U.S. Significantly Lowers Export Limitations

nevets writes: "The White house has announced yesterday that it will significantly change the export limitations on computers. Because of the increasingly availability of computers and clustering capabilities, the U.S. has decided that it can't keep up their policies with the changing technology. The export limitations are going from a four tier system to a three tier, with tier 1 and 2 merging, tier 3 changing, but tier 4 will stay the same." While the new rules still base their country-by-country distinctions on the basis of how many millions of theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) a computer can do, they do seem slightly saner. wiredog points out this story at The Washington Post as well.

Comments

Let me get this straight

[heikkile]

I don't really understand all this US politics, but to me it sounds like they are saying that last year a top notch PC could have been used to design a bomb that was a real danger to the U.S. This year, everyone can buy those computers from te far east, so there is no point in regulating them. Now they try to regulate some unspecified software that may allow the nasty guys to develop even nastier bombs that are an even greater threat to the U.S.

The thing I do not understand is this: Has the U.S. defence system get so much better that the dangerous bomb of yesteryear is no threat today?

If (say) Southern Swahililand could have developed a serious weapon last year with last years computers, how come today this is not worth worrying about, but a theoretical possibility of developing double as big bomb is?

if anyone wanted to take out Washington DC, they'd just ship in an old-fashioned bomb in a container. If anyone wanted to defend against an US invasion, they'd just bury the same old-fashioned bomb in the ground, retreat, and let it detonate when US troops were over it. No high-tech required! To rephrase: What is USA afraid of? There has been enough serious weapons to worry about for at least 30 years. So far none have been used against USA or its allies.

is this really "loosening"?

[EnderWiggnz]

seriously... i read the announcement, and instead of controlling pure hardware, and rating based on the overall performance of the hardware, they changed it to be software based.

I.E. it may fsck with the Beowulf cluster sales... because now, since they are all strung together, they may be fast enought to fall under export controls.

so ... this could be a blow to upstart beowulf companies that want to expand into shipping overseas.

i dont know... it seems like the govt. is actually becoming MORE restrictive here... whilst saying that they are easing controls...

tagline

I don't understand

[shinji1911]

why we've had any restrictions at all. It's like export restrictions on crypto (which is just NSA propaganda to make us think they're weaker than they really are...) -- utterly uselss in reality.

I mean, all the hardware in my computer seems to be manufactured outside the US anyway, and very little is even assembled here, let alone manufactured. If a malcontent really wanted the teraflops, would they really have to get it from the US?

This is good

[Bradley]

I'm an exchange student from australia in .ca now, and I tried to buy a computer from a large online retailer with a credit card with a postal address in Australia. A few hours later I get a phone call. Because I don't live in North America (even though the computer was being delivered to an address in Canada), I had to go through a whole set of export control questions: "Do you intend to use this device for nuclear or biological warfare?", "Do you intend to manufacture chemical weapons with this computer?", etc etc. The person on the other end was very appologetic about it, but still...

I didn't ask him if anyone ever said yes to those questions.

Political & Economic Pressure

[interiot]

It kind of pisses me off that this is one of a few instances where the government realizes that a law as it stands is ineffective, and the reason they suddenly "got it" this time is because the hardware industry put monetary and political pressure on them. Eventually, the software industry may do the same. But for porn filtering in schools, there's no large economic pressure, so they may continue to be blissfully ignorant that the legislation is little more than an annoyance, yet is a bad legal precident.
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Practicalities and interesting tidbit

[iElucidate]

The Administration has concluded that there are no meaningful or effective control measures for computer hardware that address the technological and marketplace challenges identified during the review. The review found that the ability to control the acquisition of computational capabilities by controlling computer hardware is becoming ineffective and will be increasingly so within a very short time...Nevertheless, the review did find that there is merit in continuing to control national security and proliferation-related software.

In short, they are reclassifying countries on a three tier scale, and restricting accordingly. They suggest that, while hardware restrictions are continuing for the time being, those restrictions are becoming increasingly ineffective and should be scrapped by the next administration. Rather, software exports should be more controlled, which to me means snooping software, encryption software, and software for CAD as it relates to high-powered weapons design and the like.

I understand this as a practical matter, but I wonder whether the US is the only country that has such software. It seems unlikely, and, while I understand that they feel they have to do what they can to preserve national security, other countries can still sell, distribute, or develop such software in the future. Still, this is good for all of those countries that need powerful computers and don't have the expertise or resources to develop them on their own.