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Can the US Stop the Illegal Export of Its Technology?
coondoggie writes "Maybe people are more desperate or maybe there's just too much opportunity to make a quick buck but whatever the excuse, attempts to illegally export technology from the US has gone through the roof.
The Department of Justice this week said it has placed criminal charges or convictions against more than 255 defendants in the past two fiscal years — 145 in 2008 and 110 in 2007. That 255 number represents more than a six-fold increase from fiscal year 2005, when the DOJ said about 40 individuals or companies were convicted of over 100 criminal violations of export control laws."
We just outsource the means of producing it en masse. Semantics count people!
Good thing there wasn't another attempt, otherwise the counter would've overflowed.
Isn't it more than a bit arrogant and unrealistic to think the US is the only country with these technologies?
I mean, I know many Americans like to believe the US invented absolutely everything and are ahead of everyone else technologically, but in fact they really didn't and aren't.
The true number is actually much higher, but with all the technology going overseas, the feds have to do with 8bit registers.
Badabumm - disssssh. Thanks! I'll be here all week. Try the lamb.
Yes.
Of course, by legalizing it.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Keep adding additional rules, regulations and laws and people tend to start breaking more laws since more of them exist to break.
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
were commodities readily available elsewhere but restricted, like standard cryptographic algorithms, from export from the USA -- even if they were originally imported?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Is this spike for real, or is it the result of increased enforcement efforts?
...laura
Good thing there wasn't another attempt, otherwise the counter would've overflowed.
WORD.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
The cost of educating a person is very high.
What of the net import in technical expertise ?
Often some of the very best students go to US, and end up staying and doing high end re-search.
The US didn't have to pay to feed and bring up this person. If this person is 1 in 100,
the US didn't have to pay and feed and educate 100 people and selectively keep only the best one without having to bother
with the rest.
I would say that the US is getting the good end of the deal
G
...and yet, information hates to be anthromorphized. It's funny that way.
Most of the stuff the US is still export-controlling either has commercial uses or non-US sources. If you look at the indictments, the big one was about someone exporting carbon fibre materials to the China Space Agency. Why is the US trying to stop that? There's some noise about how carbon fibre might be somehow used to enrich uranium. China already has its own enrichment plants, nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors. They don't need a centrifuge enrichment plant, except maybe for cost reduction. The US tries, for some reason, to slow down China's space program by refusing to export certain space-related items. Not that it makes much difference; the Chinese space program seems to be doing just fine.
It's hard to think of anything in computing that you can't get outside the US. Nor is there any military computing application that really requires more compute power that you couldn't put together from stuff you could mail order from Taiwan or China.
Arms control and technology export control are different issues. Arms control is intended to make it harder for people we don't like to get firepower in bulk. It's not about the underlying technology; it's about production. Most of the cases mentioned are pure arms control issues.
Which was the last US government that didn't illegally export arms?
That appeared to be talking about the physical costs to getting information out.
I see the Information wants to be free as an observation that information spreads easily, and that once something is out, you can't lock it up again, just like you can't put a genie back into a bottle.
A good example of this is the Streisand Effect, in which some entity tries to force the removal of some piece of information from the internet, but since the attempt makes people perceive the information as valuable, large numbers make sure that they get a copy themselves. Poster cases for this effect is the attempt by certain movie companies to remove a HD-DVD encryption key from the internet. The attempt seriously backfired, making the encryption key one of the most well-known large numbers on the internet.
Recently I was forced to sit through an online training with regards to US export controls. The regulations are insane. I came away wondering why any high tech company would want to incorporate in the US with these kind of laws on the book. For instance you could be in violation if you show foreign visitors around your company and they get a fleeting look at a white-board that discusses a strong encryption algorithm. Same thing if you discuss such a "sensitive" technology on the phone with a foreigner. Absolutely and totally nuts.
Nothing much has changed. Smaller stuff like special electronics can be easily hidden inside perfectly legal consumer electronic devices and the $8/hr TSA guy working at the airport will never know the difference. Unless you completely seal borders (??how??) and cut off all tourism etc, you're just doing it for show.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hmm.... I dunno.
If I was currently selling illegal drugs in the US and wanted to continue to rake in giant piles of money I'd be making political donations to whoever was pushing the "tough on drugs" laws with a little note along the lines of "keep up the good work mate".
Why? Well if it was legalised I'd be ruined!
Who was hurt most by the ending of prohibition? The mob of course, they wanted it to never end.
Legal distributors selling safer cheaper drugs would push them out of the market entirely.
The best thing that can happen for them is for a competitor to be busted, they can just expand into their former market overnight. Sure they might be busted themselves but the organisations which survive and grow will be the ones which are best at avoiding getting caught.
I've heard that during prohibition foreign alcohol producers quietly lobbied to keep prohibition since consumption didn't go down, the American producers were pushed out of business and import taxes went the way of the morning mist.
Few people seem to be able to graps this, drug laws just create a situation where there's a group of people distributing drugs with a large financial incentive to expand their market.
Want to get rid of the drug dealers? It only takes a few easy and cheap steps.
Step 1: Provide free high quality drugs to people already addicted with no criminal penalties or consequences to people who come forward and ask for them.
Step 2: You're basicly done, you've knocked the bottom out of the drug buisness, you are now the distributor and you have no reason to try to get more people addicted. Drug dealers can no longer make any profit out of getting kids addicted since they just go to you when it starts costing money.
Much much much much cheaper than the massive failure that the war on drugs is.
Ahum that had much more todo with the historical context in which these numbers come from. You know the seventies with the hippies. It is a well established fact that drugs usage in the Netherlands is considerable lower than the European average or the USA for that matter. See http://www.drugwarfacts.org/thenethe.htm for some hard numbers.
Huh? Whoever said the goal was to get people to stop using drugs? The goal is to end the violence, save the huge taxpayer cost, and stop the other dangers (such as cutting coke with rat poison), not to get people to stop.