Federal agencies tighten grip on export violators
Six federal agencies, led by the U.S. Justice Department, will work together to crack down more efficiently on violators of the country’s export control regulations.
The National Counter-Proliferation Initiative, announced Thursday, is specifically targeted at rooting out exporters who illegally ship restricted U.S. military and so-called “dual-use” items, or technologies with both commercial and military applications, to countries and terrorist organizations.
The Justice Department said in a statement that the illegal overseas transactions in U.S. technologies are “substantial and growing.” The department noted that in the past week there have been federal cases involving the illegal export of items with nuclear and missile applications to Pakistan and the illegal export of U.S. jet fighter parts sought by Iran.
A 2006 Defense Department report found a 43 percent increase in the number of suspicious foreign contacts with U.S. defense firms, and an intelligence report issued last year asserted that entities from 108 nations were engaged in efforts to obtain controlled U.S. technology.
The Justice Department announcement said China and Iran posed particular U.S. export control concerns.
“The majority of U.S. criminal export prosecutions in recent years have involved restricted U.S. technology bound for these nations as opposed to others,” the Justice Department said. “Recent prosecutions have highlighted illegal exports of stealth missile technology, military aircraft components, naval warship data, night vision equipment, and other restricted technology destined for China and Iran.”
“Foreign states and terrorist organizations are actively seeking to acquire U.S. data, technological knowledge and equipment that will advance their military capacity, their weapons systems and even their weapons of mass destruction programs,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L. Wainstein. “Many have targeted our government, industries and universities as sources of these materials.”
An important part of the National Counter-Proliferation Initiative will be the formation of Counter-Proliferation Task Forces in appropriate U.S. Attorney’s offices throughout the country. These multiagency task forces will take many of the concepts used in combating terrorism, namely prevention cooperation and coordination, and apply them to the counter-proliferation effort.
“The task forces will be designed to enhance cooperation among all agencies involved in export control, forge relationships with affected industries, and facilitate information sharing to prevent illegal foreign acquisition of U.S. technology,” the Justice Department said.
The department’s National Security Division is in discussions with districts with large concentrations of high-tech businesses and research facilities as potential venues for new task forces.
“Some task forces may be modeled after efforts that exist in the Southern District of New York, District of Connecticut and District of Maryland, where agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), FBI, Commerce Department, DCIS (Defense Criminal Investigative Service) and other agencies pool data and coordinate cases,” the Justice Department said. “Other approaches may be taken in different districts, depending on the needs of the U.S. Attorney and agencies in that district.”
The department said training is essential to the initiative. Export prosecutions are by nature complex because they involve intricate laws, sensitive international issues, agencies with different authorities and, in many cases, classified information. Under the initiative, the Justice Department will provide specialized training to its field prosecutors, especially those with limited backgrounds in export control. The department launched this enhanced training effort in May with a national conference in South Carolina.
The Justice Department also appointed Steven Pelak, a career department prosecutor, to be its first national export control coordinator to implement the initiative and foster coordination among the agencies involved in export control. The coordinator is responsible for overseeing the national training of prosecutors and monitoring progress on export control prosecutions.
A final component of the initiative involves greater coordination between the Justice Department and the export licensing agencies, namely the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. As part of the initiative, the Justice Department’s National Security Division has initiated monthly meetings with senior officials from these offices to ensure that investigations, prosecutions and enforcement issues are fully coordinated.
“This initiative enhances the administration’s counter-proliferation program by vigorously pursuing and prosecuting individuals who violate our laws and allow U.S. technology to fall into the wrong hands,” said Darryl W. Jackson, the Commerce Department’s assistant secretary for export enforcement.
“There are few greater threats to our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines than confronting highly advanced weapons and technology which were designed to protect them and to give them the advantage on the battlefield,” said Charles W. Beardall, DCIS director. “Our agents, who are dedicated to protecting America’s warfighters, need no motivation in aggressively pursuing these criminals.”
The Export Controls Working Group, which represents numerous Washington-based trade groups on export control matters, is monitoring the activities of this new program, in addition to the President Bush’s imminent action to sign into law a significant increase in penalties for violations of the Export Administration Regulations, and the new controls on technology transfers to China.
“For all exporters of dual-use and military items, the bottom line is that the liability for violators and the likelihood of enforcement action both are increasing, at the same time that compliance with U.S. export controls is becoming more complicated, given global sourcing and supply chains,” said Edmund Rice, president of the Coalition for Employment Through Exports, in a memo to the Export Controls Working Group about the Justice Department’s initiative.
Meanwhile, federal agencies involved in the initiative are increasing their own export enforcement activity. ICE has recently doubled the number of agents assigned to export control cases and reports making 149 export-related arrests in fiscal year 2007. The FBI reports that it is investigating about 125 economic espionage cases and has increased counterintelligence instruction for new agents by 240 percent.
The Commerce Department reports that more than 80 percent of its export convictions in fiscal year 2007 were related to weapons of mass destruction proliferation, terrorist support, or diversion to military end-use. The Justice Department has seen a corresponding increase in export prosecutions. In fiscal year 2007, there was a more than 50 percent increase in defendants charged with violating the primary export control statutes compared to the previous year.
Federal agencies tighten grip on export violators
