The House approved several export control-related bills late Sept. 9, including the Remote Access Security Act, which is designed to close a loophole that has allowed China to use cloud service providers to access advanced U.S. computing chips remotely (see 2409040046).
The Federal Communications Commission is launching a voluntary labeling program for wireless consumer “Internet of Things” products that have been certified and tested to meet FCC IoT cybersecurity standards, the commission said in a final rule released July 29.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on March 12 affirmed a federal D.C. court's dismissal of Venezuelan national Samark Jose Lopez Bello's suit against his designation as a narcotics trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Samark Jose Lopez Bello v. Andrea M. Gacki, D.C. Cir. # 21-01727).
The Commerce Department should amend several portions of its proposed guardrails on recipients of Chips Act funding, including measures that could prevent the U.S. chip industry from participating in international standards bodies or inhibit “routine” business activities, trade groups and technology companies said in comments released this week. Some said Commerce should also limit which companies qualify as “foreign entities of concern” and revise the rule’s proposed definition for “legacy semiconductor” to more closely align with export controls.
The Commerce Department this week released proposed “guardrails” for recipients of Chips Act funding, which could restrict how the funding is used in certain countries and align the guardrails with export restrictions. The proposed rule would block funding recipients from pursuing certain chip investments in China and other “foreign countries of concern,” restrict them from participating in certain research or technology licensing efforts with those countries, prevent the funding from being provided to companies on the Entity List and more, Commerce said.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is preparing a mandatory survey for hundreds of U.S. space companies, suppliers and researchers to collect data on supply chains used by the U.S. space industrial base, the agency said this week. The effort -- which is a partnership among BIS, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- will help the agencies “identify the structure and interdependencies” of the space industrial base, especially those that work with NASA or NOAA.
The U.S.’s best option to address potential national security risks arising from TikTok is through a foreign investment review rather than an outright ban, said James Lewis, a technology policy expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The U.S. should take action against TikTok to prevent sensitive U.S. personal data from being collected by the app’s Chinese owner, said Brendan Carr, one of five commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission. “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," Carr told Axios, according to a Nov. 1 report by the news outlet. Carr added that there isn't "a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party]."
Truphone agreed to divest Russian investors and pay a $600,000 fine for failing to disclose accurate ownership stakes held by foreign entities and transferring control of FCC licenses and international section 214 authorization without agency approval. In April, the FCC had proposed a fine of $660,639. The FCC said sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich invested in the company and Truphone didn’t provide timely notice or seek commission approval. “Since 2011, Truphone’s ownership and reports regarding its foreign ownership have changed over time without accurate and requisite reporting to the Commission,” the Enforcement Bureau said in the Oct. 20 order. A Truphone spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. should transform the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. into a new Commission on Foreign Investment and National Security, which would improve transparency and reduce uncertainty around investment reviews, Morgan Lewis lawyers said. Although the process of standing up a new government commission and issuing regulations may be “arduous and expensive,” the lawyers say the benefits will outweigh the costs.