A bipartisan group of senators last week introduced a bill that could place new controls on certain exports of U.S. personal data to foreign companies and governments. The Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Surveillance Act would require the Commerce Department, along with other agencies, to identify “categories of personal data” that could harm U.S. national security if they were exported, and to place export restrictions on those items.
The Bureau of Industry and Security on June 24 suspended the export privileges of three Russian airlines for violating U.S. export controls against Belarus. The agency issued 180-day temporary denial orders for Nordwind Airlines, Pobeda Airlines and Siberian Airlines, BIS said, banning all three airlines from participating in transactions subject to the Export Administration Regulations.
There isn’t a “coherent” strategy among the various bills in Congress to address international technology competition, said Jon Bateman, a technology policy expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Bateman, speaking during a June 23 event hosted by Foreign Policy magazine, said the lack of coherence isn’t “altogether surprising, partly because the government is “classically plagued with coherence problems.”
It’s still too early to regulate quantum technologies through export controls and other means, two tech industry officials said during an event this week hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Although the Commerce Department is studying new export controls on certain slices of quantum technologies, strict regulations risk hurting American competitiveness, the officials said.
The U.S. and the EU said they have made progress convincing other countries not to impose export restrictions on critical food supplies after an initial spike in the measures due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But leaders are still struggling to help Ukraine export its food supplies to the rest of the world, officials said, and they don’t expect that issue to be resolved anytime soon.
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A Federal Maritime Commission proposal that would require container documentation to include the names of all non-vessel operating common carriers in a shipping transaction would create too large of a burden on industry, two logistics companies said in comments this month. One company said it wouldn’t be able to comply with the change, forcing it to regularly violate the regulation.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is looking to build on its ability to impose multilateral export controls, said senior BIS official Thea Kendler. Kendler, speaking during a conference last week hosted by the American Association of Exporters and Importers, said the agency wants to capitalize on the highly-coordinated Russia controls to better align future restrictions with a “core group of countries,” echoing comments made by Commerce officials earlier this year who voiced support for a new multilateral export control regime.
The Commerce Department and other government agencies can better tailor their outreach efforts to universities to mitigate export control risks in academia, the Government Accountability Office said in a report last week. Although Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI all conduct outreach with colleges to prevent illegal deemed exports and other sensitive technology transfers, they can do a better job identifying and analyzing export control “risk factors,” GAO said, and use their “limited resources” to make their outreach more efficient.
Export controls on their own haven’t historically proven to be very effective in stopping U.S. adversaries from acquiring illegal technologies and components, said Daniel Gerstein, a former export control official at the Department of Homeland Security. Gerstein, speaking during a June 16 Emerging Technology Technical Advisory Committee meeting, said the U.S. and other countries have “ample information telling us that they have not been particularly effective, even for sanctions regimes.”