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Texas Man Who Acted As Russian Agent Gets 10 Years' Prison (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A Texas man who acted as a secret agent for the Russian government and illegally exported cutting-edge military technology to Russia has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Alexander Fishenko learned his punishment Thursday in federal court in New York. He pleaded guilty in September to crimes including acting as a Russian agent. The 50-year-old Fishenko is a U.S. and Russian citizen. He owned Houston-based Arc Electronics Inc. Prosecutors say he led a scheme that evaded strict export controls for micro-electronics commonly used in missile guidance systems, detonation triggers and radar systems. Prosecutors say his company shipped about $50 million worth of technologies to Russia between 2002 and 2012. In other Russian-related news, a Russian government-owned news site Sputnik has reported that the Kremlin is building a nuclear space bomber that should be flight-ready by 2020.
An electronics exporter who violates ITAR and sells electronics abroad is not a secret agent, even if he misrepresented the purchases when he acquired those electronics.
And, how did he get this stuff? By "falsely claiming to be a traffic light manufacturer." Now, think about that for a second. The traffic lights in your neighborhood have "microprocessors which are frequently used in military systems, missile-guidance systems and detonation triggers" ? Well, they may (microprocessors can be put to many uses), but that doesn't mean that the traffic lights in your neighborhood contain secret military hardware. In fact, they certainly do not.
In other words, this guy was convicted of selling export-controlled hardware, which you can buy on the open market, not militarily secret hardware, which you cannot. There is a big difference (not least in that there near no exhaustive list of what is subject to ITAR control, and at times no easy way to determine if something is or is not export restricted), but you wouldn't know it from reading this article.