Jane Harman: “I rise in support of the Dreier-Lofgren amendment, which would repeal the requirement to use MTOPS as the metric for…”

“I rise in support of the Dreier-Lofgren amendment, which would repeal the requirement to use MTOPS as the metric for restricting exports of high-powered computers and authorize the President to devise a new approach that is both more effective at protecting national security and less injurious to U.S. commercial interests. When Congress imposed the MTOPS requirements as part of the National Defense Authorization Act back in 1998, we made a terrible mistake by mandating a metric that was poorly matched to the threat it was designed to address. At the same time, we handicapped U.S. high tech companies trying to break into the world's fastest growing markets--and gave an artificial advantage to all the companies abroad who would like to move the leading edge in high-powered computing to other nations. The MTOPS metric has been ineffective at controlling the diffusion of technology primarily because computing power has advanced at such a furious pace over the past decade and a half. In 1991 when the MTOPS metric was first devised, the fastest supercomputer in the world was the Cray C90, which was the size of two refrigerators and cost about $10 million. Do you realize that today a Dell Pentium 4 laptop computer, which costs about $1,000, has more computing power than the Cray C90?”