Even modest attempts to control the export of sensitive technology are being rebuffed by the White House these days. Included in the conference report of this year's defense authorization bill is a provision requiring computer exporters to notify the government in advance of prospective sales of supercomputers to countries such as China and Russia. If the secretary of defense, state, commerce, or energy questions the sale within 10 days of being notified, the sale cannot go through without an export license from the Commerce Department.
But the White House will have none of this. National security adviser Sandy Berger wrote to House National Security chairman Floyd Spence on Oct. 20 complaining that the reporting requirement "will tax sorely the resources of our export-control agencies and the intelligence community."
As for past diversions of supercomputers to Russia and China -- which led to the provision Berger says the fact that these supercomputers are in the process of being returned shows that "our policy has not failed, but is, in fact, successful."
Not that successful. In the Oct. 27 New York Times, Jeff Gerth and Michael R. Gordon spelled out in rich detail how 16 IBM supercomputers were illegally diverted to a Russian nuclear-weapons laboratory. Clinton administration officials learned of the diversion not through the enforcement provisions boasted about by Berger, but because a top Russian official mentioned in a press conference that the country had obtained supercomputers.
The proposed reporting requirements on the sale of supercomputers wouldn't necessarily prevent episodes like this, but they would be a step, albeit a small one, in the direction of restoring some sanity to the Clinton administration's reckless export-control policy.