the sole purpose of destroying the Foundation." And Wilson stated: "I will run on a platform of the complete dissolution of the Bitcoin Foundation and will begin and end every single one of my public statements with that message." [28]
In 2017, Wilson launched Hatreon, an "alt-right version of Patreon", to provide crowdfunding and payment services for groups and individuals banned from platforms such as Kickstarter, Patreon, PayPal, and Stripe. [29] The site attracted notable alt-right and neo-Nazi figures, including Andrew Anglin and Richard B. Spencer. While Wilson said that Hatreon clients included "right-wing women, people of color, and transgender people", Bloomberg News reported that most donations went to white supremacists. [30] According to Hannah Shearer, staff attorney at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Hatreon users were inciting violence contrary to Hatreon's terms of service, which forbid illegal activity. [30] [31]
The site claimed to have received about $25,000 a month in donations. [32] Hatreon took a five percent cut of donations. [30] Several months after Hatreon's launch, Visa, the site's payments processor, suspended its financial services. With no means of processing payments, the site became inactive. [33] [34]
Wilson claims an array of influences from anti-state and libertarian political thinkers, [35] including mutualist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, [11] [36] paleolibertarian anarcho-capitalists such as Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and classical liberals such as Frederic Bastiat. [37] [35] His political thought has been compared to the "conservative revolutionary" ideas of Ernst Jünger. Jacob Siegel wrote that "Cody Wilson arrives at a place where left, right—and democracy—disappear" and that he oscillates "somewhere between anarch and anarchist". [38]
Wilson is an avowed crypto-anarchist, and has discussed his work in relation to the cypherpunks and Timothy May's vision. [39] He did not vote in the 2016 United States presidential election. [40] He frequently cites the work of post-Marxist thinkers in public comments, especially that of Jean Baudrillard, whom he has claimed as his "master". [41] [33] [42]
Asked during an interview with Popular Science if the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting affected his thinking or plans in any way, Wilson responded:
...understanding that rights and civil liberties are something that we protect is also understanding that they have consequences that are also protected, or tolerated. The exercise of civil liberties is antithetical to the idea of a completely totalizing state. That's just the way it is. [43]
Wilson is generally opposed to intellectual property rights. [44] He has indicated that although his primary goal is the subversion of state structures, he also hopes that his contributions may help to dismantle the existing system of capitalist property relations. [45]
In a January 2013 interview with Glenn Beck on the nature of and motivations behind his effort to develop and share gun 3D printable files Wilson said:
That's a real political act, giving you a magazine, telling you that it will never be taken away ... That's real politics. That's radical equality. That's what I believe in ... I'm just resisting. What am I resisting? I don't know, the collectivization of manufacture? The institutionalization of the human psyche? I'm not sure. But I can tell you one thing: this is a symbol of irreversibility. They can never eradicate the gun from the earth. [46]
Wired 's "Danger Room" named Wilson one of "The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World" in 2012. [47] [48] In 2015 and 2017, Wired named Wilson one of the five most dangerous people on the Internet, and in 2019 named him one of the most dangerous people on the Internet of the decade. [49] [50] [51]
Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Wilson was student body president at Cabot High School in Cabot, Arkansas before graduating in 2006.
Wilson graduated from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) with a bachelor's degree in English in 2010, where he had a scholarship. [52] While at UCA, Wilson was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and was elected president of UCA's Student Government Association. He traveled to China with UCA's study-abroad program. [53]
In 2012, he studied at the University of Texas School of Law but left the university in May 2013 after two years. [26] [43] [54]
On December 28, 2018, Wilson was indicted for sexual assault after a sexual encounter with a minor he met on SugarDaddyMeet.com, a website that matches younger, adult women with older men. [55] He was accused of committing a second-degree felony by paying a 16-year-old girl $500 for sex in a hotel room in Austin, Texas in August 2018. [56]
Wilson's defense attorney, F. Andino Reynal, said Wilson thought the girl was a consenting adult. SugarDaddyMeet.com requires users to declare they are at least 18 years old before they can create an account. [57]
When the police issued a warrant for his arrest, Wilson was overseas in Taipei, Taiwan. Wilson was charged with an immigration violation by the Taiwanese National Immigration Agency (NIA), and he was deported to the United States, where his passport had been revoked by the U.S. government. [58] [59] After he was returned to the U.S. by the United States Marshals Service on September 23, 2018, he was released on $150,000 bond from Harris County Jail in Houston, Texas. [60] [61]
On August 9, 2019, Wilson accepted a deferred adjudication in exchange for pleading guilty to one charge. He was sentenced to seven years of probation, 475 hours of community service, fined $1,200. [62] [63] [64] Upon completion of his probation in 2022, Wilson's charges and case were dismissed. [63] [65] [66]
3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer control, with the material being added together, typically layer by layer.
Improvised firearms are firearms manufactured other than by a firearms manufacturer or a gunsmith, and are typically constructed by adapting existing materials to the purpose. They range in quality from crude weapons that are as much a danger to the user as the target to high-quality arms produced by cottage industries using salvaged and repurposed materials.
Thingiverse is a website dedicated to the sharing of user-created digital design files. Providing primarily free, open-source hardware designs licensed under the GNU General Public License or Creative Commons licenses, the site allows contributors to select a user license type for the designs that they share. 3D printers, laser cutters, milling machines and many other technologies can be used to physically create the files shared by the users on Thingiverse.
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts". As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 Bitcoins.
Amir Taaki is a British-Iranian anarchist revolutionary, hacktivist, and programmer who is known for his leading role in the bitcoin project, and for pioneering many open source projects. Forbes listed Taaki in their 30 Under 30 listing of 2014. Driven by the political philosophy of the Rojava revolution, Taaki traveled to Syria, served in the YPG military, and worked in Rojava's civil society on various economic projects for a year and a half.
Defense Distributed is an online, open-source hardware and software organization that develops digital schematics of firearms in CAD files, or "wiki weapons", that may be downloaded from the Internet and used in 3D printing or CNC milling applications. Among the organization's goals is to develop and freely publish firearms-related design schematics that can be downloaded and reproduced by anyone with a 3D printer or milling machine, facilitating the popular production of homemade firearms.
DEFCAD, Inc. is an American startup that has created a search engine and web portal for designers and hobbyists to find and develop 3D printable and other CAD models online.
The Liberator is a 3D-printable single-shot handgun, the first such printable firearm design made widely available online. The open source firm Defense Distributed designed the gun and released the plans on the Internet on May 6, 2013. The plans were downloaded over 100,000 times in the two days before the United States Department of State demanded that Defense Distributed retract the plans.
A 3D printed firearm is a firearm that is partially or primarily produced with a 3D printer. While plastic printed firearms are associated with improvised firearms, or the politics of gun control, digitally-produced metal firearms are more associated with commercial manufacturing or experiments in traditional firearms design.
Ross William Ulbricht is an American serving life imprisonment for creating and operating the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013. The site operated as a hidden service on the Tor network and facilitated the sale of narcotics and other illegal products and services. Ulbricht ran the site under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts", after the fictional character from The Princess Bride.
Mark Marie Robert Karpelès, also sometimes known by his online alias MagicalTux, is the former CEO of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. Born in France, he moved to Japan in 2009.
The Feinstein AK Mag is a 3D printed magazine for the AK-47 rifle. It was created by Defense Distributed and made public in March 2013. The magazine was created using a Stratasys Dimension SST 3-D printer via the fused deposition modeling (FDM) method.
The Cuomo Mag is a 3D printed AR-15 magazine named after the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who signed the NY SAFE Act into law banning magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. It was created by Defense Distributed and made public around January 2013
Roger Keith Ver is an early investor in Bitcoin, Bitcoin-related startups and an early promoter of Bitcoin. Ver has sometimes been referred to as "Bitcoin Jesus". He now primarily promotes Bitcoin Cash as Ver sees it as fulfilling the intended and original purpose of the "Bitcoin White Paper", first published in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, in which Nakamoto referred to Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.
Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dept. of State is a set of court cases brought by Defense Distributed challenging the federal export control of 3D gun files on the Internet.
Deterrence Dispensed (DetDisp) is a decentralized, online collective that promotes and distributes open-source 3D printed firearms, gun parts, and handloaded cartridges. The group describes itself as aligned with the freedom of speech movement.
Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture is a 2023 American documentary film written, produced, and directed by Jessica Solce about the life of famed 3D printed gun inventor, Cody Wilson, over a period of around 7 years, from 2015 through 2022.
Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free is an autobiographical book written by American gun rights activist, author and crypto-anarchist, Cody Wilson in 2016.
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: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Hatreon processing was suspended by Visa in November.
While acknowledging that Wilson helped secure her access to some of her sources, Moyer [the director] downplays his involvement with the film...