1. Nice looking weapons and I was pleased to see that they are keeping their bugger hooks off the bang sticks.

   Of course they don’t use the slings but what can you say, they are new to them weapons…

   And I notice that they have the latest in PoS country iron sights, none in the rear.

   (I did look and it could be that there is a rear sight on one of them, but it seems awfully low.)

   (I notice that Ian talks about how many guns come in from Ethiopia with no rear sights)

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2. I’ve raged on this point for days. My job has had me involved in ITAR controlled items since day one.

   Department of State, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Department of Commerce and a couple others all up in our shit. Constant training on what we can/can’t say or do. Secure storage requirements for NFA articles and explosives. Getting TAAs and clearance from the compliance and legal department before even talking to someone who works for your company but is in another country. Background checks out the ass for anyone that crosses the threshold into the building. Almost neurotic compliance with the (sometimes conflicting regulations) because if your i’s are not dotted and t’s crossed perfectly than any one of the licenses you need to stay in business can be yanked.

   But that same government that will ruin your life for a 17.98” barrel on a shotgun or for saying the wrong thing to a foreigner (technical data, verbal or written can be considered a defense article and, therefore, can fall under ITAR) and has declared you a threat to society for owning a firearm to defend your family and home and hearth and for daring to question the narratives that they feed you through their puppets in the media . . . that same government just handed over 9+ figures worth of hardware and IP to a hostile government and their response is, “Meh. Shit happens.”

   We are so fucked.

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   1. I so feel for you. I was involved with the early days of PGP. At the time all encryption was covered under ITAR. Nobody really understood or worried about it. It just was.

      What I learned was that the reason that all the ciphers on comics and books were simple substitution ciphers was because…. ITAR. At the time, anything more complex than a substitution cipher could get you in trouble with ITAR.

      Cryptoanalysis , the art of breaking ciphers/codes was purely a government organizational study. But with PGP some ciphers made it into the real world and were available to be used. But you couldn’t get the damn software because… ITAR.

      Somebody from outside the US could potentially download the code and then oops.

      The solution for them was the 1st amendment. It seems that while ITAR could cover the program as written and distributing the source or binaries, it didn’t cover “written expression”. People printed the code in an OCR alphabet, printed it on T-shirts and just walked it across the border to places where it wasn’t controlled.

      All of the SSL/TLS (stuff that drives the internet e-commerce, the stuff that lets you give your CC information safely) had to be developed outside of the US. And for many many years, SSL was crippled because of ITAR.

      That seems to have been removed from the ITAR regulations.

      The amount of paperwork that people have to do and pay for and the inspections and the compliance officers in some occupations is just mind boggling.

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      1. That PGP book was a stroke of genius. The immediate consequence was a free for all download site for PGP, located in Norway.
         Years later, the same technology was recycled to publish the full design specification for a DES encryption breaking machine.

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      2. I remember hearing this tale at an EFF panel one year. It still makes me smile.

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   2. I just had my annual ITAR refresher training.

      The takeaway actions for me are:
      – don’t talk to anyone at conferences;
      – in fact, stop going to conferences;
      – never even try to publish anything; and
      – never hire a foreign national even for janitorial staff – let alone students or postdocs – because you might leave a manual open on your desk, and Boom! there’s a deemed export waiting to happen.

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   3. The argument I’ve heard is that ‘oh, that was stuff we gave to the Afghani government.’

      Really? We handed out that much shit to them? Including the drone systems?

      At this point, if federales started disappearing, I wouldn’t care.

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3. And, the Taliban don’t have to pay to feed the full autos. ?

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