ITAR compliance: Can of worms?

Hi, all,

I have an offshore customer who wants to work together on some dual-use infrared imaging technology. That of course is one of the hot buttons of ITAR, so in order to make sure that I stay out of jail, I'll need at very least to get an official determination of whether it's allowed or not. (There's a documented process for doing that--apparently you just send in a description of what you're planning to do, and they tell you "yes" or "no".)

Back in the day (like around 2001, the last time I needed to worry about this) there was a specific exemption in the US Munitions List for infrared imagers using PVDF, but that seems to be gone now, so I have to be extra-careful.

I know that big military contractors have whole departments devoted to ITAR compliance, but I have no idea what's it like for small outfits.

I'd like to do the work, because it's interesting and might actually advance the cause of civilization a little, but it isn't worth risking that kind of trouble.

What I'd like to know is if anyone here has experience doing ITAR-controlled work, especially in a small outfit. Easy? Dangerous?

Thanks

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Phil Hobbs
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We deal with that a lot. We're not in jail yet, but that could be luck. You could contact Matt or Kevin... they handle it for us.

I think there are still two or three separate agencies (Commerce? Defense?)whose rules need to be followed. And it's not just work done for offshore entities; we're responsible for indirect sales, too.

It's ironic that I can buy a part that's made in, say, Japan, and have to be careful about shipping one back to Japan.

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John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
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Reply to
John Larkin

That's the government. I had a friend who was in charge of the construction of a fuel tank, along the Hudson river. He wanted to fill the tank with Hudson River water and then discharge it back into the river when he was done. No can do. Hudson River water is too polluted to discharge into the Hudson River. Huh? That's government.

Reply to
krw

Yeah, I sent an inquiry to the Defense Trade help desk, snipped-for-privacy@state.gov, and they were pretty helpful in their way--within a couple of hours I received this:

"You would have to register with DDTC as an exporter. Although you are producing unclassified tech data, you are exporting it to a foreign party and providing a defense service as defined in Part 120.9 of the ITAR to Israel. The provision of a defense service requires an approved Technical Assistant Agreement (TAA) under Part 124 of the ITAR. The annual initial fee for registration is $2,250.00. As an exporter you would pay a minimum of $2,750 for the second year.

To register do the following:

Go to

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and on the Home Page click on the link to Registration. There you will find the application form and complete instructions for a complete submittal package. If this is a renewal of registration, please note that renewal is exactly the same as registering for the first time. You must submit a complete package.

Once registered, in order to app.ly for the TAA, you must sign up for the D-Trade electronic licensing system. This can be accessed from our website,

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in the section on DTrade. On the main D-Trade Page, click on the link to "Getting Started with D-Trade" in the gray box on the right hand side for instructions.

Plus all the record-keeping and compliance hassles from now till Doomsday. Oh, well, I just turned the job down. A pity.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Phil, did I read this right? So even though you are only exporting 'unclassified tech data' and not any real hardware, you still have to 'jump through hoops'?

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Yup. It would have been designing improved infrared pixels based on a new wrinkle in antenna coupled tunnel junctions, work I could easily have published in the open literature.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Phil Hobbs

If you take controlled technical data on a notebook computer or an iPad or a thumb drive outside the US borders you're deemed to have permanently exported it, even if it never left your sight.

I have had to deal with this stuff for some time now-- even though there now are other uncontrolled sources for the sensitive technology.. it's really a shot in the arm for non-US makers that could not otherwise compete with relatively low US prices (volume) and high quality.

Q. What are the penalties for violating the AECA?

A. The civil penalties are a fine up to $500,000 per violation and up to five years in jail. The criminal penalties are a fine up to $1 million per violation and up to ten years in jail. In addition, the violator can be debarred for a period of time from obtaining export licenses and possible debarment from receiving any U.S. Government contracts.

Q. The civil penalty of up to $500,000 per violation doesn?t seem too bad.

A. It does when you consider that a single case may involve more than

100 alleged violations.

--sp

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

e

ed

ny real hardware, you still have to 'jump through hoops'?

Ahh OK, So 'controlled' is not the same as 'classified'? One can have uncl assified data that is still controlled? (Maybe I don't want to know the an swer.) I assume if it's published in some journal that it's not controlled ? Could Phil publish his scheme and then help a foreign customer get it worki ng?

OK and what about the cloud? Say I put something into dropbox?

I'm very happy living on the trailing edge of technology :^)

George H.

Ahh much more than I can afford!

Reply to
George Herold

That's right. And you won't hear a single teabagger say "big intrusive government", either.

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Tim Wescott 
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Tim Wescott

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would you take the risk? it only takes one bureaucrat with an axe to grind and it is either they win or you lose

-Lasse

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Don't be so sure of that. When I worked with a defense contractor where we handled very little classified info, we had all sorts of ITAR restrictions and could not even talk to vendors until they were approved by the ITAR folks. DOD can decide after the fact that your release of the info was against the rules. Not so much different than classified info on crypto and such where they classify your work after you try to publish it.

To George: The point is to prevent the spread of information, not just hardware. In fact, the hardware could be shipped with appropriate approvals while they might never approve of sending the various manuals. Not sure why the difference, but I guess having the hardware is not so important if details of the critical technology is hard to extract.

Was there a reason why you couldn't do this through a third party who assure the sanitizing or approval of release of the info?

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Hey, the tea baggers are the ones pushing the trap laws. They love big government.

Reply to
miso

Why don't you guys go get a room? Take your political crap somewhere else. Can't you leave a non-political thread alone?

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Here's an article on one case that probably has (deliberately) had a considerable chilling effect:-

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On the plus side, if there is one, an executive of a small US aerospace firm told me that he was not interested in dealing with non-controlled commercial opportunities because then he'd have to compete with companies paying their engineers half as much.

As of early this year, they're removing some space stuff from the USML.

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Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward" 
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com 
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Spehro Pefhany

Scary! On page four it says Sherman who helped the feds got 14 months and went bankrupt*. Damned if you do and damned if you don't!

George H.

*with $400k in debts, mostly student loans! How do you get $400k in student loans?
Reply to
George Herold

Pity indeed. Couldn't you team up with some research outfit or something? They get the risk and you get the money?

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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply 
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

Yes, chilling. Complete with book-burning, a sure sign of troubled times and oppressive regimes.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

I'm filing a DS4076 form to ask them to declare this particular work to be uncontrolled, because it isn't designing infrared FPAs directly. It's just some applied research aimed at making more efficient antenna-coupled tunnel junction (ACTJ) infrared detectors.

Most ACTJ detectors are limited by the tradeoff between the RC rolloff of the optical signal and the Johnson noise of the zero-bias junction resistance.

You can't change the thickness or dielectric constant of the barrier oxide much, and with an area-resistance product of 1 ohm m**2, the time constant is right around 30 fs, i.e. a 3 dB point of about 5 THz.

That's death in the NIR (200 THz and above) and isn't that much better in the thermal IR (20-40 THz). Travelling wave techniques can help a lot--we got up to about 7% quantum efficiency at 1.6 um, which was about

50 or 100 times better than previous work. (The RC rolloff is down by more than 30 dB at that point, so the travelling wave structure was obviously working at some level.)

The problem is that you still wind up with about 100-ohm shunt resistances, which are kind of tough to overcome, given how weak thermal light is.

There's a pretty broad First Amendment right to publish research results, as long as they aren't classified, but being able to collaborate only by exchanging journal articles is pretty restrictive.

Part of the issue is that this would be paid for by US FMF aid (Foreign Military Financing), so it's fairly hard to argue that it's strictly commercial. There's really no way I can take the chance unless the information is declared to be uncontrolled.

And while I'm sympathetic to that poor guy from U Tennessee, he sounds like a complete moron. Putting Chinese and Iranian nationals to work on a munitions program that explicitly excludes foreigners strongly suggests arrogance and hubris.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Yes. They basically told us DO's etc. up front that voluntary disclosure could result in a mitigation of penalties, but there _would_ still be significant penalties.

--sp

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

George Washington being long dead, of course.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Phil Hobbs

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