[Ground-station] Call for discussion: ORI satellite program

[Phil Karn]

On 4/23/18 16:53, Bruce Perens wrote:
> I will also be at the Cal Poly event next week.

See you there!

> There is no problem with Germans (or anyone else) collaborating in
> online design, programming, discussions as long as every drop of the
> work gets publicly archived. The carve-outs in both ITAR and EAR are
> clear, and have been used for a decade by Open Source cryptography
> projects, among others, without the difficulty that AMSAT has
> experienced. They do /not /require paper publication, despite what DDTC
> wrote to AMSAT in 2009 - which simply doesn't have a chance of standing
> in court today.

That's exactly what I thought. And yeah, I think most judges have heard
of the Internet by now. Even the ones who hadn't in the 1990s.

Several years ago I was sitting in the AMSAT symposium when somebody got
up (a lawyer? I don't remember who) to talk about ITAR. Suddenly, I was
back in the mid 1990s: no foreign collaboration, we must do everything
ourselves and carefully publish everything *on paper* to establish
public availability, yada yada yada. (I still have my copy of the PGP
source code book on my shelf. What's it worth? Mint condition.)

I don't think he knew how all that stuff originally came about, or that
one of the guys most directly involved was sitting in the back of the room.

AMSAT's troubles are largely of their own doing because they are so
utterly paranoid on the issue. They're afraid of their own shadows. You
want a good example of the "chilling effect" of a prior restraint on
freedom of speech, look no further. And I ain't getting any younger.

> Transfer of physical objects across national boundaries or to citizens
> of other nations is still problematic, and the easiest way to deal with
> that is to carry out all manufacturing and assembly within the national
> entity of the launch provider. This being the entire EU for Ariane, the
> US and its possessions for NASA, USAF, SpaceX, ULA, Orbital ATK.

As I understand it, that was never the real problem. Spacecraft and
parts were shipped back and forth between Washington and Marburg and
Kourou. Yes, even before the rules tightened in the late 1990s, export
licenses were required for these physical articles but because they only
applied to a specific (not particularly weapon-like) object being
exported to a specific (friendly) place for a clearly benign purpose,
they didn't seem to be difficult to obtain (though I assume the
paperwork was tedious).

As with crypto, the big problems started only when they tried to broadly
define "technical data" and especially "technical assistance".

Phil


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