Russia export controls and sanctions

A petition seeking revocation of the station licenses of a broadcaster that airs content from Russia-controlled Radio Sputnik (see 2203230054) on a Washington, D.C., area station doesn’t satisfy evidentiary rules, violates the First Amendment, and ignores a 2020 Enforcement Bureau investigation that concluded the FCC couldn't act against the stations involved, said an opposition filing Monday from Way Broadcasting, which owns WZHF(AM) Columbia Heights, Maryland. Other companies also owned by Arthur and Yvonne Liu are also parties to the filing. “It’s about what I expected,” said Arthur Belendiuk, the Smithwick & Belendiuk attorney representing petitioner the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. Belendiuk said the Media Bureau told him the matter can’t proceed unless the petitioners challenge a specific application, and it shifted the matter to the Enforcement Bureau. Belendiuk expects to file challenges soon to Liu stations that are currently up for renewal, he said. WZHF is the only Liu station that airs Sputnik; its license doesn’t expire until 2027. The denial of a station’s license renewal can’t be based on another station’s violations, said Way’s filing Monday. The revocation petition also doesn’t have the required specificity for the allegations against even WZHF, said Way. “It does not provide dates or quotes of the alleged false programming,” and doesn’t present evidence to prove the inaccuracy of WZHF’s content, the opposition filing said. Radio Sputnik is not “a Kremlin public relations outlet beamed in from Moscow” but instead similar to programming on the BBC, the filing said. “Unlike in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Americans enjoy the bedrock freedoms of speech and of the press,” Way said. The FCC also investigated WZHF in 2018 and declined to act in 2020, Way noted. Then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai ordered that investigation in response to requests from Congress. The EB sent several letters of inquiry to the licensees and determined “there is no enforcement action that could be taken against the licensees in question,” wrote Pai in a 2020 letter to Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. The petition to revoke “fails to demonstrate that licensees breached any of their duties as public trustees and the petition must be denied,” Way said.

There's evidence of significant research and development by multiple nations of a broad range of destructive and nondestructive counterspace capabilities, but so far only nondestructive capabilities are being used in military operations, per Secure World Foundation's annual global counterspace capabilities report. Nations' growing reliance on space means bigger incentives for development and possible use of offensive counterspace capabilities, it said. It said the U.S. has done multiple tests of technologies for rendezvous and proximity operations on orbit, plus tracking, targeting and intercept technologies that could lead to a co-orbital anti-satellite capability. The U.S. doesn't have an acknowledged program to develop co-orbit anti-satellite capabilities, but it has the technological capability to develop one in a short time, the April report said. The U.S. has done R&D on ground-based high-energy lasers for counterspace. There's no evidence it has a space-based directed energy weapons capability, but the Missile Defense Agency is planning research into the feasibility of space-based DEWs as ballistic missile defense and those systems could be de facto anti-satellite systems, it said. The report also detailed known capabilities of Russia, China, India, Australia, France, Iran, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the U.K.

The Patent and Trademark Office will stop granting requests for participation in the Global Patent Prosecution Highway information-sharing program when the requests are based on work performed by Rospatent, Russia’s agency in charge of intellectual property, said a notice in Monday’s Federal Register. The ban is retroactive to March 11, it said. Pending patent applications linked to Rospatent that received “special status” from PTO under the GPPH before March 11 will lose that status and be returned “to the regular processing and examination queue,” it said. PTO has “terminated engagement” with Rospatent, the Eurasian Patent Organization and patent authorities in Belarus, said the notice. PTO announced last month it would take these steps over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Japan Patent Office, secretariat of the GPPH, was advised of PTO’s decision, it said.

The FCC would benefit from additional authority to go after robocallers rather than wait for the DOJ to take up the cases, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said during the FCBA's annual seminar Friday. Legislation for new authority, which she requested during a Thursday hearing of the House Communications Subcommittee (see 2203310060), would help speed the enforcement process, she said. Currently, after the FCC issues a fine, it can ask the DOJ to prosecute, she said: Those "requests for prosecutorial attention can sometimes take a long time." Spectrum is “a big, big priority” for new NTIA chief Alan Davidson, said Deputy Administrator April McClain-Delaney, during another session. “Innovation happens when you’re able to have more efficiencies in the spectrum,” she said. NTIA is working on a national spectrum strategy and focused on making sure federal agencies have the spectrum they need, she said. “There’s so much on our plate,” she said: “We’re hiring and putting the front office back together.” McClain-Delaney said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tasked her to help with the campaign of American Doreen Bogdan-Martin’s as ITU secretary-general over Russian nominee Rashid Ismailov (see 2203020068). The election is important because of Russia’s focus on “top-down” control of the internet and potentially censorship, she said. Bogdan-Martin’s campaign is about “standards” and a “multistakeholder approach” to internet governance, McClain-Delaney said.

A bipartisan House bill would require the administration to study how digital currencies could help Russia evade U.S. sanctions. The legislation, introduced Thursday by Reps. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the top members of the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, would also create a new State Department officer to oversee sanctions evasion efforts involving digital currency. Although administration officials have cast doubt on Russia’s ability to use cryptocurrencies to prop up its economy, digital assets are still “ripe for abuse” as Russia looks to evade the U.S.’s “unprecedented” sanctions, Meeks said. McCaul said the bill will ensure the U.S. is “taking the necessary steps to prevent these emerging technologies,” such as blockchain, “from undermining sanctions, including those currently aimed at bankrupting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war machine.” The bill would require the State and Treasury departments to submit a report to Congress that assesses how digital currencies could “impact the effectiveness and enforcement of” U.S. sanctions against Russia. It would also authorize the State Department to appoint a director of digital currency to help develop “sanctions enforcement mechanisms resilient to malevolent actors’ use of digital currencies.”

The global semiconductor supply chain is “experiencing pressure” due to the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, said Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on an earnings call Tuesday for its fiscal Q2 ended March 3. “The region is an important source for the global supply of noble gases and other critical minerals that are used in semiconductor manufacturing.” Micron's fiscal Q2 mobile revenue grew 4% year over year to $1.9 billion as the 5G transition continues in smartphones, said Mehrotra. “We see some weakness in the China market as the local economy slows, smartphone market share shifts and some customers take a more prudent approach to inventory management,” he said. Demand for Micron’s mobile memory and storage solutions “continues to be supported by content-hungry applications and the ongoing transition from 4G to 5G, which is driving 50% higher DRAM content and the doubling of NAND content,” he said. Micron expects 700 million 5G smartphones will be shipped in calendar 2022, which would be a 40% increase from 2021, he said.

Russia's Ukraine invasion is creating potential business opportunities, and also possible bottlenecks, for the commercial space industry, per a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel talk Wednesday. Quilty Analytics founder Chris Quilty said a recent dip in investor funding for commercial space could just be a blip, depending on the performance of the market overall and of a wave of space companies recently going public.

The lack of “any visible cyber activity” from Moscow is one of many “surprises about the campaign that Russia is waging against Ukraine,” Keir Giles, Chatham House senior consulting fellow-Russian and Eurasian affairs, said Friday on a Conference Board podcast. “There are a lot of areas of Russian capability that were expected to be deployed against Ukraine that somehow haven’t materialized.” The impact of major Russian cyber operations against Ukraine would be “huge,” and many experts are speculating “that is actually why Russia is being restrained and is holding off from mounting the campaigns that were expected,” said Giles. “If Russia conducts cyberattacks against Ukraine only, it may be very hard for them to contain the effects to Ukraine only.” Giles worries that in the “later stages of Russia’s war on the West” there will materialize cyberattacks from Moscow that “are far less restrained,” he said. “If and when Russia does move on from Ukraine, and it comes away from Ukraine thinking that at least it had met some of its objectives, then the next stage of the attack on the West will almost certainly include those cyberattacks that are far less discriminating.” If Russia succeeds in removing access to the internet “in large sectors of large countries,” the economic impact obviously will be significant, said Giles. “Everybody that is data-dependent or that manages civilian telecommunications infrastructure needs to be prepared,” he said.

Russia didn’t offer any “swap” or “concession” in exchange for the U.S. release of Russian cyber hacker Aleksei Burkov in August, FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing Tuesday. The division can’t comment on the wisdom of the release because it’s the Secret Service’s case, he said.

International sharing of space situational awareness (SSA) data would help with space safety and sustainability, but it also could help lead to voluntary norms of responsible space behavior by allowing countries to assess how each other are adhering to voluntary space norms, Aerospace said in a paper Tuesday. In it, author Michael Gleason, Aerospace's Center for Space Policy and Strategy national security senior project engineer, argues the U.S. shouldn't care as much about sharing SSA data with China or Russia, which have independent capabilities to confirm responsible space behavior; instead an international SSA data sharing framework should focus on other nations and other U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space members. That would "maximize the chances of generating a critical mass of support for a space norm and stimulating a norm cascade," he said. Gleason said a verification framework using SSA data from multiple sources including the nascent Open Architecture Data Repository and SpaceTrack.org, the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking consortium, and civil society, commercial SSA and other entities "should promote buy-in for space norms among a wide swath of countries and enable space norms to become accepted by the majority of countries around the world."