Surprise to U.S. Commerce Dept.: We Do Have Export Controls

Thomas Lipscomb recently wrote in “Congress Should Impose Trade Sanctions On Google-China Deal” that,

According to a blandly oblivious bureaucrat at BIS Commerce: “Internet filtering technologies are ubiquitous and are generally not subject to export controls. We are not aware of any U.S. government regulatory review requirements with respect to this transaction.”

Earth to space: There is.

Justin Busch, computational linguist at SAIC, owner of a patent for design of a natural-language search engine, had prepared “an ontology of controlled dual-use materials for an ARDA project a few years ago.”

Busch writes at his blog Semantic Compositions on “Can Google be export controlled?”

“[A]pplication service providers have been around for a few years already, and to still have no approach to that business model is insane.”

Busch continues:

Section 730.5 of the Export Administration Regulations addresses this to the extent that it recognizes "export" can mean things other than the physical transfer of hardware or media, and therefore covers things like trying to make nuclear blast simulations a service offering rather than delivered code, but there is still no recognition of the technologies which are best suited to a service model. Filtering technologies provided as a service are functionally equivalent to denial-of-service attacks, in that they have the same outcome of blocking information from being exchanged between legitimate users. The fact that no content provider's servers are being directly vandalized by the filter does not change the outcome. Export controls would come into play with any hardware device designed to provide denial-of-service capabilities to the Chinese government; why mandated filtering should be treated differently is a matter that at least deserves scrutiny.

Busch correctly contrasts the current relationship with China as quite different than the Cold War relationship with Russia. Nonetheless, Busch concludes:

[A]s the actions of the American software industry come into increasingly sharp conflict with American foreign policy, it would be a grave mistake to simply ignore the issue.

The hearings that Congressman Chris Smith will hold February 15 of his House International Relations Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations will consider reasonable measures to control the export or use of such dual-use technologies that Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo! are supplying to China and throughout the MidEast that are used to suppress dissent.

Such suppression of free speech just leaves the state line that is often inimical to the U.S. foreign policy of furthering democratic development, as we’ve sadly witnessed the past week regarding the state incited riots and threats against Denmark and others.

Again, please email Congressman Smith with your support for such export controls.