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NASA Boss Accused of Breaking Arms Trade Laws
ananyo writes "The head of NASA Ames Research Center may have fallen victim to restrictive arms regulations — just as a US government report recommends changing them to help the space industry. Simon 'Pete' Worden, who recently announced that Mars exploration would be done by private companies, has been accused of giving foreign citizens access to information that falls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ITAR has hampered U.S. firms seeking to export satellite technology. The allegations against Worden come just as the new report recommends moving oversight of many commercial satellites and related activities from the State department to the Commerce department, and some fear they could provide lawmakers with reasons to not ease export controls."
Those regulations hapmper everybody. The folks in the gun lobby will tell you that they are a backdoor attempt at gun control and they make a good case (if you're a firearms accessories and parts merchant, you literally can't drop a simple magazine spring in a box and mail it abroad without mounds of expensive paperwork) until you realize that it screws up *everybody*. Anything can be defined as "arms" if you're willing to stretch the term enough to server your particular agenda and, under ITAR, it's been stretched to a ridiculous degree, already. The anecdotes in the article (yes, I read it, so flog me) are just the tip of the iceberg.
"Gee, that's an awful nice launch system you have there... be a shame if something happened to it..."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Toshiba sold four 5-axis milling machines and four 4-xis milling machines to the USSR. In its export application, Toshiba Machine falsely described the machinery as two-axis machine tools. Anything over two-axis violates COCOM.
Read that again: Toshiba didn't innocently stumble into the export of a dual-use machine that might or might not have been approved depending on bureaucratic review whims, they flat out lied in order to export machines which were explicitly and unconditionally prohibited.
I wish it was restricted to dual use. I worked in the defense industry building stuff for the Navy, but no weapons, only commercial grade stuff. ITAR applies to that too. Our ITAR specialists use this example: If you buy a coffee pot off of the shelf of Wal-Mart, it is not ITAR controlled. If you now paint that coffee pot gray to fit to a Navy standard, and is in all other ways identical to the black one you bought, it is now a Defense Article and is ITAR controlled. Just by painting it the color the Navy wants.
We ran into issues several times where we were given permission to tell a Canadian company what we wanted (called a TAA, granted by the State Dept and takes about 6-8 months to process), basically giving them performance specs of a system we wanted so they could quote us a system that met those specs. It came in, but there was a defect. So we sent it back to get it repaired. By sending back our supplier's own product to his facility to get a defect fixed, we violated ITAR because we were not given the right to export material, only data (that's called an MLA, and can take 10-14 months to process).
And by the way, the term is not US Citizens. You can't use US Citizens, because under ITAR rules the definition of a US citizen doesn't invalidate that person from ITAR regulations (he may be a dual citizenship person, or a US citizen who is on a watch list). The term is non-US person.
Ridiculous. I am so glad I moved to the commercial world.