How military technology reaches Russia in breach of U.S. export controls

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

(Reuters) - By his own account, Ilias Sabirov, a Moscow businessman, had supplied Russia's military with high-performance computer chips made in the United States for years.

Then, in 2014, Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and the U.S. government began imposing a series of new sanctions and export controls on Russia, including severely restricting sales of such chips.

But that didn't stop Sabirov from obtaining more, according to U.S. authorities and a Reuters review of Russian customs records.

In the spring of 2015, a parcel containing more than 100 memory chips specially hardened to resist radiation and extreme temperatures – critical components in missiles and military satellites – arrived at Sabirov's business address in Moscow, according to the Russian customs records and a U.S. federal indictment. American prosecutors allege that the "rad-hard"chips were sourced from a company in Austin, Texas, called Silicon Space Technology Corp, or SST, but shipped to Russia via a firm in Bulgaria to evade U.S. export law.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/special-report-military-technology-reaches-142032120.html

[dalton99a]

1. The technology was developed with taxpayer money

Trained as a physicist and chemist, Wesley Morris had developed solutions to harden semiconductors against heat and radiation. In 2004, he founded SST (now called Vorago Technologies) in a bid to monetize his patented inventions. Morris told Reuters that his techniques caught the attention of the U.S. military, and SST received millions of dollars in research grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, including from top-secret missile programs, to hone its technology.