This poor dude was run through the system, chewed up and finally spat out. He was released to a halfway house yesterday.
What was his huge crime?
He gave the middle finger to the ATF.
There is a gizmo called a Lightning Link. This thing is supposed to function like an autosear in an AR-15. They were never very reliable and were offered more as a proof of concept than anything else. These are not drop-in autosears.
A drop-in autosear functions to carry a regular autosear but without a need for the third hole. They work well when they are a quality build.
The thing about the autosear is that very few of them were registered as machineguns. This was a $5-10 part that required a $200 transfer stamp.
There are likely no registered Lightning Links because they work so poorly that it is unlikely that anybody registered a $1 junk part, if it even had a serial number.
Matt Hoover had a semi-popular YouTube channel. He was making money from his channel. Somebody contacted him from Wisconsin, if memory serves, and together they came up with a thump nose at ATF plan.
To have a better understanding, understand that cryptographic “stuff” is or used to be an “arm” under export control. The same as an M1 tank. Exporting a cryptographic device would land you in jail, for a long time.
When RSA was first published, there was no issue. It was First Amendment protected to publish the RSA algorithm. The same is true with DES, IDEA, BlowFish, and later, AES. These were all protected speech.
What wasn’t protected, was software implementing them. The government ignored this for the most part until Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.
This changed the game, in the mind of the government.
The idea behind PGP was that you would use public key cryptography, in the form of RSA keys, to encrypt a small block of information. That block would contain the actual cryptographic key to decrypt the rest of the message.
This means that people can publish their public key with no fear. You can publish it in a newspaper or any web page. Anybody can then send you a message that could not be decrypted except by the person with the matching private key.
To get PGP out of the country legally, they printed it in an OCR font and just walked through customs with a printed book. The book was fully protected by the First Amendment. Once in a country that had more reasonable cryptographic export laws, development continued.
Matt Hoover and his partner decided to use the same idea. Instead of an “Arm” as defined by export law, they would print a “machine gun” as defined by the NFA.
They contracted to have a credit card sized piece of stainless-steel laser etched with an image of a Lightning Link. Except they were going to play it safe.
When the manufacturer suggested they etch the image deep enough that the pieces could be “popped out”, they refused. This was just an etching.
What came out later is that they didn’t even get the dimensions right. Again, this was intentional. If you were to actually cut the pieces out of that card, they would not create a functional device.
There was no way to make that piece of stainless-steel into a Lightning Link without extensive machining and other information.
In other words, it was no better than an expensive piece of stainless-steel.
Matt and his partner were charged with distributing machine guns; they were found guilty, and both were sentenced to prison.
Matt has cancer and has been given a compassionate release, if I understand the reports correctly.
So two dudes who were exercising their free speech rights, thumping their noses at the ATF, found out that the ATF has no sense of humor and were sentenced to prison for a crime they did not commit.
Oh, what was the proof of them selling machine guns? The ATF lab destroyed multiple autolink cards before they managed to get a modified AR-15 to malfunction. They got a second shot when the hammer followed the bolt down and fired the second round.
This could not be made to happen in any reliable way. In other words, they broke an AR and claimed it was a machine gun.