IMO wide, blanket bans on dual-use technologies (and many things in our high tech lives can be effectively weaponized with some effort) do more harm than good.

IMO wide, blanket bans on dual-use technologies (and many things in our high tech lives can be effectively weaponized with some effort) do more harm than good. Especially where, as in this case, violators would be hard to detect and classify into "OK" or "bad" bins. This would deter some researchers working on general topics (easy to label / threaten as law breakers) while having no impact. Organized crime has bigger laws they already broke and already have enough COTS parts to build nasty things (and are often OK with 80% reliability, thus need no cutting edge research). Many / most militaries would ignore such bans and fund development quietly, justifying this by national security. IMO the only way to make this approach tractable is to choose a narrow list of technologies we do not want developed and see if there are technologies that exist or can be developed that would effectively detect violations. And choosing even a narrow list of technologies to ban would make for lots of debates and unhappy citizens. My 2c.