As you may have noticed, we have recently made a few changes to Export Law Blog. First, we’ve spiffed up the visual design of the site a bit, having been more or less forced to redesign the look of the site when an update to WordPress nuked our old design.

Second, after many requests, we’ve added a search tool in the column on the right. The search bar uses a custom Google search. After some testing the custom Google search bar appeared to provide search results that were better than the native search engine supplied by WordPress.

In the subscriptions section, again in the right-hand column, in addition to the email and RSS options for subscribing, there is now a Twitter icon which, if clicked, will take you to our new Twitter page. Each new post will be, er, tweeted, which would allow you to receive notification on your mobile device, if you’d like, either by SMS or through the Twitter app available for iPhone and Blackberry smart phones. (Not that I’d imagine that anyone really needs to get updates from here with that much urgency!) Not to worry, there will never be a Facebook fan page for this blog.

Finally, some readers have reported that their email notifications have stopped working. It appears that some notifications are being trapped in certain spam filters. I’m working on some adjustments to the email notification program that may prevent that. In the meantime, please ask your IT department to white list “clif atsymbol exportlawblog period com,” which is the address from which these notifications originate. Also, if anyone is still having problems with the notifications, please let me know so I can continue to make sure that this function operates properly.

In upgrading to WordPress 2.9.1 today, I had a bit of a problem and lost some of the files that control how this blog looks. I’ve recreated most of them, but the blog is still looking a little odd and behaving a bit strangely. I should have time to get everything back in working order over the next few days and while I’m doing that I’ll try to add some new features like a search box.

After seeing that CNN was doing a feature on the top ten YouTube videos of 2009, the staff at Export Law Blog decided that we no longer had an excuse not to recount the top 10 export stories of 2009. However, we can’t guarantee anything quite as awesome as the YouTube video of the toddler dancing to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It). But here goes anyway, in reverse order:

10. Nobody really knows what Part 129′s definition of arms broker includes but it certainly included a website from a Portland yacht broker trying to find customers for an armed hovercraft being sold by somebody in Eastern Europe for $60 million. Several days after the web page appeared, it was yanked.

9. BIS amended its rules to control the export of tonfas and sjamboks. And, no, these are not menu items found in Asian restaurants.

8. Canada actually prosecuted someone for an export violation.

7. Iran used eBay to buy military aircraft parts from eBay dealers who, apparently, thought that DDTC stands for Dauphin Dog Training Club.

6. OFAC and BIS amended the rules implementing the Cuba sanctions to allow more exports of cellphones, computers, peripherals and digital devices to Cuba. Three months later Cuba arrested a U.S. citizen distributing laptops and cellphones in Cuba to Cuban citizens.

5. French export control officer for Luxembourg-based Qioptiq SARL urged company employees not to consult U.S. export lawyers because they “play by the book” and will “push you to” disclose export violations. DDTC briefly abandoned its distaste for export lawyers and fined Qioptiq $25 million dollars.

4. DDTC finally released its amended brokering regulations. The entire world wished it hadn’t.

3. OFAC and the State Department finally discovered the Internet and realized that letting ordinary people in sanctioned countries use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube might actually be good for world democracy.

2. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit smacked down the DOJ’s outrageous (and routine) assertion that courts can’t review DDTC’s determination that a particular item fits in a particular USML category. The money quote:

A designation by an unnamed official, using unspecified criteria, that is put in a desk drawer, taken out only for use at a criminal trial, and immune from any evaluation by the judiciary, is the sort of tactic usually associated with totalitarian régimes.

1. U.S. authorities liberated $536 million from Swiss bank vaults after Credit Suisse was caught lying to U.S. banks in order to clear U.S. dollar transactions for Iran. “Neutrality,” the Swiss learned yet again, isn’t free.

The previous post, dated November 25, quoted an article in Crain’s Chicago Business in which an export attorney was quoted as saying:

“At the very least, you should have your freight forwarder check compliance, so if they identify a problem, they can stop the order before it ships.”

I said in that post that, knowing what I did about the law firm in question, I was “absolutely certain” that the lawyer was misquoted or the statement was taken completely out of context. The attorney involved has since spoken with me and confirmed that I was right and that the article misquoted the lawyer.

Significantly, during the interview the lawyer had become concerned that the reporter was not understanding what was being said and asked to review any attributed quotations prior to publication, a request that the reporter did not honor. Another reason, of course, not to believe everything you read in a newspaper or magazine. Blogs, on the other hand, can always be trusted completely.

The title of this post is not really meant to be hyperbole. The advice given in Crain’s Chicago Business in an article titled “Liars and terrorists and drug traffickers, oh my!” is without doubt the single worst piece of advice on export law that I’ve ever seen dispensed by anyone:

Further complicating matters, export control laws are regularly updated, and it’s up to business owners to stay current. That isn’t always easy. But a good place to start, experts say, is with … a freight forwarder who is regularly dealing with shipping and tariff restrictions.

To begin with, as regular readers know, the defense of “my freight forwarder did it” is the export law equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.” It’s not going to keep you from doing detention. Worse, many freight forwarders have no working knowledge of export laws and little interest in complying because DDTC and BIS usually whack the exporter not the freight forwarder in these matters.

On top of everything else, a lawyer was misquoted by the reporter.

“It’s a labor-intensive process,” says … [the] managing partner of … [a] law firm specializing in international trade law. “At the very least, you should have your freight forwarder check compliance, so if they identify a problem, they can stop the order before it ships.”

I know attorneys at the law firm in question. They are all smart people. They have people just as knowledgeable about export law as anyone else in the export bar. I am absolutely certain that the partner in question was misquoted or the statement was taken completely out of context by the reporter. (11/30 UPDATE: The attorney in question has contacted me to confirm that the quotation was inaccurate and that the reporter, although she promised to allow the attorney to review the article in question before it went to print, did not do so. Again, I absolutely believe that the attorney was misquoted and never would have said what the reporter claimed.)

Here’s some better advice: ask a Ouija Board your export compliance questions before submitting them to your freight forwarder.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Export Law Blog will be back to a regular schedule on Monday.

UPDATE (Early Thanksgiving Morning): I should add one qualification, based on a few comments this post has received from esteemed readers who work for freight forwarders. There is, of course, an irrebuttable presumption that any freight forwarder who is a reader of this blog would be an excellent source of export compliance information.