We paid extremely high powered lawyers in D.C. to give us advice. The chief executive worked for hours with a lawyer, who is a member of AMSAT, who put himself into the same committees and so forth as the other high powered lawyers. Detailed technical assistance agreements complying with the letter of ITAR were drawn up and rejected by AMSAT-UK and AMSAT-DL with cause. It is UTTERLY ridiculous to bind entities outside the U.S., not acting in the U.S., to obey our laws when they are not in the U.S. Strictly speaking, we are requiring them to foreswear ever even accidentally doing an exported, DEEMED EXPORT being the most aggregious example.
Following this failure, I am not aware of any other activity. We made no unofficial or official requests of anyone in a position of authority inside the U.S. government who could help us officially.
To saw we have done nothing is false. We have not been effective and knowing this was a very tough nut to crack, the board and senior-officers did not do their duty, which was to bring out a no holds barred assault on this. Some are afraid of getting ourselves above "see" level and attracting the wrong kind of attention to past activities.
I have been quite upset about the lack of progress on this for some time but I am as guilty as anyone in a position of responsibility in this organization for not doing whatever it took to work this. I understood how utterly debilitating this was. Every time I have said something about it, I have been effectively ignored or asked "what do you suggest?". In other words, we have stopped trying.
Bob
ARRL SDR Working Group Chair Member: ARRL, AMSAT, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. "Trample the slow .... Hurdle the dead"
-----Original Message----- From: Bdale Garbee [mailto:bdale@gag.com] Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 11:53 AM To: Bob McGwier Cc: 'John B. Stephensen'; 'Bill Ress'; 'Howard Long'; 'Frank Brickle'; eagle@amsat.org; 'Daniel Schultz' Subject: Re: [eagle] Re: 2008 Symposium deadline
On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 10:31 -0400, Bob McGwier wrote:
Why do you not think we have already done this?
I've certainly had the impression that the issue was being worked on some level, but I don't recall seeing anything like a report or summary of the current situation. Did I miss it somewhere, or is this assumption simply the result of not everyone knowing what has and has not been done on the ITAR topic?
73 - Bdale, KB0G