Archive for the ‘Export Control Proposals’ Category


Jun

27

US to China: No Robots for You!


Posted by at 11:23 am on June 27, 2018
Category: BISChinaExport Control Proposals

Robot by Johnson Cameraface [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/87B4de [cropped]The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is cooking up new export controls on China. The idea is to restrict exports to China of technologies that could assist in China’s Made in China 2025 manufacturing upgrade initiative. That initiative focuses on 10 priority industries, which include new advanced information technology; automated machine tools and robotics; aerospace and aeronautical equipment; maritime equipment and high-tech shipping; modern rail transport equipment; new-energy vehicles and equipment; power equipment; agricultural equipment; new materials; and biopharma and advanced medical products.

Some of these items and technology might on the Commerce Control List and may already be controlled for export to China. Others clearly are not. Politico reports that the National Security Council is drawing up a list of technologies to be controlled for export to China targeting the priority sectors for Made in China 2025. It is not clear whether “technology” here includes the common usage which would cover goods or only the more technical use of that term by BIS which covers information only. The NSC List is scheduled to be released on Friday, so we should know more then.

How this new list will play out in relation to foreign availability determinations under Part 768 of the EAR is also anyone’s guess. Certainly technologies in many of the targeted sectors will remain available to China from other foreign countries, none of which can reasonably be expected to adopt these controls.

Another issue, not to suppose that the White House cares about complying with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (“GATT”), is the extent to which these new export restrictions comply with the prohibition on quantitative export restrictions in Article XI of GATT. Certainly, these restrictions will not fit within the stated exceptions to the prohibitions on such restrictions in Article XI — namely, protection of domestic supply of “foodstuffs or other products essential to” the exporting country. Nor do they have any relation to “classification, grading or marketing of commodities in international trade.”

Instead, the restrictions can only be justified on the basis of Article XXI’s national security exception which provides the basis in GATT for most export control regimes. The national security exception in Article XII is related to “fissionable materials,” “traffic in arms,” or “war or other emergency in international relations.” Obviously the reference to war in Article XII is not a reference to a trade war, so it seems unlikely that the new export restrictions could survive a WTO challenge.

Photo Credit: Robot by Johnson Cameraface [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/87B4de [cropped]. Copyright 2010 Johnson Cameraface

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Apr

3

The Export Control Nightmare Act of 2018 (UPDATED)


Posted by at 6:08 pm on April 3, 2018
Category: BISExport Control ProposalsExport Reform

Ed Royce via https://royce.house.gov/uploadedphotos/mediumresolution/320ee60e-b83a-4f74-9767-a0e68f3095f6.png [Fair Use]
ABOVE: Rep. Ed Royce

When the Export Administration Act lapsed years ago, it meant that every year the President had to issue an executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) resurrecting the Export Administration Regulations for another year.  (Declarations of emergency, the premise for any IEEPA resuscitation of the EAR, can only last one year under the National Emergencies Act.)  The proposed bi-partisan Export Control Reform Act of 2018, sponsored by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Ca) is mostly designed to give the President the authority to re-promulgate the Export Administration Regulations on a more permanent basis.  He or she will still have to renew annually the Executive Orders that impose economic sanctions on people, places, and things (mostly boats).

Nobody can really argue with the elimination of the annual renewal requirement for the EAR.  Presumably the President has better things to do, like Easter Egg rolls, Thanksgiving turkey pardons and the such.  But Congress took the opportunity to meddle with the definition of a U.S. person to create a whole new class of exports that are certain to cause headaches, if not nightmares.  Under the proposed new definition, a U.S. business entity is not a U.S. person for export purposes if foreign citizens or corporations own 50 percent or more of the corporation.  Under the old definition, a business entity was a U.S. person if  it was organized under the law of any jurisdiction in the United States.

If you previously thought that “deemed exports”  already were the stuff of nightmares, well, as they say, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Here are some scenarios that I’m optioning to start a new horror series on Netflix.

  • Company A in Chicago wants to sell some microprocessors classified as ECCN classified as 3A001 to Company C, a U.S. corporation, in Detroit.  It can’t do that until Company C gives it information on foreign ownership and, if Company C is owned 51% by Chinese corporation, then Company A cannot send the items from Chicago to Detroit without a [bad word] export license.  Scared yet?
  • Company D, a manufacturer of computers in Seattle wants to use Company F in Boston to manufacture certain components specially designed for its computers.  The computers and the specially designed parts are classified as ECCN 4A001.  In order to do that, Company D must transfer 4E001 technology relating to the production of these parts to Company F.   Company F is owned 60 percent bought by a Russian-Italian joint venture.  Is Company F Russian or Italian?  If the latter, no license is required; if the former, it is.  This gives Freddie Kruger a run for his money.
  • Company G, which is 60 percent French owned, creates designs for a CNC-machine.   That technology can be exported without license to France.  Can the French parent build the machine and ship it to China without license?  That will depend on whether the designs created by the U.S. company that is now a foreign person in the United States are U.S. technology or foreign technology.  Warning: violent ending for mature audiences only.

You have to imagine that these nightmare scenarios never crossed the minds, such as they were, of the drafters of this legislation.  Nor did they focus on the numerous compliance questions and problems that the new definition would create.  But not to worry:  section 108 is designed to provide “compliance assistance.”   Whew.  In fact, in section 108(c)(1), Congress mandates that the President “shall develop and submit to Congress a plan to assist small- and medium-sized United States [sic] in export licensing and other processes under this title.”  I always thought we were a big, indeed great, United States, so I’m not so sure who are the small- and medium-sized United States that Congress hopes to help.

UPDATE: Kevin Wolf, who you may remember was running export control reform at BIS during the Obama administration, points out, in the comments, that the definition of U.S. person which resulted in the nightmares described above was, ahem, a mistake:

Everyone should relax. The definition of US person in the bill was a drafting error. The title I export definition got combined with the title II antiboycott definition. Committee staff is aware of the issue and will fix it during mark-up to get it back to the EAR status quo. You were not wrong in pointing out the absurdities as written, btw. When things seem weird though, it is good to ask the drafters if that is what they really meant. They did not in this case. Reg and leg writers do make mistakes.

That’s good news. It also goes to show that we all would have been better off if the antiboycott regulations had been left to die a deserved death. Those regulations never put even a dent in the Arab boycott but instead merely enriched lawyers (myself included) who had to decipher their ridiculously byzantine complexity and seventeenth-century syntax to advise clients on what language could and could not appear in letters of credit.

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Jul

2

Just What We Need: More Export Controls


Posted by at 6:42 pm on July 2, 2013
Category: Arms ExportCyber WeaponsExport Control Proposals

Hacking in Progress, image by Cristiano Betta (Flickr: Barcamp London 3 @ Google Offices UK) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHacking_in_progress_at_BarCampLondon_3.jpgThe Senate Armed Services Committee has favorably reported S. 1197, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014. And, you will be pleased to know (or maybe not), they have slipped into the bill a proposal for new export controls, this time on software that could be characterized as “cyber weapons.”

What got the immensely tech savvy aging Senators all whirled up on cyber weapons was, apparently, testimony they received in hearings on the bill about the Shamoon virus. Shamoon, in addition to being an excellent name for a dog, is also the name of a computer virus that struck Aramco in Saudi Arabia and rewrote or destroyed data on hard drives. No doubt the Senators were particularly vexed that one of the payloads carried by Shamoon was a picture of a burning U.S. flag which was used to overwrite some of the data.

So now section 946 of the proposed Defense Authorization Act requires the President to convene an “interagency process … to control the proliferation of cyber weapons through unilateral and cooperative export controls.” The Senate Report on the proposed legislation acknowledged that there might be some difficulty distinguishing between “cyber weapons” (bad) and “dual-use, lawful intercept, and penetration testing” technologies” (good). But, hey, that’s what an interagency process is for!

Now, the million dollar question, of course, is whether new export controls on cyber weapons would have had any impact on Shamoon. The answer, not surprisingly, is probably not. Kapersky Labs, which dissected the virus, concluded that the virus was riddled with a number of “silly errors” which limited its effectiveness and likely was the work not of sophisticated cyber criminals but was a “quick and dirty” job by “skillful amateurs.” Significantly, it was not something that the hackers acquired in the United States (or anywhere else) and exported but home-grown, error-ridden code. The only people who are going to be bothered by section 946 and its proposed export controls will be legitimate manufacturers of network intercept, analysis and testing software.

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Copyright © 2013 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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Jan

10

More Tiers Are Shed Over Answered Prayers


Posted by at 7:14 pm on January 10, 2011
Category: BISExport Control Proposals

Kevin Wolf
ABOVE: Kevin Wolf

Today’s edition of the Washington Tariff & Trade Letter has an article (paid subscription required) quoting Kevin Wolf at the Bureau of Industry and Security as to the impact that foreign availability will have on the classification of dual use items in the export reform process.

“To be clear, availability will not be the determining factor in any particular decision,” he said. Rather, “it will be factored in as part of the government’s ultimate decision about how to tier items.”

Even though foreign availability will be one factor in the decision as to what tier the item would classified in, Wolf stressed that the ultimate decision would not overturn existing statutory and multilateral control obligations:

The only caveat to this, again, to the extent not otherwise inconsistent with existing statutory obligations or multilateral obligations, that’s a standing rule in this entire effort. We’re not trying to undo or unwind existing multilateral obligations or statutory obligations

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Copyright © 2011 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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May

21

House Committee Passes Export Reform Proposal


Posted by at 8:08 pm on May 21, 2009
Category: Arms ExportCriminal PenaltiesExport Control Proposals

Howard Berman
ABOVE: Howard Berman
Chair, House Foreign Affairs


Yesterday, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved legislation that would, among other things, amend parts of the Arms Export Control Act (“AECA”). The Bill, H.R. 2410, is titled the ‘‘Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011’’ and was sponsored by Rep. Howard Berman, chair of the committee.

Like many of its predecessors, the bill would set processing time goals for licenses and commodity jurisdiction requests, each to be no more than 60 days. And commodity jurisdiction determinations would be required to be posted by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (“DDTC”) on its website. The processing times are just “goals” so, even if the legislation passes, I wont be holding my breath waiting for CJ requests to blast out the door in 60 days. But I think we can all give some polite golf claps, and maybe even a louder hooray or two, to the requirement that CJs be posted on the website.

Section 826 of the bill permits the President to remove “satellites and related components” from the United States Munitions List, but it is poorly drafted and has a confusing China exception which reads:

(b) Exception- The authority of subsection (a) may not be exercised with respect to any satellite or related component that may, directly or indirectly, be transferred to, or launched into outer space by, the People’s Republic of China.

Come again? Does this mean that satellites and parts that might be transferred to China stay on the USML and, like all other items, require a license to all destinations? Or does it mean that DDTC can decide that the satellite-related items in Category XV can be exported to every destination but China without a license? And where does the Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) fit into this? Can it require BIS licenses for satellites and parts removed from the USML? Your guess is as good as mine.

A third provision of interest in the proposed legislation might be referred to as the Full Prisons Act. Section 831 increases the maximum criminal penalty from 10 years imprisonment to 20 years imprisonment. For whatever reason, Congress seems unable to enact any reform with increasing prison sentences, even though this appears to be an effort to conform the criminal penalties under the AECA to the increased penalties provide under the International Emergency Economic Powers Enhancement Act (“IEEPEA”) for violations of other export laws. Look for life imprisonment to be a penalty for false AES entries in the not-so-distant future.

Section 831 also attempts to conform civil penalties under the AECA to those enacted under IEEPEA by providing for a penalty equal to the greater of $250,000 per violation or twice the value of the export involved. But Representative Berman’s legislation doesn’t quite manage to get this right either. First, it fails to amend section 38(e), 22 U.S.C. § 2778(e) of the Arms Export Control Act which sets the maximum civil penalty at $500,000. Does this mean that a transaction valued at $1 million, and thus eligible for a $2 million penalty under the amended 38(c), is limited to a penalty of $500,000?

Worse the language of the bill, unlike the language in IEEPEA, makes the penalty payable “upon conviction.” Does that mean that the civil penalty is only available after a criminal conviction? Again, this is probably a drafting oversight, but with all the newly unemployed lawyers in town, can’t the committee hire somebody to clean up its bills?

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Copyright © 2009 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)