As a 24-year-old law student at the University of Texas, Cody Wilson took up a programming project that would lead to him being one of the most important figures in what I like to call the “Libertarian Tech Revolution.” It would also land him on Wired’s list of the “15 Most Dangerous People in the World,” a group that includes such luminaries as Bashar Al-Assad and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman (who is credited with a recent, precipitous drop in Mexico’s murder rate because, after securing control of the Mexican cocaine industry, he is running out of people to kill). How does a tech-geek with a clean record end up on that list? Well, he created “The Liberator,” the world’s first fully-functional, 3-D printed firearm. I spoke to him the day the Liberator software went live, and you could feel the emotional cyclone he was caught up in: equal parts fear, excitement and paranoid anxiety. The software had gone viral immediately, downloaded tens of thousands of times by that afternoon, and the US government and 3-D printer manufacturers were preparing to go to war (or were at least making all the noises).

Representative Steve Israel (D-NY), whose press office I spoke to at the time, had been ringing alarm bells for weeks about the possibility of someone developing the software necessary to print a handgun. He was given little notice though; nobody thinks there’s anything menacing about snow until it turns into an avalanche. Wilson commented on the lack of attention his company, Defense Distributed, got in the US before he kicked open Pandora’s Box, “They were awe-struck in Europe, but in terms of the press here, people just weren’t particularly interested in it. At first, until Sandy Hook at least, a lot of the attention I got on my work came from abroad.” Wilson believes the reason for this is cultural; in the US guns are already so prevalent, so deeply interwoven into the American tapestry, that the giant leap forward Wilson was proposing seemed more like a suggestion to cross a river using stepping stones as opposed to a convenient bridge. Guns are already omnipresent and easily accessible in America, so nobody cared about the possibility of 3-D printing a shoddy handgun when it’s cheaper to go buy a real gun that’s more likely to kill someone. In Europe, Japan, Australia and other developed countries with established underground tech scenes, the idea of a wave of cheap, unregulated firearms flooding the market was genuinely horrifying. Wilson acknowledges the difficult situation he faces bridging the international tech scene with his uniquely American brand of individual liberty and gun culture, “there are very stark cultural differences. People who are really in sympathy with me ideologically and with a lot of what I do just don’t have the same feelings people in America have about guns. People who also would be categorized into that kind of ‘radical, open-source software’ type are very uncomfortable with the idea of people 3-D printing a handgun. But the more I talk to them and travel in those circles…I think they’ll loosen up a little.”

In Washington DC, “loosening up” is not on the agenda. Senator Chuck Schumer, another New York Democrat, has taken up Rep. Israel’s call to arms (pardon the pun), and is championing legislative changes that will curb or outlaw the work being done by Defense Distributed and Wilson’s supporters. You’ll hear from Schumer and Israel a lot in the next couple weeks as The Undetectable Firearms Act comes up for renewal in December. Their problem, to put it simply, is that there’s nothing they can do to stop Wilson. In a letter ordering the company to remove the blueprint for The Liberator from its website, the State Department implied that Defense Distributed could be in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. The reality is, the US government has no leg to stand on. In terms of his personal well-being, Wilson has no qualms, “the letters and concerns we’ve gotten have been addressed to Defense Distributed. The government won’t pierce the corporate veil. I feel v­ery comfortable knowing the situation and with my legal background.”

Part of the problem is that the government is an ill-equipped behemoth when it comes to taking on the hyper-adaptive tech world, “They’re using their playbook from the 1980’s. And even when they update the Undetectable Firearms Act, it will be much of the same.” By ‘much of the same,’ Wilson means that all Congress can do is regulate against firearms that can pass through metal detectors. Even in conservative, pro-gun circles, this is a generally accepted regulation. Wilson, whose Liberator design needs only a small nail in order to function and could pass easily through an airport metal detector, inserts a 6oz. hunk of metal into the gun’s frame in order to comply with regulations. The obvious flaw here is that less scrupulous people could just as easily print out a functional handgun and not “bring it up to code” by inserting a piece of metal. It’s a Catch-22 for regulators. These kinds of hypotheticals (“maybe someone doesn’t put in 6oz. of metal”) are thwarted by decades of anti-regulation lobbying that make it difficult just to allocate funds to study gun violence. It is essentially illegal for the government to ever assume someone purchasing a gun might have malicious intent. For instance: the government knows that over half of all guns used in violent crimes originated from less than one percent of gun stores, but are unable to act on that knowledge in any predictive way. In other words, they can react to crimes that have already happened, following a weapon’s trail back to the gun store that was its source, but until the crime takes place they are legally required to act as if they don’t know that there are just 120 gun stores in the United States responsible for supplying the weapons for more than half of all violent crime. Wilson’s company and the legal quagmire he is in is not an analogous situation (there is absolutely no evidence that Wilson’s work has led to any kind of violence or injuries), but he does benefit from the built in anti-regulatory mechanisms that leave lawmakers in straitjackets.

The State Department can force Wilson to take the software down from his site, but as he quipped to me, “there’s no putting this toothpaste back in the tube.” And he’s undeniably correct. The file has already been so widely shared and downloaded that there’s no possibility of it being quashed. Thingiverse, a popular site run by a 3-D printer manufacturer that distributes files for printing out new products, has been playing a game of digital whack-a-mole for months trying to keep software to develop firearms and gun parts off its system. “Even if they keep it off their platforms, it’s on Pirate Bay, it’s still being downloaded. There’s nothing they can do.”

There may not be anything they can do right now, but they’re preparing to do what large businesses in high-growth-potential industries do with problems Congress can solve: throw a lot of money at it. 3-D printers only recently became available in retail. They’re still in what I would call the “wet cement” stage of product development. They want to be associated with the limitless possibilities that their products represent: doctors printing hip replacements for surgery, school districts saved from budget cuts by printing class materials, homeowners fixing their own plumbing by printing out the tools and parts they need. The commercials will write themselves. More than anything, these companies don’t want parents thinking of their children downloading the files to print a handgun in their living room. They don’t want a story on the news about somebody regulated against purchasing a firearm on the open market (ex-cons, domestic abusers, the mentally ill…) turning their garage into a small-scale gun factory. Wilson is not ignorant or indifferent when it comes to the dangers his products pose to people. He just has a consuming belief in the right of individuals to do as they please, and that a collective decision to limit an individual’s rights for a perceived good is wrong. It is a moral wrong, a matter of principle etched in stone, and thus is unencumbered by notions such as social welfare.

This is exactly the fight Wilson sought when he developed The Liberator. When we first spoke he was reserved, carefully referring to his company as being only a software development venture, a social experiment more than anything. But even then I had the feeling there was more Wilson wanted to say, a system he wanted to upend but good council urged him not to discuss. In the past six months, Wilson has unshackled himself from those reservations. Or perhaps it was the government revealing that the only shackles they had came in the form of impotent intimidation. Either way, Wilson now feels free to refer to this endeavor as a “desperately ambitious political project.” Which it always was, of course.

And now Wilson is building out an infrastructure that mirrors and supports his work with Defense Distributed. “Dark Wallet,” his new project, is fast approaching the $50,000 it set out to raise on Indiegogo. But that doesn’t count the tens of thousands they’ve raised through Bitcoin. It’s no surprise, considering Dark Wallet is a proposed encrypted system for storing Bitcoins out of government reach. It is a natural extension of Defense Distributed, and of Wilson himself as his position in the international hacktivist community continues to expand.

If you’re the government, what could you possibly do? Defense Distributed doesn’t turn a profit; they’re sustained by donations and give away their software for free. They don’t even need a website, only for the internet to exist. Wilson leads a small but widening band of people who believe in technology’s potential to empower individuals over institutions, who believe that to enable individual liberty over all other concerns is always the right thing to do, and who have the technical know-how to make those things a reality. They don’t rely on investors who, like the 3-D printing companies, have an incentive to play ball. The entire endeavor is a self-sustained organism. It feeds off the energy and enthusiasm of small galaxies of activists working on the cutting edge of emerging technology. They are not only free from the burden of a Board of Directors, they’re on the cusp of being free of government currency altogether. What could you possibly do?

Over the next three weeks, lobbyists will bounce from room to room in the halls of Congress. They will spend hours and days and small fortunes getting legislators to make superficial changes to the language of the bill, then coordinate with teams of PR reps who poll-tested every possible sentence to make sure nothing will give the impression anyone involved wants to bring SOPA back (“make sure to call it ‘modernization’!”), and most importantly to guarantee that there are no changes whatsoever to the product or price to do business. Over that time, Cody Wilson will be traveling through Europe, marshaling colonies of likeminded hacktivists. The fingers Wilson and his organization have spread out across the world may someday have the power to close into a fist. I ask him what can happen if Congress takes strong action renewing the Undetectable Firearms Act, and there’s a moment of silence where I can almost feel him pitying me. “You know why they’re so invested in these products, in this technology? They wanted to be involved in this space because of the potentially revolutionary changes it could bring. Well, guess what, it’s revolutionary.”