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China's ZTE Pleads Guilty, Will Pay $1.19 Billion For Violating US Trade Sanctions (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp will plead guilty and pay $1.19 billion ($892 million in the Iran case) to settle allegations it violated U.S. laws that restrict the sale of American-made technology to Iran and North Korea, the company and U.S. government agencies said on Tuesday. ZTE entered into an agreement to plead guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, obstruction of justice and making a material false statement, the U.S. Justice Department said. The Commerce Department investigation followed reports by Reuters in 2012 that ZTE had signed contracts to ship millions of dollars worth of hardware and software from some of the best-known U.S. technology companies to Iran's largest telecoms carrier. Between January 2010 and January 2016, ZTE directly or indirectly shipped approximately $32 million of U.S.-origin items to Iran without obtaining the proper export licenses from the U.S. government. ZTE then lied to federal investigators during the investigation when it insisted that the shipments had stopped, Justice said. It also took actions involving 283 shipments of controlled items to North Korea, authorities said. Shipped items included routers, microprocessors and servers controlled under export regulations for security, encryption and anti-terrorism reasons.
so.. anyone going to jail? Surely a fine of $2B will have jail term attached to it?
Why involve a middleman? Direct exportation from the source. No fuss, no muss.
But hey, at least they didn't send it to Cuba.
yes, can't have them turrists using modern phones. Much easier to hack and spy the older ones...like our president uses.
If you work 40 hours per week to afford rice, a mud hut, and a pail to go fetch water from the river, you're poor. In the US, we work 40 hours per week and spend a tiny fraction of our income on food (12% of the median household's consumer spending) and running hot water (lol, $45/month here); and only represent about a third of our expenses with large houses with insulation, glass windows, running electricity, and heated space.
The difference is technology. When you do something in a developed country, you use machines and advanced techniques to invest very little human labor and produce enormous output. If 10 people all work together to produce 1,000 units of a thing in an hour with the median-income wage of $27/hr, that's $270 / 1,000 or $0.27 per thing--which might sound meaningful in its own right, but essentially boils down to that thing selling for a price no less than 36 seconds of the median earner's labor. If those 10 people were only able to produce 10 units of that thing with their combined labor, then it's going to cost $27 or 1 hour (3,600 seconds!) of the median earner's labor.
How stable do you think North Korea's government would be in an environment that had to support higher technology? North Korea can bring advanced weapons against us in a war if we sell them advanced weapons; it can't produce advanced weapons. To produce advanced weapons, North Korea needs technologically-advanced factories, which means they need a highly-educated population skilled in all forms of engineering, business management, logistics, and a broad array of the sciences. That's not enough: they need to be able to support the population which provides these things, meaning they need to apply technology in the private sector so as to improve access to food, running water, and so forth, reducing the amount of labor they expend on keeping their population alive and freeing that labor for their military machine.
Does that sound like the kind of blind, raving, fanatical population that would tolerate Kim Jong-Un?
By the time any of these people developed an economy which could support their war effort, they'd have an educated population used to a high standard-of-living and utterly disinterested in their political bullshit. They'd face military coups if nothing else, because their government support structure would also need sufficient education to raise their country to a state capable of supporting the kind of war we're afraid they'd bring to us--and then their intelligence community and their military power centers would quickly recognize the tactical instability brought by the existing government, and tear it down in any way expedient.
They can't become a threat to us without acquiring a steady stream of ready-to-go weapons from a highly-developed third party seeking to wage war without the political consequences of war or simply collapsing internally along the way as the political basis of a developed country fails to support mindless and self-destructive war-mongering.
Economic sanctions are an ineffective and dangerous way to handle undeveloped ratholes.
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that selling that technology to bad actors makes them more dangerous.
This is truly nearly pointless. Even crushing fines that result in bankruptcy and failure only move the corporate assets to another, more devious, and more ingenious entity, harder to detect.
There is no compensatory punishment for such acts. We are left with enemies of their own choosing, more able to harm us, and more costly to repel or defeat.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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I find it very disturbing.
You may think Iran is the source of all evil, and of course everybody is entitled to an opinion. For me, it is not evil at all.
It's just another country in a region which seriously lacks proper control and is subject to interference from a lot of external parties.
The only responsible action to take would be to defuse the conflicts, and start vital negotiations to achieve peace and stability there, but instead many stakeholders prefer to keep the wound open, as wolves attacking cattle.
Of course, I'm not here to defend any terrorist, but we cannot equate extremism to nations (because it's dumb, that is).
Nobody wants Iran to have weapons of mass destruction, but some knowledge is used to do good; I also am not thrilled that Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons -- and for that matter, neither am I happy about the USA, Russia and China having them.
The US should provide the equipment to Iran instead of denying it; they will get it from elsewhere and that will be a lost opportunity to make friends there.
And FYI I have no relation to that region, no relatives there, nor can I speak their language, not Muslim... nada. I'm just pissed off at how a child's life there is worth less than candy. I'm talking mainly about Syria at the moment, but it could be Iraq yesterday or Iran tomorrow.
Finally, do you know I don't buy cars made by US companies? Guess what, American cars were once the best, but the world has caught up -- I have plenty of non-American options.
And what about IT equipment? Do the math.
We can make peace under risk of war -- or war without any chance for peace.
zte is partially state-owned. so basically, the chinese government was (perhaps not so indirectly) acting as a middleman to ship u.s. made products, with export restrictions, to a country on that export-ban list.
a measly billion won't do a damn thing.. not even the equal of a slap on the wrist with a limp orange noodle.
also double deals and sells technology where it shouldn't. Big surprise. Trouble is, they are getting off too light.
in this drama. And many others like it.
Wait - I thought the russians were what we had to worry about...
Same timeframe. Iran.
Any idea how software updates for existing ZTE phones will be affected? One billion dollars is probably more than just a drop in the bucket for them, so I'd imagine they'll make a few cuts somewhere. I'm just wondering if my recent purchase of an Axon 7 Mini is now effectively doomed, as they have yet to release the Android 7 update for it.
Sanctions just move things a little harder to be done but don't stop them. for example we have some businesses in Iran for bypassing sanctions in purchasing from american companies like amazon and ebay. One of this sites is charsooq that does it well! We already have purchased too many researching tools from America.