LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic Universe-Document

LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

June 14, 1999, Monday, Home Edition

SECTION: Part A; Page 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 2287 words

HEADLINE: TRADE CONTROLS ON COMPUTERS NO EASY GOAL

BYLINE: PETER G. GOSSELIN, TIMES STAFF WRITER

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:
There is a new arrival in the debate over how the United States can keep its computer wizardry from falling into the wrong hands.

It is a computer chip so powerful that officials are studying whether they can restrict its sale overseas under a law intended to deny adversaries the computer capacity to design weapons, break codes and track battles.

Where can this potentially deadly chip be found? On the Sony Playstation II, the latest generation of the world's most popular video game machine, due to go on sale next year for less than $ 500.

Playstation II is only one of the most recent and vivid examples of a technological upheaval that is reshaping both the products we purchase and the policies we pursue to protect against foreign threats.

In a little more than a decade, the number of computers and computer makers worldwide has exploded while the machines themselves have morphed from huge, temperamental, few-of-a-kind devices into Leggo-like assemblies that almost any technically competent person can put together. As a result, the United States no longer can dictate which countries can get powerful computers and for what purposes. Huge Increases in Production

"We used to be able to control these things pretty effectively because there were only a few hundred machines we had to worry about and a comparable number of organizations we didn't want to have them," said Seymour E. Goodman of Stanford University, principal author of two influential studies on computer technology and national security.

"Now, companies are producing microprocessors by the tens of millions that are more powerful than some of the most powerful supercomputers we had 10 years ago, and they are doing it around the world. How are you going to control that?"

The question was at the heart of a recent congressional committee investigation that concluded that America's national security had been compromised by Chinese spying at U.S. government weapons labs and by Chinese purchases of U.S.-built computers and other high technology.

The committee, headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), called for strictly limiting the speed of computers that U.S. manufacturers may sell abroad without a government license. It urged reviving a Cold War pact requiring allies such as Germany, Japan and Britain to impose similar limits. It said the U.S. government should ensure that exported American computers are not being diverted to military use.

Debate Likely to Affect Campaign

The Cox committee's findings are virtually guaranteed to get heavy play during the coming presidential campaign season as Republicans accuse the Clinton administration and the Democrats of trading away the nation's competitive edge in an unseemly scramble for sales abroad and political contributions at home.

But a wide array of experts say that the panel's work is unlikely to resolve the thorniest issues surrounding computers and national security and for a very telling reason: because the report is being overtaken by some of the very events that the committee is seeking to control.

One example: The committee warned that China may be using even comparatively modest machines--those that fall below the threshold for government regulation--for such military purposes as nuclear weapons testing, chemical weapons design and surveillance.

The report went out of its way to attack a 1995 Goodman study concluding that such computers are so easily available in world markets that they cannot be controlled. That left the distinct impression that the panel wanted sales limits tightened and more strictly enforced.

But Cox acknowledged in an interview last week that circumstances have changed since the 1995 Goodman study--and even since his own committee's report last month.

Cox declared that "1995 was 1995. I have to listen to what chip giant Intel Corp. Chairman Andy Grove tells me right now," which is that computers at or slightly above the U.S. limit are so widely available worldwide that they cannot be controlled.

That threshold is now about half as high as the most powerful personal computers on the market today, those with the latest Pentium III chip.

Japan-based Sony and its partner, Toshiba Corp., muddle the issue further with their claim that the newly developed computer chip at the heart of the video game machine can run almost three times as fast as Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel's latest Pentium III and has more than twice the power of the most powerful work station made by Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics, which is considered the gold standard for graphics computing power.

Both U.S. companies dismiss the Japanese firms' claims as overblown. But not the U.S. government.

"We certainly have to look at this product closely," said Commerce Undersecretary William A. Reinsch. "The chip itself may warrant export control under our current definition of high-performance computer." The restrictions, if they come, would apply to chips made overseas and shipped to the United States for reexport.

Another factor making regulation difficult: The computer's basic design has changed abruptly in recent years from one for a unitary machine wired to tackle computational problems one step after another to one for assembly of off-the-shelf chips or PCs programmed to go after all parts of a problem at once.

As the committee acknowledged, the new design makes it much easier to build powerful computers and much harder--but, the panel insisted, not impossible--to control them. But many experts believe that the possibility of control is fading fast in the face of fevered efforts to build ever more powerful machines out of the humblest parts.

"From where I sit, I see a very strong grass-roots movement to build your own supercomputer," said Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. "It's happening all over the world, and it's well beyond any export control or multilateral pact to stop."

What is driving events that are overtaking both the Cox committee's views and U.S. efforts to control overseas computer sales is a combination of recent falling defense spending and rising demand for consumer electronics.

Where once the Defense Department was the computer industry's chief customer, now consumer demand for powerful PCs and lifelike video games is fueling developments. And where once the industry's centerpiece product was a room-sized device that only the government and a handful of corporations could afford, now it is a chip the size of a postage stamp that sells for a few dollars and is stamped out by the hundreds of millions.

Internet Sales Offer Overseas Deals

One way to see the sweep of change is in statistics on who pays for computer research. In 1955, the government, principally the Defense Department, paid 60% of the bill for computer research, and the private sector picked up the rest, according to a recent study by Kenneth S. Flamm, a former defense official now at the University of Texas. By 1995, the Pentagon's share was 2%.

One way to appreciate the implications for U.S. efforts to control overseas computer sales is to spend a little time on the World Wide Web. During a single evening, a reporter found Internet sites for companies in France, Israel, India and Taiwan that offered computers that could operate at speeds above the strictest U.S. limits on overseas sales. The machines being offered by the Israeli and Indian firms were manufactured by U.S.-based IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Those being sold by the Taiwanese company Acer were home-grown, but at their hearts were four of U.S.-based Intel Corp.'s fastest processors, the Pentium III.

The evening's search also turned up Internet sites at universities in Berlin, Seoul and Bangkok, Thailand, where computer engineering students and their professors have built so-called parallel processing systems that they claim can operate at speeds above the U.S. limits. Visitors to Bangkok's site can download a how-to paper titled "Building a Parallel Computer from Cheap PCs."

Examples like these have convinced the computer industry that most of its products are beyond the reach of U.S. and other governments to control.

In Washington last week to argue their case, executives with some of the biggest U.S. firms could barely contain their exasperation with proposals such as Cox's for continued limits on sales to potential adversaries such as China.

This approach "is inviting . . . evasion and alternative, gray-market distribution," declared Intel's Grove.

"What we're talking about is something that's as available as air," exploded Scott D. McNealy, chief executive of computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. "Are we saying, 'Let's take away air?' "

Hardly anyone, however, publicly advocates scrapping all controls of computer sales overseas. Most experts acknowledge that controls provide some national security protection.

"They slow down the bad guys' acquisition of technology," said Reinsch, the Commerce undersecretary, who runs the current control program for the government. "Slowing it down, making it spotty, leaving gaps, making sure our computers run faster than their computers--these are good things."

The trick is to cope with both the rapid growth of computing power and the expansion of military uses for computers. Virtually every proposal has its flaws.

The Cox committee recommended that the government should strike deals with other major technology-producing countries that would effectively give the United States veto power over some sales by both U.S. and foreign firms. And it said the government should work to secure China's permission to conduct spot checks to see how the Chinese are using their U.S.-made computers.

Cox said in an interview last week that the committee also is willing to raise the threshold that determines which computers face export controls but only because the controls are already so widely violated. He said the panel made no other major recommendations because it believes further study is needed.

The committee's critics see no virtue in any of these points. Administration officials say they were rebuffed when they sought a stronger export control agreement with other producing nations. China, they add, has categorically refused to permit spot inspections.

"The only way to control the dissemination of this technology is to destroy the personal computer, and that's obviously absurd," said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor, Intel board member and author of several books on information technology.

Most industry and independent analysts offer a variety of proposals for controlling sales of only the fastest computers and at the same time allowing U.S. computer makers to expand sales abroad, giving them greater incentive to improve their products. The most common proposal would peg the threshold at a tiny fraction of the fastest computer in the nation. That would permit it to rise as technology changed.

Advocates say that this approach would have the dual advantage of keeping the best technology at home for a time and allowing U.S. companies to expand sales overseas.

"In this kind of global economy, the key to maintaining your edge is continuous innovation, and that costs money," said Michael D. Salomone, a defense consultant and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

However, even the authors of this approach admit that it has a problem: the assumption that the best technology will always be made in America. That assumption could prove dangerous, as illustrated by Sony's Playstation II.

So much for the era when threats to the United States come solely from another country's military. And perhaps too, so much for the era when the United States can decide--or even have much say about--who can buy powerful computer technology and how they can use it.

Previous stories on the Cox report and the report's complete text are available on The Times' Web site: http://www.latimes.com/coxreport

Regulating Computer Exports

Computer Power Has Climbing Quickly . . .

The power of microprocessors, the brains of modern computers, is doubling about every 18 months. In the graph, computer power is measured in millions of theoretical processes per second (MTOPS).

PC performance: 1990-1997 approximations and 1998-2004 forecasts, measured in MTOPS

Source: Gartner Group Inc.

. . . But U.S. Controls Have Risen More Slowly

Exporters need government approval to sell China and other countries computers whose power exceeds a certain threshold.

Decontrol Level in MTOPS

Source: Commerce Department

What Computers Do For the Military

Military uses of computers are growing with software advances that permit modeling of complex events such as bomb blasts and with networks that allow small machines to be linked together to form powerful clusters.

MTOPS / Potential Military Use

4,000: Designing some aircraft, radar and antisubmarine sensors.

12,000: Forecasting the weather to optimize the timing of military actions.

21,000: Modeling the impact of missiles on buildings, to ensure that the missiles do no more than the intended damage.

32,000: 3D modeling of how chemical warfare gases pass through different materials, to aid the design of protective gear.

70,000: 3D modeling of an operating submarine to help design a vessel that is difficult to detect, or of a shell striking a tank to aid in better armor.

100,000: Modeling the aging process in nuclear weapons to help ensure that they still operate or are replaced.

Source: Stanford University

GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC-CHART: Regulating Computer Exports, HELENE WEBB / Los Angeles Times

LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1999