According to the indictment, which was unsealed on Monday, the defendant Philip Chaohui He owned and operated a company called Sierra Electronic Instruments, of which he was the only employee. Estimated sales revenues for 2010 were $110,000. I was unable to locate any website for the company, and the company’s web footprint consisted of two sparse directory entries.

Even so, He and Sierra got their hands on $549,654 worth of radiation hardened, space qualified memory chips from Aeroflex, a Colorado Springs chip designer and manufacturer. Seven months later, He drove his car to the Port of Long Beach and to a PRC-flagged ship there which had recently arrived from Shanghai and was scheduled to return in a week. The chips in question were in the defendant’s trunk concealed “in several plastic infant formula containers placed inside five boxes which were sealed and labeled as “milk powder” written in Chinese.

The indictment doesn’t describe what happened next, but it’s pretty clear. The federal agent that had been tailing Mr. He informed his buddies who swooped down on Mr. He, waving guns and shouting typical law enforcement stuff at him before dragging him away in handcuffs. The indictment suggests that before the dockside bust, the feds had snooped into his bank account and phone records and identified numerous phone calls to the PRC and, more ominously, two wires from the PRC to Mr. He totaling just under $500,000. As a result, Mr. He’s careful concealment of the goods in baby formula was a waste of time.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what happened here. Obviously, Aeroflex smelled a rat when this one-man storefront operation wanted to lay his hands on a half-million dollars worth of highly specialized space-qualified circuitry, so they alerted the authorities. All the while Mr. He was agonizing over whether it was safest to hide the goods in baby formula, cans of dog food or boxes of knitting needles, he was already a marked man. Had he gone in for a smaller amount (for which he certainly would have been paid less) he might be basking in the Southern California sun. Indeed, he reminds me of the would-be bicycle thief who tried to walk out of my condo building’s parking garage with two bicycles rather than racing off swiftly on one bicycle.

He went down too.

According to the story, twenty-nine Holstein bulls have already been exported to Russia and another thirty are to follow. The bulls are set to, er, revitalize (at least that’s what the kids call it now) Russian Holstein dairy herds. The need for bulls with that certain American panache was explained as follows in the story:

Russian farmers want American bulls to improve dairy-herd genetics in a land hampered first by collective farming, then by the collapse of the Soviet Union. …

Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, Osipenko said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, many dairy herds were all but wiped out as hungry Russians consumed them for food.

“There was a terrible crisis, apparently, and they pretty much ate their seed stock,” said Patrick Comyn, a large-animal veterinarian with the private Virginia Herd Health Management Services who worked on the deal.

And that’s where the exported bulls come in. I am sure that the Virginia bulls will be delighted, to the extent that bulls can be delighted in the first place, that they are fulfilling both a carnal and a patriotic duty.

Of course, these mail-order American husbands may never have seen their wealthy Russian wives if they had been horses because, as all export geeks know, export of horses by sea (ECCN 0A980) requires a license from the Department of Commerce. Personally, I think this is another example of wanton discrimination against American cows in favor of American horses which are spared from both the dinner table and long ocean voyages.

• The ACI’s Second National EAR Boot Camp is coming up and will be held in Dallas on January 25 and 26, 2012. Export Law Blog readers who mention discount code EB200 will get a $200 discount on their registration fees. Download the promotional brochure here. There are some great speakers scheduled but you may want to go in particular to hear Gene Christensen from BIS. Gene knows as much about the EAR as anyone in BIS and is an all-round nice guy who shares his time freely to help out exporters dealing with his agency.
• Speaking of nice guys, John R. Liebman, Roszel C. Thomsen II, James E. Bartlett III have just released United States Export Controls, Sixth Edition. John sent me an email describing the changes in the latest edition
  

  The new edition is noticeably slimmer than its predecessors, primarily due to the consolidation of two chapters covering Commerce regulations into one and the deletion of several tables and appendices that were no longer useful (if they ever were). New chapters include the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and its intersection with export controls. In addition, Roz, Jim and I are working on additional chapters that could not be completed before the publisher’s deadline, and those should be available in 2012, along with regular quarterly updates. Among them will be discussions of export control aspects of cloud computing, the Foreign Trade Regulations, and the ongoing efforts to overhaul the current patchwork of export regulations. Finally, this edition will be the first that is available electronically as well as in hard copy.

  There aren’t any special discounts for Export Law Blog readers, but the book is worth every penny even at full price.

• If you have downloaded the new Google Currents app onto your iPhone, iPad, or Android device, there is a specially formatted edition of Export Law Blog that you can subscribe to in that service. To subscribe, click this link from the browser on your mobile device. Or click the plus icon to add more news sources and search for “Export Law Blog.” (You probably could have figured that out on your own!)

Rockport authorities, according to the newspaper article, first became aware of Atkinson when a Swiss company complained that Atkinson failed to deliver $32,000 of counter-surveillance equipment that it had ordered from Granite Island. This led to a larceny arrest, a home search, and, voilà, the discovery of the rocket launcher and other firearms.

Mr. Atkinson’s defense to the larceny charge was interesting. According to the newspaper article, he hadn’t shipped the equipment “because the firm didn’t supply him with proper export documents.” This is an odd defense, it it can be called a defense, because it’s not clear that surveillance countermeasures such as those being sold by Mr. Atkinson required an export license. ECCN 5A980 covers surreptitious listening devices but does not cover devices used to detect or disable such surreptitious devices.

Of course, even if export licenses were required and somehow could not be obtained, there’s still the issue as to why the purchase price wasn’t simply refunded. But that, of course, involves matters unrelated to my expertise and the subject of this blog, so I’ll let each reader speculate independently on this issue.

Naturally Mr. Atkinson was not going to sit around and let the city take his rocket launcher just because he was accused of welching on an export:

Atkinson filed a 653-page lawsuit against the town, Rockport Police, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and scores of institutions and individuals.

His lawsuit asks for, among other things, $175 million from the town. He has said the town violated his civil rights by entering his home and confiscating his firearms.

You might be surprised by the sheer length of the lawsuit, apparently only a few pages short of War and Peace, but that’s only if you are unaware of the binding legal precedent that requires that judgments always be granted in favor of the side that files the most paper in a proceeding.

I don’t know whether there is an iPhone app in the works or not. Apple has a nasty habit of rejecting content-based apps like this on the grounds that they don’t use enough unique features of IOS. Translation: Apple wants games and more games. I’m not sure I want to give Apple the $99 developer’ fee for the privilege of having them reject the app. Plus, you have to use a Mac to upload the app to Apple, so there’s an additional hassle for an app that will likely be rejected. Right now if you visit the site with your iPhone, WordPress automatically gives you a version of the site optimized for your iPhone, so I think that will have to do for now.

Scan the QR code below with your Android phone to install the app:

Let me know if you have any comments on the app, and I’ll try to take them into account for a new version.

Readers of this blog might recall an earlier post where a fishing boat wandered into Cuban territorial waters and got whacked by BIS with a fine for the illegal export (albeit temporary) of the boat to Cuba. Is United going to get a nastygram for BIS over this emergency landing in Cuba?

This is where license exception AVS, which is set forth in section 7540.15 of the Export Administration Regulations, comes in. That exception gives certain aircraft special exemptions from certain export requirements.

Section 740.15(a)(2)(i) deals with U.S. registered aircraft operating under an Air Carrier Operating Certificate, Commercial Operating Certificate, or Air Taxi Operating Certificate issued by the Federal Aviation Administration. This section would cover the United flight. All remaining U.S. registered aircraft are covered under Section 740.15(a)(2)(ii). Under the first of these exceptions, no license is required for the “export” of the aircraft from the United States when it flies to foreign countries, as long as certain conditions are met that qualify it as a temporary sojourn. Under the second category for all other U.S. registered aircraft, there is an explicit provision prohibiting the use of the exception for flights to Cuba. So although a United pilot could divert his aircraft to Cuba under this exception, Joe Pilot in a private plane could not make an emergency landing at Jose Marti in Cuba no matter what he smelled in the aircraft. Section 740.15(a)(5) says that the exception can’t be used for exports or re-exports to Cuba or other Group E countries, but I am assuming that this is just an inartful way of repeating that trips to Cuba must be temporary sojourns meeting the other requirements of section 740.15.

Even if the emergency landing in Cuba did not violate BIS’s rules, United’s headaches may not be over. The Cuba sanctions regulations of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) prohibit “the receipt of goods or services in Cuba, even if provided free-of-charge by the Government of Cuba or a national of Cuba.” It seems hard, if not impossible, to land in Cuba without receiving services, even if just the clearance to land, from Jose Marti airport. And I don’t see an exception in the OFAC regulations for an emergency landing. I’m sure Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Bob Menendez and the other Cuba hawks on the Hill are having major conniption fits over this and dashing off letters to OFAC calling for the death penalty for everyone involved in this unplanned trip to Cuba.

So I asked my web host where the robots were coming from. Get this: one group of them was coming from the Department of State. Judging from some activity I saw on my logs, the State robots were trying to scrape the entire site with simultaneous requests. Bad robot! (Brownie points to anyone on whom that last reference is not lost.) The hosting administrators have now blocked all access from that IP address from the State Department.

As the people at the State Department are our friends, it seems harsh to impose this permanent time out on them just because one of their robots ran amok this morning. If someone from State knows how the robots got loose this morning and swarmed the blog, please let me know and I’ll try to get the IP address unbanned by the folks at my web host. (I could go in an change the commands they put in the .htaccess file, but if I do, and there’s another recurrence of an early morning unsanctioned State Department robot party at my site, I’m likely to rendered homeless and in search of a new web host.)

The other robot(s) came from JPMorgan. Any word from JPMorgan on what caused their robots to go into a feeding frenzy at my site this morning, would also be welcome.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Needless to say, the tiles are in Category XV(e) of the United States Munitions List (“USML”), and giving access to those tiles to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident is a rather big no-no. Not to thumb its nose completely at the ITAR, NASA lawyers have come up with a document for the teacher to sign acknowledging “that all artifacts are subject to Export Control requirements” and further acknowledging “my responsibility for these controls at time of transfer of the artifact.”

Well, I’m glad we’ve taken care of that! I’m sure that most school teachers are intimately acquainted with the ITAR and will make sure that all exchange students are banished from the classroom when the shuttle tile is brought out for show and tell. Oh, and let’s hope we don’t have any kids in the room from China or everybody is going to jail.

One annoying aspect to the plea agreement is that it refers to the plates as “Level IV.” The United States Munitions List (“USML”), however, uses the same terminology as the National Institute of Justice standard, which is “Type IV.” Using the correct USML terminology might signal that the prosecutor might have looked at the USML at some point during his or her career. (Of course, it’s hard to get too worked up about this because the USML incorrectly refers to NIJ Types 1, 2, 2a, and 3a, instead of I, II, IIa, and IIIa as specified in the NIJ Standard.)

One other thing to note: ICE agents working the eBay beat probably don’t need to wear body armor while doing it.